#104 Fasting for Diabetes with Megan Ramos

Megan Ramos (0:00)

There was this one family doctor who came into the clinic screaming, how dare you fast my patient? I sent my patient here for diabetic kidney disease, not for diabetes management.

But six months later, this doctor came in with flowers, apologizing and asking if he could become a patient himself for his borderline diabetes. And he said it just took seeing that change, that transformation in that one patient to make him open-minded.

Siim Land (0:25)

Body Mind Empowerment.

SPEAKER_3 (0:27)

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Siim Land (0:33)

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SPEAKER_3 (0:35)

Control your mind.

Siim Land (0:38)

Welcome to the Body Mind Empowerment Podcast. I'm your host Siim Land and our guest today is Megan Ramos. Megan works with Dr. Jason Fung and she's the Intensive Dietary Management Program Director. She helps her patients with understanding the dietary principles and guidelines of fasting regimes.

Megan, welcome to the show.

Megan Ramos (0:57)

Hi, thanks for having me on.

Siim Land (1:02)

Let's maybe start off like how did you get involved with helping people with fasting and how did you get involved with working with Dr. Fung?

Megan Ramos (1:10)

So Jason and I have worked together since I was 15 So that's officially 20 years this summer.

Jason, he's a kidney doctor and I'm a kidney researcher. That's our background. So I started when I was a kid because I had a family interest in kidney disease, learning more about it. It's a condition that's plagued my family a little bit and I had the opportunity to do some research and I just really enjoyed it. I enjoyed the team of nephrologists and I enjoyed all of the kidney patients very much.

And there was a lot of research going on in the clinic that was focusing on disease prevention, which is where my true interest lied. You know, let's prevent the kidney disease from happening in the first place. Let's not try to fix it once it's happened. And it was pretty evident that once the kidney damage was there, there wasn't any going back.

So it was where I wanted to be, so I just stuck around.

And in my mid-20s, I started to get really disheartened because it really didn't matter when we detected the kidney disease.

The big research product I was working on was early detection of diabetic kidney disease. But it didn't really matter. If the person had diabetes, diabetes would just continue to get worse and worse and worse over time. So detecting the kidney damage earlier was just finding out that you're going to have kidney failure earlier on.

There was no benefit. You couldn't stop that unless you could stop the diabetes.

So there's sort of two parallel stories going on at the same time. I was becoming really disheartened with work. My goal was to always try to help people who prevented a medicine. And in my 20s, I almost gave up and went to law school. And during my time while I was studying for my LSATs, so the Law School Admissions Test, I decided, okay, Megan, you've got a family history of kidney damage, heart disease, cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer's disease. You need to get your health together. You need to stop eating like a university student, and you need to start eating like an adult. So I started following the Canadian Food Guide, eating, never skipping meals, because I, in hindsight, I realized I always stayed skinny, because I always skipped meals. And I actually fasted a tremendous amount in my youth, just because I was never hungry in the morning. So I never ate breakfast. I used to fight with my parents to death on that.

But I wasn't healthy either, even though I was skinny. I had fatty liver and PCOS, because I ate terrible foods. But I was never overweight.

So in my mid-20s, I decided to get it together, start listening to all of the rules and regulations and authorities on food and nutrition. And I became morbidly obese. So that was a true testament to how terrible these guidelines are. And with that weight came the diagnosis of type 2 diabetes, which at that point was obviously my biggest fear, because I was just watching it kill all these patients I loved, and so much so that it was sending me in a whole different career path. It was really devastating. Jason simultaneously was going through his own questioning about our guidelines. He was getting frustrated too. All he was doing was watching these people die. So like me, he was going through the same questioning, you know, why am I in medicine to make people better? I'm not. I'm watching them get sick. And why is diabetes such a huge issue now? Why is everybody obese now? What is it about it? And he had been doing some research into food guidelines and recommending lower carb diets to his patients, but it wasn't helping too much. The low carb back then, it was very controversial, not understood at all. Even for someone like me, when he talked to me about going low carb, I'm like, all I know how to do is eat carbs. And I've been terrified of fat my whole life. My uncle, who is like my best buddy, died when I was nine from his third heart attack, he was 36 So I was flagged with all these thoughts of how terrible dietary fat was.