By: Dr. Sarah Ballantyne
My name is Dr. Sarah Ballantyne. I am the blogger behind the award-winning website www.ThePaleoMom.com, cohost of the top-rated and syndicated The Paleo View podcast, and New York Times Bestselling author of four books: Paleo Principles, The Paleo Approach, The Paleo Approach Cookbook, and The Healing Kitchen. I consider myself a health educator and advocate. My credentials lie in three areas. First, I have a Ph.D. in Medical Biophysics and performed award-winning medical research in the area of innate immunity and inflammation. (You can read more about my academic background here.) Second, I am a wife and mother and face the typical challenges that Paleo families navigate. Third, I have had a longstanding personal battle with weight and disease.
This is my story.
My 120-Pound Journey To Paleo
I did not use a Paleo Diet to lose 120 pounds. Instead, I lost the first 100 pounds following a standard low-carb diet. In fact, I lost those 100 pounds twice. In spite of working so hard to lose weight, depriving myself of foods I craved and getting crazy amounts of exercise, I was not healthy. Even though I looked better on the outside, I was getting sicker and sicker–until I found Paleo. I lost the last 20 pounds following a Paleo Diet; but more importantly, I regained my health and have successfully maintained my weight loss for over five years.
I was teased for being chubby in elementary school, although I was just a sturdily built, tall child. It wasn’t until early middle school that I really started gaining weight. I thought it was my fault, but the math just didn’t add up. I was highly active, walking a mile and a half to and from the school bus stop each day, riding my bike around the neighborhood in the evenings and for hours on the weekends, going for frequent family walks and hikes, and taking swimming lessons. My diet growing up may not have been gluten-free or Paleo, but my mom believed in butter, our dairy was grass-fed, our eggs came from a local farm, and we ate almost entirely whole unprocessed foods, including fish we caught ourselves fresh from the ocean, wild edibles, and vegetables we grew in our garden. I thought that the reason why I was gaining weight, when the other kids around me weren’t, was because of the occasional ice cream sandwich purchased from the school canteen. I thought it was because if I found a quarter on the ground, I’d use it to buy gummy bears from the 5-cent bin at the corner store on my way home. While I didn’t get definitely diagnosed until decades later, these were the first symptoms of Hashimoto’s thyroiditis. I had other symptoms too: chronic fatigue (I would fall asleep on the bus two and from school and in the car no matter how short the drive, willingly went to bed at 8:30pm even in high school, and routinely slept 15-16 hours on weekends), dry skin, brittle nails, thin hair, headaches, mild depression (although, keep in mind I was a teenager, and not a popular one), and a digestive system that at best could be described as sluggish.
It was my attempts to lose weight by following the conventional diet wisdom of the late-eighties (low-fat, high-carb, calorie-restricted) that really did me in. I constantly felt deprived while my weight yo-yo’ed more up than down. Overall, I gained 10-30 pounds per year throughout my entire teen years, until I reached morbid obesity status in my early twenties at 265lbs (I’m a little shy of 5’6”). And, I was miserable. I had to hold my breath to tie my shoes. Everything hurt most of the time. I remember feeling so left out when my friends would go for group runs together (and not even bother to ask me). I remember getting an enormous bruise on my behind just by trying to maneuver out of the backseat of a jeep when someone was nice enough to give me a ride.
Obesity wasn’t my only health issue. Psoriasis and eczema started in my mid-teens. By the time I turned twenty, I suffered frequent migraines and, for two years I stopped drinking coffee due to suspected gall bladder issues. I got frequent colds, especially during exam week. I had fairly severe acne (although not bad enough for my doctor to recommend Accutane). I suffered chronic constipation and was tired all the time.
I was first introduced to the concept of low-carb diets in the summer of 1999, when I was 22 years old. It worked very well for me, and over the course of about a year, I lost 100 pounds. Celebrating my newfound waistline, I became very active, taking up marathon running, which entailed 14-16 hour of training runs every week, and karate. Although I always wanted to lose 30 more pounds, I believed that I was healthy. Yet, I was evaluating my health using solely my weight and activity level as the metric.
I continued to developed more and more health conditions, which at the time seemed unrelated to each other. By the age of 25, I suffered from Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS), acid reflux, frequent migraines, anxiety and mild depression, allergies, eczema, scalp psoriasis, chronic colds and strep throats, and I started to suffer an autoimmune skin condition called Lichen Planus. At the time, I blamed the stress of graduate school and my weak genetics. I used to joke that the only reason that I was alive was because of the miracles of modern medicine. Little did I understand at the time that it was the detrimental effects of my modern diet (combined with high stress, excessive exercise, and a genetic susceptibility) causing a cascade of ever increasing inflammation, hormone dysregulation, and autoimmunity.
I had a major health crisis in the summer of 2002. Adult onset of severe asthma robbed me of my active lifestyle. My lungs became extremely reactive and the inflammation was so severe that I was coughing up blood. Practically overnight, I became apartment bound, was put on extremely high doses of inhaled and oral steroids, and my entire world came crashing down. Uncontrolled weight gain is a side effect of those oral steroids and I gained 50 pounds in the first 6 weeks on them. I ended up suffering severe depression and reverting to bad eating habits (lots of sugar and binge-eating habits). I gained the other 50 pounds (that I had worked so hard to lose) more slowly over the next year. I got married in that year and weighed 235 pounds at my wedding, which was absolutely crushing for my spirit.
