Nick NorwitzMD PhD, Oxford-Harvard | Metabolic Health Educator | “Stay Curious”

How I went from illness to a metabolically awake life

6 Apr 2025 · 1 min

Watch on YouTube

1:04

In this first-person YouTube monologue, the speaker recounts a severe bout of inflammatory bowel disease that left him feeling like a shell of a person. He describes a turning point when he began to seriously focus on his metabolic health, ultimately adopting a ketogenic diet. The diet led to a dramatic health recovery, prompting him to reflect on a broader pattern: many people with metabolic diseases try extreme, desperate interventions that, when successful, reveal a stark contrast between personal experience and societal expectations about health. The speaker, an active scientist with a PhD from Oxford and a medical degree in progress at Harvard, frames his transformation as becoming "metabolically woke," a state of heightened awareness of metabolic health that challenges conventional norms.

Chapters

I woke up, so to speak, when I myself got critically ill with inflammatory bowel disease. In that time I spent suffering, I was barely a shell of a person. But things changed when I started to care about my metabolic health, truly care. And now I'm an active scientist with a PhD from Oxford, completing my medical degree at Harvard. I like to say the most remarkable thing about my story is that it's not at all unique. There's a common pattern whereby people struggling with some metabolic disease struggle and suffer, and they then try something that's out there, seemingly extreme, from desperation, not expectation. In my case, that was a ketogenic diet. And then it works, and you're left doing a double take, aghast at the vast discrepancy between your lived experience and personal health journey and what society deems as normal or socially appropriate. In effect, you've become metabolically woke.