My Endometriosis Diagnosis Was35 Years Ahead of the Research

My Endometriosis Diagnosis Was35 Years Ahead of the Research

I was diagnosed with endometriosis when I was 19 years old. Thirty-five years ago. Back then, that diagnosis in someone my age was almost unheard of. I got lucky — a young doctor who was willing to look further than most would have at the time.

But the diagnosis was really just the beginning of a much longer story nobody was telling yet.

For years after that, I was just trying to make the pain stop. I wasn't thinking about metabolic health or blood sugar or any of the language we use now. I was in my early 20s, at an age where keeping weight in check should have been the easy part of life, and I was struggling with it anyway. I stumbled onto the Atkins diet — what we'd basically call keto today — because everyone was doing it back then, not because I thought it had anything to do with my endometriosis.

And then my symptoms disappeared.

Not lessened. Disappeared. As long as I kept carbohydrates and sugar low, I didn't have endometriosis symptoms anymore. I didn't have the language for why. I just knew it worked, and I kept doing it.

It would be years before Metformin entered the conversation. Years before anyone was really talking about the connection between blood sugar, insulin resistance, and endometriosis. Years before PCOS started getting reframed as the metabolic condition we now understand it largely to be — something some people are calling PMOS, because the reproductive framing never told the whole story to begin with.

I had already found my own answer, entirely by accident, decades before the research caught up to explain why it worked.

That's likely part of why low-carb worked so well for me before I ever knew why. I was accidentally supporting a system that wasn't sending the right messages on its own.

Now we have real tools for exactly this. Some people use GLP-1s at stronger doses specifically for weight loss. Others, especially those of us managing something like endometriosis or PCOS, are finding that microdosing can help support blood sugar and lower inflammation without chasing weight loss as the goal at all. Both approaches can support these conditions — it just depends on what your body actually needs.

I think about that a lot now, doing the work I do. How many people are out there right now, managing something in their body through trial and error, without anyone ever validating that what they're doing actually makes physiological sense?Sometimes you're ahead of the research. Trust yourself anyway.

Nobody told me why the low-carb thing worked. I just knew my body, and I trusted what it was telling me, even when the science hadn't caught up yet to explain it.

xo

~Jess

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