ABOUT KONSTANTIN MONASTYRSKY

Mr. Monastyrsky graduated from medical university in 1977 with a pharmacy degree. He is also a certified nutritional consultant and an expert in forensic nutrition, a new field of science that investigates the connection between supposedly healthy foods and nutrition-related disorders, such as diabetes and obesity.

In 1978 Mr. Monastyrsky's family emigrated from the former Soviet Union to the United States, where he decided to pursue a career in the high-technology field, and taught himself advanced programming languages.

From 1985 to 1990, he worked at two premier Wall Street firms: at First Boston/Credit Suisse as a senior systems analyst and at Goldman-Sachs & Co. as a technology consultant to Dr. Fischer Black, the co-author of the Nobel Prize-winning Black-Scholes theory of options trading.

In May of 1990, Mr. Monastyrsky was invited to participate along with Mr. Bill Gates in the filmed introduction of Microsoft Windows 3.0, which forever revolutionized personal computing. He was the only programmer in the United States to earn this honor because of his substantial contribution to the development of graphical user interface and Windows programming techniques.

Between 1990 and 1998, he was the president of Okna Corporation, a software development company that he founded to market DeskTop Set — the very first personal information manager for Windows that he invented. PC Magazine described it as the “best and best loved” program of its kind, and between 1991 and 1998 it has repeatedly won all of the major industry awards

In 1996, Mr. Monastyrsky began to suffer from diabetes and a host of related ailments, including the debilitating carpal tunnel syndrome. Unable to use the keyboard, he turned his attention back to medicine to find solutions for his rapidly deteriorating health.

He applied the same analytical rigor to the study of his health condition as he had to technology, and within several years had completely recovered from diabetes. In 1998, free from the ravages of carpal tunnel syndrome, he left the technology field to pursue a career in nutritional research, medical writing, performance, longevity and weight loss counseling, and health advocacy.

Through his extensive investigations and research, Mr. Monastyrsky pioneered the fields of forensic nutrition and nutritional intervention. His unorthodox thinking, penetrating analysis, and accessible writings are ushering in a new approach to nutrition and healthcare in the United States.

The story behind my books...

I Lived To Tell the Story
I‘d Rather I Hadn‘t Learned

For reasons I didn‘t understand at the time, I first experienced the symptoms of irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) in 1984, shortly after quitting smoking. Constipation was the most troubling aspect of it.

It was all the more troubling because during those years I was quite fit. Each day, for an hour or two, I briskly walked or ran with my dog—a graceful Russian wolfhound (borzoi), who needed vigorous workouts to keep him healthy and happy.

So I went to a highly regarded Manhattan doctor, and he told me to eat more fiber, drink more water, and exercise more. I did all that, and, thank God, the constipation vanished.

Two years later I developed excruciatingly painful hemorrhoids. In 1986, I went to another doctor who told me—you guessed it—to eat more fiber, drink more water, and exercise more. I did all that, but the hemorrhoids got worse, and I started experiencing constant pain and discomfort in my abdomen.

In 1988 I went to another doctor who finally told me that I may have irritable bowel syndrome—and he instructed me to eat even more fiber, drink even more water, and exercise even more. In retrospect, it's hard to blame him for sticking to this absurd “gold-standard protocol:”

Of course, I did all that, and the pain, discomfort, and flare-ups from hemorrhoids grew much worse, so in 1990, depressed and miserable, I gave up on doctors, and went to Barnes & Noble—a favorite “research” venue for take-charge individuals before the advent of the Internet. One book in particular — Fit For Life — described a situation very much like mine. It offered what, at that time, seemed like a logical solution: a vegetarian lifestyle with even more fiber and water.

I willingly embraced this “promising” approach, and by 1994 I was twenty-four pounds overweight, clinically depressed, and suffering from a whole range of degenerative conditions specific to type 2 diabetes. The situation with IBS, constipation, and hemorrhoids degenerated, too.

Passport pictures don't lie. Same person ten years apart.
From size 32 in 1987 to size 40 in 1997.

All along I kept loading up on carb-heavy juices, fruits, vegetables, breads, rice, and pasta. Various doctors administered blood tests, but, as often happens in younger patients, my “fasting plazma glucose” wasn‘t yet high enough to diagnose me as a diabetic, despite all the obvious signs—substantial weight gain, polyuria (frequent urination), dry mouth, constant tingling in the extremities, and a host of other less obvious symptoms of late stage type 2 diabetes.

— How could they have missed it? — Well, for several reasons, all of them pretty darn stupid:

Because after 14-16 hours of a straight fast without cheating, the blood glucose from food and internal storage already vanishes, and you experience what Dr. Atkins incorrectly called ketosis (the proper term is lipolysis).

Because younger people still have a rather active central nervous system (CNS), and when they stop consuming carbohydrate-dense meals, drinks, and snacks before the test, the CNS brings the blood glucose down quite reliably, even among type 2 diabetics.

Because many patients, including this one, are scared witless of needle pricks into their veins, and also by the possibility of a life-transforming diagnosis. Inevitably, by the time they reach the doctor‘s office, their stress hormones have surged up, and they experience stress-related low-blood sugar (hypoglycemia), as opposed to high blood sugar (hyperglycemia). This phenomenon is called the white coat effect.

Undiagnosed diabetes isn't as uncommon as you may think:

Eventually, it all adds up to no good: by the time most patients are finally diagnosed, the damage from diabetes (most of it irreversible) has already occurred. In my case, undiagnosed diabetes worsened my irritable bowel syndrome because anorectal neuropathy (nerve damage) made me even more dependent on fiber.

What happened next was as liberating as it appears improbable. In 1996, after passing out from low-blood sugar (the opposite side of the coin for type 2 diabetics) while waiting for a green light, I started researching my problems in earnest. Shortly thereafter, encouraged by my findings, I abandoned a vegetarian diet and went on a gluten-free, fiber-free, and low-carb diet. Almost immediately the symptoms of IBS—abdominal bloating, flatulence, and pain—cleared up, but not the constipation or hemorrhoids. They got worse.

By the year 1998, I was diabetes-free. Not only that, but most of the diabetes-related complications were gone, too: sky-high triglycerides, erratic blood pressure, chronic colds and infections, painful gout and arthritis, debilitating carpal tunnel syndrome, chronic fatigue, migraines, insomnia, irritability, and depression.

I couldn‘t, though, undo the damage this insidious disease had caused to my career, bank account, and relationships. Nonetheless, business failure and bad memories were a small price to pay for this kind of startling recovery.

To mop up the remaining problems, by the summer of that year I turned to nutritional research full-time. By the year 2000, I was finally constipation-free, laxatives-free, and fiber-free. Unfortunately, hemorrhoids are irreversible, but luckily they no longer flared up or caused anal fissures and bleeding.

The same year I summarized my findings in a book entitled Functional Nutrition: How to Prevent Nutritional Disorders and Premature Aging with Functional Nutrition. It instantly became the highest-selling Russian-language title in the United States.

By the year 2002 I‘d lost 24 lbs (11 kg), and scaled down from a size 40 back to 32, the same size I wore in my early twenties. Throughout the process I remained vigorous, productive, healthy, and free of IBS. I also published my second book: Reversing Metabolic Syndrome: How Carbohydrates Ruin Your Health and Wealth, and What You Can Do To Reverse the Onslaught of Metabolic Syndrome, and it became the second highest-selling Russian-language title in the United States.

By the year 2004, while researching my first English-language book, entitled Fixing Up The Atkins Diet: Why Dr. Atkins is Dead, You‘re Still Overweight, and The Debate Rages On, I embarked on writing a brief—ten pages, tops—section on constipation because it‘s by far the most common and troublesome side effect of low-carb/low-fiber diets, including Atkins‘, South Beach, Protein Power, and others. By the time I finished writing that section, it was almost 300 pages long. By the end of 2005 it evolved into Fiber Menace, and, two years later — into this web site.

That's me telling Dusik & Nosik, our beloved cats: “Boys, no dry food in our house!"

And that‘s the “happy end” story behind the genesis of Fiber Menace, Gut Sense, and this web site. With close to 50 million Americans with IBS [link] and over 105 million [link] affected by pre-diabetes and type 2 diabetes aren't that lucky. Neither are their pets. Not yet, I hope.

As a side note, I'd completed researching Fixing Up Atkins shortly after Dr. Atkins' sudden and mysterious death in the spring of 2003. Dr. Atkins himself passed away while morbidly obese — at 258 lb, — and the Medical Examiner's Autopsy Report had also noted that he had a history of heart attacks (myocardial infarction, or MI), congestive heart failure (CHF), and hypertension (HTN) [link]. The ensuing controversy over the actual causes of his death and his weight had killed the chances of the successful release of this book.

This Q&A page brings my story up to date.

Author's note:

What I've learned the hard way over the last ten years about digestive disorders, you can now learn in just a few pleasant evenings of reading. And you'll have a huge advantage: you will avoid the side effects I had to suffer from and overcome. If you are affected by digestive disorders, you may start here.

Konstantin Monastyrsky