It's what we eat
Type 2 diabetes is a lifestyle disease. That means it is caused by the way we live. The typical American lifestyle of inactivity and too much to eat is the major factor in bringing on this disease. True, some have inherited a genetic predisposition to develop diabetes. But genetics is like a loaded gun, it doesn't hurt anyone unless you pull the trigger. And it is our couch potato lifestyle together with our high fat, junk food diet that pulls this trigger bringing on diabetes.
Understanding how lifestyle causes diabetes will explain how it is being reversed. This understanding will allow us to make sense of all the exciting real life stories of those who have reversed their diabetes. And it will be the basis of hope for more people with diabetes every day.
Sugar is the fuel we run on
We all use carbohydrates (sugar) for energy to live. The potato as well as the candy bar are all converted into glucose (blood sugar) circulating in our blood stream. This sugar will be taken into the cells and "burned" to supply the energy to move a muscle or to think a thought or whatever it was that the cell is designed to do.
But to get into a cell sugar must pass through a special sugar door in the cell's wall. These doors are how a cell tells the body it is hungry. A hungry cell will have thousands of these sugar doors all over its surface.
But sugar by itself has no way to open these doors to get into the cell. Here is where insulin has its job. Imagine insulin as a little guy with two hands. With one hand he grabs the doorknob and opens one of these sugar doors and with the other hand he shoves a sugar through the door into the cell. That is what insulin does, it opens the sugar doors.
Where does insulin come from? It comes from special cells in the pancreas called beta cells. These beta cells constantly taste your blood to see just how sweet it is. And when they taste your sugar level rising after a meal they release more insulin into your blood. This insulin can then open more doors and put the extra sugar into the cells. And thus, the amount of sugar left in the blood is brought back down to normal. This is how your body normally controls its blood sugar level.
So what causes diabetes?
Imagine sitting on a couch following a heavy meal. All of the calories you just ate are being absorbed into your blood. As your blood sugar level rises insulin is released. And this insulin goes around from cell to cell trying to open doors to get all of this sugar out of your blood and into your cells. But your leg muscle cells are still full of sugar from lunch. So they say to the insulin, "We are full and we aren't going for any exercise tonight so we don't need anymore sugar. Maybe you could take some to the finger muscle. He will be busy working the TV clicker." But how much sugar can a finger muscle use? And so eventually all the muscle cells are stuffed and don't want anymore sugar.
But how does a cell tell the body that it doesn't want any more sugar? It removes the doors from its surface! Now we have a problem. Where will the insulin take all of its extra sugar? Some cells can store extra sugar in the form of glycogen or fat. But day after day of no exercise while continuing to eat a high calorie diet eventually overloads these cells also. Not only do you get fat but even the fat cells are feeling stretched to their limit and don't want anymore calories. And now the problem gets worse.
How does a fat cell tell you he is full and doesn't want anymore? He removes the doors from his surface too. Now you have a serious problem. Where will the insulin take all of that extra sugar that you are eating? The answer is it has nowhere to go. It just backs up in your blood and your sugar level gets higher and higher. You go to your doctor and he does some tests and then he tells you that now you have diabetes.
The Rx
Your doctor probably did something else for you that first visit. He got out his prescription pad and wrote you a prescription for some pills to lower your blood sugar. Pills like DiaBeta or Micronase. Do you know how these pills work? They go to the beta cells in your pancreas and say, "Make more insulin!"
So the beta cells, whipped on by the medications, start to put out more insulin. And all this extra insulin rushes around your body looking for a few last doors somewhere that they can force more sugar through.
But after a time even these last few doors are removed. And your sugar levels continue to rise in spite of increasing doses of medications. Finally one day your doctor says to you, "I guess you've become resistant to your medications so we are going to have to start you on insulin." In other words, we can't whip enough insulin out of your exhausted pancreas so we are just going to start injecting more insulin into you.
But day after day there are less and less doors for the ever-increasing amounts of insulin to find. And so with your diabetes still out of control you rush down the road towards blindness, amputations and death.
The road back
If you will think carefully about how this disease has progressed to this point you will begin to see what all the excitement is about. What is the real problem here? Is it a lack of insulin or is it a lack of these sugar doors? There are not enough doors! The cells have removed all the doors because they aren't hungry anymore.
So can you see that what we really need is not more insulin but more doors.
But your doctor can't prescribe a pill or injection of new doors for your cells. So how can we get more doors back on our cells. It is really quite simple. We have to make the cells hungry! A hungry cell will make thousands of doors all over its surface.
How do we make a cell hungry? Exercise! Walk, walk, walk, walk.
And this is the simple secret that is allowing people with diabetes to walk away from heart attacks, dialysis, and daily insulin injections.
The rest of the story
The other half of the secret is that you have to learn to eat right so your body is not overloaded with calories. And the lifestyle treatment centers that are specializing in reversing diabetes have found that a simple unrefined vegetarian diet is the answer. In real life situations this is the diet that actually works. It allows people with diabetes to eat three meals a day and never go hungry and never count calories or exchanges again. This may seem surprising to some but the proof is seen in these patients' success.
One of these centers, Weimar Institute in California, has developed a program using their own special version of this diet together with walking all under close physician supervision and testing. They report 50% of people with Type 2 diabetes off of all medications and insulin with a normal blood sugar in just 21 days. 80% of patients with neuropathy are pain free in just 17 days! No pill in the world can do that.
And now Weimar Institute is taking their Reversing Diabetes program across the country in the form of three-day seminars held at major conference centers across the U.S. The seminars include vegetarian meals and cooking classes as well as walking in addition to lectures by a team of several physicians. And it is exciting to find that in just three days people with diabetes can learn all they need to know to reverse this disease on their own.
If you or someone you love has diabetes the good news is that with an about-face in lifestyle diabetes can be reversed. Heart attacks, strokes, neuropathy, blindness, dialysis, infections and amputations are not an inevitable part of your future. You can literally walk away from all of these. The sun of hope is shining at the end of the road when you turnaround and walk in the opposite direction.