Today I would like to start with some good news about type two diabetes (T2D) and insulin resistance: type 2 diabetes can be reversed (or put into remission), especially if you start early. Research suggests that you are more likely to reverse diabetes if you significantly lower your carbohydrate intake within two years of your diabetes diagnosis.
If you stop the twin cycle of fatty liver and fatty pancreas early in the process, you can potentially prevent permanent damage to the beta cells of the pancreas. We don’t say that type 2 diabetes is “cured” because it can always return if you started eating a high carbohydrate diet again. Rather, the goal is reversal or remission of T2D.
The most effective, natural and cheapest way to treat type 2 diabetes is by reducing your carbohydrate intake. Dietary carbohydrate restriction has the greatest effect on decreasing blood glucose levels. This makes sense because T2D is a defect in our body’s response to food, especially to carbohydrates. When you eat a lot of carbohydrates, you stimulate the release of insulin which promotes fat storage in the body.
In fact, research has shown that a low carbohydrate diet can improve diabetes control independent of weight loss. As soon as you find out that you have any of the following: fatty liver, prediabetes or diabetes, the best thing you can do is lower your carbohydrate intake immediately.
Low carb diets are safe, easy to follow and have been used for decades to treat T2D. Before we had medication, type 2 diabetes was treated with a low carbohydrate diet. The food we eat contains 3 macronutrients: carbohydrates, protein and fat. Carbohydrates are the most dangerous because they trigger insulin release from the pancreas and over time excess carbs cause insulin resistance, fatty liver, fatty pancreas and type 2 diabetes. A low carb diet tends to be higher in fat because you replace some of your carbohydrates with fat.
Research shows that lowering carbohydrate intake is the only dietary strategy that effectively treats type 2 diabetes.
The question is: How low do you want to go? A low carbohydrate diet is a diet consisting of less than 30% carbohydrates. A very low calorie diet means that all macronutrients are drastically reduced, including carbohydrates. The key is finding a diet that you like which lowers your carbohydrate intake to less than 40% of your total daily macronutrient intake at a minimum. An example of a low carbohydrate diet that has been shown to reduce cardiovascular risk and improve diabetes control is the Mediterranean diet.
Some tips to remember when starting a low carb diet:
1. Track your carbohydrates, not your calories. As you replace your carbs with fat, you will feel more full and it will usually be easier to stop eating because fats induce more satiety than carbohydrates.
2. Use apps like My Fitness Pal to track carbohydrates more efficiently. This will eliminate the need to manually type in the foods that you eat. Now you can just scan the barcode on the food that you eat and the program will automatically identify the name of your food and its macronutrient breakdown, meaning the percent of calories that are derived from fat carbohydrates and protein.
3. After you have removed the obvious offenders (drinks with calories, sweets, processed foods), focus on adding healthy foods such as fruits and vegetables. High-yield additions to your diet would include at least 5 servings daily of fruits and vegetables.
To help visualize the size of one serving of fruit or vegetables, you can think of one serving as one cup full of fruit or the amount of a vegetable that would equal the size of a tennis ball or the amount of a fruit that would fit on the palm of your hand.
Remember that T2D is a dietary disease that should be first treated with diet. Specifically, the disease occurs when our body is no longer able to process excess carbohydrates. Why not go to the root of the problem and cut the amount of carbohydrates entering your body in the first place?
