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- Herausgeber: Hammersmith Health Books
- Kategorie: Ratgeber
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
Type-2 diabetes doesn't have to be a lifelong condition; for many people, especially those who have been recently diagnosed, it's possible to reverse the symptoms of this malignant disease. But how can that be done? In 2017 the author, inspired by results obtained from research done at Newcastle University, UK, decided to try and kick the disease by following a carefully structured, low-carb, whole-food diet and starting a modest exercise regime. Conquer Type 2 Diabetes describes what he did to lose 31 kilos and all his diabetes signs (high blood sugar, high cholesterol, high blood pressure) and symptoms. It explains how he managed carbs, calories, sugars and weight loss, plus the light exercise regime he adopted to strengthen his chances. In so doing he answers the question so many people have been asking him – what did you do to shed an illness that affects more than 400 million people worldwide and is conventionally regarded as incurable and progressive? The book includes the author's meal and exercise plan and 40 mouth-watering low-carb recipes to ensure eating can remain a pleasure and something to look forward to while reversing type 2.
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CONQUER TYPE 2 DIABETES
HOW A FAT, MIDDLE-AGED MAN LOST 31KG AND REVERSED HIS TYPE 2 DIABETES
Richard Shaw
COPYRIGHT
First published in 2019 by Hammersmith Health Books – an imprint of Hammersmith Books Limited 4/4A Bloomsbury Square, London WC1A 2RP, UKwww.hammersmithbooks.co.uk
© 2019, Richard Shaw
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in any retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher and copyright holder.
The information contained in this book is for educational purposes only. It is the result of the study and the experience of the author. Whilst the information and advice offered are believed to be true and accurate at the time of going to press, neither the author nor the publisher can accept any legal responsibility or liability for any errors or omissions that may have been made or for any adverse effects which may occur as a result of following the recommendations given herein. Always consult a qualified medical practitioner if you have any concerns regarding your health. If you have type 2 diabetes and are planning a dramatic dietary change it is extremely important to talk to your doctor or a professional dietitian or nutritionist before you start and stay in touch with them throughout. Nothing in this book is right for children, adolescents, the elderly, those taking insulin, or pregnant mothers or those planning pregnancy, women who are breastfeeding, people in poor mental health or with other significant medical conditions or people with type 1 diabetes or those with a very long-standing type 2 diagnosis.
Many of the recipes in this book feature shellfish and seafood. Please buy shellfish and seafood responsibly from sustainable sources. The Marine Conservation Society’s Good Fish Guide is designed to help consumers; members of the fishing industry and retailers make the right sustainable seafood choices. Look for the blue MSC label on sustainable shellfish and seafood in shops and restaurants.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data: A CIP record of this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN (print edition): 978–1–78161–159–3 ISBN (ebook): 978–1–78161–160–9
Commissioning editor: Georgina Bentliff Edited by: Dan Hurst Designed and typeset by: Perrin Davis and Bespoke Publishing Ltd. Cover design by: Jason Anscomb Indexed by: Perrin Davis and Hammersmith Books Production: Helen Whitehorn of Path Projects Ltd Printed and bound by: TJ International, Cornwall, UK
www.conquertype2diabetes.com
For Tracie, who knows everything there is to know about food.
CONTENTS
CONQUER ’kɒŋk’əverb
Middle English from Old French conquerre, based on the Latin conquirere (gain, win) from con- (expressing completion) + quaerere (seek).
—To overcome or take control of by force, defeat, beat, vanquish, triumph over, be victorious over, mean to get the better of, implies gaining mastery of.
FOREWORD
Richard Shaw should be applauded for achieving what most people, including doctors, believe to be impossible: reversing type 2 diabetes.
In his book Conquer Type 2 Diabetes, Richard shows with clarity and in detail how this can be achieved. It is clear that it requires motivation, determination, and willpower, which Richard clearly has in spades. Through his remarkable weight loss, achieved by virtue of a low-carbohydrate diet and a short-term reduced-calorie approach, Richard completely reversed his diabetes in just a few months, proven through blood test results. So after years of over-indulgence and little exercise (by his own admission), Richard finally grasped the nettle and has now emerged as a healthier, fitter version of himself. He’s now free of the risks of type 2 diabetes complications, which cause so much misery and cost and are, sadly, so prevalent in today’s society.
Richard has proven that the answers to lifestyle diseases are not to be found in boxes and boxes of pills; instead, the answers lie in making lifestyle changes—most importantly those related to diet, with some exercise thrown in for good measure. And if you’re a foodie, like Richard, you can still enjoy gourmet food on the diet he followed.
As a GP working in the NHS, I’ll be using Richard’s example—anonymised, and with his permission, of course—to show patients who have diabetes and really want to make changes and improve their health (and even those who don’t) that it is possible, in many cases, to take control of their health and conquer type 2 diabetes.
—Dr Charlotte Mendes da Costa MRCGP MFHom September 2018
ABOUT THIS BOOK
This book is a personal account of my battle with type 2 diabetes. There’s an extended introduction that chronicles my journey through the diagnosis and an action plan that explains what I did to banish this disease and come off medications.
There’s a short section about a light exercise regime that happened towards the end of the programme. And the last section is a collection of low-carb, low-sugar recipes that I hope might be useful.
Some of the recipes are incredibly simple and others are a little more involved, but all are within reach of an experienced domestic cook. I wanted to eat food that I enjoyed so I’m not ashamed to admit that some of the recipes are more elaborate than you might find elsewhere, but they worked for me.
I owe a great debt of thanks to the Kitchen Guru, Tracie Dudley Craig, one of my closest friends and a wonderfully talented chef, who has immeasurably improved the recipes and even come up with several of her own. You can follow her online at @tracie_dudley_craig.
If you’re only interested in how this is done you can skip the next few pages and jump straight to the section headed The Plan (see page 35) but…
…BEFORE YOU GO ANY FURTHER
I wrote this book as a record of what I did to overcome this disease. But it is different for everyone and I’m not a healthcare professional, nor am I qualified to give medical advice. There can be some very significant risks associated with changing your diet and for some people these risks can be far greater than the original diagnosis itself. What worked for me may not work for you. Despite the fact that it’s called the same thing, your medications may be different and your outcomes may be radically different from mine.
A type 2 diagnosis disguises a huge range of complications and underlying causes and as I started to understand a little more about this disease and talked to other people about their condition it became ever-more obvious that there is no one-stop shop that’s right for everyone.
Before you do anything to challenge your diagnosis you must talk to your doctor or a professional dietitian or nutritionist and stay in touch with them throughout the process. Nothing in this book is right for children, adolescents, the elderly, those taking insulin, or pregnant women or those planning pregnancy, women who are breastfeeding, people in poor mental health or with other significant medical conditions, or people with type 1 diabetes or those with a very long-standing type 2 diagnosis. Trust me: I’m not a doctor.
Where I can offer some advice is on food, not only because I love to cook but also because I’ve faced down my own type 2 diabetes by radically changing my eating habits. Food has played an enormous part in both my professional and private life. I was trained at one of London’s leading cookery schools. I’ve made food programmes for TV in both the UK and the USA, I’ve helped publish cookbooks and I even appeared on Masterchef. And in tackling this disease, I’ve wrestled with the complicated psychological hold that food has over us. And the good news is that, although I’ve dramatically changed my diet, my love affair with food endures, it is no longer toxic and I enjoy healthy, nutritious and delicious food that I know is nourishing my body.
I was inspired to do this after reading about the work of a remarkable team of scientists in Newcastle and Glasgow. This book has no formal relationship with their work, the Diabetes Remission Clinical Trial (DiRECT1) funded by Diabetes UK2 into primary care-led weight management for remission of type 2 diabetes. But their findings inspired me in many ways, not least because they gave me the confidence to understand that something can be done about type 2 diabetes, that for many people it is reversible and that it is possible in many cases to both eradicate this disease and come off and stay off medications.
There are no guarantees in this process. Life is unpredictable. But a revolution is coming in our understanding of type 2 diabetes and the hundreds of millions of people worldwide who have this disease are arguably being short-changed by a poor understanding of the possibility of remission, by a long-standing dependence on conventional medicine and by decades of ineffective and counterproductive dietary advice.
Welcome to the diabetes revolution. And good luck in your journey.
—Richardconquertype2diabetes.com
1http://www.directclinicaltrial.org.uk
2https://www.diabetes.org.uk
INTRODUCTION
When I started out on this journey I was a fat, 54-year-old man who did no exercise within five years of my diagnosis. And when I first raised the subject of reversing my diabetes, the idea was met with a degree of scepticism. In this respect I was unlucky. I’ve since come across many people who understand how this works, but when I started out I was told that it would both take tremendous willpower and that the likelihood of success was pretty low. Someone told me they had a book somewhere on the subject and that they’d send it to me. It never arrived, so I wrote my own.
A dietitian I discussed my diagnosis with told me that I’d probably never be free of diabetes and that there was a strong chance that I’d be on medications for the rest of my life. Without a big lifestyle change, I was told that my condition could become insulin-dependent. And perhaps the biggest obstacle to believing this could work was that I struggled to find anyone who had managed to overcome the disease by changing their diet.
In the last few years the idea of reversing type 2 diabetes has become a worldwide movement. Many thousands of people have done it, and the good news is spreading. There are some extraordinarily talented researchers working in this field and some great examples of ambitious early-stage public health interventions3, but the real energy for change is coming from patients themselves—people who are successfully challenging their diagnosis and sharing their experiences with others.
By the time I had finished writing this book, both public and medical opinion was shifting a little. As I completed the weight loss and waited for the results of my blood tests, vanity got the better of me, and I posted a few before-and-after pictures of me on an online discussion forum. Within a few hours hundreds of people from across the world had responded with questions, encouragement and enthusiasm, many with their own stories to tell. And by the end of the week, the responses were in the thousands.
Many people were struggling with their diagnosis, angry at a system that was just too slow to keep up with the advances in medical science that held out the very real prospect of remission. One writer was particularly forthright. His views echoed the opinions of hundreds of others as he said,
I’d like to take your pictures and cram them in the face of every arrogant and willingly ignorant medical professional who states that “diabetes is a progressive disease and will only get worse over time” as they continue to send people to their graves because of their hubris.
Rather more robust than I would have been, perhaps, but I got his drift, and a small part of me felt the same way.
I’m part of the self-diagnosis generation. The Internet gives us access to new choices and fresh information, but not all of it is reliable. Medical science gives us mixed messages about how to deal with the food issues surrounding type 2 diabetes, and public policy and medical advice are in direct conflict with many people’s personal experience. Should we eat carbs or should we not? Should we go high protein or low protein? Should we cut the calories? Is fruit good or bad? Is it to be full-fat or dairy free? It’s a confusing picture.
As I read about the subject, I came across a clinical trial where people had used a change in diet to restore their natural pancreatic and liver functions. I desperately wanted to see if I could do this for myself, but I had no idea how to do it. In particular I had no idea how to change my diet to lose enough weight to overcome diabetes.
Even the word diet is contested. It implies something temporary, and although this book documents a process that happens over a few short months, this really does need to be a long-term lifestyle change. There’s no point going through all the challenges of weight loss simply to watch the numbers on the scales creep back up in the long term and have the symptoms return. And if the word diet puts you off altogether, don’t worry; this isn’t a particularly unorthodox regime. I’m not proposing that you should only ever eat plants or become a fruitarian or eat cabbage soup for weeks. My approach is far less radical. I like food too much and lack the self-discipline to do any of these things.
After weeks of thinking about it, I decided to become my own lab rat and attempt my own version of a weight-loss regime—not only to lose the visible body fat I was carrying, but also to reduce the internal fat that I assumed was compromising my internal organs. It worked for me. It may not work for everyone. But the benefits that will come from losing weight and getting fitter will be worthwhile, even if it doesn’t banish the disease for everyone.
I had a salutary moment as I came to the end of the process. A colleague who had watched my progress over the months confided that she had a friend who had followed an almost identical regime and lost a similar amount of weight, but his condition hadn’t improved. Despite a monumental effort, his blood scores remained stubbornly within the clinical range that defined him as diabetic. Sure, he had lost weight and was healthier as a result, but his underlying diagnosis hadn’t changed.
It’s a lottery. But I figured that if I didn’t play I’d have no chance of winning. So I rolled the dice.
3https://www.england.nhs.uk/2016/03/nhsdpp/
THE FOREVER MYTH
When the diagnosis first arrives it’s a shock. Looking back, one short sentence on the UK’s National Health Service website really brought home how much this disease would affect my life: “Diabetes is a life-long condition that causes a person’s blood sugar level to become too high.”4 It was the phrase “lifelong condition” that rattled me. At that time, as far as I was aware, there was no fix—I’d done this to myself, and there was nothing I could do about it.
When I was first diagnosed in early 2012, I entered a whole new world of tablets, tests and examinations. I’d walk home from the pharmacy with a large bag bursting with boxes of pills and struggle to find the space to store them. For several years these tablets became as much a part of my life as toothpaste and mouthwash (and took up a lot more space in the bathroom), and when they ran out I’d go back for another enormous supply.
