@mmmfood i am glad to hear you’re doing much better than you were 3 years ago! you must be generally on the right track then. so are you basically just struggling with the weight gain? did you have any blood work done before you started refeeding?
we don’t actually know exactly what brings about metabolic syndrome — it’s a set of conditions that seem to present higher risk factors for heart disease and diabetes. read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metabolic_syndrome under “etiology”; it’s complicated. look up “fatty liver” too — it always helps to be informed about what one’s doctor diagnoses, because you are the best person to be the steward over your own health.
i am not gonna defend any part of matt’s writing — i’m new here myself, and am not actually doing anything according to matt other than measuring my temperature and checking my urine so i get a baseline on those. i came here to see how other people are doing with putting his ideas into practice, and whether they’ve had success in dealing with issues other than weight loss (that’s what i am interested in).
i agree that matt’s writing is very open to interpretation. i think that’s largely because matt is writing as he goes along researching. i view it as more of a guy sharing “hey, look, i’ve found this really interesting thing” than a prescription. i think he’s mostly trying to impress on people that eating what they like, eating more than the meagre portions of most diets, is not the boogaboo they’ve been told by thousands of messages everywhere, and that to fix their metabolism it helps to throw those messages out the door and just eat whatever they feel like for a while. i’d pretty much arrived at the same conclusion before reading matt’s work. i never did go through refeeding the way he recommends, and i am not gonna do that now either because i am past those messages already.
just like matt knows people who can shovel in tremendous amounts of calories without gaining weight, i do too. i also know people who go constantly hungry and don’t lose any weight. i know people of every weight whose diets are what is seen widely as pretty darn healthy. many of those people are healthy overall, some are not. i know people of all weights whose diets are junk. again, some of those are healthy, some are not. i think it’s therefore largely irrelevant what some random other person tells you about their weight and the calories they take in and their health, because it’s likely not going to work the same way for you.
FWIW, my blood pressure was sky high when my BMI was far from obese (after dieting; i was under constant stress then), and it’s at the upper range of “acceptable” now that i am again categorized as obese — and without meds. i’ve gone from “pre-diabetic” to the “normal” range in blood sugar as well — yup, still obese. nothing majorly wrong with my blood work either. my previous GP (who’d done a whole lot less reading on nutrition and obesity than i) just couldn’t wrap his head around it. it’s actually pretty simple: obesity does not per se cause health issues, but it is instead a symptom of a whole slew of factors that all together also create risk factors for disease. we’re starting to see more studies now that dig deeper than the obvious OMG fat. just because you can see fat does not mean it’s the cause of anything underneath it.
i think that’s where matt’s work is useful — to let go of all the inane messages about food that come from people who are not actually even experts at it, or who have a vested interest in pushing their specific message. i do wish he participated here. does he ever? did he use to?