Type II Diabetes
Type 2 Diabetes is due to high sugar in the diet. The Standard American Diet is high in carbs and low in fat. This causes increased insulin. Insulin is a hormone that takes the sugar and puts it into the cells to burn it as energy.
One of the major causes, again, is the Standard American Diet (high in sugar, high in carbs). When we discuss “carbs” what we mean is sugar. Sugar and carbs are the same things. The carbs in your diet should not be over 75 grams of net carbs. Your net carbs are going to be the total carbs minus fiber. We recommend keeping carbohydrates at 75 grams net carbs or below. Anything over 75 grams is sent to the liver. Once in the liver this changes to triglycerides and is stored as fat.
The average American is eating 400 to 500 carbs per day. No wonder there seems to be such a problem with diabetes type 2.
Frequent eating is also a problem. The snacking between meals that started in the 70s to keep your metabolism level up only ends up being short-lived. It’s not something you want to do all the time as a snack is seen as a meal to the body. An extra meal (small snack) can push your sugar up.
It is possible to reverse Diabetes Type 2. We do it in our office all the time. Here are a couple of tips on how to do so:
- You have to clean up the liver.
The liver holds a cup of sugar and that has to get cleaned up. You have to eliminate sugar and foods that turn into sugar, like carbohydrates (mainly grains) Carbs turn into sugar so you would have to eliminate those or reduce those considerably. - Practice intermittent fasting.
Intermittent fasting is an eating pattern that cycles between eating and fasting. Though no study proves exactly how long you must fast for to see results, it is mostly recommended to aim for between 12-18 hours. The simplest way to do this fast is to eat your dinner and then skip your morning breakfast the following day. By the time lunch comes around, you will have hit your goal fasting time. You then would have a window to eat your lunch and dinner before starting the fasting cycle over. - Monitor your glucose.
Your glucose (blood sugar) needs to be under a hundred but ideally, we would like to see it at 85. We suggest going and getting a small glucose monitor. You can buy one at most drugstores. You then can check on your glucose first thing in the morning. This reading is done through a small blood sample, a finger prick, and you want to check it in the morning. Your reading should be between 85-100. If the reading is over 100 that’s usually a liver issue and your liver is dumping out too much of that sugar at nighttime.
- Test your A1C.
A1C test is a type of blood test that shows the average blood glucose over the past two to three months in its results. Your A1C should be as close to 5 as possible with 5 being optimal.
A lot of the time people come into our office and they’re diabetic, they’re on medication (like metformin), and they say “Well I’ll just eat more of what I want and I’ll take more metformin.” But there are side effects to metformin and those side effects can be dangerous.
