Recapping Six Months of Fast Well Feast Well Part 2

From diabetes to fearless doctors, and seedy oils to increased brain synapses, and all things insulin, we've covered the gamut and there's more to come!

Jul 19, 2023

Dear Reader,

It took me three months into this Substack before I began to talk about diabetes in earnest. This is odd since learning about Type 2 diabetes is what began my plunge into researching non-mainstream health. In the first 3 months, I had covered autoimmune diseases, heart disease risks, cancer cover-ups, big fat food lies, but said little about diabetes.

Sometimes when things develop organically and intuitively, they’re more authentic and exciting that way. I didn’t begin this Substack with an outline. I just did what I love to do—I put my nose to the ground like a hound and followed the scent of the health trails that sounded interesting. I found so much info so quickly that I hardly knew what to cover first. So my initial impetus got buried in other discoveries.

But the last post in March became the crowning crescendo of my what-if questions.

What if you lived in a world where most medical doctors weren’t taught the simple cure for a disease that will affect 1 in 2 Americans?

That’s right. 1 in 2 Americans currently has either prediabetes or diabetes. From the CDC website:

When you add together the 11% with diabetes and the 38% who have prediabetes, you get 49% of people in the US having one or the other.

That makes diabetes the most prevalent disease in the entire US and perhaps the developed world. And yet, most medical schools somehow forgot to teach the 15-minute lesson on the non-drug cure. 🤯

So let me tell you a little story. One of my married daughters was over one day. I was in the kitchen cooking so she picked up Jason Fung’s The Diabetes Code sitting on my coffee table. It has a quick start guide. (BTW, you could hop onto Amazon right at this moment and read it for free. You know how the Kindle books show you a preview of the book?)

Anyway, over the course of about 15 minutes, my daughter read the quick start guide and then walked into the kitchen and said: now I understand what T2 diabetes is and how to cure it. I started asking her about it and she had gained, in a matter of 15 minutes, a more thorough understanding than some doctors I’ve talked to. But most doctors aren’t taught non-drug cures.

I’ll summarize the point of the book for you in three sentences:

Type 2 Diabetes is caused by eating more carbs than your personal genetics can handle (which is very individual)
Cut the carbs and/or fast, and the disease goes away completely for everyone if you go low-carb or fast enough (that might mean some extreme fasting as detailed here)
If you rely on medications that partially manage the disease but can’t reverse it instead of making diet changes, the disease will continue to damage your heart, kidneys, eyes, circulation, and nerves.
Note: these complications continue while on diatetes medication. The meds control the blood sugar but not the high insulin. Dr. Fung proves in his book that high insulin causes damage to the body. Only fasting/low carb can reduce insulin. There is no pill that can replicate the healing that fasting/low carb impart.

Where It Gets Personal

None of this is merely academic for me. My dad had T2 diabetes for 30 years, and his doctors never talked to him about diet. They gave him prescriptions that managed the disease but didn’t reverse it. However, he wasn’t told that the medications allowed the disease to continue to damage his body.

He developed heart disease, kidney disease, neuropathy, and the circulation in his legs became so compromised that an infection in his toe got gangrene because his body couldn’t get the immune cells to his feet to heal. His toe became a black stump. Sorry to be graphic but people need to be told these things. Foot infections that won’t heal are extremely common in diabetics.

An ultrasound of his veins revealed that he needed to have his leg amputated from the knee down because the veins were so blocked. This is called peripheral artery disease and is the reason amputations are so common for diabetics. But his heart was too weak to survive the amputation.

His story could have been different. Around 2018, my sister gave my dad a copy of the aforementioned Diabetes Code. He read it, and he followed the plan. He began intermittent fasting. He had already cut out sugary drinks and reduced carbs, but when he added in the fasting, he completely reversed his diabetes so that he was able to come off of all meds. His doctors declared him cured of T2 diabetes.

But. It was too late for his heart. Diabetes, even diabetes so-called “controlled” by medication, destroys the heart. Period, end stop, no exceptions. He had all the heart treatments: a stent, an ablation to remove the scar tissue, and needed open heart surgery but his heart was too damaged to survive the surgery.

This story could have ended differently if his doctors had bothered to give him the right information early on. And I know he would have followed it then because when he did finally get the right info, he did change.

Every chance I get to talk to a doctor, I ask them about this conundrum: why don’t you talk to your diabetic patients about diet? And some do. But the thing that makes me the most frustrated is the ones that say to me: “People can’t cut carbs. People can’t change. People can’t stick with the diet. People like their carbs.” But my dad did.

I always reply: “But people also like their limbs to stay intact, and they like their kidneys to function, and they like eyesight, and keeping their toes, and people especially like their hearts to keep beating.”

In my post Reversing Diabetes Success Stories, I outline some stories from the Diabetes Code. My favorite one is about a woman whose diabetes was so severe when she came to Dr. Fung that she was on the verge of death (yes, you can die of high blood sugar). To save her life, Dr. Fung had her immediately begin a 7-day water-only fast (medically supervised, of course). She felt so good that she voluntarily extended the fast to 3 weeks at which point she no longer needed insulin or her other diabetic medications. Then she began doing alternate-day fasting and lost 63 lbs, a weight loss that she has maintained. As of the writing of the book, she still required no diabetes medication. She had previously been on 220 units of insulin for 10 years.

This is what I mean by saying that diabetes can be reversed for everyone without medication, but depending on how severe the diabetes is, some drastic measures may be required.

Seedy Oils

As I entered April, I thought to myself: how did I write three months of Substacks without hopping onto one of my oldest and most treasured soap boxes? So I remedied the situation by writing a post where I violently hated on toxic, pesticide-ridden, poisonous, genetically modified, planet-destroying, obesigenic, cancer-causing, depression-inducing, autoimmune-triggering, oxidized, mono-cropped, gov’t subsidized, Franken-food-like, ultra processed, and highly inflammatory industrial seed oils. Don’t worry. I provide copious evidence to back up all my derogatory statements in this post.

Then mid-April, I felt the pull to write a post that helped people understand carb cravings from a physiological perspective. My husband told me recently that he thought this was one of my best posts ever. I went back and reread it to see why he thought that. I realized that I had reached a new milestone in my writing.

When I first began writing, I was afraid to make a single statement without backing it up with a medical study. But as I got further along, I began to relax a little. I realized that if people want medical quotes, they can hop onto PubMed themselves and read to their hearts’ content. Type in “intermittent fasting” in the PubMed search bar and, I kid you not, 2,089 studies pop up.

But I realized that what most people want is a meaningful summary of the data. They need someone to make it all make sense for them, put it all together, turn it into a story. Quoting studies still has its place, and I’ll never stop quoting studies, but I realized that I was finding my voice. I was learning how to make all this real and actionable for people.

Next, I had so much fun discovering three doctors who are my heroes. I may sometimes sound like I’m down on doctors, but I only mean it for those who aren’t doing their job well.

In this post, I highlight a doctor who changed his entire practice after a patient entered his office and started lecturing him on how she had to discover the cure for her diabetes all on her own. Dr. Unwin says:

She was hopping mad. She said: “You’ve given me metformin for about 10 years and you never once asked me about the side effects or gave me an alternative. I’ve now learned about cutting the carbs. I’ve lost weight and I feel fabulous.”

This confrontation caused him to completely revamp how he practices medicine. He put on Twitter last week that he has now helped the 130th patient put diabetes into remission without medication.

Dr. Unwin published a paper in the BMJ showing that he had put 77% of his patients into remission in only one year. His co-author said of the results:

If you had a drug that did half of what we have done with the low-carb approach, it would be worth an absolute fortune.

Another doc, Dr. Fettke in Australia, was threatened to have his license removed for recommending a low-carb high-fat diet to his diabetic patients. But after four years of investigations, the charges were finally dropped.

Another fun discovery. In this post, I discuss a randomized trial that compared the results of intermittent fasting only, low-carb only, and doing both. The study found that doing both was the most effective (of course) but that if you’re going to do only one, IF beat low carb in reducing abdominal obesity, total body weight, improving metabolic markers such as glycemic control, and lowering blood pressure. I love trials like this!

May

When May rolled around, I found one of my very favorite stories. Dr. Marik was an ICU doc, top in his field and highly-published, who came up with a treatment for sepsis that reduced the death rate in ICUs from 40% to 8%. He published his results, and docs all over the country were using his sepsis protocol. When COVID rolled around, he came up with a similar protocol that cut his ICU COVID deaths by more than half—until his hospital banned him from using his method.

The first week at work after being told he couldn’t practice medicine the way he had practiced it for three decades, which was to do whatever needed to be done to save a patient’s life, not follow some officially-approved one-size-fits-all formula, he had 7 patients in the ICU for COVID and he watched all 7 of them die. And his hands were tied.

He sought legal counsel. The hospital system, in retaliation, came up with false charges against him and suspended his practicing privileges. Sounds like a terrible story. Except! When all this happened to him, it opened his eyes to corruption in medicine that he’d been blind to for 3 decades. He realized there was a war on repurposed drugs.

He had been treating his own T2 diabetes for 20 years with medication. Could he get off medication? He began intermittent fasting, reversed his diabetes, came off his meds, and now recommends IF to everyone, not only for diabetes, but (here) for long COVID and vax injuries because of the autophagy. He founded the FLCCC (Front Line COVID Critical Care Alliance) to spread the word about effective treatments for COVID.

Next, I realized through comments that it was time to get practical and tackle the topic of the clean fast head-on. “Fasting aids” are actually fasting sabotagers. Diet soda, artificial sweeteners, flavored anything, gum, herbal teas, lemon in water, La Croix, broth, and anything except black coffee, black tea, and water spike insulin (unflavored sparkling water is fine). They make fasting harder and increase hunger. They turn intermittent fasting into the hormonal equivalent of a low-calorie diet because you don’t get your basal insulin level lowered which means your body set-weight doesn’t shift downwards. If you’re going to the trouble of fasting, you might as well make it clean.

I know I’m bossy. 🥹 And I’m sorry. But I want you to be successful. Give the clean fast a try. Pretty please? Kay, thanks.

Then I decided it was time to focus on the feast and discuss how much protein to eat. Cliff notes: eat protein first at your meals and eat as much as you want to full satiety. Let your appetite be your guide. Don’t ever let your appetite be your guide when it comes to carbs, but protein is different.

Have you ever heard of someone bingeing on chicken breasts? Didn’t think so. Protein is not potato chips. Your body will tell you when to stop. The protein leverage hypothesis says that if you don’t get enough protein, your body will signal you to keep eating until it’s fulfilled the protein requirement. By eating protein first, your body will ask for less food.

But then I was feeling all nerdy, and all geeky, and all sciency, so I decided it was time to delve into some “fun” stuff (my idea of fun anyway) by writing this post about how fasting keeps your brain sharp. Lifelong fasting researcher Dr. Mark Mattson found in his lab that:

IF increases the number of synapses on brain neurons (nerve cells) and causes the neurons to remain robust instead of deteriorating
IF increases the number of newly generated neurons
IF makes neurons more resilient and resistant to injury and disease
IF stimulates the increase of an enzyme that inhibits over-excitatory brain dysfunction thereby suppressing anxiety

This image below might make the science easier to follow. You want to be the person on the bottom left not the bottom right. Fasting can make your brain look like the person on the bottom left who has numerous synapses even as he ages.

Next, I covered some rookie fasting mistakes to avoid. Sneak Peek:

Don’t Expect immediate fasting success (Rome wasn’t built in a day)
Don’t obsess about the scale
Don’t restrict calories when you eat
Never open your fast with highly-processed carbs/sugar/junk (and undo your hard work)
Eat at restaurants as infrequently as possible (bc of the obesigenic seed oils)
Be careful whom you tell you’re fasting at first so you don’t get unsolicited, unhelpful, confusing, and contradictory advice (such as: my hairdresser’s second cousin knew a waitress whose great aunt’s coworker tried fasting for 4 hours once and her toenail turned yellow and has never been the same).
Don’t think of fasting as an excuse to binge on junk food. Still make healthy choices.
Be careful who you follow on YouTube. When you’re starting, stick with teachers who have a proven track record of coaching others. There are an abundance of fasting opinions but Dr. Fung’s fasting clinic has served over 30,000 people. Now that’s what I call street cred. He has enough videos to occupy you for months, maybe years, his books are the best researched (as far as number of studies referenced), and he is mostly responsible for the current IF movement. Avoid the naysayers.

June

I began June by pointing out just how unreliable and downright false most mainstream nutrition messaging is. For example, the American Heart Association (AHA) is much more committed to its donors’ interests than it is to Americans’ heart health.

When the AMA ranked diets in order from most heart-healthy to least heart-healthy here, they ranked the DASH diet, low in sodium and fat but high in carbs, as the healthiest diet and the keto diet as the worst diet for heart health. Yet randomized trials revealed the exact opposite results. The AMA somehow happened to spend $800 million ranking diets in the exact reverse order that scientific evidence points to.

For example, this randomized trial found that the keto diet reduced blood pressure, lowered glycated hemoglobin (a measure of blood sugar), and lowered weight by over twice what the DASH diet did. Those are the top three most reliable markers for heart disease.

How can an organization that exists solely to educate on heart disease be dead wrong on its diet recommendation (and I really mean DEAD wrong, since heart disease is the leading cause of death in the US)?

I’m just going to leave you a picture of AMA donors right here and let you draw your own conclusions:

I know I say this often but I’m just going to say it again anyway: “For the gift blindeth the wise, and perverteth the words of the righteous.” Exodus 23:8 KJV

Insulin

I had this realization one day that I talk about insulin constantly but I’ve never started from the beginning and just explained the importance of insulin all in one place. This post about insulin was my attempt to say in one place why the body allows insulin to get too high and all the things that go wrong when insulin is chronically elevated, which is another way of saying all the things that fasting fixes through lowering insulin.

Insulin resistance made simple:

Insulin is your fat-storing hormone.
Ultra-processed food, high carb, high sugar diets require the body to release a large amount of insulin to shuttle sugar out of the blood so you don’t die.
The fat cells grow resistant (think rebellious) to the signal to accept more sugar. This has two causes: first, the fat cells resist when they are stuffed beyond their comfort level (this is somewhat individual). Second, the fat cells resist accepting more sugar when they hear insulin’s signal constantly; they begin to ignore the signal.
Now the body releases even more insulin to force the fat cells to accept the sugar. Sugar has to get out of the blood.
High levels of insulin cause a cascade of health problems.
Fasting is the best way, better even than low carb without fasting, at reducing insulin.

After that sciency, theoretical post, it was time to get practical and talk about how to mix up your fasting schedule to drive that insulin level good and low in this post called The Benefits of Alternating Your Fasting Schedule.

The basic idea behind this post is that you will benefit from occasionally throwing in longer fasts that you don’t want to do daily. This might be a meal-less Monday for some, (something I try to do weekly even though I’m in maintenance), and for others it might just be an OMAD now and then instead of always doing a 16:8 routine.

Then I rounded out June by encouraging readers to take supplements more strategically. There are many supplements that cause more harm than good when they are not medically necessary, such as iron and calcium. Something that is bioavailable in food, such as heme-iron found in red meat, does not have the same negative effect as supplemental iron. Check out Nine Supplements You Probably Don’t Need.

Finally, I ended the first six months by comparing how fasting works to the fancy and pricey new weight loss drugs that everyone and their mother is talking about. The rebound weight loss on these $1,500/month pills is inevitable because even though it suppresses hunger while you take it, the effect wears off when you stop.

But fasting causes your body’s set weight to reset to a lower weight. And although it’s technically possible to regain weight after losing it fasting, most people don’t. Just listen to Gin Stephen’s over 300 testimonials in her podcast of people who had yo-yo dieted their entire life until fasting.

For those who were following my paid posts, I wrote one called My Secret Weapon on how the 40-hour fast is my secret to staying on track after summer events happen. Whenever I feel appetite control slipping and the carb cravings returning, I do a 40-hour fast and things get really great again. My body instantly remembers how to make and use ketones, I get a rush of adrenaline, and I’m my old fat-burning, happy, carb-addict-free self again. After birthdays, anniversaries, and Tuesday carb benders, this is my surefire way to connect with my inner faster. Note: I recently started extending this fast to 48 hours. In fact, I broke a 48-hour fast just a few hours ago. I loved it. I do this twice a month or so.

I did two paid posts where I decided to really expand my subject matter and deal with some weighty matters facing Western civilization, and how these destructive ideas apply to health. (What Do Rousseau, Freud, and Marx Have to Do with Our Understanding of Health? and What Heidegger and Phenomenology Have to Do with Eating Healthy) These are “thinking cap” posts and perhaps make people feel like they’re back in school again (this isn’t the best marketing pitch for them. But it’s good for you; a hormetic stress remember?) 🤣 These weren’t my most popular posts but a girl never knows which darts gonna stick.

Tales From Maintenance and How Fasting Can Be the Beginning of Many Other Positive Changes were two paid posts that got a bit more love than my two esoteric, philosopher-wanna-be-but-also-wanna-hate-on-philosophy posts. (If there are one or two of you out there who really like to read something out of left field every now and then, I got some more off-beat material up my sleeve. Gotta space it out.)

What is Yet to Come

I currently have no less than 17 drafts for future posts ranging from topics such as the addiction model of sugar and carbs to how John D. Rockefeller changed medicine (for the worst) and put 50% of medical schools out of business to maximize pharmaceutical profits.

I’ve also started posts about how to push past a plateau, navigate the grocery store, and get back on track after falling off the fasting wagon. Plus, studies show how high protein has the same effect on the body as those weight loss drugs (info I came across after I wrote the post on semaglutides).

If I just mentioned something you are really interested in, drop me a comment and I’ll move it up in importance. Also, feel free to ask questions in the comments. That helps me keep a pulse on what info people are most interested in. (Q’s about the beliefs of philosophers with long German names are not commonly asked questions. But why? 🤔)

Again, thank you for being my reader and supporting this work. I can think of few things more important than doing everything we can to stem the tide of the obesity/diabetes/heart disease/cancer/mental-health/autoimmune/pharmaceutical-dependent health epidemic that developed nations worldwide are facing. Simple solutions abound but don’t hold your breath waiting for mainstream media to cover them. They’ve sold out to corporate interests. You and I are the ones who will spread the word.

Blessings,

Leslie Taylor

Fast Well | Feast Well

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