soft music) birds chirping) — 

Hello and welcome to the inaugural edition of Prevent and Reverse Type 2 Diabetes Naturally. I am Mark Ashford, I am your host, and I am a Type 2 diabetic.

My diabetes was diagnosed on December the 20th, 2022.

And as I record this inaugural edition of the podcast, it is August the 25th, 2023.

That period has been extremely short, some people would say, but it’s also been a period during which I’ve confronted many struggles, a few demons, and also a lot of success.

On December the 20th, 2022, I was prescribed 2000 milligrams of Metformin per day. That’s four 500 milligram tablets, two in the morning, two at lunchtime.

By the time I saw my doctor the next time in April 2023, she was able to reduce my prescription from 2000 milligrams a day of Metformin to 1000 milligrams per day of Metformin.

Now I’m lucky in that I have a doctor that is both interested in what I’m doing, the lifestyle changes that showed up in my blood work that allowed her to make the reduction. So, she is also a doctor who believes in no medication is the best medication. So, she is quite happy to reduce my prescription medication to 50% less than what it was when I started just four months ago, four months previously.

I met her again in early August, August the 20th actually. And once again, she was able to reduce my medication by another 50%.

So now I am down to one 500 milligram tablet of Metformin, which I take in the morning.

And hopefully by the end of November, early December of 2023, if things continue as they are, and I continue to make the changes, and I commit to the changes and keep those changes happening, she thinks that I may be able to come off Metformin altogether.

Two things have surprised me so far in this journey. One is the lifestyle changes that are necessary to allow me to make these changes so that I can reduce my medication.

But also, that none of the things that I’m doing are alien to me.

I’ve practised them all at different times in my life when I wanted to change up my diet, change up the way I’m living life, and I’m changing up things to reduce my weight, to make me feel happier, reduce the buzz that I get from sugar and those kinds of things. So my lifestyle changes really are also a reversion back to times when I considered that to be the best thing for me to do. And that is the strangest thing about this.

From my relationship or perspective on diabetes is not just in my current situation. My father in the last six or seven years of his life was diagnosed with diabetes. And this was in the 1960s and it was in the UK when there seemed to be less knowledge, less interest, less capability to deal with diabetes.

Certainly, he didn’t have any medication to take, which I have now. And I wear a continuous glucose monitor and he didn’t have anything like that. He used urine test strips to monitor his blood sugar levels.

I also had to think about how I viewed diabetes in that I also had since coming to Canada, known a couple of diabetics who had the classic diabetic complications. They had amputations, they had loss of vision, they had other things that are very significant in the way that they meet life and the way that they conduct themselves.

And to see them able to deal with these things’ radical changes in their ability to work and be happy and enjoy life was a dark period.

They’d navigated through it, but when you see a lot of the recommendations and a lot of the description of what diabetes leads to, it’s referred to as chronic, it’s progressive. Once you become diabetic, there’s no going back.

Because you can’t go back, what you’re struggling with day to day once you’ve been diagnosed diabetic is preventing yourself from becoming worse, not better.

The thing that struck me was that a lot of the websites, well not a lot of the websites, but some of them, even some of the quote official websites, they have C, cancer,