the plan

So while I was in the hospital, at the behest of a friend, I read Dr. Roy Taylor's Your Simple Guide to Reversing Type 2 Diabetes. The book provides a simple, two-month plan to help you reverse your diabetes (and like Jason Fung's book, it does assume diabetes is reversible... not curable, per se, but certainly not progressive and lifelong, as many still assume). After you go through the initial two months, you slowly reacclimate by reincorporating more-or-less regular food into your diet, and after a month of reincorporation, you can then eat a modified low-carb diet with occasional cheat days. As I mentioned before, I'm planning to follow Dr. Taylor's harsh two-month program, after which I'll switch over to Dr. Fung's intermittent-fasting regime, which I think will be better for me. Dr. Taylor's program uses diet shakes, which has me worried about sugar, but (1) he says the amount of sugar is overall negligible, and (2) I plan to incorporate exercise into my daily routine, which ought to lower sugar levels.

Dr. Taylor's program requires you to ingest no more than 800 calories' worth of food per day during those first two months—no cheat days. The lack of cheat days shouldn't be a problem, at least for the moment: since the stroke, I seem to have lost my appetite for most things, so I'm not dealing with cravings (the stroke has changed several things, mentally). If I follow the program as literally as possible, two of my meals will be diet shakes and one will be little more than vegetables. I already eat Paris Baguette salads for lunch, so this shouldn't be too hard. 

After I finish the two months (and hopefully reverse the diabetes), I'll move into a maintenance phase that will, I suppose, last me the rest of my life. My own vision of this is to follow Dr. Jason Fung's intermittent-fasting regime, but with two cheat days per month. With all the walking I hope to be doing, having two cheat days shouldn't be that big of a sin, although I realize that going insane on a given cheat day could be bad for sugar levels, etc. That's going to be a struggle. Maybe for some months, it'll have to be just a single cheat day.

I'm not planning to start Dr. Taylor's program until after June 10th, which is when I have to make an appearance at the hospital, diaries in hand (blood sugar and blood pressure). The two months during which I'll be following Dr. Taylor's program are among my least favorite months of the year, so that's another good thing. Anyway, that's the plan. Check in again soon for more fun and excitement.