Before I get into this article I want to make it clear that I am not a Doctor, Nutritionist or Dietician or even a Health Care Worker. Everything on this site and in the articles comes from my personal experiences in my fight against Metabolic Syndrome, Type 2 Diabetes, and general bad health. Since I was diagnosed with Diabetes I have spent hundreds of hours on research into the causes and treatments of Type 2 Diabetes and Diet. I cannot stress strongly enough that anybody considering making any changes to their diet or trying fasting, or anything else consult their DOCTOR or health care worker first, because if you are on medication changes can be FATAL.

I was invited to a barbeque the other day, and although I was fasting I decided to go, as being around food when I am fasting doesn’t bother me. A husband and wife couple came over and asked if I was the guy who wrote about weight loss and type 2 Diabetes, and I told them I had a website that covered weight loss and diabetes, and they told me I should be ashamed of myself for printing lies and putting out false information and hope to people who are already suffering. My friends holding the barbeque knowing this couple both suffered from type 2 Diabetes, recommended they have a look at my site which they did. On their next doctors visit they asked him about controlling their Diabetes with diet, and he told them “rubbish, total nonsense, never heard of anything so silly, it’s a chronic and progressive disease, so you just keep taking your medication and you will be fine”. I tried to explain that all the information was from personal experience but they didn’t really appear to be listening. What the husband said next totally threw me, as he told me his wife caught it first, and she obviously passed it on to me, and that is how they both ended up with it. I was totally stunned, at the fact they appeared to be perfectly normal people, yet had no knowledge of Diabetes, were obviously not getting any relevant information from their doctor, nor did they seem bothered about it, and just put it down to bad luck.

The wife was a big woman, probably bordering on morbidly obese, but her husband didn’t really appear to be that much overweight, but while we had been talking he was on his second energy drink that gives you wings and she was on her second pint of cola. She was already injecting insulin but he was still taking Metformin tablets twice a day, and they truly believed that because they were being medicated sugar was not a problem!!! I felt like saying for f***s sake change your doctor, but it really is not his fault, I think if you are diagnosed with a so called chronic and progressive disease you owe it to yourself to at least learn about the basics of the disease and the effects it can have on your general health and wellbeing  The trouble with this couple was that they accepted their situation, and as far as they were concerned could do nothing about it anyway, and really were not interested in what anyone else had to say. With this sort of ignorance there has to be a price tag somewhere down the road in the form of complications, but unfortunately it is the already stretched resources of the NHS that have to pick up that bill.

As I started to walk away a woman came over and said I hope you don’t think I am being rude but I heard what you were talking about, and I have been told I have Pre Diabetes. I asked her what her doctor advised and she said, she just told her to come back in six months and get another blood test. What I really don’t understand is that here in the UK Diabetes and its associated complications costs the NHS around £10 Billion every year, so why don’t they give people who are so called Pre Diabetic a leaflet or information booklet telling them what dietary and lifestyle changes they need to make, to STOP them becoming fully Diabetic in the first place. Helen she has said I can use her name, has found out some information on type 2 Diabetes but was not aware that you could stop it in its tracks by making some diet and lifestyle changes. There does seem to be plenty of information about how to live with it, but not that much about how to prevent it or reverse it. I know it’s easy to oversimplify things but as I said to Helen, stop putting sugars into your body and burn off what is already there and you’re on the right path to prevent full blown Diabetes.

By the time a doctor says you have Pre Diabetes it is not the start of a problem, the problem would have been smouldering away in the background for years, I never had the chance to sort things out at the Pre Diabetes stage, I only go to know when I had the full Monty, metabolic syndrome and type 2 Diabetes, and then not knowing anything else I went the pharmaceutical route, but it can NEVER CURE your condition only manage it. Type 1 Diabetes is different and not really covered here, but I will say that one guy at the barbeque with type 1 went from 110 units of insulin a day to 30 units purely by working with his doctor, and changing his diet to LCHF (low carb high fat). There is a problem with pharmaceuticals and type 2 Diabetes, the meds can get the excess sugar out of your blood and force it anywhere it can in your body, usually as fat, but it leaves your blood with high insulin levels circulating and that is just as bad as high sugar. This is just a vicious circle, a human merry-go-round with more and more sugar being crammed into your body as fat and no amount of pharmaceuticals are ever going to get rid of it.     

So how do we get rid of the sugar stored in our bodies especially if you are Pre or type 2 Diabetic, and more so if you are male because it is a double edged sword!!! It doesn’t matter what you do diet wise if you are producing insulin you cannot burn stored energy, so you need to cut the carbs and raise your fat intake to control your insulin level and prevent any spikes. Now for some bad news for the guys, if you are storing fat around your belly and organs as visceral fat, it causes the body to produce oestrogen the female hormone which suppresses our testosterone levels even more than the natural loss with age, which makes losing weight even harder. There is no easy solution, no magic potion where you can lose 50lbs of belly fat by next Thursday, or some miracle lost ancient formula that dissolves fat overnight, the only thing that I have found that works is a combination of diet and fasting. So now we come to the title Fasting, Fasting, and more Fasting, But Why? And the why is to get rid of the stubborn visceral belly fat and in the process greatly improve our health.

This WILL NOT work for everyone, I have spoken in person, on the phone and by email to people who want to fast but just can’t do it, and they ALL have one thing in common, they are high carb eaters. If you are a sugar burner fasting is going to be pure torture, you might be able to go for 24hrs but it will be very uncomfortable, because your sugar supply will run out in about 12hrs, and your body is going to be screaming for more sugar, and you will get some serious hunger pangs. There is no free ticket here, you are going to have to make some dietary changes in order to become fat adapted. Once you are fat adapted when your body runs out of sugar to burn as energy it automatically switches to burning stored body fat, which is what we are designed to do, by producing ketone bodies, which is a much better fuel than sugar. The problem is these days a lot of people just eat too much, breakfast, mid-morning snack, lunch, afternoon snack, evening meal, television snack, and some have a snack before bed, their bodies are constantly digesting food, and some wonder why they have no energy?  

So how do you go about becoming fat adapted or metabolically adapted as it is more usually referred to, well it’s not a switch that you can just turn on but is a process. The first step is to cut right back on your carbohydrate intake especially the ones that quickly convert to sugar, also totally cut out any high sugar drinks, fruit juices and soda’s and stop adding any sugar to tea or coffee. Any kind of fast food is out, also ready meals and processed food in general and any wheat based products, it’s not rocket science you just need to get back to eating proper food. Once you have become fat adapted you can concentrate on fasting and this is a case of the longer the better. Every time you fast the first 2 days are the hardest so it pays to go as long as you can comfortably to get the most benefits, and 7 days is a good start. There is no way I am saying it’s easy but the benefits always out way the effort, because the aim here is to improve INSULIN RESISTANCE which is the key to reversing Type 2 Diabetes and Pre Diabetes, and to rid yourself of belly fat and that lethal build-up of sugar.

I believe we are on the verge of a medical revolution we already know that Type 2 Diabetes can only be reversed by diet, as pharmaceuticals can only control it at best. Dementia and its most common form Alzheimer’s has no cure using pharmaceuticals only short term management, but reports going back to 2008 show much better results using diet, C8 MCT oil, and organic coconut oil, with the ketone bodies being able to pass through the blood barrier and feed the brain, and fasting helping to clear the plaque tangles. Even certain cancers are being assed for treatment with diet and fasting because they need sugar but cannot survive on fat, and some of the treatment available now can have worse side effects than the disease. With the global explosion of Type 2 Diabetes and Alzheimer’s you would expect it to be common knowledge that natural remedies appear to have better results than those from the pharmaceutical companies, could it be down to the fact that there are no vast profits to be made from natural and free remedies?   

If you are Pre Diabetic or already Type 2 Diabetic I recommend you watch this video by Dr Jason Fung https://youtu.be/ZEr9AjjL3No   There have been two things that have changed my life health wise, the first was watching a series on-line by Naomi Whittel called The Real Skinny On Fat, which made me rethink everything I had read about diet up to that point. The second was Dr Jason Fung and his approach to treating Type 2 Diabetes which instantly made total sense.

Until next time I wish you the best of health…