To get busy living, you must CHANGE! Clinical studies show that an integrated diet and exercise program is the best way to control diabetes or to keep from getting it. Unfortunately, those same studies also show that it's hard to change. Despite the fear of diabetic complications, fewer than half the people who attempted to change their lifestyle succeeded.

Beating Diabetes.org is dedicated to helping you make those changes. If you want to get busy living, you've come to the right place.

The Clinical Studies

Coping with Type 2 diabetes is very difficult. A pioneering clinical study (see note 1 below) shows how tough it is to break the bad habits that lead to diabetes. In the study, 3,234 people classified as obese and prediabetic were placed randomly in three groups. One group received intensive lifestyle counseling, including diet counseling, free health club memberships if needed, group and individual fitness training, and regular follow-ups. The other two groups received basic exercise and diet recommendations, but one group was treated with the drug metformin (aka Glucophage), while the other was not.

After three years, the group that received intensive lifestyle counseling had a 58% lower incidence of developing diabetes than the group that just received basic counseling, while the group treated with metformin had a 31% lower incidence of developing diabetes. Amazingly, however, even in the group that received intensive lifestyle counseling, only 50% of the members met the target of a 7% weight reduction.

What can we conclude from the study? The good news is that diet and exercise really works to control diabetes or prevent you from getting it. The bad news is that it is really, really hard to break the habits that lead to diabetes, especially if you do not get intensive help from both nutrition and fitness experts. Even with intensive help, about half of the people do not manage to stick to their diets. Without such intensive help, furthermore, the results are far worse.

Like Quitting Smoking Only Harder

Beating diabetes is like quitting smoking, except it's a lot harder. Whether you go cold turkey, undergo hypnosis, or use some gradual method like the patch, you stop smoking through one simple action - not putting cigarettes in your mouth. To beat diabetes, you have to avoid eating the favorite foods that you've eaten for years and learn to eat new foods. You have to add regular exercise into your already busy lifestyle when all you really want to do is relax on your couch or easy chair. You also have to regularly monitor your blood sugar levels and actively plan how to manage yourself. Finally, you have to do it month after month after month. The bottom line is that you have to make numerous changes to your life, which nobody really wants to do.

Quite frankly, many diabetics and prediabetics are overwhelmed by the changes they have to make. They're also falsely seduced by how healthy they feel, which makes it even easier to go into denial about diabetes. When you have a disease, you're supposed to feel sick. Unfortunately, most diabetics feel fine. They're seduced by the lack of symptoms and go into denial until the first time they get a nasty diabetic complication, like neuropathy (numbness in the feet).

How Do You Beat Diabetes?

So how do you cope? What's the secret to beating diabetes? Unfortunately, there's no secret key that unlocks the door. There's only old-fashioned resolve, like the kind you need to quit smoking. The bottom line is that you can beat diabetes through three connected steps. The first is that you must accept you really have diabetes or that you will get it if you do not change. The second is that you have to believe that you can beat it. The third is you need the right program to help you beat it. It's time to tell you my story, so you can understand our perspective.

My Story

My name is Steve Caswell. I'm the principal designer of Beating Diabetes.org. I'm also a diabetic. I was diagnosed in 1997 and, until late 2003, I had an on-again, off-again battle to keep myself under control. For short periods, I would do well. For much longer periods, I would be out of control. In July 2003, I had my semi-annual fasting cholesterol and blood sugar test. My numbers were horrible. My triglycerides were above 200 when they should have been below 150. My Hemoglobin A1C was 8.5 when it should have been below 6.7. My HDL (good) cholesterol was 24 when it should have been above 35.

My diabetes counselor at Kaiser Permanente sent me a letter warning me that if I did not change quickly I could expect to start seeing complications. Of course, since I had been hearing about these complications for six years without experiencing them, a part of me really didn't believe it. Since I also had been trying to keep myself under control, another part of me had just given up. Basically, a part of me was resigned to what was about to come.

The worst part was that my diet wasn't all that bad and I sort of exercised. I didn't drink alcohol. I rarely ate red meat. I tried to keep down my portions of rice and related starchy carbs. I only ate at fast food joints once or twice a month. I walked golf courses twice a week and occasionally hiked in nearby mountains. It wasn't enough or even close. The bottom line was that I was in denial about my precarious position.

In September 2003, I decided that I needed to regain control of my diabetes. I wasn't really sure where to start, but I decided that I should at least join a health club and begin exercising. While checking out all the local clubs near my home, I added a place to my list called the Theiss Institute of Health & Fitness. I called and set up an appointment to meet with its president, Brian Theiss.

The Theiss Solution

My meeting was remarkable. Brian explained that while everyone knows that both diet and exercise are the keys to a healthy lifestyle, the diet and fitness industries seem to operate in a disjointed fashion. The world of diet focuses on eating, and treats exercise as almost an afterthought, while the fitness industry focuses on working out, and treats diet in a secondary manner.

Health care organizations, he explained, also have serious problems. While they have good intentions, they are geared towards treating people after they became sick. Few health care organizations, if any, have formal services that show you how to develop an integrated diet and exercise program.

He then explained his program in which I would be given a diet that was coordinated with an exercise plan. Both are scripted on a weekly basis, so that I would know exactly what to eat and how to exercise. An eight-week program, he explained, consists of a detailed evaluation of my health and fitness, along with an integrated diet and exercise program that is customized for me based upon the evaluation. Under the plan, I would be expected to follow the diet exactly and to exercise six days a week -- three days of cardio and three days of cardio-resistance training. I decided to sign up. The results were phenomenal.

The New Me

In less than one week on the program - and before I had even lifted one weight - I stopped taking insulin. As a Type 2 diabetic, I was taking 20 mg of glyburide a day and 2,500 mg of metformin, which are the maximum amounts allowed. Glyburide stimulates the pancreas to produce more insulin, while metformin stimulates the cells to absorb more sugar. While the pills work wonders, they can cause liver damage as a side effect, so there's a maximum dosage anyone can take. I took insulin because the pills alone were not working at their maximum dosages.

After two weeks of only doing cardio, I started the combined cardio and resistance (weight) training program. My blood sugar dropped so low several nights in a row that I had to reduce the dosages of my pills. By the end of the eight-week program, I was taking only 5 mg of glyburide and 1,500 mg of metformin a day, a drop of 75% and 40%, respectively. Because of the potential of liver damage, this alone is a huge long-term benefit for me.

My numbers also did an incredible turnaround as shown in the following table:

In less than two months, my diabetes went from being completely out-of-control to fully under control. In what I think of as the first stage of my new lifestyle, I went from being obese to being just slightly overweight. Furthermore, I maintained this control for several months. In the next stage, Now comes the bad news. I successfully managed my diabetes for about a year, then I started to slide. My numbers went higher than I or my doctor wanted, although they were still better than before.

The primary reason was not knowing how to control diabetes. It was because I was doing it all by myself. I had no support group to help me stay on the correct path. This was the genesis for BeatingDiabetes.org. We do not lack for information about how to control our diabetes. Instead, we lack a support group of fellow diabetics to help us along. But we're all busy people. So instead of trying to start a local meeting of fellow diabetics, I believe we can have the same effect using e-mail, the phone, and, maybe, occasional face-to-face meetings.

Update

Making It Work For You

Beating diabetes is not something that you can easily do by yourself. As we've already seen, the odds of success are far less than 50 percent if you try to go it alone. The American Diabetes Association has concluded in its Clinical Practice Recommendations 2003, "Better strategies are needed to help people lose weight and keep it off and exercise more often. Moreover, the U.S. health care system is not structured to provide or reimburse for regular lifestyle counseling." The recommendations continue, "From a practical point of view, this means that the diabetes health care team will be required to understand how to analyze the risks and benefits of physical activity in a given patient. Furthermore, the team, consisting of but not limited to the physician, nurse, dietician, mental health professional, and patient, will benefit from working with an individual with knowledge and training in exercise physiology (see note 2 below)."

Beating Diabetes.org is designed to be that key member of your team "with knowledge and training in exercise physiology." Basically, we've created an integrated diet/fitness/self-help program to help almost anyone beat diabetes. We invite you to explore our program in detail, and also to ask your diabetic counselor or doctor to look at us as well. If you want to get busy living, we're confident that we can help you beat diabetes.

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1. The Diabetes Prevention Program Research Group

2. Diabetes Care, Volume 26, Supplement 1, "American Diabetes Association: Clinical Practice Recommendations 2003", pages S65 and S73.