Elie Jarrouge, MD - How I got here
I used to be proud of my good health and athletic tendencies growing up. Fast forward many years, while I was busy with medical training, I stopped paying attention to my own health. My weight slowly crept up, and within eight years, I had gained 30 pounds, and my waist grew by 4 inches. My blood pressure began to run high, I was on the verge of becoming pre-diabetic, and my energy levels plummeted. I developed textbook metabolic syndrome at just 28 years old. I thought I knew the answer: I just had to eat less and move more. Great! I gave it a shot... but nothing changed.​
BEFORE AFTER
One day, at age 30, I was putting on pants when my back gave out. I was in excruciating pain for a week, slept on the hard floor, and it took me three weeks to walk straight again. I chalked it up to bad luck at the time. But over the following year, my lower back gave out every 2–3 months, leaving me debilitated. In between episodes, I dealt with chronic lower back pain. Structurally, there was nothing wrong with my spine—I just couldn’t understand it. Every attempt to exercise inevitably led to another flare-up.
As a hospitalist from 2013 to 2022, I’ve treated patients admitted to the hospital for a myriad of conditions. The work was high-acuity and fast-paced. When I first started, I would see very sick patients, treat them, and watch them improve dramatically. I thought I was fixing problems. Life was good, right? I couldn’t have been more wrong. Over time, I realized it was all just a band-aid. Many of my patients kept getting readmitted with the same problems, slowly deteriorating over time. I wasn’t fixing anything—I was simply managing their diseases. It dawned on me that I couldn’t even heal myself!
I dismissed dietary advice from friends, ignoring the fact that I had received no nutrition education in medical school. I thought it was easy for them to talk about because they were fit. But after my fifth or sixth severe back strain episode, it became clear I had to do something different. Feeling desperate, I could no longer resist lifestyle changes. I started reading about nutrition, beginning with the Whole30 program, which is essentially paleo with a focus on the psychology of food. A month later, I was down 15 pounds. I repeated the program a couple of months later and lost another 5 pounds. Between rounds, I maintained a semi-clean diet and felt amazing. My back pain improved by 80%, my energy levels increased, and my waist size dropped by 4 inches. I started working out and felt stronger.
Excited by my progress, I dove deep into the world of nutrition and health. I read books, listened to countless podcasts, and decided to take things up a notch by trying the ketogenic diet in January 2018. I stayed on it for three months straight. During that time, I dropped another 10 pounds (30 pounds total), lost another inch off my waist, and felt better than ever. My back pain was completely gone.
Since then, I’ve continued to tweak my diet and have incorporated intermittent fasting. I haven’t had a back pain flare-up in over two years. My high blood pressure resolved, I’m no longer pre-diabetic, and my weight is back to where it was when I was 17 years old.
Once I experienced the benefits, I couldn’t ignore them. Practicing conventional medicine alone began to feel wrong. Prescribing medications to treat symptoms without addressing the underlying problem felt like a betrayal to my patients. During the last few years as a hospitalist, I used the time I get with my patients in the hospital to teach them about the root causes of their conditions and explain how medicine alone isn’t going to make them healthier.
For those who listened and were willing to make changes, they took notes and promised to implement what they learned. Seeing the look of hope on their faces—realizing that their diabetes, liver disease, or obesity doesn’t have to progress until it takes their lives—made it all worth it. They felt empowered knowing there was something they could do about it. But they also felt angry, wondering why no one talks to them about nutrition. And when nutrition is mentioned, it’s often the same flawed advice: eat less and move more.
Those encounters, however, left me questioning whether my patients would actually follow through and stick to the changes long enough to see the benefits. I know how much I struggled at first—it took tremendous effort and multiple attempts to make sustainable changes. I realized they needed someone to guide them, coach them, monitor their progress, and eventually help them get off their medications.
But who was going to do it? Their primary care physician? PCPs barely have 15 minutes with their patients, and many doctors are still dismissive of lifestyle interventions. I knew I had to step up and be their coach. So here I am.