The BEST diet to reverse diabetes

WHEN I started investigating intermittent fasting, I had a strong personal reason for doing so.

I was only a little overweight, but to my shock a routine blood test revealed I was in the early stages of type 2 diabetes.

I was delighted when the experiment I conducted on myself — by going on the 5:2 — effectively reversed my diabetes and took me out of the high-risk category.

All the evidence at the time pointed at the benefits of intermittent fasting and shifting excess weight.

Then, in 2014, I came across what seemed like a crazy claim: that people who follow a rapid weight-loss diet not only lose a lot of weight fast, but also clear fat out of their livers and reverse their type 2 diabetes.

This audacious claim was being made by Dr Roy Taylor, professor of medicine and metabolism at Newcastle University and one of Europe’s leading diabetes experts.

When we first met, he showed some of the studies he’d done — showing that type 2 diabetes (the sort you get when you are older) can be put into remission, perhaps even ‘cured’, by a rapid weight-loss diet.

As he explained, the reason most people get type 2 diabetes is because they have too much fat around the tummy, called ‘visceral fat’, which also infiltrates the liver and pancreas and stops them ‘talking to each other’. This can, in time, lead to type 2 diabetes.

Roy told me I’d managed to get my blood sugars back to normal by doing the 5:2 because I had lost more than 10 per cent of my body weight, thus draining fat from my liver and pancreas.

The implications of what Roy said were huge: this was a massive breakthrough. Type 2 diabetes is the fastest-growing chronic disease, worldwide. There are more than 400 million people with the condition and though drugs help control symptoms, they have limited impact on the underlying disease.

However, for a long time doctors remained sceptical. ‘They don’t believe patients will do it,’ Professor Taylor told me. ‘And they don’t believe it will work.’

He teamed up with Professor Mike Lean of Glasgow University to run a huge study called DIRECT (DIabetes REmission Clinical Trial). Patients were randomly allocated to either an 800 calorie-aday diet, made up largely of meal replacement shakes, with behavioural support, or asked to follow the best conventional diet advice and support.

The results, published in February 2018, were astonishing. The 800-calorie dieters lost an average of 10kg, compared with 1kg in the control group, and nearly half managed to bring their blood sugars down to normal, despite coming off their diabetes drugs.

Mike told me: ‘Given our results, it should be considered unethical not to give people with type 2 diabetes access to the necessary support for at least a good try at a remission.’

Two other studies, also published in 2018, support this. One, dubbed the PREVIEW study, hoped to find out whether people with PRE-diabetes (ie, elevated blood sugar levels that put them at risk of getting type 2 diabetes) could stick to 800 calories a day for long enough to reduce their risk.

More than 2,000 volunteers from eight countries stuck to the 800 calories a day for eight weeks. They lost an average of 11kg (nearly two stone) in that time and many got their blood sugar levels back to normal.

So if you have type 2 diabetes please do talk to your GP about trying my new 5:2/FAST 800.

You might need a little supervision or support because the diet’s effect is so powerful.

Remember, rapid weight loss is challenging, so if you are not suited to fasting you may prefer to follow the Med-style low-carb recipes in these pullouts without significantly reducing calories.

You can also double up the quantities or add extra vegetables for non-fasting days.