Started calorie restricting and eliminated grains and sugar from my diet almost entirely, and all pre-diabetic symptoms disappeared within a month or two. Zero GERD, zero heartburn, no longer obese, no more disturbed sleep, lots of energy.
I think in most cases type 2 diabetes (and most symptoms associated with obesity, metabolic syndrome, etc) is a disease people inflict on themselves through poor diet. Particularly by eating refined carbohydrates (especially wheat and sugar) and being genetically predisposed to not metabolizing those very well.
The food industry spends a lot of money skewing the research on this and pushing people toward exercise so they can wash their hands of it all, and they have the cooperation of the USDA (just look at that ridiculous pyramid ffs). So you kind of just have to explore this diet on your own through a lot of noise and people telling you you're wrong. In my case it was an outright cure for a lot of health problems, and it didn't take very long to confirm that either. I don't read public health journals or articles about nutrition anymore.
If you’re on a different team, you’re an attack on their dietary beliefs. If you’re on any team, you’re a pain in the ass to anyone who hasn’t picked a team yet.
People also have a tendency to form part of their identity around how they eat. “I’m a ______.” So now you’re not just questioning their dietary beliefs, you’re casting judgment on their identity.
So I get why people are so sensitive about it. And like politics and religion, I try to keep it to myself.
it pops up everywhere, sports, operating systems, code editors, vehicle manufacturers.
and it is actively used by and encouraged by all sorts of power structures.
I had great success with what I considered low C, but what would be considered high C by the Atkins, paleo, and keto folks. I aimed for 40% of less of calories from carbs--low by the standards of the average American.
I was not even trying to cut calories. I just wanted to lower blood sugar, and was trying to see how much changing carbs affected that. However, I found that because the food was now more satisfying, I ended up cutting calories as a side effect.
I picked 40% because (1) it is significantly lower than what I was doing before, and (2) it is really easy to check on a nutrition label--take total calories, divide by 10, and if that number is larger not larger than the number of grams of carbs, the item is 40% or under calories from carbs.
If I wanted to eat something that was over 40%, I would fix it by adding fat or protein. For example, suppose I wanted a ham sandwich. Before I would have ordered that with cheese, assorted veggies, and mustard. No mayo to try to keep the calories down.
On the "40% or under" diet, I would order that ham sandwich as before, but would go ahead and add mayo (full fat mayo...none of that lite crap) and/or order it with double meat. That would raise the calories by about 50%, but it would bring the carb percentage down from about 45% to about 30%.
Not all foods could be tweaked easily to bring them under 40%, but if I ate such a food I would try to pair it with other foods that were enough under 40% to bring the total for the meal under 40%, and if a meal was a little off I'd fix it in the next meal.
You can pretty easily keep a running total of how you are doing, by on a food by food basis keeping track of how many grams over or under you are. So if I had something that was 300 calories and 20 grams of carbs, I'd mentally think "300/10 = 30 grams of carbs to be 40%. 20 grams is 10 under, so add -10g to my running total".
If at the end of the day the running total is not positive, I've met my 40% goal for the day.
To reduce the risk of getting to the last meal or snack of the day and being too far over to correct, I put in some effort to make sure breakfast put me a fair amount under 40%.
A nice thing about this approach is that 40% (I actually ended up at around 35% once I found a diet soda that I actually started to like, and so cut full-sugar Pepsi out) can be done without giving up most fast food restaurants. You might have to give up some items on their menus, but a lot of their main items can be brought under 40% by tweaks like I did for my sandwiches. E.g., if you want a burger and fries, you might be able to get the combo down to 40% of you go for the double burger and extra cheese and mayo. Pizza can be gotten under 40% with enough meat and cheese.
That makes it much easier to stick to it compared to diets where you have to plan ahead for all your meals away from home.
Result: over about 18 months, I lost 140 lbs, and then mostly leveled off. A1C went from 8.1 on 4 different diabetes medicines to 4.8 on no diabetes medicines. Also got completely off cholesterol medicines.
Going vegan is definitely helpful.
Not saying there aren't an abundance of diet fads that find roosts the minds of uncritical hopefuls (like anything else, really), but being more conscious of what you eat and how you feel is a good thing. If the diet seems zany and tenuous but promotes portion control and variety to people who've been feeding themselves and their families out of cans and whatever is closest and cheapest, I'd tolerate if not encourage their new interest.
Some people's enthusiasms are just difficult to put up with day in and day out, whatever they might be. But in the grand scheme of it, I'd rather they be obsessed with salads than Scentsy.
Like gergnz, pop is really sweet! Unbearably sweet. Actually most sweets are just overwhelming concentrations of sugar, and they feel weird to eat.
Sweetness is something that your body adjusts to. Once you're used to eating a brownie a day, brownies no longer seem so sweet to you. But go without sweets for six months and suddenly you'll realize just how pointlessly sweet they are.
The thing that really drives me crazy is how _so much_ food is sweetened, even things where it makes no sense. It's like everybody's palette is so accustomed to sugar that now restaurants have to add sugar to their savory foods just to make them taste normal. It's a disturbing trend.
Reminder: the US government spends $2 billion a year on sugar subsidies.
Because there's just not enough sugar!!
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/bitter-battle-over-sugar-subsid...
Yeah.. thats restricted to US :) Visiting US from India, I ended up throwing away a loaf of bread cause it was as sweet as chocolate
In most stores there will be a few choices in the bakery section that don't have added sugar.
In a vaguely similar vein, I pretty much exclusively[1] drink "diet" drinks (i.e. sweeteners rather than sugar, not that I think they are particularly healthly). Now, whenever I have the non-diet versions (which is very rare), I prefer the taste somewhat, but find them to be unpleasantly sticky and syrupy. It almost feels like they need more water adding to them, even if it's from a can/bottle so presumably mixed correctly.
[1] Unless it's a mixed alcoholic drink, but those are so different anyway
Also, people are so clever now, finding recipes like your mousse has been a great joy. I now mostly prefer the more wholesome alternatives. For instance, that mousse is a huge hit, and most people wouldn't know it's non-dairy.
If I want carbs, favor sweet potato / regular potato over grains. Generally avoid that altogether though.
No beer, favor wine and liquor, all in moderation.
So that’s how I select, then from there I restrict to the calorie goal. If I do have pasta or cake, I go a little harder on myself the next day (or in the days prior). That’s rare though.
It’s been really easy. Hardest day was day 1, second-hardest day was day 2. Sustained for about a year so far, and I’m not struggling at all.
It's also similar to nuts/cheese in that if I allow myself unrestricted access, I tend to overeat them.
They're probably not that bad though.
The only saving grace I see is that at least it still has the fiber, fruit juice discards with that and just leaves the sugar.
Association of raisin consumption with nutrient intake, diet quality, and health risk factors in US adults: National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey 2001-2012. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29056890
The most important thing is to see your calorie intake, not as a goal in itself, but as the control variable in a feedback loop, with your weight as the process variable that you're trying to control. (If you really wanted to get hardcore about it, you could use a PID controller to set your daily calorie intake. :)
When you reach your target weight, keep doing whatever you were doing and just gradually increase your portion size until you stop losing weight. If you're gaining weight again, gradually reduce portion size until you get back to your target weight. If you're losing weight, gradually increase portion size until you get back to your target weight. That's literally all there is to maintaining a target weight.
...
"Started calorie restricting and eliminated grains and sugar from my diet almost entirely, and all pre-diabetic symptoms disappeared within a month or two. Zero GERD, zero heartburn, no longer obese, no more disturbed sleep, lots of energy."
A serious, well-intentioned[1] question for you and your parent:
How has this changed (or not changed) your views towards classifying obesity/diabetes/metabolic treatments (as opposed to your cure) as unnecessary medical interventions ?
How does this change, if at all, your perception of the responsibility of others to fund those treatments ?
[1] Congratulations on this achievement and your good health.
What did work for me, a little, was increasing the amount of beans I eat, and with it grains (rice), and curries, and not eating meat for at least two days a week. My bloodwork got better across the board (cholesterol, glucose) despite gaining 10 lbs.
Distinguishing those people from the people who can just decide to make it better is probably impossible.
So I see some validity to all approaches.
The problem with treating it as purely a medical issue though is that, by doing that, society is being more permissive of the poor decisions people make. People who can choose to eat better and improve their health that way might never find that out, if they're just told it's all medical and we're dust in the wind.
The problem with treating it entirely as a choice is your prescription becomes punitive toward people who genuinely can't control themselves.
So I think the right approach is a balance between the two. Having said that, I think the current climate favors the dust in the wind hypothesis too heavily, and I think a lot of people are hampered and harmed by a complete lack of criticism and concern as they make and keep themselves obese.
Aside from just the economic side of it, it is exceptionally difficult to lose weight. It drove me to tears and severely impacted my mental state (despite also being treated for my mental illnesses) and that's even despite being very motivated to succeed. I don't look down on anyone looking for an easier route, whatever that may be; if I saw one, I would've taken it myself.
Eating whole food plant based diet with moderate exercise usually reverses T2 diabetes and definitely prevents it.
Dude, that's a really bad misrepresentation and very unhelpful to all the people who do need one. Many of them already struggle with self-worth issues, and seeing (whether intentional or not) lies like that spread, or worse, parroted back at them by others later does not help that.
It's made a lot worse by the alternative being to gamble on suffocating in your sleep, or doing brain damage to yourself with prolonged apnea periods that drop your blood oxygen, or at the very least, having a shit life due to low energy levels every day from having been 8 hours with the blood oxygen level of a 90 year old.
You're still breathing entirely under your own power with CPAP devices. All they do is basically balloon you up a little to keep your throat from closing up in your sleep, by providing a continuous flow of air pressure higher than the ambient air pressure. Yes they have an up/down rhythm that matches your breathing, but that's not because it breathes for you, but because it literally matches your breathing patterns so it won't obstruct your own breathing.
> put my bed at an angle so I could sleep through the heartburn/reflux
Also, to be honest, this is ridiculous. Medicines to help your body regulate gastric acid exist and aren't particularly expensive.
Unfortunately it didn't help me that much (even with it, I would still not breathe properly which was reflected in my O2 sat. IIRC) and it aggravated other health issues, so I stopped using it after 4-6 months (which, when one of the first things I read after diagnosis was along the lines of "Rarely, CSA may result in sudden death", isn't a choice I made lightly!).
And a lot of CPAP devices have a "encourage the user to breathe by doing some flutter" mode.
There are many other health devices that are (likely) obviated by proper health status in life, and maybe more importantly, in utero. Two that come to mind that affect me are glasses and braces.
For myopia, there is weak evidence that it is caused by lack of sun exposure at an early age.
So, you can blame your parents for giving you a bad diet low in fat soluble vitamins in your childhood, and not making you go outside. Other than that, you can try to prevent it in your own children.
As for myopia the effect is probably due to some combination of lack of very bright light exposure and a infrequent need to focus far away or too much time spent focusing close without breaks. As you say the solution is to spend more time outdoors as a child, and alternate relatively shorter sessions of desk/screen work with more active interludes, making sure to glance around the room with some frequency.
Also note, as i stated: "intentionally or not" It doesn't matter what the intent was when lies are spread. The end result matters.
And walterbell is exactly right. Would love to see an answer to that.
Junk, Fast, Frozen, and Artificial :)
I'm a type II diabetic (my A1C was 8.7 when diagnosed) who is technically "cured" (my A1C ranges between 5.8 and 6.0), but my doctor said to me, "Make no mistake, the minute you go back to eating the way you used to, all the symptoms will return."
I don't take any medication, but I remain on my diet. And I never cheat.
I don't practice calorie restriction, but I follow my doctor's and nutritionist's guidelines: I avoid the four horsemen of the diabetic apocalypse (bread, rice, potatoes, pasta), no desserts, no dried fruit or fruit juice.
I dropped 10 lbs. when I changed my diet (I'm at 150 lbs. now), and I've never really felt the same sense of fullness as I did when I ate carbs. I'm mildly hungry all the time.
I've been debating how else to tackle this problem. So far calorie restriction seems to be a way I can decrease my intake across the board (including the four horsemen, which unfortunately are all foods I love) and start losing weight again.
It's just become incredibly difficult to stick to any plan. My longest run was four months low carb.
When I was at school, we were taught, by full-time, qualified educational professionals, that if you were hungry you should bulk up your meals with these 4 because it's impossible to eat too much of them.
I totally get the willpower argument but I am also aware there are many people who try to eat right who are simply acting on bad information from supposed authority figures.
Does this exist for non-diabetic patients? I recently had weight gain for the first time of my life after reaching 30yrs of age and always being underweight. I've been meaning to look into some diet-based approaches that would be supported by science, but Googling it has always been a deluge of pseudo-science.
The Keto diet(s) are pretty popular for weight loss and general health too. The subreddit [1] is pretty active and has lots of people vouching for it. I don't know how scientifically sound or safe it is, because I haven't researched it, but you might find some answers there.
It's a great sub. The keto diet helped me lose about 30 pounds this year, and I was only fully committed to it about 20% of the time.
The rest of the time, I do my normal diet of mostly fast food, too much candy, and no exercise. I might drink a little more water than I used to in this period, but no major changes.
Sorry if there was a better way to phrase this.
Note that keto flu only occurs when your body is switching from carbs to fat, but disappears when your body is keto-adapted.
"Weight loss was induced with a total diet replacement phase using a low energy formula diet (825–853 kcal/day; 59% carbohydrate, 13% fat, 26% protein, 2% fibre) for 3 months (extendable up to 5 months if wished by participant), followed by structured food reintroduction of 2–8 weeks (about 50% carbohydrate, 35% total fat, and 15% protein), and an ongoing structured programme with monthly visits for long-term weight loss maintenance."
It will also help provide warnings about sugar, etc.
My understanding is that you are using a diet plan that the literature warns as being dangerous, (for example losing more that three pounds a week in cases of morbid obeisity) and a doctor is monitoring your vitals and blood work to make sure you aren’t damaging your organs in the process. Essentially they are red-lining your weight loss.
In the most drastic case I’ve ever heard of (second hand) you can actually check into a hospital and they will literally meter your food. If you have a proper metabolic dysfunction they will know because your calories in doesn’t match your weight loss and they can prove it.
> "A radical low-calorie diet can reverse type 2 diabetes, even six years into the disease, a new study has found."
Thank you for the book recommendations, ordering two of them.
I'm not saying it's a miracle diet, in the end if you lose weight it's because you're consuming less calories.
What made keto work for me is that, because of it's very restrictive nature, I became acutely aware of everything I put in my mouth.
I could have only 20g of carbs max per day, so I started reading in detail all the nutritional sheets on every food I bought. Of course, I also stopped buying basically all processed food. Not because they where high on calories or because they were unhealthy, just because they had carbs.
It's been years since I went off keto, but I still read everything about the food I buy.
Part of overeating/mindless eating is ignoring any data about what is being eaten. I am far more mindful now.
Overall, I went from somewhere over 400lbs (my scale wouldn't go above that) to 280lbs in around 9 months; my wife went from 258 to 198lbs in the same time. After she became pregnant, we fell off the bandwagon and both regained a decent amount (I'm around 330lbs now) but plan to start back on New Direction as soon as she gives birth, any day now.
I don't know if it would reverse diabetes for anyone but me -- there'd need to be more done to study this, for sure -- but I can absolutely say it saved my life. I frankly can't wait to get back on this diet.
Generally people eat mostly fat if a keto diet is higher calorie.
Since OPs was lower calorie it would be mostly vegetables and protein.
- Removal of all beverages aside from water, unsugared coffee, tea - Removal of all rice, grains, potatoes, corn - Chicken, Pork, and Beef (in that order) became my primary food product. Sous Vide allowed for a more convenient method of food preparation that made it feasible for my schedule (throw it in in the morning, done when I get home from work) - Vegetables other than the ones above became my secondary source of food. - Don't care about fat, just about carb intake. My personal target goal was under 30 grams of carbs per day, which I was mostly able to adhere to. Now that I am stable under 6 A1C I have loosened it to about 45. - My caloric goal has been to stay under 1600 calories. I feel like all the other steps helped drop my A1C, but this alone was what made me actually lose the 90 pounds of weight itself.
[1]: https://www.amazon.com/Art-Science-Low-Carbohydrate-Living/d...
[2]: https://www.amazon.com/Art-Science-Low-Carbohydrate-Performa...
And when you say "worked for [you]" do you mean lost weight or helped with your overall vitals?
From what I've gained, low carb diets are great short term strategies for burning fat but not healthy in the long-term for overall balanced health.
Low carb diet lowered my weight by 25 lbs, made my GERD disappear, no more taking omeprazol 'for the rest of my life', my gallbladder stopped acting up, and I have more energy as if I was 10 years younger. This was enough to convince me that I'm not going back to eating carbs as I did before.
But typing on my phone, and too busy to provide more references. You can start in the publications I linked to earlier though.
Seriously.
"But show me the clinical study"
Yeah yeah, keep on saying that folks. You must realize universities and pharma companies have very little incentive to put this to the test, because the LAST thing they want is to admit water fast cures diseases they tell you will need to be medically treated for the rest of your life.
"Modern science" when it comes to diseases such as T2D, Crohn's, IBS, arthritis, and many others is the biggest con in modern history.