Right, Time To Act

I was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes at the end of May 2022. It was as a result of a routine blood test and checkup.

Diabetes isn't something that runs in my family. In fact, apart from my grandfather who developed it in his 90s, nobody in my family has diabetes. And I come from a family of South-West France eaters (you can imagine the kind of greasy, meaty diet that is traditional in my family). My family does thyroid problems, though, and everybody apart from me has Hashimoto's thyroiditis.

Lessons learned from feline diabetes

I had some experience with diabetes because one of my cats, Fleas, had been diagnosed with diabetes several years earlier. It was bad enough that he couldn’t climb the stairs anymore without being out of breath. At the time, the vet had prescribed daily insulin injections. At first small ones, then gradually larger ones as improvement didn't come. It hadn’t made sense to me to blindly inject massive amounts of insulin into my cat, so I started looking around to learn about cat diabetes and how to treat it. I eventually found a great community of diabetic cat owners implementing the tight regulation method developed by Dr. Hodgkins. That method made sense to me, and the community was very supportive. After three weeks of that treatment, my cat was freely moving around again, and in 2 months, I had stopped insulin injections completely, and he was back on his normal food.

So knowing that, learning I had diabetes from test results was more of a challenge than a disaster. I'm probably one of the few people that, instead of being crushed or depressed learning he had diabetes, thought, "ok, let's deal with that." Did I forget to say I'm an engineer?

Making dietary changes

Even before I saw my GP, my wife and I decided to start changing things. I read several books on how to control T2D, and I read as many research papers as I could on the subject (it's shocking how little was published on T2D before 2000). I have a Ph.D. (not in medicine), and that's a natural way to approach things me. With the experience of my cat, we knew the key to living with diabetes is diet. My research confirmed it (for humans). I discussed my findings with my wife, and we devised that new diet: out most carbs (no sugar, no wheat, no rice, no bread), fat and proteins (all from vegetables, beans, and pulses in small quantities), stick to the vegetarian diet (we're both vegetarians).

Working on my goals

Our diet had two goals: to lose weight and control glycemia. I was very overweight at the time, it was urgent to lose a lot of it (research showed a massive increase in remission in patients that lost 15kg and over immediately after diagnosis). That would also take care of one of the sources of diabetes: fat deposits and insulin resistance due to interaction with fat.

Two weeks later, my GP prescribed me Stagid (aka Metformin) once a day at first, then twice a day to control my glycemia. I wasn't entirely happy with that since, in the previous two weeks, I had managed to bring down my glycemia from 300mg/dl+ to less than 130mg/dl most of the time. I was hoping to get back to the normal range on my own. But he's a doctor, so I went with his decision.

Keeping my diabetes in check

Fast forward six months, I’ve lost just under 40kg, and my glycemia has been normal for the last 5 months (HbA1c of 5% for the last two quarterly blood tests). In fact, my GP wants me to increase it since, as a diabetic, I should have a higher average. I'm not planning to stay in the diabetic range: I want to be where I am now, in the "normal" range around HbA1c of 5%.

I'm hoping that things will continue that way for the foreseeable future and I'll manage to keep the progression of my diabetes in check.