In 1985, our house in Reston, Virginia burned down. It was difficult for all of us, but especially difficult for my mother. She had lost nearly all of her worldly possessions on two different occasions - once in Bangladesh at the outset of a war that made her a refugee and once in Silver Spring, Maryland when our apartment was robbed. She also suffered from her own history of deep trauma after losing her father to suicide when she and her siblings were young.

For me as a 9-year-old it felt like my mother had disappeared. Certainly she was no longer emotionally available because of her traumatic experiences.
I went through my own period of confusion and depression that saw me transform from a flamboyant, active, overachieving child to the surly, argumentative, underachieving teenager I would eventually become. Midway through that process, at about the age of 12, I woke up one morning with huge white patches on my shins.

The second the doctor looked at the patches, she introduced me to a new word - “vitiligo.” At the time, the autoimmune disease was pretty rare. The doctor had trouble hiding her pleasure at finding a real-life case of something she had only previously seen in textbooks. Her recommendation was medication - cortisol creams along with a course of light therapy.

For years, I applied those creams religiously. I would also show up every Tuesday afternoon – driven by my grandmother originally and then after my 16th birthday in my own 1971 BMW 2002 – for the light therapy treatments.

I noticed something odd after a few years of this routine. First of all, there was absolutely no change to my vitiligo patches. If anything they were getting worse.
Second, I would see the same people in the waiting room for the light therapy every week. Most of their patches were also getting worse.

My vitiligo was relatively contained. It was on my legs, and when I wore long pants they weren’t visible. I liked to swim, so I would get funny looks at the swimming pool, but when I went to college in Canada, I stopped swimming. I didn’t bother to continue the treatments after high school.

As the years passed, my vitiligo stayed relatively stable. Sometimes I would develop new patches: on my wrists, on my elbows, and at one point on my face. That spot on my face concerned me, but I wasn’t sure what to do about it.

Around this time, I started having other health issues – I started having trouble seeing in the dark, I started gaining weight, and I started waking up many times in the night to pee. I looked into the cause of these symptoms and ended up concluding (after a lot of research and even writing a book) that my symptoms were caused by high insulin and high sugar levels.

When I changed my diet to resolve those “other” issues, the idea that diet could affect vitiligo didn’t even occur to me. Yet I almost immediately began to see that when I was strict about my low carb (or sometimes zero carb) diet the patches would fill in and when I wasn’t strict, the vitiligo would get worse. A trip to Italy, where foods are full of carbohydrates, really illustrated this point for me.

If any of this resonates with you, I’d urge you to consider working with a health coach. Health coaches often have personal experience of practically solving health-related problems which can be as valuable (or more valuable) than medications. Having had a disease and having recovered from it provides a deeper understanding than anyone can get from textbooks.

Dealing with childhood trauma is a lifelong task, but I’m certainly in a better place to deal with that underlying trauma than I was a few years ago. With my mental and emotional health improved, my vitiligo has all but disappeared. And if I can reverse my autoimmune disease, anyone can.

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Sameer Dossan Youtube channel