After 15 years of intense research (reading, practicing, analyzing, checking and reapplying paid dividends) I have finally reversed my diabetes and the muscle problems that came with it. That doesn’t mean I can eat all the sweets, it means that I don’t have to take medicines anymore, check blood sugar levels, and I can cut down my dependency on doctor’s and more importantly I don’t have to worry about diabetes complications like heart attacks, kidney failure, blindness, leg amputation, etc…etc…
More than the diabetes, it is the muscle loss, muscle weakness and severe muscle pain that frustrated me for so long. Doing daily activities was a challenge, even holding a tea cup was hard. Doctors only said, ‘maintain your sugar levels’ and they weren’t sure about my muscle problems. No doctor wanted to spend time to find out of why I got diabetes at a young age. I had to find a solution and became a lab rat to find out the cause.
One doctor in India said that diabetes is very common now a days and that it is my fate and I had to just live with it. But it wasn’t what he said, it was how he said it - the arrogance in his voice - that fired me up and was one of my motivation factors in this journey. Just because he read 1000 books more than I did, didn’t mean he knows everything and could decide my fate.
We were always reminded that once you get a lifestyle disease like diabetes you are stuck with it for the rest of your life and the ever-mounting strong medications is the only recourse. Be it financial or moral dependence, this is what the system (medical field, pharmaceutical companies…etc..) wants us to rely on and believe. I am not against doctors in any way but had to take things into my own hands as the pain was unbearable.
I went against doctor’s advice and it was not easy. It is very frustrating at times as I was not getting the results I wanted then I had to start all over again. I went from one theory to another. I had to put everything under microscope. I took each myth/misconception and tested it out on myself.
Despite maintaining good sugar levels, I got a minor heart attack in 2013. We moved to India during that time. Unfortunately, I was alone at home and drove myself to Apollo hospital which was around 7 kms. I knew I was in trouble but didn’t panic as it would have made things worse. I applied Yoga/Pranayama techniques to stay calm throughout my drive. Parked the car and reached ICU. I was told I had 2 blockages in the heart and got stents installed to clear the blockage. Stayed in hospital for 2 days and that is when I decided to intensify my research. Even though I maintained sugar levels it was the stress that caused the blockages.
If I only listened to doctors I would have been dead by now. Whatever I was doing helped me to survive. Working in IT field in India is not easy. Stress is the number one killer and very underrated. Lot of people are stressed and unfortunately they don’t know that they are stressed as it has become part of them.
Lifestyle disease should be fixed with lifestyle and not medicines. Medicine does not fix the fundamental problem but only the symptoms and that too only for that day. You must take the medicine again tomorrow to fix the symptom for tomorrow only and this goes on for the rest of our lives.
I did reverse my diabetes 2 years back but I was not satisfied and needed more answers, so I started focusing on other lifestyle diseases. Spent one full year on stress. Took Yoga teacher training and got Yoga certified teacher for this reason.
Last year I was more focused on weight loss. Always wondered why everyone says that they cannot reduce weight despite doing everything. Even though I am not overweight decided to try it on myself. In 2 months, I reduced 10 pounds despite travelling.
After doing so much experimentation and observing of people, I can say that weight loss is a smaller issue in scheme of things. I am happy that I got this disease and not my kids. I have already started working with both my kids so they can completely avoid lifestyle diseases or worst case scenario push it into old age. Here are some examples of things I did:
- I went on a 3 month no salt diet just to see if is it true that we cannot live without salt. It was not easy to completely remove salt from food which means I had very limited options of what I ate.
- On one occasion, I wanted to just eat fast food for 2 weeks to see what happens to the body. I gave up after 4 days. I felt very heavy in the chest and was breathing heavy, felt like choking. I was also getting irritated very easily.
- Done lots of crazy things which I cannot even tell to anyone.
It is an amazing feeling to be disease free and enjoy life the way we are supposed to.
Sorry for the long article……hope it was worth it.