When I was about 35 years old, around the year 2005, I started having strong stomach pains and weakness 30+ minutes after breakfast (my usual breakfast used to be coffee with sugar, a scone, bread+cheese, some fruit). I also often felt nauseous and had stomach pains after loading up on soda/sweets/bread after dinner. I saw several doctors, they of course diagnosed nothing useful (no-one even mentioned that it was caused by what I was eating) and gave me some worthless stomach pills. I started doing research online and eventually self-diagnosed myself with Reactive Hypoglycemia - it is where your blood sugar drops too low shortly after you eat carbs (initial blood sugar spike followed by over-exaggerated blood-sugar drop).

I started cutting down on sugar/carbs I was eating and continued to research food online. Between 2007-2015 or so I was really obsessed with food and was spending 2+ hours most days reading books as well as various online forums about peoples life journeys when it comes to food and health. I was primarily influenced by carnivore-related forums, fasting-related forums, as well as researching how people ate in the past who lived till 100+ years old. I also saved over a thousand of comprehensive testimonials from forums/reddit/etc... of individual journeys of people who completely overcame diabetes and permanently lost most of their extra weight - all the details about what/how they ate and their replies to questions.

That gradually helped me understand patterns as to what tends to work for most people, and what adjustments one can make to gradually transition to eating less often and eating protein-based real food.

Since about 2010 or so I was eating mostly OMADish or twice a day, mostly meat-based, with some vegetables, starches, grains. My stomach pain issues went away, and I was feeling much better.

A few years later - towards 2014, I started reading a lot of research about seed oils and how harmful they potentially are. And since eating seed oils is totally historically inaccurate as they simply did not exist until 1900s or so, I cut out most of seed oils. Eliminating seed oils made me feel even better.

My health today (at 53 as of 2023) is basically perfect. My blood pressure is perfect, my blood sugar is perfect, I sleep as well as when I was 20yo, I have no skin issues of any kind, I have no nausea or stomach issues of any kind, I have no pain of any kind anywhere, my waistline is the same as when I was a teen, and I obviously take zero meds of any kind. People also generally assume I am in my 30s when they first meet me - a good 15-20 years younger than my actual age.

My friends started asking me for advice on how to make a permanent transition to eating Real Food. I was usually able to gradually steer them in the right direction, addiction-wise, because of my extensive archival of testimonials as to what worked for others. Then friends-of-friends started asking, etc...