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, the big letter C written all over them.

While my success so far is in reversing my type 2 diabetes, also you can prevent type two diabetes.

But these websites were plastered with words like remission and reversing diabetes is not possible.

Face it, what you’ve got to do is face it and stop yourself from becoming seriously ill and facing this loss of limbs, loss of functionality, loss of hope, in other words.

My first struggle was to get out of this dark space that I had gotten into. I even started to wonder whether my cat who is supposed to live a very long life would actually outlive me and how I would provide for her in my will.

I also wondered how I would feed her if I were in a wheelchair because I had had amputations.

All kinds of dark thoughts started to go through my mind and they were fed in part by these negative websites, this negative information. The first thing I had to do was obviously separate the old and outdated and negative views on diabetes treatment and existence from the new positive and proactive outlook.

I could see where my responsibility for my lifestyle changes started and that it would never end.

I knew that I had to make changes and the changes that I found documented were certainly durable because I’d already done them at different times in my life.

There was new knowledge and understanding of diabetes that had to be applied and I had decisions to make.

I also made the decision that to be successful at reversing my type 2 diabetes, my lifestyle changes had to be strictly applied.

I would probably say that I was hardcore and my ultimate goal was to be off Metformin, my diabetes medication and eventually to where a CGM continues glucose monitor, optionally.

However, during the period from April to August, I started to see my CGM as a tool, a positive tool, a tool that I might continue to wear even once I was off Metformin. And it would be a tool to monitor my glucose levels, what food I was eating, what it did to me, how my body responded and yes, there was also a sense of compromise. If I went to a celebration, I would recognize that having a slice of celebratory cake or something else at the meeting would be something that I could have, but it would not be something that I would continually have if that seems right.

Let’s say that it is right.

But in working on this section in the book that accompanies this podcast,

I have a section on experimenting with food. It’s the way I monitor and use the CGM to read and learn about the effect of food that I’m consuming on my blood glucose.

Obviously, there are foods that have sugar in them or high fructose corn syrup that I was simply not putting in my mouth to start with because of the effect they would have.

But looking at two things, for example, in that section on experimenting with food, there are pasta sauces with sugar in them and there is pasta with sugar in them. And combining one pasta sauce with one item of pasta, one product of pasta, you would actually have 10 grams of sugar in your intake.

Assuming, of course, that you order or you eat the recommended portion size. And that’s 10 grams of sugar, regardless of anything else on the table, any dessert, any sweet and coffee, anything else that you choose to eat, breads, crusty breads, things that might go very well with pasta and meat sauce.

So, you can quite easily digest or take in quite large amounts of sugar without even realizing it. And that was also a big learning experience.

And it leads to some of the habits for testing, how your body reacts or how my body reacted to food that I was eating and how my body turned it into sugar and glucose and how it affected my body.

My thoughts on reversing Type 2 diabetes are pretty straightforward. Anybody can do it as long as they have the will and the interest and the commitment. And I say interest because one of the other things that spun out of this was my relationship with medicine.

We tend to treat doctors rather like mechanics.

When something breaks or doesn’t perform well on our car, we take it to a mechanic and we expect a diagnosis and we expect options for how something can be repaired or replaced and we give an approval to have the work done. And then we drive away satisfied or I’d say satisfied that the work had resulted in the performance or corrected the defect that we had taken the car to the mechanic for. And medicine is something like that.

Another example, I wear my CGM, my continuous glucose monitors every day. And it’s the Abbott Freestyle, Freestyle, Libra 2 version and it lasts 14 days. At the end of 14 days, I apply a new one to my body and continue to meet and practise my discipline of taking readings constantly to see what the state of my glucose levels are and how foods or drinks that I’ve consumed are affecting me.

There are people that are prescribed CGM who don’t wear them, which means that they have no idea what level of, what their blood glucose levels are until they go back to the doctor and have more blood work done maybe three or four months from the previous reading. I can tell you where my blood glucose is constantly throughout the day, every day, and I make use of it. CGM is a valuable tool. Some people don’t. And some people will treat the medication, Metformin or whatever they’re taking as strictly a pill that will help them manage their diabetes without taking any responsibility or making any lifestyle changes to make it possible for them to eventually get off Metformin or whatever medication they’re taking.

These issues need to be dealt with because that’s the relationship you have with your doctor and the relationship you have with your own body. Because at the end of the day, if you do develop diabetic complications because you’ve ignored the results, you’ve ignored the tools that are provided for you, you are going to possibly have those serious consequences of having prosthesis instead of legs and feet and toes.

And you’re going to have to deal with the fact that your driving license is rescinded because you can no longer focus and see clearly.

So, let’s look on the positive side. There are a lot of good things that have come out of my experience and those are the things that I’ll pass on through this podcast and also updates and revisions to the accompanying book.

They are things that I want to describe to people, describe to you as the audience. And I do want to be helpful and share the information that I’ve learned and applied to my own success so far. I think it’s a very good indication that things are going in the right direction to, from December the 20th, 2022 to August the 25th, August the 20th, 2023, to have reduced my medication from 2000 milligrams a day to 500 milligrams a day. And the vision is very clear that I’ll be off Metformin and diabetic medications by the end of 2023. That’s my goal. That’s the goal that I want to share with you. And it’s how I get there. This is my journey. This is my perspective.

But anybody can follow these suggestions and recommendations. They can see the evidence that I provide on how success or things are and how things are going.

And since I got past the dark and old negative views of diabetes, things have been very much better, much brighter, much more hopeful.

And that is the message that ultimately, I want to give to all of my subscribers that there is a strong sense of hope, there’s a strong sense of commitment and accomplishment and things will go right.

But you have to take responsibility and you have to commit to making the changes that will allow your body to recover because that’s what it’s doing. It’s recovering from an oversaturation of highly sugared, highly processed foods that generate a lot of glucose in the body when it does something quite natural and normal for itself, which is processed those things into glucose and releases them into the bloodstream for the liver and the pancreas to deal with.

So, this is, it might sound a little bit, I don’t know, depressing.

Or I would say brutally factual in this inaugural introduction.

The podcast is intended to be biweekly.

Definitely there will be a podcast every month, but I am planning on having something to share, even a short podcast of containing information which is useful in a little nugget that is passed out to you.

I hope you found this initial introduction interesting and come back soon and subscribe to the podcast and listen to how the journey continues and how my perspective continues to be very strict and hardcore on how I apply the rules and the lifestyle changes which I’ve rediscovered.

Yes, that’s the word rediscovered. I wish I had continued with them all along because I wouldn’t be here as a type 2 diabetic talking to you if the changes that I’ve made had been continued from when I first encountered those changes.

Thank you very much. Thank you for listening and please subscribe and come back later.

Music from Epidemic Sound – ES_Comfortable under the Surface – Hanna Lindgren

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