I hear the phrase “know your why” in the keto community. I first heard it from Brian Williamson (a.k.a ketovangelist) who I can paraphrase as: if you don’t remember why you’re doing something, what’s going to keep you doing it?

My why has always been my mom, for many, many things, but specifically, her health struggles have always driven me to try to be healthier because I never wanted to end up with the same troubles. My mom had trouble with diabetes and heart disease dating back a long time.

My experience with the ketogenic lifestyle has caused some noticeable improvements in my life. Besides having to buy even smaller clothes than from the ones I had gotten just a year before, I had to get a smaller wedding band, because my fingers were too small for my original ring to stay on. My aches and pains have gone away, I haven’t seen the chiropractor in ages.

I expected that sort of thing, but what I didn’t expect was other improvements to my health. I used to take Zyrtec or Allegra every day in the summer but since early March of 2015, I have not taken any allergy medication whatsoever! My psoriasis has also improved, I have only very rarely used the cream I used to have to use daily (rarely, meaning less than three times per year). I did another sleep study and learned that I no longer was having apnea events while I slept, and no longer needed the CPAP machine.

After getting diagnosed with type 2 diabetes, I followed the diabetic nutritionist’s guidelines and was very careful with what I ate. I lost nearly 40 pounds over the winter! Dropping those pounds really helped me feel better, but so far it was mostly on accident that I lost weight. So, I decided to get serious, what I’d been taught was that I needed to eat less and exercise more. I got a Fitbit tracker to track my progress, I started walking every day and eventually biking to work. I started using MyFitnessPal to track calories. Since my blood sugar seemed to be under control, I lost focus on the strict guidelines from the nutritionist and focused on limiting the calories I consumed, only trying vaguely to keep my number of carbohydrates low. For instance, I would use Atkins bars (sometimes two or three in a day) for snacks, since those should be low enough in sugar for a diabetic, right?

My family history lead me to a near-vegetarian diet, which I followed for almost two decades. Red meat gives you heart disease and fruit, vegetables and pretend meat made out of soybeans are healthy. I felt I did moderate exercise, I got tired of going to the gym, but continued to walk and bike when I could. That should have been enough to keep me healthy, right?

In my mind I had no real healthy problems, just sleep apnea, but my mom has that, so that must be hereditary, not because I was overweight. Besides that, I also saw the chiropractor for back pain and also saw a doctor and physical therapist several times for the back pain and join pains throughout my body, but that was probably because I was getting older. We hired the neighbors to mow the lawn because I was knocked out of commission for a week due to allergies if I did it, but I always had allergies and athsma, it was nothing new. Also, around the time my first child was born, I was diagnosed with psoriasis, but it was another auto-immune disease, it just goes hand-in-hand with allergies and athsma, there was nothing I could have done about that. So, basically I was healthy, until suddenly I had a kidney stone.

I have explained this story to enough people that I think I’d better write it down so I can both share it with other people who are interested and so I don’t forget anything. Once I started writing it, I got to the point where I never thought I’d finish, so I’m breaking it up into parts so I actually get somewhere. Here’s the first part…

My dad’s side of the family has had heart problems. His dad had a heart attack, his brother and my cousin have had issues with high cholesterol. My dad has a number of stents in his coronary arteries, he got a couple at a time starting in about 1997 and then the most recent four were put in at the end of 2006. In the middle of all that, he was also diagnosed with type 2 diabetes but he has followed what the doctors told him and hasn’t had too much trouble with that.