Reverse Pre-Diabetes with a Fasting-Mimicking Diet

When your body isn’t able to properly use the hormone insulin to absorb glucose (sugars), it starts to build up in your blood. Too much buildup of sugar in the blood is labeled as diabetes. Unfortunately, this inability to absorb and use sugars and its excess in the blood comes with a lot of consequences.

The treatment for diabetes in the last 50 years has centered around medication that stimulates hormones to take glucose out of the blood, or decrease the resistance to insulin. However, a more modern approach to diabetes has shifted to the lifestyle changes you can make to decrease insulin resistance in a natural way.

Diabetic Nephropathy

One of the possible consequences of diabetes is diabetic nephropathy, or damage to the kidneys as a result of poorly managed diabetes, which causes proteins and other molecules to leak out of the body through the urine. This makes it harder to get rid of toxins and optimize your gut, liver, and adrenals, which are key to reducing inflammation among other roles.

One of the early symptoms of diabetic nephropathy is waking up at night to use the restroom more frequently. That doesn’t mean that you already have damage in the kidneys, but rather that the blood glucose is draining more water out of your system. A urinalysis that looks for microalbumin in the urine will detect whether or not you are in this early stage, where it’s easier to reverse.

Nutrition & Lifestyle

More than 80% of diabetic patients with Type 2 Diabetes get it due to lifestyle and overeating, which increases blood sugar that can get stored as fat, and increases insulin resistance. With insulin resistance, the pancreas needs to produce more insulin to compensate. If this goes on for too long, the pancreas can start failing in addition to the need for external insulin. Diabetes Type 2 isn’t just about overeating, but unhealthy eating habits. Overeating processed food with artificial colors, artificial flavors, and high in sugar or artificial sweeteners is different from overeating broccoli. Add to that a lack of exercise and aging, and you have a recipe for disaster.

Medication should be the last resource when a patient fails at following the right lifestyle. We should put much more emphasis on treating stress, exercising, intermittent fasting, and eating healthy when in the early stages of diabetes (or even before that!). This also includes monitoring your sleep, reducing the toxins you’re exposed to, and optimizing the function of your gut and how you excrete, a vital part of detox.

Longevity and Healthy Aging

The best way to stay away from the onset of chronic age-related diseases is to stay biologically younger. That’s the true goal of the fasting-mimicking diet, which aims towards longevity and healthy aging.

If you are diabetic, many doctors will recommend the short-term ketogenic diet so that you can try to reverse it in the early stages and then migrate to a longevity diet like pescatarian or Mediterranean. However, the fasting-mimicking diet not only helps diabetic patients, but also causes a healthy stress response in the body which pushes the body to rejuvenate cells.

You’re getting biologically younger, a better performer, which is very important for diabetes because of its long-term effects. When diabetic diets consist of healthy food, we occasionally see patients losing metabolic rate and muscle. Whereas with fasting, because of that stressful rejuvenation, you maintain lean body mass and metabolic rate.

Listen now and learn more about preventing and reversing the damaging impacts of diabetes with Dr. Joseph Antoun!

Guest Bio

Dr. Joseph Antoun is CEO & Chairman of the Board of L-Nutra and Member of the Forbes Business Development Council. He’s the former CEO of Health Systems Reform, a boutique consultancy aimed at improving public health by reforming health systems, management, and delivery. Prior to that, he was Director of Health Policy at the University of Chicago, Editor in Chief of the Journal of Health Systems and Reform and head of Business Development for Eli Lilly & Co. He completed his studies in Public Policy at Harvard University, in Public Health at Johns Hopkins University, and his Doctorate in Medicine and Masters’ in Medical and Biological Sciences at Saint Joseph University.

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