After a devastating cancer diagnosis, South Philly man overhauled his diet and found a passion for raw foods

Ulysses Kae Williams, 38, is a busy man.

Apart from running the Classics Hub barber shop in South Philadelphia for 14 years, he’s the father of four children – Mya, 20, Kadence, 10, Kingston, 5 and Mylan, 3. For six years, he has spearheaded a competitive program to teach entrepreneurship to kids ages 13 to 18.

Then there is his newest venture, Fresh Jawn, which will begin this June, a smoothie and juice bar designed to showcase his newfound passion for fresh fruit and vegetables. Nothing about Williams’ energy or initiative is new: He’s been hustling since high school, when he bought candy bars for a dollar and sold them for twice the price.

But two years ago, a diagnosis of stage 4 cancer stopped him in his tracks.

It started with an innocuous symptom. A bachelor party in Las Vegas, where Williams chowed down on steak and a little salad at a Brazilian themed restaurant. He expected to feel full, but a month later, back home in Mount Airy, the feeling never disappeared.

“Anything I ate, I felt like I had just finished Thanksgiving dinner,” he said.

Although in some pain, Williams figured it would pass. But when the discomfort intensified, he sought help at the emergency room of Lankenau hospital, where a scan revealed an aggressive tumor in his bowel. A surgeon gave him a grim prognosis and told him he required exploratory surgery.

“He said he was going to open me up and figure it out as he went,” Williams said.

The news was devastating.

“I was in a real bad space; I went home and sat in a dark room for three days,” he recalled. “I was only 36. My oldest daughter, Mya, looked up to me as a hero. It wasn’t so much that I was dying in a year, but I was so worried. How was I going to tell my children?”

It was his fiancé and mother of his youngest daughter, Whitney Harris, who convinced Williams to get a second opinion. After weeks of research, he ended up at Fox Chase Cancer Center, where a three-doctor team told him that rather than surgery, he needed six months of chemotherapy.

“He had cancer in the small intestine that had spread out into the abdominal cavity,” said Michael Hall, a gastrointestinal oncologist and clinical cancer geneticist.

Two weeks after the meeting, Williams began chemotherapy. Weak and nauseated, but always active, he wanted to do more for his health. He remembered how Joe Brown, a barber at his shop, had adopted a raw food and herb diet when diagnosed with cancer. So Williams, never one to do things halfway, decided to take a year off and overhaul his eating habits. Whole heads of lettuce, fruits and juice replaced steak.

“It was bad,” Williams said of the palatability of his early regimen. Gradually, he figured out how to make things taste better, devising his own dressings and blending improved smoothies. Between the chemo and the raw food diet, the six footers’ weight dropped from 210 to 138.

While his doctors supported his healthy eating initiative, “at one point one said if you lose any more weight, I’m going to make you drink Ensure,” Williams said.

Gradually, he added fish, oatmeal and beans. He loved blue crabs and shared them with Harris a few times a week. He also took up regular exercise, heading to the gym for a workout and sauna and riding every other day on a bike gifted to him by his best friend.

Even while going through chemo and the pandemic, Williams continued his entrepreneurship program, teaching kids principles of accounting, finance and the stock market. The six-year-old project had received a mayor’s grant in 2020 and is financed each year by contributions from customers and the community. Last year, the program even ran a “Shark Tank” competition, in which students presented ideas for start-ups with two winners rewarded $500 seed money.

Two years out from his diagnosis, Williams follows a five-year plan of maintenance chemotherapy every three months. He says he feels better than he did before the diagnosis, while his doctors are amazed by his journey.

“When he decided to change his diet, he wanted to know my opinion about what the optimal weight was for his height. He really thought a lot about this stuff. Every time he came in, he looked healthier,” Hall said.

Although there is little scientific evidence that dietary changes — keto, raw food, Mediterranean or other nutrition plans — can affect the course of metastatic cancer, Hall said he tries to be open to patients who want to change their lifestyle.

“I realize additional stuff that goes on outside my office is really important to people to feel like they’re contributing to saving their own lives,” he said. " We’re here to make your treatment work around your life, not to be your life. No treatment is so rigid that we can’t work around what is the goal in the first place: to give people back their lives.”

As to whether his diet contributed to Williams’ current good health, Hall said he wasn’t sure.

“There’s lots we don’t understand about diet or how it’s relevant in developing cancer or treating cancer,” he said.

Hall said he admires Williams’ “proactiveness and his desire to work with us. All the things he did, he always talked to us about it. Which is really important.”

At the moment, Williams is working hard to get the juice and smoothie bar up and running with the help of members of his entrepreneurship program and his oldest daughter. It will be at his barber shop, which is on Broad Street near Snyder Avenue.

Scans and tissue analysis show no evidence of cancer in Williams, although microscopic metastases would be too small to detect.

“Last time I walked in the doctor’s office they showed me my scan and told me ‘if we didn’t know it, we wouldn’t know you had cancer. We know it’s there because it doesn’t disappear, but we can’t see it. So, whatever you’re doing, keep doing it.’”