Editor’s note: We found Rey’s remarkable story in the diabetes online community, and asked him if he would share it with us. Rey experienced extraordinary rapid success by following a precise diet and medication regimen immediately after diagnosis with type 2 diabetes. His improvement was incredible, but others making the same changes may not experience the same success. Please speak to your doctor or caregiver before enacting any major health changes of your own.

This story was originally published in the autumn of 2021. 

I’m Rey, and I’m a 44-year old male with a history of high blood pressure and being overweight, but until recently I had no major health issues. Only this past summer I learned that I had dangerously uncontrolled diabetes. Within the span of just a couple of months, I completely changed my diet, started and then stopped glucose-lowering medications, and got my blood sugar back into the normal, healthy range. Here’s my story.

My First Health Scare

My story is ultimately a diabetes story, but there were some bumps along the way that I think are worth including before I jump into the diabetes.

My adventure really began in the summer of 2020. After some stressful life events, I developed a rather constant state of anxiety, which seemed to be preventing me from getting good sleep. Even while using a sedative, I was up at least 4-5 times during the night, every night. I didn’t have a previous history of mental health problems, so this was all new to me. The especially challenging part was that as time passed, lying in bed became a trigger for the anxiety, which made the sleep even harder to come by. I felt like I was just going through the motions to get through life.

Fortunately, after months of stubbornness and sucking it up the best I could, I finally got to the bottom of things. I discovered it was sleep apnea, and started CPAP treatment. The result was truly life-changing, sleep returned to normal, and my anxiety went away 100%.

Life was great and I’d survived and handled my major mid-life health crisis…. or so I thought! Little did I know, but that relief would prove to be short-lived as in the coming months I started to experience a new set of symptoms.

I was at my highest weight yet and my BMI was creeping towards 30. Some reading this will scoff and think “30 is nothing, I’m well above that,” but everyone’s body is a little different and apparently 30 was my personal breaking point.

My fasting blood sugar was over 100 mg/dL, and my doctor said something about pre-diabetes, but she didn’t sound too concerned about it.

The Symptoms

I was again experiencing sleeplessness. Now I was finding that instead of sleep apnea waking me up during the night, my bladder was sure filling up and I was getting up to pee several times a night. Also, I was quite thirsty when this would happen. I did notice it was nights that I’d eat pizza or pasta for dinner that were the worst. Some combination of stubbornness and perhaps denial kept me from taking this too seriously, so I just kept on with things. Besides, this was March 2021 and you didn’t dare go into a medical clinic unless you were on your covid deathbed. Surely, this was no big deal, and getting checked out could wait.

Still, I sensed something was wrong and I reduced the amount of pizza and pasta I was eating for dinner (maybe twice a week instead of five nights a week), eating beans with rice and veggies for dinner instead. In hindsight, not great, but a minor improvement.

The next major symptom arrived in April: blurry vision. At first, I wasn’t worried. I’d gotten LASIK eye surgery done 12 years earlier, and this change seemed like a mild return of my nearsightedness. I was also in my mid-40s, which I’m told is a time where focusing becomes harder and your vision changes.

Then it got really bad: I was on a trip to Florida when I couldn’t read a menu board that was 8 feet in front of me. I had to resort to taking a picture of it with my phone and then looking at that picture to read the menu. Something was majorly wrong!

When I got back from Florida (after some real nerve-wracking and likely dangerous driving), I went in to get my vision checked and received a -2.0 diopters prescription. The optometrist was shocked that I had let my vision get that bad before getting glasses and made a comment about diabetes, but was also of the impression that my vision would change throughout the day as my blood sugar changed. That clearly wasn’t happening to me (turns out it’s more complicated than that).

The last major symptom was that I had been losing weight at a pretty decent clip (5-10 pounds a month). Obviously, this must have been due to cutting back on pizza and pasta, right? Curiously, past attempts at eating better had never been quite this effective, but why question such great progress when you’re on a roll! At this point, it was late April and the earliest I could get in for a check-up was mid-June, so why not ride out another month of weight loss and see how great my labs come back then?

My Diagnosis

A little over a week before the appointment I started researching diabetes online, since I was starting to wonder about what my doctor and optometrist had said. But surely that takes years to develop, right?

Obviously, my “diet” was working since I had now lost 25 pounds this year and weighed less than I did in my 30s. Who knew eating healthy was so easy!

After a little light reading, I quickly realized how wrong I was, that everything that had happened in the last few months was explained perfectly by diabetes, and that the weight loss might have been diabetes rather than my new diet. This was hard to process.

I picked up a blood sugar meter, and on a Friday night fumbled with the thing enough to figure out how to get a reading. I was shocked when the meter read 567 mg/dL. That can’t possibly be right! My girlfriend tried the meter and her result came in at 77 mg/dL. I tested mine again and this time it registered 596 mg/dL!

At this point, it was 11 PM on a Friday night, and my safest course of action would have been to go to the ER, but I figured if high blood sugar hadn’t killed me in the last 3-4 months, it probably wasn’t going to kill me that weekend. I decided to read more about diabetes, give myself a couple of days to get my wits about me, and go into urgent care on Monday. I also continued to test my blood sugar and it seemed to stay in the 300 to 450 mg/dL range that weekend, regardless of what I ate or whether I was eating.

At urgent care my A1c came in at 13.7%, and my fasting blood sugar was 449 mg/dL. Based on my history, I was more likely to have type 2 diabetes (and additional testing would later confirm that). I was prescribed metformin, and advised to take insulin, advice that I wasn’t ready to take.

A New Diet

I now understood that the reason I had lost so much weight so quickly was my uncontrolled diabetes, at least 3 months of it!

I immediately cut most high-carb foods out of my diet and subsisted largely on a diet of full-fat cottage cheese, full-fat plain Greek yogurt, hard cheese, nuts, avocadoes, and canned beans with olive oil. I also kept some fruit and berries in my diet initially. Throughout the day I ate random combinations of these foods. I didn’t really prepare them or fancy them up at all with cooking (other than heating the beans in the microwave so they’d be warm).

I knew I had screwed things up, and if there was going to be any hope of reversing the damage I feared I had done to my body I needed to focus. Maybe I would be able to go back to eating pizza, pasta, and all those delicious carb-filled foods that I loved someday, but it was clear now wasn’t the time for that.

I’d certainly thrown in the towel on diets plenty of times before and gone back to eating like crap, but this time it felt like there was a gun held to my head, and quitting wasn’t an option. Perhaps I’m being overly dramatic about this, and perhaps it wasn’t the healthiest outlook, but it’s how I saw things and it got me through the first weeks where I was at my highest level of motivation.

I wasn’t using a particular diet system I had found on the internet or in a book, it was just me trying to think of all the foods (as a vegetarian) that I normally ate that were lower on the glycemic index, and sticking to those. Frustratingly, there seemed to be a lot of disagreement online in regards to what the “best” diet was for a diabetic, but I’ll come back to that later.

The Right Medications

With this diet and metformin, my blood sugar still ranged from about 250 to 400 mg/dL that first week. My blood sugar really needed to come down since the longer it remained elevated, the greater my risk for diabetes-related complications. Clearly, a week of my new diet and metformin wasn’t enough, and I was more open to exploring what else could be done.

When I saw my primary doctor after that week, she wanted to put me on insulin too, in order to stabilize my blood sugar. Although I knew that insulin would have rapidly brought my blood sugar down to normal levels, using it would have made it difficult for me to gauge if my dietary changes were getting the job done.

Through my research, I had become convinced that SGLT2 inhibitors were the only class of drugs that made any sense for a person with new uncontrolled type 2 diabetes to take (in addition to metformin). Normally in uncontrolled diabetes, your kidneys excrete sugar to your urine as a means of keeping your blood sugar from getting dangerously high, but that effect doesn’t really kick in until your blood sugar levels are way up there. With an SGLT2 inhibitor, your kidneys are just doing that all the time, keeping your blood sugar down in the process. The real beauty of this is instead of insulin, which causes your body to store that excess sugar (only delaying the problem), once you pee out the excess sugar, it’s gone forever.

I asked my doctor for a referral to an endocrinologist and a prescription for an SGLT2 inhibitor instead. She didn’t have much experience with SGLT2s and started talking about other drugs, but she could see I had a pile of notes with me on different drug classes, the research I had done on them. I think she also realized that although she was the one to write the prescription, that I was ready to argue my case.

As soon as I started taking the SGLT2 inhibitor my blood sugar came down almost immediately.

On Farxiga, within days my blood sugar dropped to the 100 to 150 mg/dL range. I had to pee a little more at first too, which suggested the drug was doing exactly what it was supposed to. After a few days, I found I wasn’t peeing any more than normal, which was probably due to my fairly low-carb diet.

[Editor’s note: Rey had an incredibly positive experience with SGLT2 inhibitors, but they are not for everyone, and do carry side effects and risks, especially when combined with low-carbohydrate diets. Please speak to your doctor about changing your medication.]

This was a great improvement over where I was before, but like every newly-minted diabetic I had dreams of reversing my diabetes and getting my blood sugar back to “normal.” I obviously wasn’t there yet and just because you want something doesn’t mean it’s possible or realistic, but I was holding onto that dream.

Remission is a very controversial topic. Most ADA and official-looking literature I found said that diabetes was a progressive disease. As time passes, more drugs are required to maintain the same degree of control, and some pretty awful complications occur as it gets worse and worse. That was a rather depressing outlook. If it all falls apart in the end, why not just go back to enjoying all those carb-rich foods that I love and enjoy whatever time I’ve got left? Fortunately, I didn’t fall into that trap, but I have to imagine many do.

Intermittent Fasting

I was aware of internet doctors out there on the fringes saying type 2 diabetes can be reversed and people can manage through diet alone, without drugs. Are they selling false hope, similar to new-age healers selling energy crystals to cure cancer? Most of them are talking about low-carb and “keto,” which I’d previously assumed to be just another random fad diet. “They’re obviously quacks,” I thought. I figured that American Diabetes Association was most certainly correct about diabetes being progressive, just giving me the cold hard truth. But just for the sake of argument, I decided to hear the quacks out first.

Of the doctors on Youtube, the first to really suck me in was Dr. Jason Fung, a Canadian nephrologist. He had a very intuitive model for explaining type 2 diabetes, and used research on treating the condition with gastric bypass surgery (which has been highly successful) as a starting point. He suggested a low-carb diet combined with fasting in various forms. Hey, I’m already doing the low-carb thing and it seems to be helping. Maybe fasting would be the next nudge I needed.

I started with 3 set meals a day (eating between 7:30 AM and 7:30 PM, and then fasting from 7:30 PM until 7:30 AM the next morning). Around the time I started Farxiga, I moved into the next phase of fasting, which was to skip breakfast and then eat only lunch and dinner (eat at 12 PM and then 8 PM). To my surprise, I no longer felt hunger when I wasn’t eating. I now know that’s a common benefit to the keto diet, but if someone had tried to tell me about that a year earlier, I would have thought they were crazy. Also, I didn’t really know I was doing keto. I was just doing a tighter version of the diet I’d explained earlier, with less fruit and no beans.

I completed my first full-day fast the weekend after starting Farxiga. I didn’t eat anything at all starting Friday after dinner until around 1 PM on Sunday, for a 40+ hour fast. Again, Farxiga had gotten my blood sugar down to under 150 mg/dL on a regular basis, but this was the kick that finally got me back under 100 mg/dL. Throughout Friday it was testing 130 to 150 mg/dL, Saturday morning I was at 144 mg/dL, but as Saturday dragged on and my fast continued I started getting multiple readings under 100 mg/dL. My Sunday morning fasting result was 96 mg/dL and, it got as low as 79 mg/dL on Sunday afternoon before I finally broke my fast. To my surprise, breaking my fast only bumped me to 119 mg/dL and 5 hours later my blood sugar was back down to 82 mg/dL. Seeing this progress felt truly amazing and it was only 16 days after finding out I had diabetes!

Maintenance

Of course, you don’t eat your way to diabetes in two weeks and you don’t undo your diabetes in two weeks either. I was taking 2,000 mg of metformin a day as well as the SGLT2 inhibitor. The week after my big fast, my fasting blood sugar readings would go back over 100 mg/dL, but I kept plugging away, only eating two larger meals a day during a narrow set of eating hours. I also tested the high-carb waters with a 6-inch Subway sandwich – it spiked my blood sugar to 190 mg/dL, which is much higher than a non-diabetic would likely hit from that meal. That helped knock me back down a peg and remind me that I still had diabetes, after all.

The next weekend I noticed that my blood sugar numbers were starting to come down to under 100 mg/dL without extended fasting. I also noticed that foods that previously spiked my blood sugar a great deal were now spiking it much less. On June 28th (day 24 of knowing I had diabetes and 13 days after starting my SGLT2) I decided to stop taking Farxiga and see what effect it would have. This was not a responsible decision, as you should always consult with your doctor before discontinuing medication, but with my improved blood sugar levels, I questioned if Farxiga was still doing anything for me. It turned out my guess was correct. There was no significant change in fasting or post-meal blood sugar readings in the days that followed, and my type 2 diabetes was now well-controlled via just diet and metformin!

About a week later I started wearing a Freestyle Libre 2 to get a broader picture of my blood sugar trends, and for convenience. My readings were still in the 80-90 mg/dL range throughout the day, with small bumps up over 100 mg/dL after a meal. When I finally was due for my appointment with an endocrinologist to discuss my diabetes treatment, the feel of the visit could best be summed up as “why are you here?” My data showed that my average blood sugar in the previous 10 days had been 95 mg/dL, which would extrapolate to a 4.9% A1C (compared to the 13.7% result when first tested). This is, of course, only an estimate. And my blood sugar had only been well controlled for 2-3 weeks at this point.

Blood sugar wasn’t the only improvement either over last year’s numbers: total cholesterol dropped from 238 mg/dL to 172 mg/dL, with HDL (“good cholesterol”) fairly steady from 64 to 62 mg/dL. LDL (calculated) dropped from 141 to 90 mg/dL. Triglycerides dropped from 165 to 102 mg/dL. The endocrinologist agreed that I no longer needed Farxiga and indicated there really wasn’t a reason for me to see her again, but that I was free to set up another appointment if things changed.

My Best Path Forward

Since then, I’ve done more reading on the keto diet and feel that’s my best path forward to continue to maintain my health, both in terms of diabetes and beyond. I’ve improved enough that I no longer wear a CGM or perform finger sticks to check blood sugar on a regular basis, only checking maybe once a week “just to be sure.” Although I’ve tested out eating some of my old high-carb favorites and been impressed by how much less they spike my blood sugar now, I’m no longer interested in eating them on a regular basis, which is surprising to me. I’ve also found I can sleep through the night just fine without my CPAP machine due to the 35 pounds of weight I have lost from my peak of 215 lbs. The sleep apnea isn’t completely gone, so I still wear the mask most nights, but it appears to be dialed back from severe to mild.

It’s a very weird feeling: when I first found out I had diabetes I wanted nothing more than to continue eating the foods I loved and found comfort in. I felt like something had been stolen from me and feared that my body was permanently broken. Why should other people be able to eat what they want to, and I can’t? It felt very unfair and I really wanted there to be a drug or a treatment that would let me eat how I wanted to. Now that I’ve immersed myself in a better understanding of just how bad those foods were for me, I view things very differently.

I share my story not to lord my results over you if you’ve been less successful with your diabetes. I got really lucky, finding good dietary advice quickly after my diagnosis. Sadly, much of the official guidance out there seems sure to fail. I was also lucky with my uncontrolled diabetes “helping” with the first 25-30 pounds of weight loss.

I no longer have aches and pains when I get up out of bed or have to roll a certain way to avoid them, my memory has improved quite a bit and I’m no longer struggling to recall things I was just told, as I did with high blood sugar levels. I have so much more energy and stamina rather than feeling lethargic or struggling to complete physical activities. It’s like I’m in my 20s all over again (except for a little gray hair)! The downside is I now know if I go back to a lifestyle of enjoying carbohydrate-rich foods, things will go poorly for me, but as long as I don’t, I get to enjoy life so much more than I had before. And there are plenty of delicious foods that aren’t packed with carbs that I’m free to enjoy.

I think diabetes has been a net positive for me, as strange as that sounds. The me of today is very different than the me of a year ago.