Bench
Full Member
So I'm not diabetic (or at least, I don't think I am, I've never tested for it, and I haven't been to a doctor since I was aged 10), but I read an article last week about Type 2 diabetes which made me think "Wow!" - a Journalist who was diagnosed with it and managed to actually cure and completely reverse his diabetes just by going on a really strict diet for a few days, then went on to talk about some other diabetes patients who did the same thing.
http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2013/may/12/type-2-diabetes-diet-cure
I suppose one of the reasons I went "wow" is because I'd always assumed it was incurable; as I used to know somebody who'd been taking the tablets for it, who was very large and talked about the insulin meds being the reason for weight gain, and had always been vehement about the fact that it was incurable, but this is talking about people very quickly managing to cure their diabetes, lose weight, and keep off the weight just through a quick (but fairly brutal) diet change lasting a few weeks.
The other reason I went "wow" is because, despite (luckily) not being diabetic, I started to wonder if maybe I actually am diabetic and have just never seen any symptoms which were serious enough for me to take note (cue frantic googling, alongside hyperchondriac tendencies of reading every single medical website and suddenly coming to the conclusion that I'm about to have a heart attack, go blind, lose limbs..)
But among the things I found, were other researchers who had done studies on weight, diabetes, insulin and blood sugar. This video I found by an American doctor is possibly the most educational 1 hour of my life I've ever spent on the internet.
He came to a couple of conclusions which felt like a huge lightbulb switching on in my head
- "Hunger" and the urge to eat something is mainly caused by having insulin in the body
- We eat more stuff containing glucose (carbs and protein), which causes the body to secrete more insulin, which makes us hungry again once all the glucose has been burned
- Part of the "vicious" cycle - the more we eat that stuff, the more we crave
- The other part of the "vicious" cycle - the more insulin our bodies generate, the more we resist it, causing our pancreas to secrete even more to compensate for the resistance (And the resistance seems to be attributed to fatty stuff around our pancrease/liver and other internal organs - fatty stuff which obviously came from glucose being converted by insulin)
And actually, the thing I struggle with most - which is 'switching off' my obsession with food, and my compulsion to eat is most likely to be Hormonal - i.e. the presence of insulin is driving me to eat and snack.
So he carries on to essentially label the "root cause" of Type 2 Diabetes, and by proxy, the root cause of weight gain and overeating as being the same thing - too much insulin.
Yet he also cautions that simply losing weight doesn't actually cure the fatty pancreas, which means that you can lose massive amounts of weight through normal diet programs yet still be insulin resistant. The drastic diet is designed to remove fat from that very specific part of the body around your liver and pancreas, thereby actually fixing the underlying problem, rather than simply losing weight and fighting cravings to keep that weight off. (I guess it plays in to the way I see other people who eat the same stuff as me, yet never gain weight in the same ways that I do)
So, while I still haven't been tested for type 2 diabetes yet, I'm starting to think that I might be somewhere on that graph of people who have "above average" blood sugar levels (Pre-diabetic), and probably a bunch of fatty stuff around my liver/pancreas which is making me eat too much, and thwarting my efforts at maintaining a healthy weight, even if I do actually manage to make it to my target, and also making it harder to lose the weight in the first place.
In other words, it seems like weight gain is merely an early symptom of type 2 diabetes (i.e. insulin resistance and pancreas fat), which I take to mean that the only way I will ever gain full control over my weight is to go and fix the root cause, getting my body's insulin under control and getting rid of the internal fat.
Aside from that, the stories of people who lost massive amounts of weight and cured their type 2 diabetes at the same time is impressive just for how quickly they managed to do it, and how many of them seemed to find the "fasting" hugely calorie-restricted diets so easy to do, how it gave them energy (I'd always assumed that 'fasting' like that would result in extreme tiredness and hunger...)
So in a break from the SW plan which I was going to follow this year, I'm going to try something different before I start - getting rid of most of the glucose from my diet for a couple of weeks, and see how it works out by spending the next two weeks eating loads of leafy greens, and keeping a really low calorie count.
I guess the worst that can happen is that it doesn't work and I'll go back to the SW plan, but suddenly I feel like I need to "cleanse" my body of insulin (as well as whatever internal fatty stuff might be around my inner organs) and get blood sugar as well as cravings under control before I should go to a diet which involves a lot of carbs.
http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2013/may/12/type-2-diabetes-diet-cure
I suppose one of the reasons I went "wow" is because I'd always assumed it was incurable; as I used to know somebody who'd been taking the tablets for it, who was very large and talked about the insulin meds being the reason for weight gain, and had always been vehement about the fact that it was incurable, but this is talking about people very quickly managing to cure their diabetes, lose weight, and keep off the weight just through a quick (but fairly brutal) diet change lasting a few weeks.
The other reason I went "wow" is because, despite (luckily) not being diabetic, I started to wonder if maybe I actually am diabetic and have just never seen any symptoms which were serious enough for me to take note (cue frantic googling, alongside hyperchondriac tendencies of reading every single medical website and suddenly coming to the conclusion that I'm about to have a heart attack, go blind, lose limbs..)
But among the things I found, were other researchers who had done studies on weight, diabetes, insulin and blood sugar. This video I found by an American doctor is possibly the most educational 1 hour of my life I've ever spent on the internet.
He came to a couple of conclusions which felt like a huge lightbulb switching on in my head
- "Hunger" and the urge to eat something is mainly caused by having insulin in the body
- We eat more stuff containing glucose (carbs and protein), which causes the body to secrete more insulin, which makes us hungry again once all the glucose has been burned
- Part of the "vicious" cycle - the more we eat that stuff, the more we crave
- The other part of the "vicious" cycle - the more insulin our bodies generate, the more we resist it, causing our pancreas to secrete even more to compensate for the resistance (And the resistance seems to be attributed to fatty stuff around our pancrease/liver and other internal organs - fatty stuff which obviously came from glucose being converted by insulin)
And actually, the thing I struggle with most - which is 'switching off' my obsession with food, and my compulsion to eat is most likely to be Hormonal - i.e. the presence of insulin is driving me to eat and snack.
So he carries on to essentially label the "root cause" of Type 2 Diabetes, and by proxy, the root cause of weight gain and overeating as being the same thing - too much insulin.
Yet he also cautions that simply losing weight doesn't actually cure the fatty pancreas, which means that you can lose massive amounts of weight through normal diet programs yet still be insulin resistant. The drastic diet is designed to remove fat from that very specific part of the body around your liver and pancreas, thereby actually fixing the underlying problem, rather than simply losing weight and fighting cravings to keep that weight off. (I guess it plays in to the way I see other people who eat the same stuff as me, yet never gain weight in the same ways that I do)
So, while I still haven't been tested for type 2 diabetes yet, I'm starting to think that I might be somewhere on that graph of people who have "above average" blood sugar levels (Pre-diabetic), and probably a bunch of fatty stuff around my liver/pancreas which is making me eat too much, and thwarting my efforts at maintaining a healthy weight, even if I do actually manage to make it to my target, and also making it harder to lose the weight in the first place.
In other words, it seems like weight gain is merely an early symptom of type 2 diabetes (i.e. insulin resistance and pancreas fat), which I take to mean that the only way I will ever gain full control over my weight is to go and fix the root cause, getting my body's insulin under control and getting rid of the internal fat.
Aside from that, the stories of people who lost massive amounts of weight and cured their type 2 diabetes at the same time is impressive just for how quickly they managed to do it, and how many of them seemed to find the "fasting" hugely calorie-restricted diets so easy to do, how it gave them energy (I'd always assumed that 'fasting' like that would result in extreme tiredness and hunger...)
So in a break from the SW plan which I was going to follow this year, I'm going to try something different before I start - getting rid of most of the glucose from my diet for a couple of weeks, and see how it works out by spending the next two weeks eating loads of leafy greens, and keeping a really low calorie count.
I guess the worst that can happen is that it doesn't work and I'll go back to the SW plan, but suddenly I feel like I need to "cleanse" my body of insulin (as well as whatever internal fatty stuff might be around my inner organs) and get blood sugar as well as cravings under control before I should go to a diet which involves a lot of carbs.
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