My Journey: By Josh Koop

Like many who are in the broad definition of Generation X we were a generation raised on "cleaning our plates" and you eat everything you take. This isn't to blame our parents but more the truth of life growing up and setting us up for the food issues and problems that are widespread in the current world.

I was just like any other kid growing up in the 80's, I loved sports and played baseball and soccer consistently. Then around the 6th grade my parents divorced and somehow the life I had thought was perfect imploded, overnight I lost the stability and I became a babysitter until mom came home from work.

This is where I started to have issues as the sports all stopped and the activities dropped off, but the eating maintained its course. From here forward is where my weight started creeping ever upwards and I wasn't properly set up to succeed, as no child is when their parents don't have the knowledge.

Note for those here, I love my parents and I don't think they did anything wrong other than be parents who love their kids. Without the internet that we have today, which is often overlooked, there was no information available on how they could help get my weight under control. I love you mom, I also miss my father more than words could ever explain.

When I was in the military I heard about Atkins and how people were using it to maintain their required weight. While it interested me I took it to be mumbo jumbo and didn't pay it any more attention even though I saw people who were doing it were fit.

Now that I have come to read his book and learn more about the reasons why it works I have realized they were probably more fit due to the eating of the Atkins diet. Since it limits your carbohydrate intake and has a focus on protein it helps you use fat stores while the protein helps maintain you muscle or gain additional muscle.

As I found success and lost a large amount of weight I fell into that trap of not managing my diet as much, this was fine until my wife and I moved to California. This is when I said, well since we are driving and it is difficult to eat Atkins specifically I let myself eat whatever I wanted.

As you can probably guess it was at this time that I stopped Atkins and over time would gain back everything I had lost. I hadn't learned the biggest lesson which is needed, this needs to be a lifestyle change, something that you never consider is that changing back to the diet which made you aft in the first place will probably make you fat again.

In general this progression of slowly gaining weight continued for the next 10 years and went into overdrive when I took a contract position and was flying to Houston weekly. My diet obviously got worse and worse as time went and I weighed myself and I was horrified at the scale and the 320lbs it showed.

I started reading books and watching videos on YouTube since I had heard that Keto was very similar to Atkins and I had success prior on an Atkins diet. The more I read the more it was in alignment with how I was doing the diet as I never left the Induction phase on Atkins and always kept my carbs low.

I read more and more, I checked from numerous personalities ranging from Dr Berg to more normal people like ScottTheTruckDriver. I prefer to watch people on YouTube who don't sell their own products, I like it much more when they share what has worked and what has failed them.

I still periodically suffer from issues due to my energy drink and diet soda consumption which when removed did lower the problems decently. The additional gut issues appear to be tied to the vegetation my wife still has with her meals that I am eating also. To find out what is overall causing me issues I am working on carnivore as a elimination diet that also keeps me healthy at the same time.

As of today (12/31/2019) I have seen the issues lessening, though not fully carnivore yet as I am really re-learning how to manage this process with a family I will continue to document my process and successes and failures within the blog to help others out in their journey!