How did I reverse my diabetes, and how can YOU do it as well?

Putting diabetes type-2 into remission, a step-by-step guide.

It was one lovely day during the month of December, 2020. I had my usual healthy oat porridge breakfast with skimmed milk and then had some fruit as a part of my five a day. I am a digital marketing specialist and was doing my full-time job based in London. I used to have my 5 days a week workout and regular 6-km brisk walk to keep myself healthy and fit. Life looked beautiful, things were looking great until I got this call from NHS (National Health Services, UK) that my blood results were back with high blood sugar, an HbA1c result of 78 mmol/L (9.3%), means an average blood glucose of above 220 mg/dl (12 mmol/L).

The sound of GP physician was quite concerned. I do remember her mentioning of heart disease, kidney failure and some other complications while she was trying to pursue me to start Metformin (Glucophage), a medicine that has been used safely for almost 60 years as a first-line defence against diabetes. Feeling extremely disappointed with the outcome after all these years of healthy diet and exercise, my final resort was to blame my diabetic genes that run in the family and it revealed to me just then that I had to had it sooner or later, even though I never thought I would.

I am a biology major, studied genetics in my M. Phil and worked most of my career in medicine field working with doctors and hospitals for their digital marketing needs. Diabetes runs in the family. My sister died at the age of 52 because of diabetic complications. Despite all this, the only thing I knew about diabetes was that if you are diabetic, you will pee a lot.  You will need to avoid sugar in your tea, take some pills with food, eat food at fixed timing and you are all set. Whatever happens to you in the coming year, the progression of diabetes, was inevitable.

I also knew that if those magic pills didn’t control your blood glucose, you were offered insulin and that would have definitely solved the problem. I had no idea what caused diabetes (except that it’s hereditary disease), what are normal blood glucose levels, and how blood glucose control differs in a diabetic from a non-diabetic. To me diabetes was just like another chronic disease, where you need to take medicines for the rest of your life.

By nature, like most of us, I don’t like neither doctors nor the medicines. However, the sound of GP made me concerned. I accepted the offer and meds were issued. I brought the medicines home, but it was only after 3 weeks that I started taking them. The researcher inside me got better of me and I started reading about diabetes, its complications, its treatment and how to manage it. I came across Diabetes UK forum which was of great help to gain first-hand knowledge of diabetes management from the very people who had diabetes. I also stumbled across Dr. Richard Bernstein during my research and bought his book “Diabetes Solution”. The book changed everything!

The more I read about the disease, the cause, prevention and management, I realised it was little to do with my genes and more to do with my food habits. I first time realised that glucose is not found only in table sugar but rather carbohydrates in any food convert into glucose after digestion. That was a revelation. Preaching of Dr. Bernstein coincided with what I was reading on different forums. Everything started to make sense. Conventional medicine was failing in treating diabetes because of high influence of big food and pharma companies that dominate the mainstream media and dictate treatment options. I found out that most of the diabetic associations are sponsored by this big pharma. I also found that conventional medicine is focused on treating symptoms, not the disease.

I learnt that diabetes is not a disease, it’s a symptom. Symptom of metabolic disorder in the grand scheme of things. If you can learn to fix your metabolic disorder, you can not only fix your diabetes, but a lot of other manifestation of this disorder, like high blood pressure, cardiovascular disease, central obesity, kidney failure & Alzheimer, to name a few. It takes several years of your metabolic disorder to reach the diagnosis of diabetes. Healthcare should not be waiting for the elevated blood sugar (the symptom) to discover and announce your metabolic disorder. There are a few simple tests that can be incorporated in routine annual health checks to prevent or fix metabolic disorder much before the diabetes diagnosis. I bet the money invested in those tests will save global healthcare much more than what they are spending in managing diabetes. However, the only loser in that case is the pharmaceutical companies who will not be selling billions of dollars of diabetes drugs and drugs used to fix symptoms of complications caused by diabetes (high blood pressure, cholesterol etc).

At the time of diagnosis, my blood pressure readings were over 150/90, a huge surprise for me because my BP was never higher than the normal range of 120/80. It was only after few months of constant reading, talking to experts, and doing my own experiments that I realised how to normalize my blood sugar. My HbA1c came back to 27 mmol/L (4.6%). My fasting blood sugar went down to 80’s mg/dl (4’s mmol/L). My postprandial blood glucose seldom touches 125 mg/dl (7 mmol/L). Its only after normalizing my blood sugar that I realised that during all these years, I was not feeling as great as I thought. I felt more energetic once my blood glucose became stable. My brain fog was gone. My eyesight improved. I was not feeling tired anymore. My blood pressure went below 120/80. My blood count and all other markers were in healthy range too. That’s where I realized that we will never know our peak performance until we experience it.

I am in a diabetic remission now. I enjoy my life, enjoy the real “healthy” food. I have blood sugar readings that many of non-diabetics would wish to have. I don’t believe diabetes is a progressive disease, and that you must deteriorate and move from one medication to another and then to insulin, and that you are still going to get your ill-fate. That’s where I started doing certification in diabetes management and nutritional therapy. I also started my own diabetes educational channel to provide evidence-based scientific information to laymen to make them understand what diabetes is and how they need to manage it.

Remember, its you who has the diabetes, and it’s you who is going to get the complications, not your doctor.

Some common misconceptions about diabetes

1. Diabetes is a progressive disease
2. If diabetes runs in your family, you must get it
3. Diabetes can be fixed with medications without changing the lifestyle
4. Diabetics should avoid sugar and eat healthy carbs and wholegrains
5. Diabetics have less life expectancy
6. Diabetics cannot build muscles
7. Only overweight people get diabetes, thin people don’t get it
8. High blood pressure, retinopathy, and kidney disease is a natural outcome of diabetes
9. Fruits, honey, dates are natural sources of sugar, so these are okay to consume
10. Regular walk after meals will keep your blood sugar normal regardless of what you ate

I have all the pre-requisites of metabolic disorder. I can be a real good example of someone who is at risk of all major diseases. I am of Asian origin. I have tendency to grow fats around belly easily. My waist to hip ratio was always in the red zone. I had a sedentary lifestyle until the age of 45. I have a strong family history of diabetes from both parents. I have sweet tooth and my food mainly consists of carbohydrates. I could not run a block without being so short of breath that I would just stop. I was a total disaster. I never thought with my genetic predisposition and a long unhealthy lifestyle, I would be able to recover from my bad health. I was wrong!

I put the science, my faith, my knowledge, learnt from thousands of other diabetic patients’ experiences, gradually started fixing my issues and just under 9 months, I was able to get my glucose readings in normal range. I am able to run as long as I want. I can run the 2.4 KM challenge under 13 minutes, which is great for my age. I can run 5km under 30 minutes. Peripheral artery disease and claudication symptoms I had are absolutely gone. I have become so metabolic flexible that food or absence of food doesn’t affect me.

So, how did I do it?

Well, it would be unfair if I don’t mention Dr. Richard K. Bernstein whose book “Diabetes Solution” gave me a starting point and basic understanding of metabolic health and diabetes. My second source of information was Diabetes UK Forum, where I met thousands of diabetics who already changed their lives with simple modification to their lifestyles. The book “Why We Get Sick” by Dr. Ben Bickman and finally “Primal Blueprint” by Mark Sisson. These were just the starting points for me to understand physiology of metabolic syndrome, diabetes, insulin and the issues causes by high insulin (hyperinsulinemia) even if you are not a diabetic. And of course, Diet Doctor podcasts by Dr. Bret Scher, and the website itself has a scientific and authentic information on nutrition.

Apart from the above sources, I did a deep dive into scientific literature available online on diabetes and its complications and how to avoid them. I went through most of the popular journals and peer reviewed research studies on the subject to try to understand the physiology and findings. Along with all these hundreds of hours reading and listening to experts, I was also doing self-testing and checking the effect of food and lifestyle on my well-being. I was able to connect dots among faith, science and my personal experiences to understand that human body is so robust that it always has a survival mechanism, and our bodies fight till the end. If you use the scientific knowledge and help your body in this fight, you will see a tremendous improvement in short time. I am a living example of this theory.

I was testing my blood sugar before and after each meal, several times a day. I was testing on average 10-12 times a day to understand how my blood sugar was rising or going down, what was the curve like and how each food impacted it. How was my fasting sugar acting and how was my postprandial blood glucose behaved with food. This reassured me of the fact that there is nothing called healthy carbs or wholegrain or 5 a day fruits if you are a diabetic. It’s not the pure sugar that diabetics avoid and still don’t see improvement in their condition. Its overall carbohydrates that we eat in each meal that dictate our daily blood sugar levels. Carbohydrates becomes sugar after digestion. The only difference between pure sugar and carbohydrates is that carbohydrate will raise your blood glucose after it gets digested, maybe 30-60 minutes after eating, whereas pure sugar will do a quick raise in your blood glucose. It doesn’t matter where these carbs are coming from, from wholegrain, organic oats, brown rice or simply fruits, they all raise your blood sugar.

Normal fasting blood sugar levels in human beings range somewhere between 80-90 mg/dl. Once you eat carbs or sugary food, your blood glucose starts rising. At somewhere when you hit 110 mg/dl, your brain sends signals to your pancreas to release insulin to take care of increasing blood glucose. Insulin is released from beta cells of pancreas and takes the sugar out of blood into muscles, brain, and other body cells where it’s needed. If we don’t have insulin, there is no way our body could use that glucose.

In healthy non-diabetic person, this insulin response (bolus insulin) is so strong that no matter how many carbs or sugar you ate, in couple of hours, your blood sugar will drop back to normal or even go lower under the influence of insulin. That is the reason when you eat sweets, you feel extremely hungry after couple of hours because the insulin response made your blood sugar go down quickly and you feel an urge to eat something.

In diabetics however, there are three phenomena that could happen.

1. Lack of insulin production. This means that the insulin is not being produced enough to take care of rising blood sugar. This could be a type-1 diabetic whose pancreatic beta cells got destroyed by autoimmune disease, or having pancreas infection called pancreatitis, or this could be a type-2 diabetic whose beta cells are destroyed due to pancreas overload and heavy lifting to recover high carbohydrate / sugary diet over the years. This could also be due to prolonged high blood glucose itself that is known to cause beta cell death.
2. Insulin resistance. This means that the insulin is being produced as usual or even in excess quantity, but it is not functioning properly. Over the years of high refined carbohydrates, processed and sugary foods, our pancreas have to go an extra mile to recover this rise in the blood sugar. As I explained earlier, our body is so robust that it will go to extremes to keep our body homeostasis in balance. To keep the blood sugar in normal levels, our pancreas keeps secreting insulin to the point that our cells get resistant to our own insulin and that is called “insulin resistance”. Insulin resistance is one of the major causes of type-2 diabetes and a true manifestation of metabolic syndrome. Please remember, insulin resistance almost always is caused by high insulin production over the years, which is also called “hyperinsulinemia”. Chronic hyperinsulinemia is now medically proven to be the cause of 95% of our chronic illnesses including high blood pressure, diabetes, Alzheimer, dementia, PCOS (polycystic ovary disease), cardiovascular disease/heart attack, IBS (irritable bowel syndrome), IBD (inflammatory bowel disease) and coeliac disease to name a few.
3. Impaired insulin signalling: One less obvious but very common reason for high blood sugar and getting diagnosed with diabetes is issues with insulin secretion signalling affected by factors other than blood sugar concentration, for example incretin hormones that signal insulin release regardless of blood sugar concentration. So, if you were a type-1 diabetic and don’t produce any insulin at all and you just eat broccoli with almost no carbs in it, this will release incretin hormone as soon as the food goes down the stomach and stretches your intestine.

That was a simple explanation of what happens when you eat refined carbohydrates and sugary foods both in diabetics and non-diabetics. The people who are non-diabetics, their pancreas keeps producing insulin and their blood glucose level never reaches diabetic range until 10-15 years later when their pancreas gives up, or their insulin becomes ineffective. That is when their fasting blood glucose starts creeping up and they are diagnosed with diabetes. This process takes years to happen.

My advice for individuals and authorities is to check insulin levels in healthy population as a routine yearly check. This test is called HOMA-IR where fasting insulin and fasting blood glucose are tested at the same time and a ratio is established. Ideally, your HOMA-IR score should be less than 1. Anything above 1.9 means you are insulin resistant. The higher the HOMA-IR value, the more insulin resistant you are.

If you feel that your HOMA-IR is borderline or is in non-healthy range, that is a sign that you are on your pathway to be a future diabetic in 5-10 years down the road. It is much easier to bring lifestyle changes at that point to reverse your insulin resistance. If you do so at an early stage, as a matter of fact, you may never be diagnosed as a diabetic. This is even more important if you have a history of obesity or if you have a family history of diabetes.

Let’s move onto the next scenario. You have been eating carbs, sugars and refined/processed food like myself all your life. No one told you to get tested for HOMA-IR and after 10-15 years you have suddenly found your fasting blood glucose way above 100 mg/dl (6 mmol/L). That is the first sign that your body reached its maximum effort to keep you healthy. Now it is your turn to support your body and reverse these symptoms. If you got diabetes in very early age and it was due to autoimmune disease, that is not attributed to the diet and is called type-1 diabetes. That means you are not producing enough insulin to keep your blood glucose in check, and you must start insulin regimen to stay healthy, rest of your life. Eating a low-carb food even in type-1 diabetics is much helpful in reducing and/or affectively administering their insulin dose.

Once I learnt all the physiology of diabetes as explained above, I started looking at my numbers with finger prick readings before and after each meal. First thing I did was to cut the sugars and refined carbohydrates, grains, rice, potatoes, lentils, fruits, and any processed food from my diet. I did eat carbohydrates from vegetables, and it was normally 30 gms of carbs per day with 6 being in the breakfast (you are more insulin resistance in the morning) and 12 gms of carbs both in lunch and dinner. I also learnt from scientific papers and research studies that there are no vitamins that you cannot have if you are eating a variety of vegetables. You do not need to eat fruits at all. For example, oranges which are considered a source of vitamin C, can be replaced with bell pepper and brussels sprouts which are high in vitamin-C and so on.

This reduction in daily carbohydrates affected me in two ways. Firstly, my daily blood glucose readings dropped to 150 range and my insulin resistance started improving gradually. When I had my HOMA-IR after three months of low-carb, I found that I had no insulin resistance anymore. My fasting inulin was at 3. Below 6 is considered normal.

The second effect of low carb diet was indirect. This means that when my blood glucose stayed low around the clock, my pancreas needed to produce less insulin to cover that rise. Now if you don’t know already, insulin is a fat storage hormone and is an evolutionary hormone that saved us during the time of hunger and famine. When we had food availability in old times, we ate, our insulin rose and it stored excess sugar into fats that was used as a fuel when we did not get food for days. However, in modern world, we are never deficient of food, so we are just storing the extra sugar into fats and not utilising it and becoming fatter and fatter every day.

Because my insulin production went down, my pancreas had time to take some rest and produce even better insulin as the time went by. Its most probable that with the regulation of my blood sugar, and as shown by several studies, the weaker beta cells started functioning better with regrowth of new cells, that in turn helped me produce more and better insulin, which was good enough to keep my blood sugar in normal range.

It would be useful to mention here how the extra blood sugar that we eat from food gets regulated. In other words, the metabolism of food. Human body has three sources of energy.

1. The energy coming from the food you eat (rising blood sugar).
2. If you have not eaten for several hours (like fasting), then the body uses stored glucose which is called “glycogen” and this energy is stored in liver and muscles and can provide roughly 1500-2000 calories
3. Once glycogen stores are finished, then body starts using its own fat storage to provide instant energy for body to survive if you have not eaten for days. Body could also use a process called gluconeogenesis (means producing new glucose) from free fatty acids in the blood or by converting protein into sugars in the liver.

When you eat food and your blood sugar rises, insulin puts the energy required by the body into body cells from the rising sugar. However, because we eat big portions, and high starch, sugary foods, there is still a plenty of sugar left after the needs of our muscles and other body cells have been met. That is where insulin performs the second function. It takes this extra energy and stores it into glycogen in the form of stored glucose to be used later. Once your glycogen stores are full (or if they were already full), all extra sugar gets converted to fats by the liver.

This fat then moves in the blood stream in the form of triglycerides (that is why if you do your cholesterol test after a meal, your triglycerides are normally high) or the fat is stored as fat deposits as visceral fat. This is the fat that is stored around your belly and around your internal organs including liver and intestines. When this fat keeps increasing because we are eating excess energy, this covers our liver/pancreas and blunts the effect of released insulin from pancreas and is called “fatty liver”. The biggest cause of fatty liver is either alcohol (in the people who drink) or the fructose, particularly fruit juices in the people who do not drink alcohol, and is called medically “non-alcoholic fatty liver disease”

Once you start low-carb diet, the insulin levels in your body drops. As I said earlier, insulin is a fat storage hormone. When insulin level in the body is low, a counter hormone “glucagon” starts taking the charge. Glucagon acts opposite to insulin. Glucagon helps in burning fats. You cannot burn fats when you are in a high-insulin mode or in hyperinsulinemia. You can burn fats only when your insulin levels in the blood are very low and your glucagon is higher. That is the reason when people start injecting insulin, they put on weight because of fat-storage effect of insulin hormone.

So going back to my recovery stage, once I started low-carb food keeping my daily carbohydrates under 30 gms (6 gms in the breakfast, 12 gms in lunch and dinner each), my insulin levels went down, and I started burning the fats around my belly and internal organs. These are called visceral fats. This did a dramatic effect on my own insulin effectiveness and my blood sugar went into real normal range within 3 months of adapting low-carb diet. My belly fats started melting like butter melts on fire without much physical effort, simply by reducing my blood insulin levels. My waist to hip ratio became optimal within 6 months. My waist size dropped from 36 inches to 28 inches within few months.

That was just the story on the side of insulin and metabolism. I also started studying physical effort and exercise effect on longevity and diabetes. I discovered that my cardiac fitness was very poor. I could not run a block. I was short of breath within a minute or two. I could not run 500 meters in one go. My heartbeat went very high, above 170 within few minutes of light jogging. With exertion, I started feeling calf and left leg pain which went away with rest. This is called claudication and medically it is called peripheral artery disease (PAD). This means that the blood flow to your legs is weak or is partially blocked due to blockage in some of the arteries. That was a worrying situation.

But again, as I mentioned, our body is very robust. If you catch these issues at an early stage, you will be able help your body and reverse most of these issues. At the time when I started working on my cardiorespiratory fitness and improving my VO2 max, my resting heartbeat was in 80s. Now just for your information, athletes and people who do a lot of physical efforts, normally have their resting heartbeat in 40s and 50s. As a rule, the lower the resting heartbeat is, the better your cardiorespiratory fitness is. With my efforts and gradual increase in my fitness routine, today I am able to bring my resting heartbeat close to 60. I plan on improving it even more over the coming years. As soon as your resting heartbeat starts going down, your blood insulin level is not high anymore, you are eating low carb, you will notice that your blood pressure will gradually start improving and will go below 120/80 mark within few months. If you were on blood pressure lowering medications, you may need to stop them entirely. My blood pressure within 6 months of my cardiorespiratory fitness went well below normal range of 120/80 range. Remember, the scientific literature tells that low resting heartbeat and low blood pressure is directly correlated to less cardiovascular diseases or heart attacks in the future.

Just to give you a quick hack on how I did it, it was a gradual effort but based on science. I started gradually first with fast walking and increasing the length of walk time. Then I started slow jogging. I started with 5 minutes and gradually increased it to 10 minutes in the first month and then 5 minutes every month. I also started doing some fast speed running off and on to give my heart a chance to pump to its fullest speed and open my arteries. This is called HIIT (High Intensity Interval Training). The first time I ran the 2.4 km challenge to test my VO2 max after 3 months of training, it came out to be at 17 minutes. Another regular and persistent effort of 3 months and now I can do 2.4 km challenge below 13 minutes, which is excellent for my age. Just to point out, gradual increase in exercise and consistency is the key here.

While doing this, I kept testing my blood glucose regularly and testing my resting heart rate and blood pressure on weekly basis to see improvement. Now at the end of 9 months, I have no extra fats in my body, I can run without shortness of breath for as much as I like, and I have started working on building the muscle strength which is yet another key area to improve your insulin sensitivity and glucose consumption. Because our muscles are the main users of our blood glucose, the higher the muscle mass you have, the lower the blood sugar you will get after any food because your muscles will be using a lot of this sugar. It is also important to know that muscles, during exercise, can use blood glucose in the absence of insulin as well, so if you are insulin resistant, you can still reduce your post meal blood glucose by slow jogging or fast walking.

When I started all this in January 2021, I was put on Metformin (Glucophage) 500 mg twice a day. Now just to let you know that Metformin/Glucophage is the first defence against type-2 diabetes and insulin resistance. This helps in insulin sensitivity and helps in better utilisation of your own insulin. Glucophage does not help in lowering blood glucose or increasing insulin production. That is why Glucophage is mostly helpful in obese people who have high insulin resistance. But when you lower your body weight and abdominal fats with low-carb regimen, you will find Glucophage is not useful anymore. When I tested my HOMA-IR and I found that I had zero insulin resistance, I stopped my Glucophage cold turkey, just like that. Trust me, my blood sugar had some fluctuations for a week or 10 days and then when Glucophage affect went from the blood (it takes about 14 days to flush off metformin from your body), my blood sugar readings came back to normal or even better again. So, based on my experience, I would highly recommend Glucophage for type-2 diabetics who are overweight or even for type-1 diabetics to make their injected insulin more affective. You must consult your doctor to get the proper dose. However, regular use of metformin/Glucophage can reduce vitamin B-12 levels in your body. So it’s wise to get your B-12 level tested every few months and take some supplement to make up for the deficiency. Some studies show that metformin/Glucophage also reduce testosterone levels in Men.

Recently in Nov 2021, when I was able to reverse my diabetes and got my HbA1C score consistently close to 30 mmol/l (5%), I thought of using CGM (continuous glucose monitor) to test different foods that our conventional medicine still advocates as healthy food for diabetics. This was to prove how each food affected my blood glucose. My CGM findings can be found here in detail. You can see for yourself that even when I ate wholegrain barley and oats, wholegrain paratha, and rice, my blood sugar shot up. That is exactly what happens in all diabetics. Their blood sugar stays high for hours wreaking havoc in the body. Eating grains, bread, pasta, rice and then taking Metformin doesn’t make any sense at all because metformin only affects a little on your overall blood glucose levels, and may have some effect on the fasting blood glucose. However, it will never bring your blood glucose reading of 300 mg/dl to 100 mg/dl. It can only affect 20-30 mg/dl which is nothing in the grand scheme of things.

That’s what happens when your diabetes becomes old, and it starts progressing. Doctors still call diabetes as a progressive disease, and they still believe all diabetics will have eye, kidney and heart issues sooner or later. But that is not true. If you take control of your blood glucose today, you can reverse and avoid most of these complications. Trust me, your diabetes doesn’t have to be progressive. I’m a living example of this. Look at Dr. Richard Bernstein who had type-1 diabetes at the age of 12. Type-1 diabetics life-span is lesser than non-diabetics. He discovered the self-monitoring of glucose and fixed his blood glucose readings. He is 89 years of age today and still goes to gym and is in a perfect health. Not just him, I know hundreds of diabetics on different forums who when went on low-carb, they did reverse their diabetes and complications and are enjoying perfectly normal life.

Regarding the complications, you need to understand that your risk of neuropathy, eye, kidney, and heart disease increases many folds as soon as your blood sugar starts rising. The ideal Hba1c to target is as close to 5% (or 30 mmol/l) as possible. Ideal fasting blood glucose should not exceed 90 mg/dl and ideal blood glucose 2 hours after meals should never cross 120 mg/dl, optimally below 110 mg/dl.

Based on my personal experience, extensive research, and diabetes/nutrition certifications I did, I was able to take control of my diabetes. I am sure everyone can take control of their diabetes the way I did with a little effort by going low-carb and starting gradual increase in their fitness level.

20 practical steps to reverse your diabetes in plain English:

Putting diabetes into remission is a consistent effort and every diabetic needs to understand physiology and mechanics of how metabolism works. I have explained most of this physiology above for those who are really interested to know how diabetes happens and how it affects. However, here I am going to give few handy tips that if you follow and commit to, you can reverse your diabetes too. These are based on my personal experience, experience of thousands of diabetics that I communicate with online and based on modern medical research papers in the scientific journals.

1. Buy yourself a glucometer to start testing yourself regularly to understand your blood glucose levels. Make a diary of your food and blood sugar readings and try all the food you are eating and see the affect of this food on your glucose levels by testing right before the meal and 2 hours after the meal.
2. Eliminate entirely all kinds of processed food (packaged food), simple sugars, cakes, pastries, refined flour, and all kinds of bakery products and sweets. Reduce fruits consumption to once or twice a week. Few berries every day won’t hurt.
3. Give 4-5 hours between two meals or snacks. You can drink black tea or black coffee, green tea etc whenever you want. No tea with milk etc.
4. Do not eat food for an hour or two after waking up in the morning. Our body already releases sugar from stored glycogens somewhere between 6-8 am to get our bodies ready for the start of the day, so its best to wait this sugar go away before you have your breakfast.
5. Eat your last meal within one hour of sunset. Follow the circadian rhythm. That means only eat during sunlight. Our metabolism goes to rest after sun sets, so any food eaten after sunset will take longer time to get digested.
6. Try to eat your food within 8-10 hours window and give your body rest for 14-16 hours. This will reset your hormones and give rest to your metabolism. Research shows that in the long term, your pancreatic beta cells may grow and produce better insulin again.
7. Keep moving whenever you have the chance to do so. You don’t have to be a gym freak. Its better to keep moving all day than going to gym one hour and then sitting on a couch rest of the day.
8. Brisk walk and light jogging utilise blood sugar easily even if you are insulin resistant. Make a habit of doing a 30-minute brisk walk after every meal. Do it after one hour of eating your food. If you happen to eat more carbohydrates or sweets, then do a light jogging for 30-40 minutes.
9. Keep your carbohydrates in the morning meals when you have chance to be active after those meals. Keep your last meal carb free.
10. Eat less carbs in the breakfast because we are normally insulin resistant more in the early morning.
11. Your muscles are the biggest users of your blood glucose, so build muscles. The more muscle mass you have, the better sugar levels will become eventually. This means lifting weight and strength exercises to grow your muscles.
12. Avoid fruit juices and high fructose foods. Fructose gets metabolised in the liver. Fruit juices have no fibres and our liver can not handle high amount of fructose. Think of it like this. You can not each 7 apples in one go, but you can drink juice of 7 apples easily. Fructose in nature always comes with fibre so we do not consume high amounts of it, and also the fibre reduces the absorption rate of fructose.
13. Avoid vegetable oil for cooking. Use butter, natural ghee, olive oil or coconut oil for cooking. Remember, natural fats are okay to eat in moderate amount.
14. Always use full-fat dairy and eat meat along with its fats. They are healthy and will be utilised as your body fuel if you are not eating carbohydrates with them.
15. 2-3 eggs with yolk a day are okay to eat. Remember egg yolks do not increase your cholesterol level. It’s the extra sugar that we eat gets converted to cholesterol by our liver.
16. Try to eat fermented food. Pickles, yogurt, kefir (rayab) milk, fermented cheese etc. Some of the sugars in the milk gets used during the fermentation process so its healthier for diabetics.
17. If you feel like snacking or hungry, eat few nuts or a piece of cheese instead of carbohydrate rich foods.
18. It’s better to avoid grains, rice, breads, lentils etc to help your insulin take control of your blood sugar. Once you have optimised your blood sugar levels, you can introduce a little bit of carbohydrates that your body can handle without giving you a blood glucose peak. This is called “carbohydrate threshold”. Every diabetic has a different threshold. I can manage 30-50 grams of carbs a day without swings in my blood sugar. I know some people can eat much more than that. But I also know many people who can not eat more than 20gms of carbs a day.
19. Fast couple of days a week. Dry fast is more effective than water fast. For dry fasting, best way is to do it from dawn to dusk. For water fast, you can go up to 24 hours without food but you can drink water and plain tea. If you do this twice a week, this will reset your metabolism and help your beta cells function improve.
20. Your daily meal plan should look like this;
    1. Breakfast: You can eat any of these foods in your breakfast; fried eggs, boiled eggs, vegetable omelette, cheese or cheese omelettes, yogurt, and nuts.
    1. Lunch: 100-200 grams of meat/chicken/fish with vegetables or salad
    1. Dinner: yogurt, cheese, meat/chicken/fish/nuts

What about diabetes medicines?

Conventional medicine believes diabetes is a progressive disease and that people will never stop eating carbohydrates and sugars. Doctors do not have time to explain and follow every patient on what foods they eat and have an eye on their daily progress. Also, medical doctors study how to treat a disease with medicine. The do not study nutrition except for a few lectures in 5-7 years. So, when it comes to diabetes, their treatment is always reducing your blood sugar through medicine. They are treating the symptom (high blood glucose) and not the disease itself.

Conventional medicine starts with metformin (Glucophage) as a first defence against diabetes. Metformin is the safest of all diabetes medicines and I recommend everyone who has insulin resistance to take metformin right away till they can improve their insulin sensitivity. Because conventionally, medical doctors only ask you to stop sugar but not the carbohydrates (grains, rice, lentils, milk, fruits etc), metformin doesn’t help a lot to reduce your blood glucose levels. Sooner or later, your doctor will start you on blood glucose lowering medications.

There are two types of medicines that help in reducing your blood glucose. One type works on your pancreas and forces your pancreas to release more insulin. This type of drug normally helps very well initially, and you will see great results and will be very happy with your physician. However, the issue is that in type-2 diabetics, the whole problem is extra insulin production and insulin resistance. Your pancreas is already tired of producing insulin to combat sugars and carbohydrates you eat. With this type of drugs, your pancreas will need to work even harder, and it will be just a matter of time when your pancreatic cells will give up and the drug will not be useful anymore. That is why these types of drugs work well for few years and then your blood glucose starts rising again.

Another drug that medical doctors use affects in spilling out the extra sugar out of your body through urine. This drug prevents sugar absorption into your blood through intestine and throws extra sugar out of your body through urine. Again, for some time, even if you are eating high carbs, your blood sugar will not be very high because extra blood sugar is thrown out through your urine. Apparently, this looks a much viable solution for a diabetic patient. They can enjoy sweets and carbs without having a high rise in their blood glucose, right? But it’s not! The excess sugar that is expelled out of the body goes through your kidneys and urinary tract every single day. Remember, wherever there is extra sugar, the chance of bacterial infection goes very high. These types of drugs can cause serious infections in your kidneys and urinary tract. So, you are getting rid of extra blood glucose on the expense of your other body part.

Now you understand why our conventional medicine calls diabetic as a progressive disease? Your health is deteriorating slowly because you are not taking care of the cause. You are just trying remove symptoms (or high blood glucose from your body) by either producing more insulin or expelling it out of your body.

Let’s say that you had mild diabetes. The above medicine regimen will last 8-10 years while you are fighting for your health. After that, your pancreas beta cells are almost dead, constant high blood sugar and spilling cause you more complications in your kidneys, eyes and heart (neuropathy) and your blood pressure levels are also gone up. Now you are on BP medications as well!

At this point in time, your last line of defence is injected insulin. Your doctor will start you on insulin (because your pancreas is almost dead due high blood sugar and due to secreting extra insulin). Now, again there are two types of injected insulin therapy that your physician will use. Let me explain this.

There are two types of insulin that our body releases, bolus and basal. Basal insulin (from base) is a base level insulin that our pancreas keeps producing 24 hours to keep our blood glucose level in the normal range. When our blood sugar drop after not eating for several hours or during sleep, our stored glucose (glycogen) is released into the body to bring it back to normal level, which is somewhere between 80-90 mg/dl (4.5-5 mmol/L). Basal insulin makes sure that released glycogen doesn’t increase the blood glucose levels from the normal levels and that is the function of basal insulin. In other words, basal insulin works on your fasting blood sugar. It releases slowly and acts slowly.

Bolus insulin is the stored insulin that our pancreas secretes, and this gets stored in the form of granules. This insulin acts when you eat. Because after the food we eat, particularly if its high-carb or sugary food, our blood glucose rises quickly. Our basal insulin levels are not high enough to combat that fast increase in our blood glucose. As soon as our blood sugar reaches somewhere close to 110 mg/dl (above 6 mmol/l), our pancreas releases a burst of bolus insulin granules that helps this extra blood sugar get used in the body. That is why in non-diabetics, whatever carbohydrates, or sugar you eat, your blood glucose will hardly go above 120 mg/dl after the food, because of the effect of bolus insulin.

The injected insulin works using the same principal. Doctors will normally start with basal insulin (called slow-acting insulin). You will probably take few units in the morning and few units in the evening. This will be released in your body slowly for several hours to combat fasting blood sugar mainly. However, this injected slow acting insulin will not be enough to avoid blood glucose spikes after a meal. Doctors normally start with slow-acting insulin because that does not cause hypoglycaemia (very low blood sugar). If you are still producing some insulin, sometimes using just slow-acting insulin injections can keep your blood glucose in the optimal level (provided that you are eating low carb food). However, if you are not producing much insulin (or if you are insulin resistant), slow acting insulin will not bring your blood glucose levels to optimal.

What about blood glucose spike after meals? Normally, medical doctors do not cover your food at initial stages with injected insulin, unless you are type-1 diabetic and not producing any insulin. The danger of fast-acting (injected bolus) insulin is that its extremely hard manager your food and insulin dose together, particularly if you are eating high-sugar, high-car food. If your doctor will start you on fast-acting insulin, they will normally advise you to eat a lot of carbohydrates because they could get sued if you went into hypoglycaemia. The irony is that no legal system in the world punishes physicians for all the complications of high blood sugar because of recommending high-carbohydrate food.

However, if you have reached a stage where you can not control your post-meal blood glucose without insulin, the best strategy is to go low-carb, count your carbohydrate grams (approximate) and use small dose of fast-acting insulin and keep testing your blood glucose with glucometer. Within a few weeks, you will understand how much fast-acting insulin you need prior to a meal, depending upon how much carbohydrates you are eating. With high carbohydrate food and high insulin doses, its practically impossible to match the glucose peak and insulin peak and there are higher chance of hypoglycaemia. That is why conventional medicine recommends high carbohydrate food with heavy doses of injected fast-acting insulin. That means that your sugar levels after a meal will always be much higher than normal sugar levels.

Sometimes, doctor will use a mix of all the above drugs as a strategy to combat your sugar levels. However, the best treatment is to eat low-carbohydrate food (30 gms a day) and follow the above recommendations. Once you have optimised your food and exercise etc, chances are very high that you will bring your blood glucose levels within normal range without any medicine. However, if your blood glucose levels are still high after 2-3 months of low-carb and exercise etc, you should take metformin at least to help increase your own insulin sensitivity or the best drug is to take basal insulin (slow-acting) and if needed small units of bolus insulin (fast-acting). Dr. Richard Bernstein recommends not to use any drugs that will push your pancreas to create more insulin or the drugs that force your body to throw sugar away using your kidney.

All above is not a medical advice, but its more of making you understand how diabetes happens and how you can control and what conventional treatment options are there. Once you understand all this, you can discuss this at length with your doctor and try different things along with low-carb food to get control of your own diabetes.

I became passionate to help others for their diabetes and metabolic syndrome disease and did two level-2 certifications last year, one in Diabetes Care & Management and the other in Health & Nutrition. I am currently enrolled in a full-time graduate degree in “Integrative Health & Nutrition Coaching” and plan to finish it in 2022. I am always here to assist and share my experience and help others who plan to put their diabetes into remission. I also run a charity channel to improve diabetes epidemic in Pakistan (giving back to my roots) under the name of Sugar Free Pakistan. Eat Well, Get Well is my blog where I will be sharing my personal experiences to help people manage and prevent chronic illnesses using nutritional therapy. Please comment below with your thoughts and let’s see how many other success stories we can add to this.

APPENDIX – What is diabetes and its symptoms?

Diabetes is a horrible and heartbreaking condition that affects millions of people worldwide. Diabetes is a chronic condition that affects how food affects your body. When you eat, your body will begin to turn that food into the energy you need to keep going. When you have found that your body cannot do it correctly and you have been diagnosed, you will find that your doctor will immediately give you corrections and ways to fight the condition and keep you healthy.

How Your Body Gets Affected With Diabetes

When you have food in your body breaking down into sugar (or glucose), it gets released into your bloodstream, and you will find that when the sugar rises, it will signal your pancreas. Your pancreas releases insulin which then acts as a source to let your blood sugar get into your cells. Then your cells use this as energy. However, your body can't do this is if you have Diabetes. When you are affected by this challenging condition, you will notice that you don't have enough insulin, and if you do have it, your body is unable to use it as well as it should be able to. This causes too much blood sugar to be in your bloodstream, and your cells can stop responding to the insulin you do have. When your body continues to have too much sugar in the bloodstream, it can cause blindness, heart failure and other issues, and kidney disease, just for starters. There are far worse conditions that can occur if this condition continues and you don’t treat it, so this is something to be aware of.

Different Types of Diabetes That You Can Be Affected With

There are four different areas of Diabetes that you can be affected with, and each one is just as bad as the next, with none of them being something that you want to experience. In many countries, you will see that if adults don't have type one or type two Diabetes, they are experiencing prediabetes. The problem here is that you don't know when you have it, which can cause issues that you may not expect. When prediabetes is a concern, you will see that your blood sugar is higher than it should be but not actually high enough to be diagnosed. However, with prediabetes, you will find that you are at risk for heart attacks and strokes. Changing what you eat will help lower your chances of this issue.

Type One Diabetes is another issue that you can experience. This differs because it's caused by your immune system attacking itself. It doesn't do this on purpose, and it can't help it. You will find that the symptoms show up exceptionally quickly and it is most often diagnosed in children and teens. You will find that younger adults are far more susceptible as well. To survive, you must take your insulin.

Type Two Diabetes is when your body doesn't have the ability to use insulin well and keep your blood sugar at the expected levels it should. Almost everyone who experiences type two Diabetes has issues that occur quickly like the others and can be prevented with dietary changes and exercise.

Gestational Diabetes occurs when you are pregnant. It puts the baby and you at risk and puts you at risk for having Diabetes. Unfortunately, it puts your child at risk for type two diabetes as well. Gestational Diabetes can be severe and needs to be understood with the utmost care.

Signs That You May Have Diabetes

There are obvious signs that you might have Diabetes, and if your child is experiencing any of these symptoms, you need to check their blood sugar right away, and the same is true for yourself. You will see that the following things are dangerous.

• If you experience abnormal hunger
• If you experience abnormal thirst
• If you have blurry vision
• Experiencing dry skin
• If you have more infections than average (watch your feet especially)
• If you heal from your sores slowly
• If you have to urinate more frequently than expected, particularly so at night
• Experiencing weight loss without trying
• If you are unnaturally fatigued
• If you experience nausea
• If you experience vomiting and stomach pain
• If you experience numbness and tingling in your feet and hands

Along with these symptoms, your family history and age affect your health, and while you may find this surprising, your heritage may as well. Being overweight can also cause Diabetes, and if you have ever had Gestational Diabetes, you are far more likely to get Diabetes than those who have never experienced it. In addition to this, you can experience gestational issues if you have ever given birth to a baby that weighed more than eight pounds or if you are over twenty-five. You will find that these factors play a heavy part in whether or not this condition will affect you, and if it does, you must ensure that you are being careful so that you and your little one waiting to be born do not suffer from adverse side effects.

Can You Live a Normal Life with Diabetes?

You will find that many people have understood that while it is challenging to lead a regular life with Diabetes, it is not impossible. You will see that if you pay attention to what you need to do, it can be far easier than you think to accomplish this. The thing that you need to remember above all is to change your eating and lifestyle choices so that you can get healthier and begin to keep your hope that things will change.