Carb Experiments

December 4, 2018 By Bob 8 Comments

I’ve been trying a few things

Checking how I am with diabetes with carb experiments

I’ve been doing some carb experiments. Almost 2 years ago, I cured my own diabetes through a regimen of a low-carb diet and fasting. Before that, i was diabetic for more than 25 years, and my diabetes was very bad.

in fact, I almost died several times in the past 20 years due to diabetes. I experienced:

A stroke in 2001
Many serious infections
Heart Attack in 2016

I was so happy when my diabetes went away. Now, I have been doing some carb experiments just to see how my blood sugar reacts to eating some carbohydrates.

My current work

I work as Santa Claus in malls and other venues during this time of the year. I have a very busy schedule. Most of my clients feed me, and it always turns out to be carbs!

I started my carb experiments, though, before my Santa work started, in November. One night, after dinner (a keto meal), my wife and I went to the mall to pick up something. After we took care of our purchases, I told my wife that I wanted to do a little experiment. She asked what it was, and I said that I wanted to eat some carbs and see how my blood sugar reacted.

Krispy Kreme

I suggested that we go and have some donuts at Krispy Kreme, and we did. We each ate 2 donuts. I had not eaten anything even remotely like this for about 2 years and I had no idea how my blood sugar would react.

When I checked my blood sugar about 2 hours later, it was 93, perfectly normal, in fact low for after eating. I was so happy.

In addition to diabetes, I am also quite militant about my weight (I am down more than 230 pounds from my peak), so I don’t plan to make it a habit of eating donuts regularly, but I wanted to experiment and see if I would get back to diabetic levels of blood sugar. I was so happy that I did not.

More Carb Experiments

During my Santa work at the malls, as I said, my clients often bring me a meal to eat during my break. It is kind of intense work, and a meal is very welcome, but I rarely have much control over what they feed me.

One client will usually bring me food from McDonald’s. Not high on my list, but it is food. At one event, I ate 2 McDonald’s cheeseburgers and a Coke light. Again, my blood sugar remained completely normal.

My diabetes really is gone

Over the past couple of years since my diabetes was cured, I did worry a bit about whether diabetes would just return if I was eating (I usually fast). I figured that after my weight loss journey was completed, I would get back to eating more regularly. So, I just wondered what my blood sugar numbers would look like when eating became more of a regular part of life.

I am really pleased at this point because I can see that blood sugar and diabetes really is not an issue. I am sure if I went back to full-bore eating of carbs and such I could (would?) develop diabetes again. However, I enjoy eating a ketogenic diet, and I also enjoy fasting, so I don’t see myself eating many carbs at all at any time in the future.

So, it looks to me like I am doing well!

Is Diabetes Curable or Just Manageable?

August 20, 2018 By Bob

Do You Have Diabetes Type II?

Can It Be Cured?

I was diagnosed with type II diabetes many years ago. I believe it was in 1992, but possibly in 1991. I suffered many complications from diabetes over the years. Diabetes nearly killed me.

The biggest complications caused by diabetes which I experienced were:

In 2001 I had a stroke
In 2016 I had a heart attack
Over the years I would get many very serious infections

There were other things which I suffered that were caused by diabetes, but these are the most serious.

My Diabetes was Uncontrolled

Over the years, I made several attempts to keep my blood sugar under control. Those attempts were never very successful. I would experience short-term fairly moderate success, but never any large degree of success, and never over a long period.

Most of those years saw my blood sugar numbers completely out of control. I rarely even tracked the numbers, because frankly, I didn’t even want to know. I knew that it was bad, so why should I worry myself more?

At the times that I did the test, which was rarely, it was common to see blood sugar levels in the 400 to 450 range. In other words, it was terrible.

I Started Trying to Take Control

In 2014, after that kind and gentle urging of my physician, I decided to try to get some degree of control over my type II diabetes. At first, I implemented some pretty strict diet control and exercise, and I experienced some degree of success. However, because my success was not to the extent where it should be, my doctor urged me to start using insulin injections.

I avoided insulin for about a year, but in 2015 I relented and began using insulin. When I did that, although my blood sugar numbers became very well controlled, the insulin caused me to start gaining a lot of weight again.

I Decided to Start Eating a Ketogenic Diet

Because of the weight gain side effect of using insulin, I wanted to get off the insulin injections, so I decided to try radically changing my diet, going low-carb, and went with a ketogenic diet. I experienced great success with this. Over a period of a few months, I was able to reduce my insulin usage by about 90%.

Next, I Implemented Fasting into My Routine

When I started doing fasting, intermittent fasting at first, followed by extended fasting, I was able to totally get off of the insulin. Even with no insulin, my blood glucose numbers were lower than they had ever been since I became diabetic. I was very happy.

Not very long after that, my endocrinologist told me that I no longer have diabetes. I was ecstatic.

Some Recent Events

Recently, a couple of things happen that made me think more about this and also angered me to some extent. Have you ever heard the phrase “you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink”? I am sure that most of you have.

It is so true, no matter how much you try to help some people, you can’t force them.

My Aunt

Around six weeks ago, I would estimate, my aunt (my uncle”s wife, so maybe she is my aunt in law) posted something on Facebook. When I saw the post, it made me feel very bad. In some ways, it made me angry.

About a year ago my aunt had sent me a message asking me about how I was able to your diabetes. I explained everything to her, and she said she was going to try to do it for herself. To be honest, I really don’t know if she did anything or not, but I would suspect she did nothing.

When my aunt posted on Facebook a while back she was posting about her brother, as I recall. I don’t know the brother and never have. Anyway, when my aunt posted on Facebook she was telling about how her brother had just gotten his leg amputated because of diabetes. Well, as I said, just last year I sent my aunt all of the needed information to get rid of diabetes completely. And, curing yourself of diabetes is not difficult to do.

It made me very sad, even disgusted, to read this. Somebody having to amputate one of their limbs is sickening especially considering that they could have easily prevented it. Very easily.

My friend

I have a friend that I consider to be a good friend, although we have never met in person. We have been friends on Facebook for many years. In some ways, she has a similar health history as me. Although I do not believe she was ever obese, she used to be overweight. She had a heart attack not long before I did.

After her heart attack, she went the traditional route with a low-fat diet. The kind of diet that has been the standard treatment for heart disease for decades now, but frankly has not been very successful.

After my heart attack I took a very unconventional route, but a route that has proven very successful. Successful for myself, and also successful for millions of others. I went with a high-fat diet and low carbs. With this type of diet, I completely reversed diabetes, in my heart health is also excellent now.

My friend posted a few days ago on Facebook that diabetes is a killer, a slow death, and seemingly there is not much you can do. I have told her many times about how I reversed diabetes, and how she could as well. A few times she has told me that she has tried doing what I had done, but from what I can tell those attempts have only lasted a few days. Perhaps I am wrong.

I replied to my friend’s post and told her that diabetes does not have to be a killer, it is easily reversible and that she already knows that I have reversed it myself.

Distressing

Frankly, it is distressing to see people that I have tried to help who are continuing to suffer the consequences of diabetes. As my friend had posted on Facebook, diabetes will kill you. If you don’t take action sooner or later it will get you.

The conventional methods of treating diabetes are not effective. Newer research is showing that diabetes is very controllable and even curable by strictly limiting carbohydrates in your diet. It is that easy.

Come on, if you are diabetic, do something about it! Honestly, it is not very hard. If you are addicted to carbohydrates, you will go through maybe a couple of weeks of withdrawal, and then it will be smooth sailing. I never crave carbs anymore, my blood sugar numbers are very low. My doctor says I no longer have diabetes. About a year and a half ago I told my doctor that I was going to get rid of diabetes and he told me it was impossible. I told him to just watch and see, and he agreed to do so. He was shocked by what happened, but he agrees that my diabetes is gone.

Your type II diabetes can be gone as well.

Have you noticed a common theme?

May 17, 2018 By Bob

In many of my recent articles, I have been telling you about a lot of stupid things I have done over the years in regards to my health.

Today will be the last of the stupid things unless I remember something else later down the road.

Most all of my “stupid things” have followed a common theme, they are all about following medical advice that has been prevalent during my lifetime. This advice has also been widely accepted.

And today’s stupid thing is…

Following the advice of medical professionals. It’s really hard to say this because doctors and other medical professionals are people that we trust with our health. However, what I have learned in recent years is that much of what these doctors tell us is simply incorrect.

I have heard a lot of people say that doctors intentionally mislead us because they will make more money that way. For me, I don’t believe that. I think the doctors have good intentions, they are simply following the advice that they have been taught, and read in medical journals and other such publications. Perhaps there are some people with poor intentions who do things like this intentionally, but I would believe that such people are very few and far between.

Either way, though, this poor advice has heard and even killed many people. Diabetes, heart disease, and obesity are all killers. The medical advice over the last 50 to 70 years, though, has not only not helped, it has actually hurt millions of people, including myself. Some doctors today are pioneers in the low-carb movement, and it seems that more and more doctors are jumping on the bandwagon. To me, that is good.

There are other kinds of diets that have helped other people, so I can’t say that low-carb is the only way to go. What I do know is that it is the only thing that has ever worked for me, and that seems to be the case with millions of other people as well.

So, this will be a short article, but blindly following medical advice from doctors and others is not necessarily a good thing. Don’t just do what you are told. Be the captain of your own health team. When people on your team tell you to do certain things, do some research. Find out if that thing is working for other people because most of what we have been told in the areas of heart disease, diabetes, and obesity has just been incorrect. If I had only known what I know now earlier in my life, my life would have been very different.

You can listen to your doctor, but go check out another doctor as well, Dr. Google works for me. I bet he will work for you too. Best thing is, he is also free.

Eat 6 small meals per day

May 15, 2018 By Bob

Over the past 60 or 70 years, since sometime in the 1950s, we have been misled on many health matters. I can certainly say that I was among those who believed what I was being told.

Ancel Keys came out with a lot of research in the 1950s. His research pointed to changes that should be made in the diet. Everything was about cholesterol, everything was about high-fat, all of these things were leading to heart attacks.

The way that things are looking now, with the latest research, it seems most of what Keys said was wrong. In fact, information has come out that some of his research was done in an improper way, eliminating some of the data points which did not support his theory. Things are changing now.

Well, one of the things that came out, not necessarily from keys, but due to his research, was that it was healthier to eat six small meals per day instead of eating three meals per day. It was at around that same time that the incidence of heart attacks skyrocketed, and the incidence of diabetes was even larger.

I bought into the whole six small meals per day because that’s what doctors were saying. However, it seems that nothing could be further from the truth. Every time you eat, your body releases insulin. How much insulin your body releases depends on what you eat. If you are eating carbohydrates your insulin spike will be very high. If you are eating protein your insulin spike will be moderate. If you are eating fat your insulin will still spike, but only minimally. Insulin is the hormone that our body produces that directs our body to store fat. Not burn fat, store fat.

Since Dr. keys said that we should avoid fat, and switch more toward carbohydrates, that is what most people ate during their six small meals per day. Every time that they would take in carbohydrates like this, the insulin would spike, causing more weight gain, even if they are eating less food and fewer calories. By eating fewer times per day, three meals, two meals, one meal, or even fasting, much less insulin is released from our pancreas, and it is much healthier for us.

In 2015 my doctor finally convinced me to start using injected insulin to get better control of my diabetes. I had lost quite a bit of weight before that through exercise. But when I started using insulin, I was still eating very reasonably, but I gained 70 pounds in one year. This weight gain was a result of insulin. And, the more meals you would eat the more times for a day you would probably need insulin.

Conventional medical wisdom tells us that by eating six small meals we would need less insulin, but the truth is the opposite. On top of using insulin that we inject, every time we would eat those small meals our body would produce more insulin. Type II diabetes is a disease of too much insulin, even though many doctors think it is from not enough insulin. Many doctors say that type II diabetes develops when our pancreas can no longer create enough insulin. Recent medical research, however, shows that insulin resistance is the problem in type II diabetes. Our bodies are producing insulin, but unable to use it, so we create more insulin, and it becomes a vicious circle.

So, yes, another stupid thing that I have done is buying into the story that we should eat six small meals per day. When I stopped doing that, and even three large meals per day following a ketogenic diet, I started losing weight. Additionally, when I started fasting, the weight poured off of. Whether using a ketogenic diet, which greatly restricts the intake of carbohydrates, or completely fasting, it creates a. Where our body is not releasing insulin. In fact, our bodies become fat adapted (they become good at burning fat for its fuel), and if we are not eating enough then our bodies will burn our body fat, and we will lose weight.

It was a stupid thing to do, but it was also the conventional wisdom in the medical community, and even among average folks. So, I don’t blame myself, but looking back, I know that I was 180° out of whack. Most people still are.

Are you Diabetic?

April 17, 2018 By Bob

Do you have diabetes? If you do, or even if you are just prediabetic, you need to take action. Diabetes is a very serious disease. It will kill you. If you don’t take action you will die from diabetes. I can just about guarantee that.

I was diagnosed with diabetes in 1992. I probably had diabetes for years before that, but just did not know it. Starting in 1992, once I knew that I had diabetes, I went to some classes to learn what I needed to do to minimize the disease. But, the truth is, I really didn’t take much action. Furthermore, the real truth is that the things that the medical profession taught about diabetes at that time (and many medical professionals still do not understand diabetes) was just dead wrong. Dead is the key word there. They taught you to eat a “balanced diet” with about 60% carbohydrates. If you have diabetes, the carbohydrates are what will kill you. The carbs are what will make diabetes worse.

Will it really kill you?

Well, as I said, I was diagnosed with diabetes in 1992. In 2001 I had a stroke, I was only 39 years old. I nearly died. At the time that I went home from the hospital I could no longer speak, I had to relearn how to talk. I also could not walk, even with a walker. I had to learn how to walk again.

After around 2010, I developed many diabetic ulcers on my legs. Having one of these diabetic ulcers can quickly lead to needing an amputation. In the course of a year, I would get four or five of these diabetic ulcers. Thankfully, I had a friend who was a doctor, and he would come to my house to help me beat these ulcers back. These ulcers continued until around 2016. I took action which put an end to them, I will talk about that later in this article.

In June 2016, I had a heart attack which was attributed to having been diabetic for nearly 25 years. My father was diabetic, and he died of a heart attack when he was 55 years old. I was 54 when I had my heart attack. Thankfully, I survived it. In November 2016 I had a quadruple heart bypass operation. The doctor told me that I was within days of death. Thankfully, I had my surgery, and I made major changes to my health and I don’t think I will ever have a heart attack again.

After my heart bypass, in January 2017, I heard about a fellow named Dr. Jason Fung. Every doctor I had ever heard of in my life told me that diabetes was an irreversible disease. It was a chronic condition that only kept getting worse over time. Basically, there was no hope. I started watching videos by Dr. Fung on YouTube, and the doctor was telling about how you could reverse diabetes. I could not believe it, and I wondered if he was a kook. But as I thought, I figured “what do I have to lose?” If I kept moving in the same direction that I had been going over the past 25 years, I would probably die in a relatively short time.

So, I studied what Dr. Fung was saying.

Eat a low-carb diet.
Start doing some intermittent fasting.
If possible, do some extended fasting as well.

Dr. Fung gave me the motivation to do these things, and I got very serious about it in 2017. By the end of 2017, I had lost 200 pounds from my peak weight. My peak weight was 430 pounds, and I was down to just under 230 pounds. I felt great.

Want to know what one of the best things about it was? I officially no longer had diabetes. Based on the numbers when I have a blood test, it has been more than a year now since I kicked diabetes. You can do it too. I know you can, and it’s not that hard. A lot of people say that fasting is hard. What do you think is better, fasting for a few days, or dying when you are still young? If you think that fasting is harder, ask your kids or your spouse what they think.

Recently, I was going back and doing more research about Dr. Fung, and I found that he has a new book out. This is his third book, and the title is The Diabetes Code. In this book, Dr. Fung outlines what you need to do to get rid of diabetes. I know that you have been told all of your life that you cannot get rid of diabetes, but that is simply not true. I know for sure that you can because I did it myself. And do you want to know something else? It really was not very hard to do in fact, in less than a month after I started doing the things that Dr. Fung recommended, my diabetes was gone. For a year now it has not come back. My blood sugar is very low, probably lower than most people that don’t have diabetes. I also feel great and am looking forward to a long life ahead. Just a few years ago, I didn’t think that my lifespan would be more than a few more months. Now, I seriously think that I could easily live another 30 years. I am 56 years old, and I feel like I’m in my 20s again. It’s hard to argue with that.

If you have diabetes, I believe that you are doing yourself an injustice if you do not buy a copy of The Diabetes Code by Dr. Jason Fung. I promise you that it will change your life, and it will do so for the better. I guarantee that.

How are you feeling?

February 26, 2018 By Bob

After seeing the title of this article, most readers are going to expect that this article is about how I am feeling. Is that what you thought? Well, it’s not. Frankly, I am feeling great, super in fact. But, this article is about how you are feeling. Mostly, it’s about those who are not feeling so well.

I know that this article will be controversial to some. Give me a chance to explain myself, though.

Let me get the controversial statement that I’m going to make out of the way. You get to decide how you feel. Yes, it is all up to you how you feel. At least that’s the way that I see it.

Now, I know that many people who are ill and suffer from various ailments are going to be angered when I say that. Many such people are going to say that it is not within their control. That is just the life they have been given. Based on my own experience, I disagree. Perhaps I am not right, particularly in some cases, but I’ll explain why I feel this way.

I recently turned 56 years old. Honestly, I never thought I would live to 56. I lived an entire life of obesity. At the young age of 39, I had a stroke. That is a very young age to suffer a stroke. But, I did, and I almost died. When I went home from the hospital, I could not walk, nor could I talk. I had to learn to do those things again. My sheer determination, though, allowed me to learn how to do those things quickly, and much quicker than the doctors predicted, I was more or less back to normal again.

I had diabetes starting at age 29. Well, let me correct that statement. I was diagnosed with diabetes at age 29, although I’m sure I had diabetes long before I was diagnosed. Diabetes brought me many ailments and caused me to feel terrible for many years. I’m sure it caused my stroke. Last year, at age 55, I reversed my diabetes. My blood sugar numbers are now well outside the range that would be considered diabetic. Even my endocrinologist agrees, I no longer have diabetes.

In 2016, at the age of 54, I had a heart attack. Thankfully, I survived it. My father had a heart attack at age 55, he didn’t get another chance like I did. Later in 2015, I found that I needed to have a quadruple bypass operation. Just before the operation I nearly died. However, after my surgery, recovery, and turning my health around became my full-time job. It was my laser focus almost immediately after my surgery had been completed. The diabetes was also the major cause of my heart disease.

I suffered many other ailments over the years, mostly related to diabetes, caused by diabetes, are caused by my obesity and overeating.

The heart attack and heart bypass surgery were a major wake-up call for me. I knew that if I did not turn my life around and make major changes to my lifestyle, I would not live very much longer.

My doctors told me all sorts of things that I needed to do. I needed to eat a low-fat diet. I needed to do this, I needed to do that. Now, I am not against doctors, nor do I think that I am smarter than doctors. However, I also do not think the doctors are right about everything. In fact, after I started doing research, I felt that almost everything that doctors have told us in the past 50 years or so in regards to heart disease, diabetes, and obesity, has been incorrect.

Instead of eating a low-fat diet, I chose to eat a high-fat diet. I chose to stop eating carbs, or at least to eat them in very small quantities. As my journey continued, I chose to stop eating for days at a time. I have done fasting for periods up to 20 days at a time. 10-day fasts were very common for me. Today, I fast five days per week and eat two days per week. When I first started doing this, my doctors told me that I would be dead in a short time. Instead, my recovery has gone wildly better than my doctors even thought was possible. I have lost a lot of weight. I feel better than I have in decades. Most of my doctors still do not understand how it is possible. But, they cannot really berate me, because they can see that the results have been huge.

So, getting back to my controversial statement that you get to decide how you feel, I believe that I chose a path that was going to make me feel good, thus I feel great. Frankly, I believe that if I had followed the advice that had been given to me by my doctors, I would not be doing nearly as well as I am now. In fact, I feel that I would still be diabetic.

Speaking of diabetes, after my heart attack, while I was in the hospital, as part of the dismissal from the hospital, I had to have a visit from a nutritionist who would advise me on how I should start eating. Honestly, she told me, advised me, that I should eat 1 cup of potatoes three times per day. That is a lot of carbs. I would certainly be suffering from even worse diabetes now if I had followed that advice. Instead, I no longer have diabetes.

I have a lot of online friends and followers. I have several very popular websites, and because of that many people have been following me for years. Because of the number of people who follow me, I get a lot of emails, people asking for advice, that sort of thing. During the rest of this week, I will be having some articles on this website about some of the health questions that I get from people and health statements. Frankly, a lot of these people are in very poor shape, healthwise. They follow what their doctors tell them, but in my view, that is not always the best advice. Instead, I feel that these people could turn their health around, start feeling a lot better and enjoy life. My coming articles will feature this theme, tell about the sorts of problems that these people have, and why I think it would be better for them to do things that are generally unconventional.

Remember, I am not a doctor, nor do I claim to be (I don’t even play one on TV, LOL). I am only relying on my own research and the effects that that research has had on my life in the past year or two. I have been on a journey, and it has been an amazing journey for me.

So, I stand by my statement: it is up to you how you feel. It’s kinda like the old saying, happiness is a choice. How you feel is a choice. How healthy you are is a choice.

Come back again tomorrow and read my first article on this topic. The article is about a family member and my hopes that he will see the light, and follow a different road than he is on now.

See you then?