Most people who were alive at the time know where they were on September 11, 2001.
Jules and I were 100m away from the two towers when they were hit.
We were working on Wall Street at the time. I was building Credit Risk analytic software, and she was developing internal CRM systems – we’d both made partner in a spin-off organization built from the risk management team at J.P. Morgan and the data team at Reuters.
What we didn’t realise at the time was no matter how messed up the world was at that particular time, both of us inside were really quite sick, and we just didn’t have a clue – and our doctors didn’t have a clue at the time either.
That was 15 years ago, on September 11, 2001. I took that photo of Julie after the first tower was hit and before the second tower – right in front of the stock exchange.
We walked out of downtown with a million other office workers. We were heading to our home in Brooklyn.
Julie took the photo of me in Chinatown after the first building had collapsed almost directly over our heads, and before the second building fell.
At that time in 2001 both of us had passed recent company physicals. I was not yet Diabetic … but it’s pretty clear if you know what to look for that we were both making a *LOT* of insulin.
That centrally stored body fat, is all fat around our internal organs – Human foie gras if you will.
Eventually 3 years later in 2004 my pancreas would start to give up keeping up with the demand for more and more insulin – and I first leaned that Diabetes was my future.
Julie’s pancreas kept on delivering and she never quite reached the levels of blood glucose that might cause a Doctor to say “Oh you might be starting to become diabetic” … but of course both of us had been on that trajectory for decades and had been making heart disease causing amounts of insulin for decades.
The tipping point at which we finally started to do something about this was in 2014 when we both started a ketogenic diet.
By total coincidence in September 11, 2013 we took photos at what might be our most obviously sickest point – with giant novelty bars of chocolate, as you do.
We didn’t realise until afterwards that that was September 11 .. but at that time in our lives both of us were trying not to remember that date. So some Costco hijinks with some novelty chocolate bars were just the ticket.
Now 3 years later and both of us have been eating a low carb high fat diet now for over 2 and a half years. Both of us are as healthy as we have ever been, certainly fitter than we’ve been since we were teenagers.
It is September 11, 2016. We both just cycled around the lake at the center of Canberra together … just for fun … because apparently we are now people who like to exercise for fun.
We both still have lingering effects of PTSD from our experiences during the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001 … but that metabolic syndrome that was lurking inside us at the time and which we really didn’t know that we had – that has gone.
For both of us.
Completely.
Thanks to us just ignoring the dietary guidelines and eating a ketogenic diet.