What happens when a fat girl goes Bulletproof?

I am a thirty-something graduate student with a busy schedule and a tiny budget.  I have been overweight since about the age of eight, and a vegetarian all of my life.  It all started when my mother went to work and my grandparents began taking care of me in the afternoon, feeding me ice cream and popcorn to my heart's content.  What does an eight-year-old know of nutrition?  My grandmother had always been a little on the heavy side (probably about a modern size 14 when she was a teenager in the 1930s, with minor fluctuations up and down in between), but even by the late 1980s-early 1990s, childhood obesity wasn't a thing on anyone's mind, particularly.  Kids are active and growing, so they burn it off, right?  Obviously, we know differently now.  But at the time it all seemed perfectly harmless.  So I ate.  And ate.  And ate. And ate.  By the time I reached my teens, I was a chronic weight cycler.  I would go from eating nothing but an apple all day to eating everything in sight, and my weight would follow. 

As an adult, I have followed similar cycles, accompanied by depression, alcohol abuse and heavy smoking, social isolation, divorce, and general poor decision-making.  About 2006, I started to get back on track professionally by going back to college.  I finished my degree in 2007 and married for the second time in 2008.  All the while my weight bouncing around between 145 and 190 (at 5'4'').  I started graduate school in the fall of 2008, and everything in my life outside of school basically spun out of control.  As a child, I had a near-genius IQ.  That's great, right?  Except that when everything comes easy, you never learn to work hard.  I suffered from a severe lack of discipline and focus, and used food as a crutch.  And lemme tell ya, reading 600+ pages and writing extensive papers on a weekly basis is NOT the same as learning multiplication tables.  My self-esteem and general mood suffered, and ultimately my second marriage failed. 

I finished my MA and started my PhD in 2011.  While writing my thesis, I had managed to get my weight back down to a reasonably-comfortable (if not quite healthy) 165.  By the end of my first semester in the PhD program, I was tipping the scales close to 200.  Now, here I am, four semesters later, almost done with coursework.  My weight this morning was 213.8.  I am not an athlete-biohacker trying to trim another 1% off of my 18% body fat.  I am a fat girl who has tried everything.  Nutrisystem (FAIL), Weight Watchers (semi-fail), anorexia + cocaine (goes without saying).  I have just always been hungry.  Ravenously hungry.  Eat-my-arm-off hungry.  All the time. 

A couple of weeks ago, I went to visit my parents for the weekend.  I only get to see them about twice a year, as they live five hours away and I rarely have a single day off much less multiple for travel.  My mother has been suffering from some sort of rheumatoid/fibromyalgia condition for a couple of years now.  She, like me, has been overweight her entire adult life, apart from a brief spell in her 20s.  She is now 63 and using a walker to get from the den to the kitchen.  She's always been reasonably active, a regular walker, who never ate much junk food or even large portion sizes.  Yet her weight has hovered between 200-230 for years.  The most frustrating part has been the way the doctors have treated her; if you can't walk, it's because you're too fat.  One idiot even told her to quit exercising, yet still expected her to just magically drop the weight and suddenly feel better, without giving her any guidelines on how to do it.  Watching her suffer has given me extra motivation to get to the root of the issue.  My basic philosophy:  obesity is NOT A DISEASE.  Obesity is a warning sign that something is wrong.  Obesity does not CAUSE diabetes, heart disease, breast cancer - it is CAUSED BY the same things that cause those diseases.  The problem is, doctors have been treating obesity as the root problem for years - putting the cart before the horse and misdiagnosing god knows how many conditions.  But if you simply cut back on calories without changing the basic content of your diet, then you are still fueling the same disorders.  Logical. Simple. And, I think, true. 

After I got home from the weekend with the folks, I looked up a diet my mother had mentioned, Wheat Belly.  It made absolute sense to me.  I immediately cut out wheat and cut back on my carbs - voila!  Six pounds gone in a week.  Better than that, the pain that I have had in my knees and ankles since I was 28 has disappeared.  I became obsessed and started scouring the internet for anything else that could be helpful, and came across Bulletproof Intermittent Fasting.  I am not an endorser - I am an experimenter (okay, maybe I am a biohacker?)  I don't necessarily believe every claim that either the creator of Bulletproof or Wheat Belly make, but after years of failure and one week of smashing success, I think it is worth a shot.

I decided to blog because on my numerous searches, I could not find a single person who was ACTUALLY overweight blogging about their experience.  I found a lot of already fit people looking to "tweak" their performance or body fat.  So I am the lab rat.  What happens when a fat girl goes Bulletproof? 

This morning I had a high quality coffee with 1 T of pasture-fed butter and 1 T of MCT oil.  I am going to the gym in just a bit to do a quick weight routine (no more cardio!)  and then I will break my "fast" with some salmon cooked at a low temp, loaded with olive oile, rosemary, and thyme with a side of steamed broccoli soaked in (pasture-fed, hormone-free) butter. 

Starting stats (unfortunately I have no insurance and therefore no doc for bloodwork):
Weight:  213.8 (was 219.8 a week ago, btw)
Bust:  48
Waist: 41
Hips: 48.5
Body fat:  47.5%