How Illness Broke Me — and Curiosity Rebuilt Me

A personal journey through misdiagnosis, resilience, and discovery — and how science, curiosity, and community helped me reclaim my health when medicine didn’t have the answers.

Happy Thanksgiving! Whether you celebrate the holiday or not, I hope today can be a moment of reflection — a chance to focus on gratitude within our growing StayCurious Metabolism community.

Let me say this with as much sincerity and enthusiasm as I can muster: I am deeply grateful for you.

And I don’t say that as a cliché.

Since I was a teenager, I dreamed of using science to help people. Throughout college, I believed the best way to do that was by becoming a physician. But as I navigated my own health journey — and as I connected with so many of you — I realized something important: My passion, my skill set, and the opportunities in front of me were pointing toward another way to transform lives — through teaching about metabolic health.

Sure, I could talk numbers — the rapid growth of our community, our Top 3 spot on Best-Sellers in Science lists globally, the tripling of my YouTube audience in just a few months — but the thing that has moved me the most isn’t quantitative. It’s qualitative.

It’s your words. Your stories. The community you have helped and are helping to build.

I can’t thank you enough for that.

To show you that I see you as more than subscribers — that I see you as a kind of chosen family, united not by genetics but by curiosity — I want to share my story in a way I’ve never quite told it before.

So, let’s go—not just down memory lane, but into the moments that broke me, shaped me, and eventually brought me here.

Spoiled by Good Health

In retrospect, I grew up a little spoiled.

Not in the way you might expect — no flashy cars, no unlimited spending. (I wasn’t even allowed to own video games, to the ongoing disappointment of my friends.)

What I was spoiled with — what I came to feel entitled to — was good health.

Before age 18, I had no real medical history to speak of.

I’d heard terrible stories of suffering — plenty of them from my doctor parents — but they felt more like bedtime horror stories than real threats. (In fairness, my father is a high-risk obstetrician and I’m not too worried about complications of pregnancy.)

I assumed health was the default. For me, it always had been.

So, I ran with it. Literally.

Running into Trouble

I played soccer, basketball, martial arts, swimming, and cross-country. But my true love was long-distance running.

By 17, I had time-qualified for the Boston Marathon — a dream come true, not just because it was the Boston Marathon, but because it was the year after the Boston bombings.

I had earned a spot in the elite Red Wave. I was proud. In retrospect, I was obsessed. Imagine a 17-year-old going out every Sunday, religiously, to run he’s routine 22-miler before hitting the gym for a lift. The effort generated returns. Even as a “kid” I could run a 2-hour 45 min marathon (a 6 min 18 second per mile pace).

Then, just weeks before the race, I sustained a stress fracture — a bad one — in my lateral tibial plateau.

It wasn’t going to heal in time.

But I did say I was obsessed.

So, I “ran” the Boston Marathon anyway… on crutches.

But that’s not really where the story begins.

The story begins after the race — when the fracture didn’t heal. Not for a long time.

I Started to Crack

And when I tried to return to running, my body betrayed me.

Every time I increased my mileage, something broke: legs, feet, hips, vertebrae. The injuries came faster, with less effort. Eventually, I couldn’t run 5 kilometers without snapping bones in my feet — clean in half.

It took two years, and multiple fractures, before someone finally ordered a basic DEXA scan.

That’s when I was diagnosed with osteoporosis.

It was a shock. I was young, at a healthy weight, with no known medical or family history, and what most would call a conventionally ‘well-balanced’ diet. My testosterone was normal. No red flags. Nothing in any textbook suggested I should have severe osteoporosis.

But there it was. And there I was.

Doctors were stumped. So ,they did what doctors do — they reached for the differential diagnosis. At the top of that list?

Something called Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport (RED-S).

Translation: “you’re not eating enough for your activity level.”

It was a tidy diagnosis — patient-controlled, with a simple solution: eat more. And once that label stuck, it was nearly impossible to unstick.

In medicine, that’s called “premature closure” — ending the diagnostic process too early because you’ve found an answer that might fit, even if it’s the wrong one.

Never mind that I was the kind of teenager who would come home from that long winter run and warm up with hot chocolate made by melting two-thirds of a jar of Nutella into milk. I wasn’t starving. I had a normal BMI. Normal hormones. But with nothing else to go on, the label stuck — and I was dismissed.

What frustrated me most wasn’t the diagnosis.

It was that I didn’t feel heard.

I explained why the pieces didn’t fit, but instead of curiosity or further investigation, I got psychological platitudes about my “relationship with food.”

Eventually, in college, I wrote and published a case report — on myself. (First of four.)

Only then did the system start to take me seriously.

Turns out, I have a rare mutation in the LRP5 gene — a gene that regulates bone remodeling under mechanical stress.

That changed me.

Not just because of the diagnosis — but because it was the first time I felt failed by the system I’d always trusted. I believed medicine would have the answers. It didn’t. In the end, a teenage boy had to figure out what was wrong with his own body.

That’s not a humerus joke.

And yet, I still received excellent care. Good medicine doesn’t always need perfect answers. I was prescribed bone-building medications that worked. Today, I no longer have osteoporosis. I still avoid long-distance running, but I live a full life otherwise.

Still, the experience left a lingering message: You’re on your own.

And that message would return — with force.

I was finishing college when things got worse. Much worse.

Sh*t Hits the Fan

That’s when my ulcerative colitis began — an illness that tore through my life like wildfire.

Bloody diarrhea. Cramping pain. Urgency without warning. The symptoms arrived like a nightmare carnival game: unpredictable, humiliating, unrelenting.

It derailed everything.

Sports became impossible. Academics became exhausting — not from the material, but from the fear I might not make it through an exam.

My social life evaporated. Even the sound of music at parties would jolt my gut into chaos.

And romantic relationships? Forget it! There’s awkward — and then there’s sprinting to your dorm bathroom, mid-kiss, to take a bloody shit. Sounds. Smells. Colors. The whole show.

Colitis changed me.

I didn’t want it to. I fought hard. But it changed me anyway.

At my college graduation, I was honored to give the valedictory speech.

I was terrified I’d have an episode on stage. But I did it. I smiled. I shook hands. I made a few cringe-worthy jokes (including about cookies). And afterward, I felt… hollow.

Everything was a performance.

Like life had become a show I put on for others while I fought a private war inside.

(At the time I felt alone. But I now realize this is a common experience. Share your thoughts?)

That’s where I was when I moved to Oxford to begin my PhD.

And that’s when things hit rock bottom.

Hitting Rock Bottom at Oxford

Within months, I was hospitalized multiple times with severe flares. My health crumbled. My spirits followed. My experience in the UK’s NHS was dismal.

During one severe flare, I was admitted to a palliative care unit with malnutrition and a heart rate in the 20s. After three sleepless nights surrounded by the screams of death and dementia (truly), I was discharged… still with a heart rate in the 20s.

The official diagnosis?

“You may have ingested too much turmeric.”

Yes, the spice turmeric. Or technically, curcumin (a component of turmeric) — which I had been taking under medical guidance as a common anti-inflammatory nutraceutical at standard dosing.

I didn’t argue. I knew it was utter nonsense. I also I knew I wouldn’t get the help I needed.

So, I left.

I went back to my dorm. I lay motionless for two days. One of them was my 23rd birthday.

That was my lowest point. I had three options:

1. Keep going like this (not viable)

2. Die (increasingly tempting)

3. Or try something radical — unproven, even risky

As the son of two MD-PhDs, enrolled in a PhD program at Oxford and accepted to do me MD at Harvard, non-evidence-based medicine felt like heresy.

Well. Call me Lucifer.

The Day my Life Changed Forever

On June 1, 2019, I tried the ketogenic diet for the first time.

I wasn’t hopeful. I’d tried everything else: low-FODMAP, SCD, vegetarian, vegan, paleo, Mediterranean. Nothing worked. Nothing lasted.

So, I figured: why not? I had nothing left to lose.

And what happened next felt like magic. Words can describe how my life changed on that day.

Within a week, I felt like myself again. Energy returned. Pain vanished. Inflammation plummeted. Bloody diarrhea stopped. My colonoscopy showed no visible disease.

I was stunned. I was overjoyed!

It was like drinking Felix Felicis in the Harry Potter universe — except it wasn’t luck. It wasn’t magic. It was real. It was biological. It was confusing as heck, but as a patient I didn’t care. I was happy and I was me for the first time in years.

You might think that turned me into a ketogenic evangelist.

It didn’t.

I don’t believe in silver bullets. I don’t think keto is for everyone.

What I did learn is this: Curiosity Cures.

My willingness to explore, to question, and to take ownership of my own health — that’s what saved me. And it’s what’s helped countless others, too.

Through my journey, I got curious.

And — more importantly — I Stayed Curious.

Six and a half years later, I’m still amazed by how life has twisted and turned — from Oxford for my PhD to Harvard for my MD.

But through it all, it’s the friends I’ve made and the community I’ve come to know — all of you — who have taught me more than anything.

So once again, I say: THANK YOU!