Editor’s note: We found Rey’s remarkable story within the diabetes online community, and asked him if he would share it with us. Rey experienced extraordinary rapid success by following a precise food plan and medicine regimen immediately after diagnosis with type 2 diabetes. His improvement was incredible, but others making the identical changes may not experience the identical success. Please speak to your doctor or caregiver before enacting any major health changes of your individual.

This story was originally published within the autumn of 2021. 

I’m Rey, and I’m a 44-year old male with a history of hypertension and being chubby, but until recently I had no major health issues. Only this past summer I learned that I had dangerously uncontrolled diabetes. Throughout the span of just a few months, I completely modified my food plan, began after which stopped glucose-lowering medications, and got my blood sugar back into the traditional, healthy range. Here’s my story.

My First Health Scare

My story is ultimately a diabetes story, but there have been some bumps along the way in which that I believe are value including before I jump into the diabetes.

My adventure really began in the summertime of 2020. After some stressful life events, I developed a slightly constant state of hysteria, which gave the impression to be stopping me from getting good sleep. Even while using a sedative, I used to be up at the least 4-5 times throughout the night, every night. I didn’t have a previous history of mental health problems, so this was all latest to me. The especially difficult part was that as time passed, lying in bed became a trigger for the anxiety, which made the sleep even harder to return by. I felt like I used to be just going through the motions to get through life.

Fortunately, after months of stubbornness and sucking it up the very best I could, I finally got to the underside of things. I discovered it was sleep apnea, and commenced CPAP treatment. The result was truly life-changing, sleep returned to normal, and my anxiety went away 100%.

Life was great and I’d survived and handled my major mid-life health crisis…. or so I believed! Little did I do know, but that relief would prove to be short-lived as in the approaching months I began to experience a brand new set of symptoms.

I used to be at my highest weight yet and my BMI was creeping towards 30. Some reading this may scoff and think “30 is nothing, I’m well above that,” but everyone’s body is a bit different and apparently 30 was my personal breaking point.

My fasting blood sugar was over 100 mg/dL, and my doctor said something about pre-diabetes, but she didn’t sound too concerned about it.

The Symptoms

I used to be again experiencing sleeplessness. Now I used to be finding that as an alternative of sleep apnea waking me up throughout the night, my bladder was sure filling up and I used to be getting as much as pee several times an evening. Also, I used to be quite thirsty when this may occur. I did notice it was nights that I’d eat pizza or pasta for dinner that were the worst. Some combination of stubbornness and maybe denial kept me from taking this too seriously, so I just kept on with things. Besides, this was March 2021 and also you didn’t dare go right into a medical clinic unless you were in your covid deathbed. Surely, this was no big deal, and getting checked out could wait.

Still, I sensed something was incorrect and I reduced the quantity of pizza and pasta I used to be eating for dinner (possibly twice per week as an alternative of 5 nights per week), eating beans with rice and veggies for dinner as an alternative. In hindsight, not great, but a minor improvement.

The subsequent major symptom arrived in April: blurry vision. At first, I wasn’t fearful. I’d gotten LASIK eye surgery done 12 years earlier, and this alteration gave the impression of a light return of my nearsightedness. I used to be also in my mid-40s, which I’m told is a time where focusing becomes harder and your vision changes.

Then it got really bad: I used to be on a visit to Florida after I couldn’t read a menu board that was 8 feet in front of me. I needed to resort to taking an image of it with my phone after which taking a look at that picture to read the menu. Something was majorly incorrect!

Once I got back from Florida (after some real nerve-wracking and certain dangerous driving), I went in to get my vision checked and received a -2.0 diopters prescription. The optometrist was shocked that I had let my vision get that bad before getting glasses and made a comment about diabetes, but was also of the impression that my vision would change throughout the day as my blood sugar modified. That clearly wasn’t happening to me (seems it’s more complicated than that).

The last major symptom was that I had been losing a few pounds at a reasonably decent clip (5-10 kilos a month). Obviously, this will need to have been as a result of cutting back on pizza and pasta, right? Curiously, past attempts at eating higher had never been quite this effective, but why query such great progress once you’re on a roll! At this point, it was late April and the earliest I could get in for a check-up was mid-June, so why not ride out one other month of weight reduction and see how great my labs come back then?

My Diagnosis

A bit of over per week before the appointment I began researching diabetes online, since I used to be beginning to wonder about what my doctor and optometrist had said. But surely that takes years to develop, right?

Obviously, my “food plan” was working since I had now lost 25 kilos this 12 months and weighed lower than I did in my 30s. Who knew maintaining a healthy diet was really easy!

After a bit light reading, I quickly realized how incorrect I used to be, that all the pieces that had happened in the previous few months was explained perfectly by diabetes, and that the load loss might need been diabetes slightly than my latest food plan. This was hard to process.

I picked up a blood sugar meter, and on a Friday night fumbled with the thing enough to work out tips on how to get a reading. I used to be shocked when the meter read 567 mg/dL. That may’t possibly be right! My girlfriend tried the meter and her result got here in at 77 mg/dL. I tested mine again and this time it registered 596 mg/dL!

At this point, it was 11 PM on a Friday night, and my safest plan of action would have been to go to the ER, but I figured if high blood sugar hadn’t killed me within the last 3-4 months, it probably wasn’t going to kill me that weekend. I made a decision to read more about diabetes, give myself a few days to get my wits about me, and go into urgent care on Monday. I also continued to check my blood sugar and it appeared to stay within the 300 to 450 mg/dL range that weekend, no matter what I ate or whether I used to be eating.

At urgent care my A1c got here in at 13.7%, and my fasting blood sugar was 449 mg/dL. Based on my history, I used to be more more likely to have type 2 diabetes (and extra testing would later confirm that). I used to be prescribed metformin, and advised to take insulin, advice that I wasn’t able to take.

A Recent Weight loss program

I now understood that the explanation I had lost a lot weight so quickly was my uncontrolled diabetes, at the least 3 months of it!

I immediately cut most high-carb foods out of my food plan and subsisted largely on a food plan of full-fat cottage cheese, full-fat plain Greek yogurt, hard cheese, nuts, avocadoes, and canned beans with olive oil. I also kept some fruit and berries in my food plan initially. Throughout the day I ate random combos of those foods. I didn’t really prepare them or fancy them up in any respect with cooking (aside from heating the beans within the microwave so that they’d be warm).

I knew I had screwed things up, and if there was going to be any hope of reversing the damage I feared I had done to my body I needed to focus. Possibly I might have the ability to return to eating pizza, pasta, and all those delicious carb-filled foods that I loved someday, however it was clear now wasn’t the time for that.

I’d definitely thrown within the towel on diets loads of times before and gone back to eating like crap, but this time it felt like there was a gun held to my head, and quitting wasn’t an option. Perhaps I’m being overly dramatic about this, and maybe it wasn’t the healthiest outlook, however it’s how I saw things and it got me through the primary weeks where I used to be at my highest level of motivation.

I wasn’t using a specific food plan system I had found on the web or in a book, it was just me trying to consider all of the foods (as a vegetarian) that I normally ate that were lower on the glycemic index, and sticking to those. Frustratingly, there gave the impression to be quite a lot of disagreement online with regard to what the “best” food plan was for a diabetic, but I’ll come back to that later.

The Right Medications

With this food plan and metformin, my blood sugar still ranged from about 250 to 400 mg/dL that first week. My blood sugar really needed to return down for the reason that longer it remained elevated, the greater my risk for diabetes-related complications. Clearly, per week of my latest food plan and metformin wasn’t enough, and I used to be more open to exploring what else may very well be done.

Once I saw my primary doctor after that week, she desired to put me on insulin too, with a view to stabilize my blood sugar. Although I knew that insulin would have rapidly brought my blood sugar all the way down to normal levels, using it will have made it difficult for me to gauge if my dietary changes were getting the job done.

Through my research, I had change into convinced that SGLT2 inhibitors were the one class of medication that made any sense for an individual with latest uncontrolled type 2 diabetes to take (along with metformin). Normally in uncontrolled diabetes, your kidneys excrete sugar to your urine as a way of keeping your blood sugar from getting dangerously high, but that effect doesn’t really kick in until your blood sugar levels are way up there. With an SGLT2 inhibitor, your kidneys are only doing that every one the time, keeping your blood sugar down in the method. The actual fantastic thing about that is as an alternative of insulin, which causes your body to store that excess sugar (only delaying the issue), when you pee out the surplus sugar, it’s gone endlessly.

I asked my doctor for a referral to an endocrinologist and a prescription for an SGLT2 inhibitor as an alternative. She didn’t have much experience with SGLT2s and commenced talking about other drugs, but she could see I had a pile of notes with me on different drug classes, the research I had done on them. I believe she also realized that although she was the one to write down the prescription, that I used to be able to argue my case.

As soon as I began taking the SGLT2 inhibitor my blood sugar got here down almost immediately.

On Farxiga, inside days my blood sugar dropped to the 100 to 150 mg/dL range. I needed to pee a bit more at first too, which suggested the drug was doing exactly what it was imagined to. After just a few days, I discovered I wasn’t peeing any greater than normal, which was probably as a result of my fairly low-carb food plan.

[Editor’s note: Rey had an incredibly positive experience with SGLT2 inhibitors, but they are not for everyone, and do carry side effects and risks, especially when combined with low-carbohydrate diets. Please speak to your doctor about changing your medication.]

This was an important improvement over where I used to be before, but like every newly-minted diabetic I had dreams of reversing my diabetes and getting my blood sugar back to “normal.” I obviously wasn’t there yet and simply because you would like something doesn’t mean it’s possible or realistic, but I used to be holding onto that dream.

Remission is a really controversial topic. Most ADA and official-looking literature I discovered said that diabetes was a progressive disease. As time passes, more drugs are required to take care of the identical degree of control, and a few pretty awful complications occur because it gets worse and worse. That was a slightly depressing outlook. If all of it falls apart in the long run, why not only return to having fun with all those carb-rich foods that I really like and revel in whatever time I’ve got left? Fortunately, I didn’t fall into that trap, but I actually have to assume many do.

Intermittent Fasting

I used to be aware of web doctors on the market on the fringes saying type 2 diabetes will be reversed and other people can manage through food plan alone, without drugs. Are they selling false hope, much like new-age healers selling energy crystals to cure cancer? Most of them are talking about low-carb and “keto,” which I’d previously assumed to be just one other random fad food plan. “They’re obviously quacks,” I believed. I figured that American Diabetes Association was most definitely correct about diabetes being progressive, just giving me the cold hard truth. But only for the sake of argument, I made a decision to listen to the quacks out first.

Of the doctors on Youtube, the primary to essentially suck me in was Dr. Jason Fung, a Canadian nephrologist. He had a really intuitive model for explaining type 2 diabetes, and used research on treating the condition with gastric bypass surgery (which has been highly successful) as a place to begin. He suggested a low-carb food plan combined with fasting in various forms. Hey, I’m already doing the low-carb thing and it appears to be helping. Possibly fasting can be the subsequent nudge I needed.

I began with 3 set meals a day (eating between 7:30 AM and seven:30 PM, after which fasting from 7:30 PM until 7:30 AM the subsequent morning). Across the time I began Farxiga, I moved into the subsequent phase of fasting, which was to skip breakfast after which eat only lunch and dinner (eat at 12 PM after which 8 PM). To my surprise, I now not felt hunger after I wasn’t eating. I now know that’s a standard profit to the keto food plan, but when someone had tried to inform me about that a 12 months earlier, I might have thought they were crazy. Also, I didn’t really know I used to be doing keto. I used to be just doing a tighter version of the food plan I’d explained earlier, with less fruit and no beans.

I accomplished my first full-day fast the weekend after starting Farxiga. I didn’t eat anything in any respect starting Friday after dinner until around 1 PM on Sunday, for a 40+ hour fast. Again, Farxiga had gotten my blood sugar all the way down to under 150 mg/dL frequently, but this was the kick that finally got me back under 100 mg/dL. Throughout Friday it was testing 130 to 150 mg/dL, Saturday morning I used to be at 144 mg/dL, but as Saturday dragged on and my fast continued I began getting multiple readings under 100 mg/dL. My Sunday morning fasting result was 96 mg/dL and, it got as little as 79 mg/dL on Sunday afternoon before I finally broke my fast. To my surprise, breaking my fast only bumped me to 119 mg/dL and 5 hours later my blood sugar was back all the way down to 82 mg/dL. Seeing this progress felt truly amazing and it was only 16 days after checking out I had diabetes!

Maintenance

Rey’s blood sugars improved rapidly and remarkably with the best combination of food plan and medicine.

In fact, you don’t eat your technique to diabetes in two weeks and also you don’t undo your diabetes in two weeks either. I used to be taking 2,000 mg of metformin a day in addition to the SGLT2 inhibitor. The week after my big fast, my fasting blood sugar readings would return over 100 mg/dL, but I kept plugging away, only eating two larger meals a day during a narrow set of eating hours. I also tested the high-carb waters with a 6-inch Subway sandwich – it spiked my blood sugar to 190 mg/dL, which is far higher than a non-diabetic would likely hit from that meal. That helped knock me back down a peg and remind me that I still had diabetes, in any case.

The subsequent weekend I noticed that my blood sugar numbers were starting to return all the way down to under 100 mg/dL without prolonged fasting. I also noticed that foods that previously spiked my blood sugar an important deal were now spiking it much less. On June 28^th (day 24 of knowing I had diabetes and 13 days after starting my SGLT2) I made a decision to stop taking Farxiga and see what effect it will have. This was not a responsible decision, as you must at all times seek the advice of together with your doctor before discontinuing medication, but with my improved blood sugar levels, I questioned if Farxiga was still doing anything for me. It turned out my guess was correct. There was no significant change in fasting or post-meal blood sugar readings in the times that followed, and my type 2 diabetes was now well-controlled via just food plan and metformin!

About per week later I began wearing a Freestyle Libre 2 to get a broader picture of my blood sugar trends, and for convenience. My readings were still within the 80-90 mg/dL range throughout the day, with small bumps up over 100 mg/dL after a meal. Once I finally was due for my appointment with an endocrinologist to debate my diabetes treatment, the texture of the visit could best be summed up as “why are you here?” My data showed that my average blood sugar within the previous 10 days had been 95 mg/dL, which might extrapolate to a 4.9% A1C (in comparison with the 13.7% result when first tested). That is, in fact, only an estimate. And my blood sugar had only been well controlled for 2-3 weeks at this point.

Blood sugar wasn’t the one improvement either over last 12 months’s numbers: total cholesterol dropped from 238 mg/dL to 172 mg/dL, with HDL (“good cholesterol”) fairly regular from 64 to 62 mg/dL. LDL (calculated) dropped from 141 to 90 mg/dL. Triglycerides dropped from 165 to 102 mg/dL. The endocrinologist agreed that I now not needed Farxiga and indicated there really wasn’t a reason for me to see her again, but that I used to be free to establish one other appointment if things modified.

My Best Path Forward

Since then, I’ve done more reading on the keto food plan and feel that’s my best path forward to proceed to take care of my health, each when it comes to diabetes and beyond. I’ve improved enough that I now not wear a CGM or perform finger sticks to ascertain blood sugar frequently, only checking possibly once per week “simply to make certain.” Although I’ve tested out eating a few of my old high-carb favorites and been impressed by how much less they spike my blood sugar now, I’m now not considering eating them frequently, which is surprising to me. I’ve also found I can sleep through the night just high quality without my CPAP machine as a result of the 35 kilos of weight I actually have lost from my peak of 215 lbs. The sleep apnea isn’t completely gone, so I still wear the mask most nights, however it appears to be dialed back from severe to mild.

It’s a really weird feeling: after I first came upon I had diabetes I wanted nothing greater than to proceed eating the foods I loved and located comfort in. I felt like something had been stolen from me and feared that my body was permanently broken. Why should other people have the ability to eat what they wish to, and I can’t? It felt very unfair and I actually wanted there to be a drug or a treatment that might let me eat how I desired to. Now that I’ve immersed myself in a greater understanding of just how bad those foods were for me, I view things very in another way.

I share my story to not lord my results over you for those who’ve been less successful together with your diabetes. I got really lucky, finding good dietary advice quickly after my diagnosis. Sadly, much of the official guidance on the market seems sure to fail. I used to be also lucky with my uncontrolled diabetes “helping” with the primary 25-30 kilos of weight reduction.

I now not have aches and pains after I rise up away from bed or need to roll a certain technique to avoid them, my memory has improved quite a bit and I’m now not struggling to recall things I used to be just told, as I did with high blood sugar levels. I actually have so rather more energy and stamina slightly than feeling lethargic or struggling to finish physical activities. It’s like I’m in my 20s all once again (apart from a bit gray hair)! The downside is I now know if I am going back to a life-style of having fun with carbohydrate-rich foods, things will go poorly for me, but so long as I don’t, I get to enjoy life so rather more than I had before. And there are many delicious foods that aren’t filled with carbs that I’m free to enjoy.

I believe diabetes has been a net positive for me, as strange as that sounds. The me of today could be very different than the me of a 12 months ago.