Reverse Type 2 Diabetes Faster: 10 Daily Habits That Lower Blood Sugar

Hi, I'm Dr. Ken Barry, a family physician, and in this video, I'm going to teach you how to reverse your type 2 diabetes and keep it reversed for life. I've helped thousands of people do this all over the world, and now I'm gonna help you do it because I know that that is your goal, or at least it should be your goal. Now, your first question should be, if he's a doctor, why is this being filmed in a kitchen? Here's the answer. You're never going to reverse your type 2 diabetes in the doctor's office, at the pharmacy, or in the gym. You're gonna reverse it right here in the kitchen. So let's go through the 10 ways you're gonna reverse your type 2 diabetes and keep it gone forever. And you may say, well, my doctor taught me everything I need to know about type 2 diabetes, and that's probably false. Doctors are very, very busy. They're often not interested in nutrition at all, and what that's gonna wind up meaning for you is that you don't get the complete information that you need. So I want you to continue to follow up with your doctor. I want you to continue to follow your doctor's advice, and I want you to keep working on this stuff at home and checking in with your doctor from time to time, giving them updates just as they give you updates. So tip number one, if you have pre-diabetes or type 2 diabetes, and this also applies to people with type 1 diabetes as well, is to stop drinking sugar in any form. Now, I'm hoping that you've already stopped the Coca-Cola and Pepsi and all the other soft drinks that are sweetened with sugar, but what many people with diabetes don't know is that fruit juice is just as bad as drinking a Coca-Cola. Anytime you drink sugar, that sugar is immediately available for your body. It immediately hammers your pancreas, which has to put out a bunch of insulin if you're type 2, and that's not a healthy place for you to be. There is no healthy fruit juice for somebody who is a diabetic. Stop drinking any sugar whatsoever. Tip number two is start every day with a meal that is mostly protein and fat and very low in carbohydrates. Now, your doctor or your dietician may have literally told you you need to have this many grams of carbohydrates per meal and carbohydrates in your snacks. The research doesn't support this, and if you follow that advice, you will never reverse your type 2 diabetes. If your doctor or dietician said something like you need to include 20, 30, 40 grams of carbohydrates per meal, that's not serving you, and it's not gonna help you reverse your type 2 diabetes, but your first meal of the day needs to be mostly protein and fat, both of which are healthy and good for you, and very low in carbohydrates. I would say for breakfast, try to keep your carbohydrates under 20 total grams a day, and if you can eat a breakfast that has no carbs, that's gonna keep your blood sugar from spiking, and it's gonna keep your A1C continuously decreasing, which is what you want, that's the goal. So if you start your breakfast with bacon and eggs or steak and eggs or eggs and avocado and bacon, those are perfect breakfasts for somebody with type 2 diabetes. If you add a slice of toast, that's all gonna turn into starch, which all turns into sugar, which is gonna spike your blood sugar and make your A1C worse. Now, tip number three is, of course, I think you know that you should be really severely cutting down on desserts, anything that added sugar is inside it, anything that's predominantly carbohydrate or sugar. Hopefully you already know that, but what you may not know and what you may have been misinformed on is that, hey, you can have a baked potato, a baked sweet potato, or you can have sweet potato fries. Even though these are natural sugar, guess what? Your pancreas and your body cannot tell the difference between the natural sugar in a sweet potato or a baked potato and the actual sugar that's in a sugar bowl, because those are natural sugars too. All sugar's actually natural, there's no unnatural sugar. But here's the thing, the potatoes contain something called starch. Now, if you're not a dietician, and I don't expect you to be, you may not realize that starch is just long chains of sugar holding hands. And as soon as you eat something that's starchy, like a potato or bread or many other things, that starch breaks down immediately into sugar. And then guess what that does? I don't have to tell you, you already know. So cut down on the overall sugar for sure. Cut it back severely. But starches as well are just sugar in disguise. Tip number four is to pretty please beg your doctor for a continuous glucose monitor. Now, your doctor may have said, hey, you've gotta prick your finger to check your blood sugar, and that's way better than nothing. But if you're really gonna reverse your type 2 diabetes, you've gotta get dead serious about this, and you need the state-of-the-art equipment, that's a continuous glucose monitor, or a CGM. With it, you can watch your blood sugar every five minutes, 24 hours a day. Super important, because a lot of people with type 2 diabetes don't know that if they fast, their blood sugar might go up. That's not bad or dangerous or unhealthy, that's just a normal physiological reaction. You also may not know that when you work out or go for a brisk walk, your blood sugar might go up. That doesn't mean you shouldn't work out or shouldn't walk. That's something that you have to learn as someone with diabetes. That's okay, that's a normal blood sugar excursion. That's not a blood sugar spike caused by you doing something wrong. Tip number five is something that, again, is probably gonna fly in the face of the advice you were given by your doctor, or if your doctor refers you to a dietician. They may have actually told you that to control your blood sugar or to moderate your blood sugar, that you should eat snacks in between your meals. This is absolutely wrong. I'm highly encouraging you to not snack at all, and there's various, multiple physiological reasons for this. You don't wanna graze like a cow. That's not gonna help your A1C, your blood sugar, your diabetes. You wanna eat discrete meals, and then in between those meals, do not snack, and definitely don't drink anything with sugar or really with calories in it at all, because when you fast, and anytime you're not eating, you're fasting technically. Let's say you have breakfast at 8 a.m. and you have lunch at noon. That's three and a half, four hours there that your blood sugar's gonna have a chance to return back to normal. Also, your insulin level is gonna have a chance to return back to normal. The only reason that you should ever snack is if you're currently injecting insulin and you haven't yet got off the insulin, which will happen very quickly if you follow the tips in this video, then you might need a snack just to keep your blood sugar from going too low because you're currently taking too much insulin or too much diabetes medicine, but on the whole, you need to minimize snacks. Try not to snack at all between meals. That's gonna go a long way towards reversing your type 2 diabetes. Tip number six, prioritize your sleep like it's a medicine from the pharmacy. Your sleep and protecting it is so important for keeping your cortisol levels normal. You don't wanna keep them low or non-existent. Cortisol's your friend, it's not your enemy. You wanna keep it at a normal level, though, and if you lose sleep, not only is it gonna raise your cortisol, it's gonna raise your blood sugar, which is gonna raise your A1C. You're gonna be more snacky. You're gonna be more hungry. You're gonna also have lower levels of willpower so that when somebody comes over and brings you that ding-dong cake that they made, you're gonna be less likely to be able to say no thank you to that. So prioritize your sleep by maximizing your sleep hygiene, and I actually have another YouTube video. Maybe it'll pop up right here, a link, and you can go watch that. The more you prioritize and protect your sleep, that's gonna help you keep your blood sugar down and lower your A1C. Tip number seven, I hope you're enjoying this. Tell me in the comments what you think about it. Tip number seven is, if you're going to drink an alcoholic beverage, let's not drink beer. Beer's very high in carbohydrates. It's gonna spike your blood sugar. Beer's for frat boys, grow up. Stop drinking your beer. The IPAs are no longer cool. That was so 1990s, okay? Number two, wine, don't drink wine. Wine is often very high in carbohydrates, which are sugar, which spike your blood sugar and all the other things. Also be very careful with mixed drinks. 99% of the mixed drinks at a bar or at a party are gonna contain sugar, so you're literally drinking sugar with your mixed drink, okay? So for a diabetic, if you want a mixed drink, you're gonna have an ounce of some liquor with club soda and a squeeze of lime. That's gonna be almost zero carbs, zero sugar, and that's not gonna spike your blood sugar. Now, as a diabetic, I want you to really, really limit the alcohol overall, even if you're drinking something that I just said is not that bad to drink, because the more alcohol you drink, the more inflamed your liver's gonna be, the less likely it's gonna be able to perform its duties like gluconeogenesis and other things that the liver does. You wanna baby your liver and take care of it. Just avoid alcohol altogether. But tip number eight, stop buying foods at the supermarket that say diabetic-friendly, diabetes-friendly, approved by the American Diabetes Association, or keto on the label. All of these are marketing terms. The companies that make these foods, they don't care if you ever reverse your type 2 diabetes. All they want is your six or seven or eight bucks. You understand? That's marketing. If it says keto on the front label, it's not keto. If it says diabetes-friendly, it's definitely not diabetes-friendly. You want to eat as much as you can from one ingredient, whole, real foods that come from the produce section or the meat section or the dairy section. That's where you need to buy 99% of your food. And when you eat out, it needs to be a meat, it needs to be eggs, it needs to be a low-carbohydrate vegetable. I've got a YouTube video about the top seven low-carb-friendly vegetables. This is very important. This is your one life. This is your one shot, okay? You don't get a do-over. This is not a video game. You can't hit reset. Once you've had a disastrous diabetes complication, it's too late to take that back. So do not trust your health to the marketers that market these products made by huge corporations that do not care about your health. Tip number nine. Now, I mentioned earlier that I want you to work with your local doctor, right? Here's one of the ways you're gonna work with your local doctor. Many local doctors will tell you things like, oh, your A1C's six or it's under 6.5. That's good enough. That's not true. The research is very clear that if your A1C's above 5.6, you're doing permanent damage to every organ and tissue in your body. Your goal is to have an A1C of 5.6 or lower. That's it. Don't take any compromise because if you do compromise with your doctor, you're compromising not your doctor's health, you're compromising your health, okay? Now, I don't want that for you. I want you to have the best health you can possibly have. So here are the labs you're gonna ask for routinely, and I would recommend you ask for them every three months. You wanna know, what's my A1C, doctor? Also, what's my fasting insulin or serum insulin? Very important to know. Expect some kickback and pushback on this. Many doctors have no idea how a fasting insulin would help a diabetic, but you're gonna say, well, doctor, the reason I want my fasting insulin is if it's above 10, that tells me I'm still eating too many carbohydrates for my personal physiology, and I need to cut the carbohydrates down even more. So every three months, please check my fasting insulin. Also remember, many doctors will tell patients, you don't have to fast for labs anymore. This also is false. You wanna fast for 12 to 14 hours before any time they stick a needle in your arm to draw blood. So you want an A1C, a fasting insulin. You also wanna know your triglycerides, because if they're still high, that's a sign you're still eating too many carbohydrates for your body. HDLC, that's gonna be in the lipid panel. You want your HDLC to be 50 or higher. If it's low, that means you're not eating enough fatty red meat. You need to increase the volume of fatty red meat in your diet. And then the fifth test is an HSCRP, high-sensitivity C-reactive protein. This is gonna talk about levels of inflammation in your body. If that number's high, you're gonna keep doing things to lower the inflammation in your body. If your doctor wants to order more tests, I would highly encourage that. Get all those, yes, absolutely, but make sure these five tests are always included. Now, tip number 10 is very important. If you're already taking prescription medication for your diabetes, if you are, then I don't want you to abandon your doctor. I want you to keep working with your doctor and keep checking these labs because these numbers are gonna tell you, hey, I started out taking three different medications for my diabetes, two pills and an injection, but now my blood sugars are so good, my A1C's come down so far, it's probably time to stop one of those medications. I don't want you to do that on your own. I want you to do it with your doctor. If your doctor wants to refer you to a dietician, accept that, go see the dietician, but I want you to be prepared to ask intelligent questions. Many dieticians, just like doctors, they just memorize what they're taught. They believe the party line, so to speak. Much of dietician education is actually designed by the American Diabetes Association. They say on their website, we wanna be your partners for life. It's my contention that you shouldn't be partners with life with the ADA, you should just reverse your type 2 diabetes and then go outside and play and enjoy your life. That's my goal for you. As you cut the carbohydrates, cut the starches, get rid of the sugar, you're gonna need much less insulin quite quickly. And so when you first start following my 10 tips in this video, you might wanna follow up with your doctor every week or two or three if you're injecting insulin, or at least communicate with them on the portal or a text message or email and just say, hey, here are my blood sugars over the last two days, is it time to decrease my insulin more? So just be prepared for that. Follow your blood sugar very closely because what I don't want for you to do is to cut the carbs too quickly while you're still taking too much insulin and have a hypoglycemic or a low blood sugar episode and pass out, hit your head or something. So work closely with your doctor if you're injecting insulin. Now, if you've already used some of these tips to lower your A1C, I want you to please tell your story in the comment because people who are new to this, they have no idea whether I'm some crazy kook, even though I'm a board certified licensed doctor, sometimes it freaks them out a little. Also, if you need way more help than just 10 tips on YouTube, consider becoming a member of the PhD community. There's a link down in the show notes and you can ask me questions 24 hours a day. I answer four hours of live Q&A video a week, but we have Dr. Barry AI in there that can answer your questions 24, seven, 365. So if you wake up and you have a question at 2.30 AM, Dr. Barry AI is happy to answer it exactly like I would answer it. So join us in the community. Otherwise, hit the thumbs up on the way out and I'll see you next time.