Day 12: The Ketogenic Diet and Diabetes

The Ketogenic Diet and Diabetes

These are the notes from last night’s video in the 28 Day Challenge.  You can join us in the 28 Day Challenge FaceBook Group here, get our FREE 28 Day Ketogenic Meal Plan here, and pick up our recipe and instructional books here.

One of the biggest problems in medicine today is the marked increase in the number of Type II Diabetes diagnoses and the medical community’s insistence on treating the same as Type I Diabetes.  Type I Diabetes is a disease where the patient’s immunity system has attacked the pancreas and the pancreas can no longer produce insulin.  Type I diabetics will always have to take insulin because the body cannot produce its own.  While a ketogenic diet can help with Type I by reducing the amount of insulin needed, it can never cure it.

Type II Diabetes, however, is an entirely different disease.  Someone with Type II Diabetes has eaten so many carbohydrates and their body has produced so much insulin that overexposure to the hormone has caused the body to become insulin resistant.

We have already looked at the metabolic process that happens when you eat a carbohydrate where the pancreas secretes insulin to either use the blood glucose as fuel or to store it as fat.  What we didn’t say at the time is that when insulin levels are chronically high over the course of years or decades, the body begins to become resistant to the insulin signals.  The LPL “hooks” on your cells become fewer and fewer as the body tries to deal with the massive insulin hormone signals that are always being thrown at it.

It is the LPL receptors on the muscles that are the first to shut down, leading to a loss of overall energy and a decreased desire to be active.  The LPL receptors on fat cells take longer to shut down which means more of your blood sugar is shunted into fat cells for long term storage.  This is why weight gain isn’t linear but you tend to gain weight faster the heavier you become.  As you become more and more insulin resistant, your body moves blood sugar into fat cells at a faster and faster rate causing you to gain weight faster.  Over time, your body just loses the ability to deal with blood glucose at all, causing Type II Diabetes, increased rates of obesity and even death if it goes on long enough.

The typical treatment for a Type II Diabetic is either to increase the amount of insulin available to the body through insulin injections or to increase the body’s sensitivity to insulin by using drugs like Metformin.  This is almost exactly the opposite way Type II Diabetes should be treated.  If Type II Diabetes is caused by so much insulin that the body has become desensitized to it, then whatever the treatment is, it is certainly not more insulin.  The treatment should be to require less insulin to treat and food eaten.  This is accomplished by eating less carbs and smaller meals, both of which come naturally with a ketogenic diet.

The dirty secret of Diabetes is that is an almost universally curable disease.  There are people that have struggled with diabetes for over 25 years that have reversed it very quickly with just changing their diet.  My wife was diagnosed with it before we switched to this low carb lifestyle and disappeared in about a month.  My point is that if you or someone you know has diabetes, you can absolutely cure it quickly and easily with a ketogenic diet.

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