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Comment by vijayr | Hacker News Reader

Could you please share some details? What did you eat? Do you think it is possible to reverse it, even if the person was diabetic for a long time?

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They may seem a little faddish sounding, but Joel Fuhrman has several books written for a popular audience on dietary interventions for a variety of health conditions, diabetes and heart disease among them. Eat for Life was his first book, and then he wrote The End of Diabetes. Both books lay out a fairly restrictive diet plan for improving health. His patients come of medications quite quickly and he provides anecdotal stories of several patients who have had long term conditions that were able to reverse the problems through diet.

Not faddish at all. I've read about fruitarians, people who eat only one food item at a time (mono meals) etc - all claim it worked for them.

Thank you for the book recommendations, ordering two of them.

I was on the New Direction VLCD. 3 shakes (mocha only -- the rest were awful, but even months after stopping the diet, I still love the mocha) per day, 200 calories each. It's expensive as hell and only available via medical providers, but it worked exceptionally well. I saw my doctor every two weeks for a check-up and did monthly blood work to ensure that everything was still going well; there's a not insignificant risk of gallstones and other risks with such severe weight loss.

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.

https://www.reddit.com/r/keto/

I lost almost 80 lbs (and I'm only 5'5 on a good day) thanks to keto.

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.

This is very true. Though I am no longer on keto, I've gotten to the point where I must know the ingredients and nutritional content of every single thing I eat.

Part of overeating/mindless eating is ignoring any data about what is being eaten. I am far more mindful now.

From the article:

> "A radical low-calorie diet can reverse type 2 diabetes, even six years into the disease, a new study has found."

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