I’ve been keeping you guys up on some of my health struggles, but I think we’ve had a bit of a breakthrough today. I’ve been more-or-less following the meal plan my nutritionist made up for me for eight weeks now, and can you guess how much weight I’ve lost?

None.

On top of that, I’ve been feeling less than awesome towards the middle / end of the day, despite the frequent snacking the plan calls for. This is why having an ongoing relationship with the nutritionist has been key to figuring this out. No wonder I haven’t been making any progress on my own, this is a complex issue!

Yesterday, my nutritionist started asking me about hypoglycemia, insulin resistance, cortisol and just generally how I feel given varying different eating scenarios. Apparently everything, my digestive issues, the weird anxiety I’ve been feeling, the ridiculous difficulty with losing weight – even the constipation – could all be tied together with insulin resistance and lowered / exhausted cortisol levels.

This makes perfect sense because I’ve been casually supporting myself for adrenal fatigue by drinking oat straw tea, which has helped me feel more relaxed. It’s no surprise that the stress of the past few years has slammed my body into a negative cycle of high baseline insulin, which drives down my blood sugar levels, PLUS cortisol fatigue, which should be kicking in to support the sugar levels but probably isn’t doing a great job.

I have that enthusiasm that you experience when you’ve had a chronic health issue and nothing seems to be helping, but you finally get something that feels intuitively right! I’m stoked for my new diet plan. It’s going to be high-ish in fat, lots of protein, low carb. We’ll probably stick with that for a while until my insulin levels calm down, my cortisol recovers and the weight starts coming off. We’ll see what she comes up with.

I’m stoked. Intuitively, I think we’re finally on the right track.