Why Didn't Someone Tell Me Before?

Eight years ago last May I was scheduled to move to Wisconsin. I'd been living and working in northern Virginia, enjoying it all very much. One day two weeks before moving date something went wrong physically. My wife convinced me to take the time to visit a wholeness clinic not too far away. After unloading on the doctor he asked if he could do a test. I agreed. He asked for a sample of my water. When he returned he sat down, looked at me, then asked, "When is the last time you ate?" I told him and he pursed his lips a moment, then said, "You have a very sluggish pancreas."

My wife was working at Fairfax Hospital and she'd come home several times to announce that she'd heard a doctor say, "Get cancer. Get leprosy. Get hit by a Mac truck, but don't get sugar. It's the worst disease you can have because it messes with your mind so bad." What I heard this doctor saying without using the word, was I was diabetic. It scared the wits out of me. "What do I do, Doc?"

He took a sheet of paper and started writing as he talked. The first thing he said was I should avoid all animal products. (This as I was about to move to America's Dairyland?) Next, I should avoid all artificial additives to foods, and so on... By the time he'd finished I was a confirmed vegan, which is someone who eats a plant-based diet. By the time I'd finished, I'd pitched four kinds of premium ice cream into the trash. My wife could not believe it.

I remember the first meal I tried to fix and eat that would qualify under what the doctor told me. I hate to admit that it was less than palatable, but since I wasn't about to start using a needle...

When I arrived in Wisconsin I stayed with my oldest daughter and her family for a few weeks. One of their books was Proof Positive, authored by Dr. Neal Nedley, a nationally known expert on depression . I read it twice and the section on diabetes four times. I learned a lot.

I learned that diabetes is reversible! I learned that you don't have to take insulin if you're willing to manage it with lifestyle changes. Now, I'm not talking about juvenile diabetes: I'm talking about Type II, adult-onset.

Something else I discovered was sugar is not the culprit in diabetes. One study that was done involved feeding some medical students a low-fat, pound of sugar/day diet. In three weeks there were no observable changes, so the study was terminated. Later, the same researcher fed the same students a low-sugar, high fat diet (something like 60% fat, which is not as high as the cheese I loved; that was around 80%). In three weeks over 80% of the students had become diabetic. So it is fat in the diet that sets us up for diabetes.

My favorite food at that time was cracker sandwiches: a slab of aged cheddar cheese between two crackers--Yum! I could eat a couple dozen at a sitting.

What happens with adult-onset diabetes is our cells lose their sensitivity to insulin. This means that when our blood stream has a high-level of blood sugar (glucose) the doors of the cells don't open to receive it, which then remains in the blood. This can bring on blindness and several other less-than desirable results. What we usually respond with is upping the insulin, either by mouth or by injection. However, a few lifestyle changes can do the same thing.

What I learned from Dr. Nedley is, walking re-sensitizes the cells to insulin. Thus: walking regularly. That made so much more sense to me than taking insulin that I started walking about an hour a day. Man, did I start feeling better.

I also discovered fiber. Next time I'll tell you about the Full Plate Diet book. JG