Follow the simple Wheat Belly No Change Rule for fingerstick blood sugars and you maximize your chances of getting rid of type 2 diabetes and accelerating weight loss.
By becoming non-diabetic or at least minimizing it, you are freed from the awful health consequences of this disease, as well as extending life considerably. The No Change Rule also helps reverse insulin resistance that blocks weight loss.
Transcript:
Hi everybody. Doctor William Davis here. I want to talk about something I call the Wheat Belly “No Change Rule” — that is, no change in blood sugar — comparing a pre-meal to a post-meal blood sugar.
Well, why do this? There’s two really big benefits of following this Wheat Belly No Change Rule
- It maximizes your chances of becoming a non (Type-2) diabetic. Isn’t that great? You can get off insulin. You can get off oral drugs, and injectable drugs, by doing this; the majority can. There’s an occasional person who can’t become fully non-diabetic, because some people, maybe about 5 to 7% of people, have done damage to their pancreas (and the pancreas is very bad at recovering). Those people sometimes have to remain on some medication, but at least you’ve minimized (1) your medications, and (2) the complications of having repeatedly high blood sugars — that’s what leads to blindness, and kidney failure, and all that sort of thing. The No Change Rule is very helpful in helping you become a non (Type-2) diabetic.
- The No Change Rule is also very helpful for accelerating weight loss, because if there’s no change in blood sugar, no rise, you don’t provoke insulin release. Recall that insulin is the hormone of weight gain. Every time insulin goes up, you store fat. Well, you’re not going to raise insulin. It allows your body to mobilize its fat and lose weight more quickly.
In order to do this, you’re going to need a glucose meter. There’s a whole bunch out there. You can go to Walmart, for instance. Their own brand is like less than $20, I believe, and the test strips (you’ll have to buy also) those are also inexpensive, and you’ll have to buy the fingerstick devices (also inexpensive). You’ll need those 3 things.
Here’s one of my favorites. It’s the Dario device. What I like about it is it communicates with your smartphone. It’ll talk to your smartphone. You can track your blood sugars on your phone. It’s a little more expensive, a few dollars more expensive.
What you’re going to do is:
• do a blood sugar just prior to a meal, and then
• 30 to 60 minutes after the start of the meal.
What we’re trying to do is capture the peak blood sugar. Doctors often tell you check blood sugar before a meal and then two hours later. They’re looking for whether your blood shows coming back to baseline on your drugs. That’s not our concern, right? We want you off the drugs. So we check a blood sugar 30 to 60 minutes after the start of the meal. We aim for no change.
So what if you start at a blood sugar of 100, and you eat your meal, and the blood sugar is 148? Uh-oh. Look back at your meal. Identify which food did that. It will be a carbohydrate food. Next time, cut back or even better, eliminate that food, and eat more of the other foods — maybe an extra pork chop, or something like that.
What if your blood sugar starts at 100, and the next one is 105 or 95, give or take 10 or 15. That’s the error of these devices. You’re fine. No change, right? What if you start say, at 85, perfect blood sugar, and it goes to 95? As long as you’re below 100, you’re still pretty good. That’s essentially no change, given the error built into these devices.
Stick to that, over and over and over. What happens? Well, the fasting blood sugar comes down, and you do not need the medications anymore. Ideally you work with a health care practitioner who understands these principles. Unfortunately, 98% of them don’t, but try to find somebody help you to at least reduce your insulin, reduce your glipizide/glimepiride/glyburide — those kinds of drugs, reduce your injectable drugs.
Insist that your doctor help you get off these drugs. Hopefully they know what they’re doing, because one thing we do not want is hypoglycemia. You can see a lot of discussion about that on the Wheat Belly blog and Undoctored blog.
We do not want any hypoglycemia. As you become less and less diabetic, and you don’t reduce the medicines sufficiently, you can have hypoglycemia, which is an acutely dangerous situation. You do not want low blood sugars. If you were my patient, I’d rather have high-ish blood sugars (no higher than 200 preferably) in the in the midst of trying to get you off the medications. I’d rather have high-ish rather than low, because low can be acutely life-threatening.
A couple of tips when you do your finger sticks:
- You want to use firm pressure. When you click the device in, it does a finger stick. You get a nice little dot of blood.
- Do not squeeze your finger. People milk their finger — don’t do that, because that screws up the value. If you’re not getting it be good enough, drop even with firm pressure, and you’ve set the depth setting on this finger stick device to the lowest it can, that is, the deepest, what I do is just bend over and let your arm hang down. Let gravity cause blood to come to the to the finger you’ve stuck.
So follow the Wheat Belly No Change Rule in blood sugar, and you’ll see magnificent results in both getting off diabetes medications, in becoming a non-diabetic, and also accelerating weight loss. If you become a non-diabetic, you are spared from kidney failure, much reduced risk for heart disease, stroke, cancer, dementia, and you add many years to your life. It’s so important that you follow these kinds of ideas, and get rid of the diabetes.
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