Imagine your body as a big sugar bowl. At birth, the bowl is empty. Over several decades, you eat sugar and refined carbohydrates and the bowl gradually fills up. And when you next eat, sugar comes in and spills over the sides of the bowl because the bowl is already full.
The same situation exists in your body. When you eat sugar, your body secretes the hormone insulin to help move the sugar into your cells, where it’s used for energy. If you don’t burn off that sugar sufficiently, then over decades your cells become completely filled and cannot handle anymore.
The next time you eat sugar, insulin cannot force any more of it into your overflowing cells, so it spills out into the blood. Sugar travels in your blood in a form called glucose and having too much of it – known as high blood glucose – is a primary symptom of type 2 diabetes.
When there’s too much glucose in the blood, insulin does not appear to be doing its usual job of moving the sugar into the cells. We then say that the body has become insulin resistant, but it’s not truly insulin’s fault. The primary problem is that the cells are overflowing with glucose.
The high blood glucose is only part of the issue. Not only is there too much glucose in the blood, there’s too much glucose in all of the cells. Type 2 diabetes is simply an overflow phenomenon that occurs when there is too much glucose in the entire body.
In response to excess glucose in the blood, the body secretes even more insulin to overcome this resistance. This forces more glucose into the overflowing cells to keep blood levels normal.
This works, but the effect is only temporary because it has not addressed the problem of excess sugar; it has only moved the excess from the blood to the cells, making insulin resistance worse. At some point, even with more insulin, the body cannot force any more glucose into the cells.
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What happens in the body if we do not remove the excess glucose? First, the body keeps increasing the amount of insulin it produces to try to force more glucose into the cells. But this only creates more insulin resistance, in what then becomes a vicious cycle.
When the insulin levels can no longer keep pace with rising resistance, blood glucose spikes. That’s when your doctor is likely to diagnose type 2 diabetes.
Your doctor may prescribe a medication such as insulin injections, or perhaps a drug called metformin, to lower blood glucose, but these drugs do not rid the body of excess glucose. Instead, they simply continue to take the glucose out of the blood and ram it back into the body.
It then gets shipped out to other organs, such as the kidneys, the nerves, the eyes, and the heart, where it can eventually create other problems. The underlying problem, of course, is unchanged.
Remember the bowl that was overflowing with sugar? It still is. Insulin has simply moved the glucose from the blood, where you could see it, into the body, where you cannot. So, the very next time you eat, sugar spills out into the blood again and you inject insulin to cram it into your body.
The more glucose you force your body to accept, the more insulin your body needs to overcome the resistance to it. But this insulin only creates more resistance as the cells become more and more distended.
Once you’ve exceeded what your body can produce naturally, medications can take over. At first, you need only a single medication, but eventually it becomes two and then three, and the doses become larger.
And here’s the thing: if you are taking more and more medications to keep your blood glucose at the same level, your diabetes is actually getting worse.
Type 2 diabetes is reversible and preventable...without medications
Once we understand that type 2 diabetes is simply too much sugar in the body, the solution becomes obvious. Get rid of the sugar. Don’t hide it away. Get rid of it. There are really only two ways to accomplish this.
- Put less sugar in.
- Burn off remaining sugar.
That’s it. That’s all we need to do. The best part? It’s all natural and completely free. No drugs. No surgery. No cost.
Step 1: Put less sugar in
The first step is to eliminate all sugar and refined carbohydrates from your diet. Added sugars have no nutritional value and you can safely withhold them. Complex carbohydrates, which are simply long chains of sugars, and highly refined carbohydrates, such as flour, are quickly digested into glucose.
The optimum strategy is to limit or eliminate breads and pastas made from white flour, as well as white rice and potatoes.
You should maintain a moderate, not high, intake of protein. When it is digested, dietary protein, such as meat, breaks down into amino acids. Adequate protein is required for good health, but excess amino acids cannot be stored in the body and so the liver converts them into glucose. Therefore, eating too much protein adds sugar to the body. So you should avoid highly processed, concentrated protein sources such as protein shakes, protein bars, and protein powders.
What about dietary fat? Natural fats, such as those found in avocados, nuts, and olive oil – major components of the Mediterranean diet – have a minimal effect on blood glucose or insulin and are well known to have healthy effects on both heart disease and diabetes. Eggs and butter are also excellent sources of natural fats.
Dietary cholesterol, which is often associated with these foods, has been shown to have no harmful effect on the human body. Eating dietary fat does not lead to type 2 diabetes or heart disease. In fact, it is beneficial because it helps you feel full without adding sugar to the body.
To put less sugar into your body, stick to whole, natural, unprocessed foods. Eat a diet low in refined carbohydrates, moderate in protein, and high in natural fats.
Step 2: Burn off the remaining sugar
Exercise – both resistance and aerobic training – can have a beneficial effect on type 2 diabetes, but it is far less powerful at reversing the disease than dietary interventions. And fasting is the simplest and surest method to force your body to burn sugar.
Fasting is merely the flip side of eating: if you are not eating, you are fasting. When you eat, your body stores food energy; when you fast, your body burns food energy. And glucose is the most easily accessible source of food energy. Therefore, if you lengthen your periods of fasting, you can burn off the stored sugar.
While it may sound severe, fasting is literally the oldest dietary therapy known and has been practised throughout human history without problems. If you are taking prescription medications, you should seek the advice of a physician.
But the bottom line is this: If you don’t eat, will your blood glucose come down? Of course. If you don’t eat, will you lose weight? Of course. So, what’s the problem? None that I can see.
To burn off sugar, a popular strategy is to fast for 24 hours, two to three times per week. Another popular approach is to fast for 16 hours, five to six times per week. The secret to reversing type 2 diabetes now lies within our grasp.
All it requires is having an open mind to accept a new paradigm and the courage to challenge conventional wisdom.
Read more:
- Diabetes is now an epidemic in the UK. Here’s how we should fight it
- Can eating a lot of sugar really lead to diabetes?
This text was extracted from The Diabetes Code: Prevent and Reverse Type 2 Diabetes Naturally by Dr Jason Fung, out now (£14.99, Greystone Books).
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