You might. There are MANY disorders or diseases that are categorized as Metabolic Disorders. I am not a doctor, so I certainly would not know all of them. However, most of them are Genetic, they are complicated and getting testing is difficult. There is a shortage of physicians to evaluate these disorders and test as well.
Did you know that most MD is considered a metabolic disorder?
There are many disorders, including a huge family of disorders called Fatty Oxidation Disorders or FOD. They can be fatal and present many symptoms, including an intolerance to exercise as the person goes into what is called, a metabolic crisis. There could be many less drastic responses to running out of useable fuel. Severe fatigue, muscle spasms, seizures, collapse, severe overheating, electrolyte imbalance that can be fatal, liver and heart failure, to name a few. One of the common ER protocols for these patients is to administer D-10 which is a different form of a glucose solution; this provides immediate calories into the system to save the patients life. In cases where the episodes of Metabolic Crisis have become frequent, some FOD adults and children have ports installed for this purpose.
Of course like any disorder, you may have many healthy years with symptoms that are manageable and the FOD patient can live a normal life. Like all disorders, symptoms are variable and changing.
The crux of most metabolic disorders is the person cannot metabolize food to useable energy. This is the same scenario when an athlete collapses on the foot ball field, but the people with these disorders do not need to run for it to happen! Although this is an overly simplified explanation, that is what in essence happens to me and many others.
Over the years this disorder continues to get worse with age. Anytime I cut calories or carbohydrates, I would go into a 'Metabolic Crisis' which has almost killed me more than once. I get daily muscle spasms which increase drastically with activity. For the last 2 days, I did some jogging and marching in place in my living room. One day was 6 minutes, yesterday was 5 minutes. I went into spasms this morning. That is how delicate these diseases become, in time.
Therefore, losing weight becomes very difficult as the diet cannot be cut severely and exercise is very tricky. I have gone into thousands of muscle episodes, many of them end up with me screaming in pain, completely contorted, collapsing to the floor, dragging myself on the floor in agony to get to the kitchen sink, pulling myself up the counter as my body is screaming for water. It has shut down my respiratory system and I was gasping for air (air hunger) with a boa constrictor compressing my chest over and over. I also have seizures during episodes. This is what I face to adjust food and employ movement into my life. There are many thousands of us with these disorders. But we have no choice, but to keep going!
When your ability to utilize food is compromised, weight problems do become and issue.
Here is a link to Metabolic Genetic Disorders:
http://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/conditionCategory/food-nutrition-and-metabolism
You can manipulate the site and sort it down more specifically into different categories of Metabolic Disorders.
Another excellent site, and one I am a member of the e-mail and Facebook groups is:
https://www.fodsupport.org
Thank you for reading the post, please feel free to ask any questions. Please see the post on Mitochondrial Disease for further information.
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