A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step

Last year, in December,  I went to visit my friend Nina in Stockholm. I had a great time over there, in spite of being rather ill a few days. I could not pinpoint what was making me ill, but I blamed it on the lactose intolerance I suffer, and of course in the copious amounts of wine and drinks we consumed.
I had been already fat when I went there, and probably the trip, where I indulged myself a lot, made me even fatter. How much, I actually don't know. I had been so fat lately that I just couldn't face it anymore and stopped weighting myself. I had given up.
And when I say fat, I mean very fat. I am very short, 1.52 m (4 ft 11.8 in), and when I eventually collected the courage to weight myself, I was weighting a staggering 80 kg (176.4 lbs). By any standards, I had passed the "overweight" label into "obese". I am blessed with good health (so, far, touch wood and all that), and my metabolic markers were ok-ish (cholesterol was slightly high, but nothing outside the healthy window). I had begged the doctor to make such tests after getting so fat so fast. But I am getting ahead of myself.
I live in The Netherlands. Country of tulips, windmills and clogs. And also a country where the food is just terrible. At least for somebody like me. In spite of this, the dutchies are in a vast majority not very fat, and their "old people" live to enjoy their retirement period very much indeed (although this pretty picture is changing). I arrived to The Netherlands with a healthy weight (50 kg). And in 6 years I gained more than half of my initial body weight. The reason? The dutch diet.
The dutch diet consist on eating loads of bread and a little bowl of soup for lunch, then having a dinner consisting on meat, potatoes and some vegetable (like green beans). They are moderated at lunch, but I come from another culture, so eating 2 meager slices of bread and some soup is really too little for me. I was hungry on only those, so I was eating between 4-6 slices of bread, and a little treat for "dessert": a yogurt full of chocolate chips. My dinners would be very often bread again, as I was too exhausted to make proper food.
The dutch diet seems to work well for them, as I said. But for me it was a disaster. After only a few months, I had gained 2 kg. Those "innocent" few extra grams transformed into 5 kg, then 7, then 10. I started to become worried. To make things worse, I was getting periods of sickness (feeling bloated, gas, constipation followed by diarrhea) that I could not understand. I started dieting, and of course, exercising. The diet, was the "traditional diet advise": count your calories, eat fruit, remain wary of fat. I aimed to consume 1500 calories a day. I was constantly hungry (and angry). But I perhaps went down 1 - 2 kg, or remained stable. I just couldn't count my calories forever (and it didn't seem to work), and when in the middle of a PhD, exercising was a struggle, as I was putting many, many hours at the job. It didn't work.
By the end of 2 years in The Netherlands, I was oscillating between 10 and 12 kg overweight. And because the diet didn't seem to work I got discouraged (after all being hungry for nothing is just infuriating) so I abandoned myself to hedonic pleasures in the form of cookies, chocolate, etc. Big mistake. I gained another 5 kg, and was 17 kg overweight. Soon those became 20 kg. I went in the search for another solution. I had heard of the GI index, and the GI diets. I went to the bookstore and bought myself 2 books: one of GI index and diet, and another of Patrick Holford GL diet. They seemed to make sense. I followed the GL diet for a few months and went down 4 kg. Successful, but after that my weight was stuck there and the plateau did not move a millimeter. The GL diet was complicated, where I had to weight each food to get the right amounts of carbs and proteins. It was very difficult and often I was hungry. The holidays came, I took a few excesses, and the kilos came back.
By then I had worked out what was making me sick. I had lactose intolerance. I worked it out myself, because the dutch health system is one of the worse I've ever seen: the doctors tell you to go home and do nothing for you. They don't ask more questions to try to figure out what is making you sick. I suppose they are overwhelmed with the amounts of patients they have, but it is indeed a poor excuse.
After 20 kg, and so little success with the dieting, the kilos just piled up. They kept on creeping on me, and for all my efforts I was rewarded with a plateau of weight, almost never with losing weight. I kept on trying to keep calories at bay and exercise, but to no avail.
When I hit 27 kg overweight I just couldn't exercise anymore. What I mean is that I could not do any more aerobic classes, or run. I could just barely walk, and all my joints were in pain. I felt bloated, sluggish, tired all the time. When you feel like this you reach for comfort foods, sweet treats, I became a couch potato. Then I would feel guilty. I hated to see myself in pictures. I gained so many dress sizes that I was constantly shopping for more, and the shopping trips were a nightmare, I was so unhappy with my size. My waist size became larger than my leg size. I felt ashamed and ugly. I was the typical obese cliche.
Well, coming back to my Stockholm trip. Among many conversations (most of them silly), my friend told me about this "fat diet" that everyone was following. My friend was also trying to lose weight, but the comment came about that all the people she knew were talking about diets and that depressed her. I had no clue what was she talking about. Then she said: "this diet, called LCHF, for 'Low Carb High Fat'. My sister followed it with some success, and a friend of mine went down 6 kg in just one month following a strict version of it.". My eyes lighted up. I had not been able to go down 1 kg in a long time. I went home and looked on the Internet, googled "low carb high fat diet". The rest is history.