Mike Dean, a trial attorney in East Lansing, Michigan, has a well-recognized story: He was fit and lean in highschool, but over the subsequent few a long time he steadily placed on nearly 100 kilos. Eventually, Mike was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes. He got serious, exercised, dieted, lost weight … and gained it back again.

Today, though, Mike is almost back to his college weight, and feeling prouder than ever of his healthy lifestyle changes. Mike has used nearly every option available to him — food regimen, exercise, medication, a nutrition app, and an entire lot of biohacking technology. We’re delighted to share his success story.

Failed Starts

For years, Mike just accepted that his expanding waistline and growing health problems — along with diabetes, he has experienced high cholesterol, hypertension, and gout — were out of his control. Weight gain just appeared like something that naturally followed aging, fatherhood, and a busy profession.

“The thing that held me back for a very long time was, you get to a certain weight and you think that: That is just the brand new me now.”

“And we all the time have a capability to self-delude ourselves, to think we’ll fix the issue next week.”

When he ballooned as much as 260 kilos, Mike was finally ready for a change.

“Around 2018, I had a ‘come to Jesus’ moment with myself and spent six months dropping a whole lot of weight.”

He threw himself into an intense weight-loss program, counting calories and exercising almost each day. This energetic approach worked — until it didn’t.

After months of regular weight reduction, Mike’s gout intervened. Gout, a type of arthritis characterised by painful flare-ups within the joints, may be very common in individuals with type 2 diabetes. An attack landed Mike on the couch for per week, and that was the start of the top of his first major weight reduction effort. “It really messed with my workout routines, then I fell back into some bad habits. I form of fell off the wagon.”

“It was a slow progression back up.”

The burden got here back.

A Wake-Up Call

Around Christmas in 2021, Mike ran out of his diabetes medications. It was the top of the 12 months, his prescriptions had expired, and he needed to see his doctor to get them renewed. Mike was busy, stressed, and maybe hampered by the malaise of diabetes burnout. Whatever the explanation, Mike didn’t get to his doctor’s office, and he simply stopped taking the glucose-lowering drugs he’d been prescribed.

The results were predictable: “My blood sugar numbers really got bad, and I could feel it.” Mike realized that his vision had severely declined. Eyesight problems are a symptom of acute hyperglycemia, an indication that his blood sugar numbers had skyrocketed right into a very dangerous range.

When he saw the doctor, his A1C was over 12 and his cholesterol was up over 1,000. That was the wake-up call. He needed to make a change.

“I finally said, ‘I can’t do that anymore.’”

An Incremental Approach

Mike knew that he was able to losing a few pounds — he’d done it before — but he also knew that his old, intense approach wasn’t sustainable. This time, he promised himself that he’d make incremental changes and deal with small goals.

“I used to be just 10 kilos at a time. Once I got below 250, I told myself that 250 could be the high-water mark and that I could push right down to 240. Once I got to 240, I told myself that I’d never get past 240 again and commenced 230.”

As an alternative of going whole hog with a restrictive food regimen, Mike added recent eating goals with every 10 kilos.

“I wasn’t trying to vary so many things directly, juggling all these balls within the air. I used to be the long run somewhat than attempting to drop weight superfast.

“The important thing was that I made incremental food regimen and activity changes somewhat than big dramatic changes at first. I made sure I could live with each change before I added something recent.”

The first step: Cut out the soda. Mike quit sugary beverages cold turkey. As he went on, he patiently added other food regimen goals, like selecting a healthy day by day breakfast smoothie (“stuffed with fiber and fresh fruit”) and banning himself from lunchtime fast-food runs. Now he’s attempting to up his protein intake.

Using Smart Technology

Mike’s been tracking his food intake and progress with the Lose It! weight reduction app. Lose It! makes it easy to count calories and macronutrients, and it offers all types of useful data in your nutrition and weight trends. It was key to his success.

“Just the act of tracking helps you make higher decisions. You really don’t wish to log that bag of potato chips.”

The app also makes it easy to seek out nutrition details for brand spanking new foods and input family recipes. “Lose It! might be one of the best tool I even have.”

He uses one other app, Glucose Buddy, to trace his blood sugar numbers. He has a sensible digital scale and a sensible blood pressure cuff. Most of his numbers get robotically uploaded to his doctor’s office. “That’s been an awesome thing. It spurs me to take all those measurements, and it really helps the doctor understand my health.”

Meanwhile, Mike’s also been exercising as much as possible. While there’s little question that exercise has exceptional metabolic advantages, experts have come to imagine that it normally doesn’t contribute very much to weight reduction, unless you may devote an enormous variety of hours to the practice. Mike, despite his busy profession, is the exception. He hits the gym 5 – 6 times per week for pickleball, the elliptical machine, or strength training. And he keeps track of the whole lot on his Fitbit, steadily doubling the usual goal of 10,000 steps per day:

“I normally attempt to get as close to twenty,000 steps as I can. 10,000 steps just don’t feel like very much now.”

His Fitbit is linked to LoseIt!, which adjusts his day by day calorie goals for his physical activity. He loves seeing exactly how much extra he’s allowed to eat after a day of heavy exercise.

The Results

Mike has lowered his A1C right down to 6.5 percent, barely throughout the diabetic range.

“I attribute that to the food regimen, getting back on medication, and understanding continually.”

Mike is currently within the 210- to-215-pound range, down about 50 kilos from his peak, and recently passed a joyful milestone: He isn’t any longer considered “obese” on the body mass index (BMI) charts. His cholesterol is down under 200. He expects to see 199 on his scale for the primary time in a long time before the top of the summer.

Last 12 months, Mike’s closet was stuffed with size 42 pants. Now he matches into size 34, a size that he hadn’t worn because the late Nineteen Eighties.

Mike still takes several diabetes medications — metformin, dulaglutide (Trulicity), and empagliflozin (Jardiance), all of which have likely helped together with his weight reduction. Given his progress, he’s optimistic that his doctor will soon ask him to drop a number of of them.

He’s also completely modified his relationship with exercise: “I used to, if not hate exercise, at most feel prefer it was an imposition on my time and a chore. Now, I’m trying to add movement and recent exercises to my day each time I can. I feel like I can’t wait to get a workout in or a game of pickleball.”

Mike is a terrific example of an individual with diabetes who has used every option at his disposal —not only food regimen, exercise, medication, and technology, but in addition hard-won personal experience — to design a sustainable weight reduction plan that basically works for him.