First reaction from people who knew me before I started on my natural healing journey is “waou! You’ve lost weight!” And that is how the whole conversation about how I’ve lost weight begins.

Back in October 2017, as I was talking to my new friend Manon about my joint pain, fatigue, and the huge impact my ankylosing spondylitis was having on both my personal and professional life, she advised me to go see her nutritionist, to check with him about food intolerances. Coincidentally, at that time, I had already been reading a lot on this subject and I was ready to give it a try. So my only goal, when I went to see this nutritionist was to try to stop the pain in my joints that I had been suffering from most of my life. By that time, I weighed 138 pounds (for a 5ft4 height) so I absolutely didn’t think that I was overweight.

This nutritionist/functional doctor got me tested for intolerances on 22 foods and did a complete checkup of all my vitamin levels and many other things. As it turned out, with the results of these tests, he had the proof in front of his eyes that I was living a pretty healthy life. I’ve always exercised and eat home cooked meals (I almost never bought prepared meals in the supermarket), I was already used to check all ingredients on everything before buying it (that’s because I grew up with my ingredient expert dad who checked everything at home) and select the best quality product (which has absolutely nothing to do with the brand). I knew that I was gaining a little bit of weight each year since I was 18 (about 4 pounds a year) for no particular reason but I wasn’t really worried about it because my mom and many people around me told me that it was normal to gain weight as I was getting older.

But my nutritionist told me, “although it happens very oftenly, it is not normal to gain weight just because you grow older, without a change in your way of feeding yourself and exercising”.

What he also told me, was that I was overweight, even though I didn’t really look fat and my Body Mass Index (BMI) was saying that I was in the “normal” zone.

First explanation he gave me was: you are overweight not because of some trend or because a standard index is telling you this, but according to your own specific body constitution (he has a special machine, telling him the exact weight of fat, water and bones in my body).

Then he explained, that I wasn’t at fault in gaining this weight.

If you have read about food intolerances (if not you can read my articles on food intolerances published on this blog) you know that you can eat food you are intolerant to, without even noticing it. That is exactly what happened to me. According to him, eating food that I was intolerant to was causing inflammation in my body. This inflammation was preventing the adipocytes (body cells) from doing their job of fat destocking.

That is why, by just removing my food intolerances from my diet, I lost 33 pounds, even though I eat quite a lot, regardless of the calories and the quantity of fat in my food. Again, my goal was not to lose weight (or to cure my keratosis pilaris and many other things) but by removing the food causing inflammation in my body, I cured all these other symptoms. And honestly, I feel much better now in my body without those 33 pounds.

If you want to learn more about the link between gut health and weight you can read the book Gut and Weight: From dysbiosis to overweight, From inflammation to obesity written by Doctor Panizza.