Because juvenile (type 1) diabetes is purely a matter of not producing enough insulin to handle the carbohydrates in the diet, the treatment is simply to replace the missing insulin, reduce carbs or both.
Adult onset (type 2) diabetes, while often milder, is more complicated. You make plenty of insulin, but your muscles don’t respond to it. As a result, your insulin secreting cells—the “beta cells” of the pancreas– have to secrete as much as six times the normal amounts of insulin to keep your blood sugar down. Years of overwork eventually wears out those cells so they can’t produce enough insulin to overcome the muscles’ lack of responsiveness to it. That’s when your blood sugar levels rise and you develop diabetes.
Whether you go on to develop diabetes or not, years of flooding your body with insulin—“hyperinsulinemia”–has its own effects, some of which are more troublesome than diabetes itself. Excess insulin builds belly fat, promotes weight gain, increases the number of cholesterol particles in your blood, upsets the balance between good and bad cholesterol, reduces testosterone levels if you’re a male and triggers menstrual difficulties if you’re a female; that’s even if you don’t develop diabetes.
While getting the blood sugar down is of primary importance, you need to try to do it without raising insulin levels more than they already are. You do this by eliminating the double whammy that causes type 2 diabetes–the combination of muscles that don’t respond to insulin and too many high glycemic load carbohydrates, the same thing that causes belly fat.
The type of muscle activity that restores muscles’ responsiveness to insulin is not the kind that makes you huff and puff. Job One, Activate Your Slow-twitch Muscles will show you how to eliminate insulin resistance with an easy type of physical exercise. Job Two, Lower Your Glycemic Load will help you get rid of the carbohydrate shocks that drive up your blood sugar and insulin levels. The good news is, you can reduce the glycemic load of your diet to a fraction of what it was and still eat plenty of rich, satisfying food. You’ll probably find yourself eating better than ever.
If activating your slow-twitch muscles and reducing your glycemic load doesn’t bring your blood sugar down to healthy levels, it may be time to consider medication. Research shows that if you maintain good control of your diabetes, even if it requires medication, it shouldn’t limit your lifespan.
