Thank you very much for this post as I am stubbornly stupid when it comes to some medical matters. The reason I am eating protein is because it is the only thing not causing massive gastro problems until midday. I never know whether it is my immune deficiency or thyroiditis attacking me or what, and mornings are vicious.
The NAFLD is new, seen on an abdominal sonogram in the Spring whereas 3 1/2years ago I had abdominal MRI and MRA with far better resolution showing none. The original one was during time I was losing muscle mass and in constant pain for a few years with seemingly normal liver except one small punctate cyst there and another in the kidney and nothing else alarming. Now I also have microalbumuria, i.e. the beginning of kidney problems. I have been writing about occasionally scary edema, hard to know whether heart condition or something else. So I try to get muscle back and maybe I am craving protein. It is working to an extent. Newly, I can bend my knees and squat to sit up and sit down in a chair which was very hard to impossible for a while. My goal by year end is to walk around my block and attend my small neighborhood's Halloween potluck block party and nor scream in pain after twenty minutes. And after that, I am going to get on a plane and visit my farthest away son in the far northwest instead of him having to come see me.
When I first came on this forum, I quickly saw some posts by someone very like myself except British Isles. That was late November of 2015. I was suffering from a strangle kind of meningitis along with the other issues. My initial reflection was that the person like me had left the forum or was just struggling too much to post for a while. It turned out she had just died. I feel very fortunate to be able to write you this message and to learn something new to help myself a couple years later.
As far as the obesity thing, I was of two minds about it for years. One is that the nice doctors were calling me "well nourished" while the really dismissive ones were calling me obese. It was when I finally began to lose some weight that I realized that the terms were ludicrous. That's when I figured out that the difference between helpful and dismissive were that there was one category of healthcare folks who were capable of celebrating my successes and supporting my struggles and another sort who sought to see how I failed to fit some non compliant impossible to reach imaginary goal and used pejorative phraseology and terms to match. But that was with healthcare situations.
In personal life, I tried to find and cook the best diet possible for all the people I cared for, tried to follow a decent diet myself and otherwise just tried to do what I could, cognizant of my shortcomings and kind of self checking till I got to my next confession.. In other words, when I got over 195 pounds, I didn't become depressed, I just got on with life and tried to be more aware. But I stopped weighing myself. A legacy of that period that I still have today is that I literally hate weighing myself with clothes on at a doctor's because the weight is dependent on what I am wearing that day and has very little real reference. When I got myself down to 172, which I thought was my permanent weight, I tried to tone up, exercise more, etc. When one of the nicer one of my docs said that I could die if I didn't lose some weight, I went on the pcrm.org diet (vegan, fat restricted, not the kind of food I pine to eat) and reached another plateau for a few years of 159.
Got to my new norm of 143 with more normal food for me which is a combo of international food within gastro allergy dietary restrictions. Don't think I will ever reach that 10% additional weight loss the Hepatologist wants. I was born hungry.
But as far as weight loss surgery is concerned, I kind of wish it had been around when I was trying to lose the first chunk of weight and I feel I would not be diabetic if that had occurred, because it really is a type 2 cure. And maybe some of the other co-morbidities would not have happened.
I am intrigued by your statement that there are drugs that cause NAFLD, so if you know about any of that, please post.