She Asked to Have Her Colon Removed — Then a Doctor Finally Said “Change Your Diet” — with Dr. Jocelyn Foran

Jocelyn grew up in the 1970s with one foot planted firmly in a meat-based diet — roast on Sundays, lamb, liver, meat and some veg, dessert once a week. Then the 1980s arrived with the food guides and their eleven slices of bread a day. She became a teenager in exactly that window, didn’t like how her body was changing, and started doing what so many of us did: going all day without eating, then coming home starving and putting away two bowls of cereal.

Underneath all of it was a childhood shaped by severe poverty. Her dad left when she was eight and she never saw him again. Her mother had rheumatoid arthritis, and from an early age Jocelyn was mothering her. By the end of high school she had what she calls a hellbent determination to become a physician — because it was a way to help people, and a way out.

She got the chemistry degree. She got into medical school. And in her last month there, at 24, she was diagnosed with her own autoimmune condition. She asked the obvious question — should I change the way I eat? — and was told no. Just take the pills. She describes herself then as a good little rule follower, a box checker. So she took the pills, through a five-year residency, through three pregnancies, through her thirties.

By her late thirties she was becoming insulin resistant. She was told to go vegetarian, then told that wasn’t vegetarian enough and to go vegan, which she did for three years. And at 43 she sat down with her gastroenterologist and said maybe we should cut my colon out, because I can’t live like this anymore.

That was the moment someone finally said: why don’t you change your diet? She started with the specific carbohydrate diet and saw a huge change — which led to the question that reorganized her life. If specific carbohydrates are good, maybe low or no carbohydrates is even better. Paleo, low carb, keto in 2016, meat-based by 2020, fully carnivore by 2022. Off her medication. In remission.

We dive into ideas like:

• The operating room patterns that pushed her into prevention — the diabetic mismanaged for twenty-five years coming in for an amputation, the small children raised on sugary drinks having every tooth extracted, ECT after ECT for depression that gets controlled and never cured — and the underlying theme she kept seeing in all of it.
• Going upstream. She takes the phrase from Archbishop Desmond Tutu: we have to stop pulling bodies out of the river and go upstream to keep them from falling in. Medicine, she argues, used to be better at this — until the 1910 Flexner Report reorganized every medical school in North America and took diet off the curriculum.
• What Sir William Osler, one of the giants of modern medicine, told his type 2 diabetics: eat nothing from a garden, eat only from the animals. Then insulin arrived in 1921, and the advice quietly became cover your carbs with insulin — ice cream three times a day on the hospital menu, we’ll just give you more.
• Her framework for insulin: carbohydrates are the strongest stimulus, protein moderate, fat barely moves it — and it isn’t only what you eat, it’s when. She walks through why the same meal eaten in the evening needs roughly twice the insulin it would have needed twelve hours earlier, why 1pm is her biggest meal, and why the farmers she grew up around had it right.
• A day in her life: waking naturally around 6am, morning light before anything else to anchor her circadian rhythm, a walk, a lift, electrolytes and creatine, sauna three times a week, and eating done by 6pm — plus blue-light blockers ninety minutes before bed and incandescent bulbs on her desk.
• The gratitude practice she started in 2020, scared, watching footage of anesthesiologists dying of Covid and wondering if that would be her fate. Three things that went awesome, written down every single night since, without missing a day. Plus breathwork, the vagus nerve, and why so many people with autoimmune conditions are stuck in a sympathetic state.
• Food addiction and emotional eating. The literature puts food addiction at around 14% of the population — Jocelyn thinks it’s far higher, and that almost all of us eat emotionally to some degree. Her explanation for why is the gentlest thing in this episode: our first taste of sweet came in our mother’s arms, cradled and soft and warm. Swallowing something sweet was the first way any of us learned to feel better.
• Why she calls it the ultra-poison food industry — a slow poison, like alcohol or cigarettes, that won’t kill you tomorrow but will over decades. What happened when Philip Morris and R.J. Reynolds moved into food in the 1980s, what the “bliss point” actually is, and why sugar ended up in the hamburgers and the sausages.
• Her definition of addiction: continued consumption despite known consequence. When she asks patients whether they could give up bread and they say I can’t give up bread — that, she says, is addiction speech. And the story from Dr. David Unwin about the businessman who ate bread out of the garbage after his wife poured detergent on it.
• Moderation and cheat meals, where she does not hedge: “Moderation is basically addiction talk,” and it’s something the ultra-processed food companies have every reason to keep alive. A treat, in her framing, should be something that’s actually good for you — for her, saving up for a tomahawk steak.
• The genuinely practical half of the conversation: good, better, best as a decision rule when you’re travelling; hard-boiled eggs, cold sticks of butter, club soda and salt at an airport; breakfast restaurants and building a meal out of sides and add-ons; purse bacon; batch cooking ten pounds of ground beef at once; and the “carnivore brownies” she cuts into wedges and keeps in the fridge.
• And the reframe that makes social eating survivable — she goes for the connection, not the food. The food is secondary.

Jocelyn speaks with an unusual double authority. She’s the doctor who stood in operating rooms for years watching preventable disease come through the door, and she’s the patient whose own profession had nothing to offer her but pills for two decades. She’s not evangelical about it — she says plainly that she doesn’t think everyone has to be carnivore, and that she got here through a long series of incremental changes and experiments, not a single decision.

If you’ve ever been told to just take the pills, or been made to feel that not being able to moderate something is a failure of willpower rather than a reasonable response to something engineered to be irresistible — this conversation is for you.