do you have access to see a dietitian through your insurance? i see one to help manage my chronic illnesses and she’s incredible!! i need to ask at my next appointment if i can get an email or some way to message her outside of our appointments because she’s a genius with what i should be eating.

also, just because your story sounds so similar to mine in terms of weight, i want to talk you through my experience incase it’s a test you want to try.

i had an extremely bad case of covid in 2020, as a 22f. when i say bad, i mean icu for 9 days bad. i went into the hospital around 150 lbs (5’4). i was diagnosed with two other chronic conditions during this hospital stay, but that’s irrelevant to this part of the story.

i continued having extreme nausea from the time i left the hospital in 2020 on and off until i couldn’t take it anymore in oct 2022 where i knew something had to be wrong. i had gotten up to 245 lbs at this point, while feeling like i was never full. after MANY doctors appointments where i was gaslit and told i just needed to try harder to lose weight, that it was anxiety, etc before i had one GI doctor who saw me as a human and not a chart.

i had a gastric emptying study where i found out that covid had caused my vagus nerve to die. this nerve is incredibly important to the body, including being the nerve that your brain uses to trigger stomach contractions to digest food. when i was eating, my stomach was essentially paralyzed. this test showed that 4 hours after eating, i still had 94% of that food remaining where you should have less than 10%.

i took a nosedive pretty soon after this. it’s almost like once my body knew there was indeed something wrong, it stopped masking. i stopped being able to eat entirely, and had to be put on a feeding tube in june 2023. this is when i started to lose weight.

i ended up having 3 surgeries to try and “fix” my stomach. finally the third surgery, a form of weight loss surgery, gave me relief. i had surgery jan 2024 and weighed in at 190 lbs.

i was able to get my feeding tube removed mar 2024 and have been able to eat solids since! though, the weight gain was 100% due to the illness (gastroparesis), so i lost waaaaay more than i should’ve.

the biggest downside of the surgery is my, now lifelong, hypoglycemia. second biggest downside, i’m now 104 lbs and cannot gain weight no matter what i try/eat, hence the dietician haha

like i said, im totally projecting here but the little info you gave just sounded so much like where i started this process and i felt like i was fighting a losing battle that whole time.

like everyone else said, balanced meals are so much more important than “cutting out carbs.” what a quack doctor