I'm a family doctor who recently graduated. About a year ago, I was on maternity leave with my second child, feeling tired, overweight, and discouraged. I had never been this hungry in my life, and never this fat. I had always maintained a normal weight with lots of exercise, but I was too exhausted to start training again, and my pelvic floor wanted nothing to do with exercise.
A family physician colleague of mine told me about LCHF. Since I had one of those babies who think that sleeping is for the weak, I had plenty of opportunities to start reading everything I could about LCHF, including DD and Dr. Fung's Obesity Code, but numerous scientific articles as well. The science behind it amazed me.
This got me thinking: if it works so well for me, and for many of my physician colleagues, then it can work for my patients. I was lucky enough to get a week of training with Dr. Fung and Megan Ramos at Intensive Dietary Management in Scarborough (Canada). Obviously, I had naively not fully weighed in the pros and cons of getting actual LCHF and IF training...
Opening my own LCHF clinic
After that week, I was totally stuck. I could not unsee what I had seen at their clinic. I could not unlearn what I had learnt. I could not go on and "treat" diabetic patients the way I had been taught in med school. There was no turning back. I had to set up my own LCHF clinic. At least, I thought, patients needed to know there was an alternative to drugs, insulin injections, fatigue, weight gain, and diabetes complications. Maybe not all of them would be motivated enough to change their eating habits. But everyone deserves to know that this is an option.
And so I embarked on a journey to get a LCHF clinic running, with my own money, and all my "free time" as a mother of an infant and a toddler, and as full time family physician. I work in a general practice clinic, but also in a long-term care facility for elderly people, and in a provincial male prison. "Free time" is even rarer than sleep, in my case, but I was determined to make it happen.
I found the best assistant a doctor could ask for, a nurse named Sylvie who is specialized in diabetes, and has been diabetic herself for 27 years. Without knowing anything about LCHF, she had figured out long ago that carbs were making diabetic people more dependent on their meds, and had already been teaching patients to reduce their carb intakes.
Slight detail, though, she had just retired two days before I approached her. I think she had even packed her suitcases to go somewhere warm and sunny, far far away from our Canadian winter. Nurses, in general, are some of the hardest working people I know. When a nurse finally retires, she most likely really deserves to rest, and to finally have a normal life. So you leave her alone.
"Sylvie, how would you like to not just control diabetes with food, but actually completely reverse it?" I said. "No medication, no surgery, no long term complications. Complete and natural reversal."
Sylvie looked at me long and hard with a frown. She probably even lifted her imaginary sunglasses off of her nose to stare at me.
"I never thought I would live long enough to see this day. Curing diabetes naturally? I'm in. Retirement can wait!"
That day, a sleepless doctor and a sunless nurse sat down and started working together to build a LCHF clinic, which opened its doors in February 2017. Through this blog, I will tell you all about our challenges and successes, and about our patients who have recovered or are currently recovering from a much broader range of health issues than I had expected at first from my scientific readings.
It is my hope to help people with health issues, and health care professionals who truly want to make a difference, to get inspired to give it a try.
See you in a week!
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Dr. Evelyne Bourdua-Roy
"Everything in life begins with a choice"