By reducing 15% of their body weight, almost 90% of those who have type 2 diabetes for less than four years may be free.
Currently, more than half a billion adults have diabetes, and about a 50% increase is expected in the next generation. I have many videos on the best diet for diabetes, but what about not eating at all?
More than a hundred years ago, fasting was said to cure diabetes, quickly stopping its progression and eliminating all symptoms of the disease within days or weeks. However, starvation is guaranteed to lead to total extinction you if kept long enough. What’s the point of fasting if the pounds will come back as soon as you restart the diet that was created in the first place? Would it help to start a healthy diet? Let’s see what the science says.
Type 2 diabetes has long been considered a disease of excess, which was thought to affect only “the idle rich . . . anyone whose land and livelihood does not require him to work hard every day, and whose income or salary allows him, and tends to tempt him, to eat more than he needs.” Diabetes is preventable, so can it be cured? If we are dying from overeating, perhaps we can be saved by eating less. Notably, this idea was proposed some 2,000 years ago in an Ayurvedic text:
“Drugs for people with diabetes
He should live like a saint (Munni);
He has to travel 800-900 kilometers.
Or digging a lake;
Or you will live on cow dung and cow urine only.”
That reminds me of Rollo’s diabetic diet proposed in 1797, which consisted of red meat. That was on top of drugs like ipecac that he used to make him sick and vomit. Anything that makes people sick “has a short-term effect on diabetes” because it reduces food intake. His diet—which included blood clots for lunch and spoiled meat for dinner—certainly had that effect.
Similar benefits were seen in diabetics during the siege of Paris in the Franco-Prussian War, leading to the recommendation that this is possible le moinswhich translates as “eat as little as possible.” This was formalized in Allen’s starvation therapy, which is considered “the greatest advance in the treatment of diabetes before the discovery of insulin.” Before insulin, there was the “Allen Era”.
Dr. Allen noted that there are clinical reports of even severe cases of diabetes being resolved after the onset of a “wasting condition” such as tuberculosis or cancer, so he decided to investigate. He found that even in the worst form of diabetes, he is able to remove sugar from people’s urine within ten days. Well, that’s the easy part; it’s hard to care when they start eating again. To manage diabetes in patients, he adhered to two principles: Keep them underweight and limit fat in their diet. A person with severe diabetes may not have symptoms for days or weeks, but eating butter or olive oil can make the disease flare up.
As I have said before, diabetes is a disease of fat toxicity. Put fat into people’s veins through an IV, and, using an advanced type of MRI scanner, you can show in real time the accumulation of fat in muscle cells within hours, which is accompanied by increased insulin resistance. The same thing happens if you put people on a high-fat diet for three days. It can happen even in just one day. Even a single meal can increase insulin resistance within six hours. A diet high in saturated fat quickly increases insulin resistance. Why do we care? Insulin resistance in our muscles, in the case of excess calories, can lead to fatty liver, followed by fat accumulation in the pancreas, and finally full-blown diabetes. “Type 2 diabetes can now be understood as a condition of excess fat in the liver and pancreas, and it remains reversible for at least 10 years in most people.”
When people are put on a very low-calorie diet—700 calories a day—fat can be released from muscle cells, with a corresponding increase in insulin sensitivity, as shown below and at 4:43 in my video. Fasting To Reverse Diabetes.
The accumulation of fat in the liver has been shown to decrease significantly, and if the diet continues, the excess fat in the pancreas also decreases. If caught early, it is possible to reverse type 2 diabetes, which means that blood sugar levels remain healthy on a healthy diet.
With a 15% weight loss, about 90% of people who have had type 2 diabetes for less than four years can achieve diabetes-free sugar levels, while it can only be changed in 50% of those who have had the disease for more than eight years. That’s better than bariatric surgery, where those who lost more weight had lower remission rates of 62% and 26%, respectively. Your forks are better than scalpels. Indeed, most people who have had type 2 diabetes for an average of three years can reverse their disease after losing about 30 pounds, as you can see below and at 5:37 in mine. video.
Of course, a medically supervised, water-only fast can get you there, but you’ll have to maintain that weight loss. Another thing that has been said “with certainty” is that if you lose weight, you reverse diabetes.
To put it bluntly, “the initial excitement over the ‘greatest miracle of medicine'”—the discovery of insulin in 1921—”quickly gave way to the realization” that, although it literally saved lives in people with type 1 diabetes, insulin alone was not enough to prevent complications such as blindness, kidney failure, stroke, and amputation in people with type 2 diabetes. That’s why one of the best-known pioneers in diabetes care, Elliott Joslin, “says abstinence in food and exercise, as was the case in the days before medicine was discovered.” [insulin]should be a cornerstone of diabetes management….”
Doctor’s Note
Check it out Diabetes as a disease of Fat poisoning to find out more about the cause of this disease.
For more on fasting to reverse disease, see:
Fasting is not the best way to lose weight. To learn more, see the related post below.
What is the best way to lose weight? Look Friday Favorites: The Best Foods for Weight Loss and Disease Prevention.
