My Experience

Professor Roy Taylor’s diabetes diet and what went wrong for me

April 8, 2020 By Sue Moseley

If you’ve been following my blog you’ll notice things have been quiet since last July when I weighed up the results of my 8-week attempt to cure my diabetes using the principles of Professor Roy Taylor’s research. I followed his principles, not his method. I am pretty confident people would not run into these problems, if they used his method of nutritionally balanced meal substitute milkshakes. I stuck to the caloric restriction of 5,600 calories per week in the hope of reducing my body weight and in particular my visceral fat to a point where my insulin response became normal. I did this using a ketogenic, plant-based diet, plus supplements, in place of Professor Taylor’s milkshake alternative, which I think would be hard to stick to for most people, and for me, impossible unless there was a dairy-free equivalent.

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Improvements

I made overall improvements in my stats, including fat levels, bmi, weight, resting heart rate, and my blood sugar management was great, however I was completely disappointed to discover that my body’s ability to handle carbs hadn’t improved at all. A high-carb meal still provoked unacceptably high post-prandial blood sugar levels. I still believe though that Professor Taylor’s research holds a key to curing type 2 diabetes. I do think that if I can get my visceral fat down low enough my insulin response will return to normal and I haven’t given up on proving that yet. However I’m no longer going to try and achieve this using the drastic methodology of my 8 week experiment, and here’s why:

Unexpected complications

I was taking some supplements during the very low calorie phase, to make up for any nutrients I may be missing due to the severely restricted caloric intake. I thought supplementing would easily cover my nutritional needs, but I was wrong.

Because of the drugs I take for the Rheumatoid Arthritis I have regular blood tests and at the end of the 8 weeks my blood tests flagged a potassium deficiency. My hair also started to fall out in handfuls – masses of it every time I brushed my hair or took a shower. Clearly my body did not get sufficient nutrients to function properly as a result of what I was doing and so I don’t recommend that anyone should attempt to do what I did. Less drastic action, that is sustainable over the long term, is a better way to go in my opinion. I still consider fasting to be highly beneficial, the problem of nutrient depletion came from my sustained low-calorie intake over a period of weeks, which is the typical method of many weight loss diets. Short fasts and time-restricted eating, where I ate sufficient calories but limited the amount of time in a day when these were eaten did not result in the same negative consequences, and only bought me the beneficial results of less pain, more energy, more mental clarity, improved vision, lower CRP levels and lower cholesterol levels.

Why did I become potassium deficient?

I hadn’t really appreciated how much I needed to increase my electrolyte intake when on a very low calorie, ketogenic diet. When you’re in ketosis your body flushes out more electrolytes than it would when eating carbs. Advice given to ‘cut salt intake’ is based on people eating carbs, which cause you to retain excess salt and that results in water retention. When you get into ketosis you’ll notice all that excess water in the body goes away and that’s because you are no longer holding onto the electrolytes, including salt, therefore you actually need to add salt to food if you are in ketosis. I was losing potassium due to being in ketosis and I was not eating enough potassium in my diet because of the caloric restriction; I realised after I became deficient that the multivitamin and mineral tablet I’d been taking didn’t actually have any potassium in it at all. The diuretic drug I am on for high blood pressure also causes electrolytes to be flushed from the body, a problem I was aware of due to becoming magnesium deficient a few years earlier, but I hadn’t really thought about as far as potassium intake went, so I’d assumed all my minerals were covered by the supplement I was taking.

Every cell in your body needs minerals to function. Picture of Himalayan salt.

Hair loss

My hairdresser agreed with my assumption that the hair loss was caused by the nutritional deficiencies of my diet. He gave me some products to stop the hair loss, which I’m greatly relieved to find actually work and suggested specific nutrients that I might be deficient in. I have seen bloggers claim that hair loss on a ketogenic diet is normal and part of the process of the body adjusting and will correct itself in time. I disagree. It’s a result of not getting enough nutrients and the diet needs adjusting in my opinion. Using a site like www.cronometer.com to track your nutritional intake will help you to see which nutrients you might be short of, but bear in mind that if you’re in ketosis you may need a higher intake of electrolytes than indicated.

Conclusions

I’m pretty much back to where I started and I’ve regained all the weight I lost. I don’t know what my current V02 Max readings are – due to the lockdown I’m spending most of my time indoors, and I have, in recent months had a few mild episodes of tachycardia again, which my Apple Watch alerted me to, and a mild angina attack. These have given me the motivation to get back on track with exercise and diet. A series of serious illnesses and injury in my family, plus my involvement in a business start-up have meant that diet and exercise took a back seat in my priorities for a while and I’m now reaping the results of that. Without health I have nothing and I’m no good to anyone if I’m dead, so I’m starting over. Being out of ketosis makes me feel constantly hungry and craving carbs, which makes it quite a challenge to be strict with my dietary choices, so burning off the sugar stores and getting back into ketosis (with plenty of electrolytes) needs to be high a priority for me. Starting over is tough though, especially as we are now in the midst of a pandemic which puts restrictions on my diet and exercise choices.

The real test is not whether you avoid this failure, because you won't. It's whether you let it harden or shame you into inaction, or whether you learn from it; whether you choose to persevere - Barack Obama

Maybe you didn't reach your goals last year. Don't let it stop you from trying again - Sue Moseley

How do I know I’m in remission?

April 22, 2019 By Sue Moseley

The DAS 28 mathematical model

My rheumatologist used the DAS28 mathematical model to assess the level of disease activity in my body. The data used for the model consisted of assessing the number of swollen joints, the number of tender joints, ESR and CRP levels, and feedback from me about where I would score on a level of well-being (pain, stiffness etc) between very good and very bad. A high score of 5.1 or greater will qualify you for treatment with an anti-tumour necrosis factor therapy in the UK. A score of less than 3.2 is considered to indicate low disease activity and a score of less than 2.6 indicates the disease is in remission. My score was 2.16, so well inside the remission range. You can read more about the DAS28 score here:
https://www.nras.org.uk/the-das28-score

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Here is a clip from a recent hospital letter

5 years plant-based

Since adopting a plant-based diet 5 years ago my CRP levels have at times fallen into the completely normal range, which considering I never achieved a normal CRP reading while on 2 DMARDs and an anti-inflammatory over more than 2 decades, is incredible. During the time I was on 2 DMARDS and an anti-inflammatory my CRP was most often in the high teens or low 20s. The normal range is below 10.

Remission

I did get into remission once back in my early 30s, with the use of drugs. I was so well that I asked my rheumatologist to cut the dose of the DMARD I was on at the time, 3 grams of Sulfasalazine. The dose was cut back too much (to 1 gram) and I went into a massive flare. I had to return to the high dose of Sulfasalazine, plus start on Methotrexate as well before I got any real improvement. I never got back to how well I’d been before the cut in medication though and it took two years to get the flare under control, during which time I needed to wear splints on my wrists. At the end of the flare, I was left with fused and immobile wrist joints. To this day I have difficulty writing, playing musical instruments, racket sports and doing some other tasks because of the damage to my wrists from that flare. If I’d known then what I know now I could have got the flare under control in 7 days and not suffered long-term damage. Medically supervised fasting followed by a plant-based diet for those in extreme flares would be a more effective, faster, less damaging and cost-efficient way for the NHS to treat RA patients. This could be managed at the patients own GP surgery if they have phlebotomy services there. I hope I will see that become a reality.

Backed by science

Fasting followed by a plant-based diet for RA patients is backed by a scientific study published in the Lancet, demonstrating a reduction in CRP and ESR levels, and improvement in pain scores and numbers of sore joints after a 7 to 10 day fast, the benefits of which were still present a year later. You can read the abstract here: https://doi.org/10.1016/0140-6736(91)91770-U In my opinion, hanging onto the remission after fasting depends on finding the right diet and maintaining a daily time-restricted eating and intermittent fasting regimen. My experience of drinking milk and eating a slice of dry toast after obtaining remission with a fast was that extreme pain and disability set in within 30 minutes of breaking the fast. Nowadays I like to break my long fasts with steamed broccoli, which tastes out of this world when you’ve not eaten for 7 days and does not cause me any pain. Fasting and a plant-based diet work for me, you can try this yourself and see if it helps you. Freedom from pain might just be a week away. I have seen another study that claims to contradict the study in the Lancet, but they only fasted patients for 3 to 5 days on 3 separate occasions. That will not work, you need at least 5 consecutive days before the results start to appear, and if you’re in a severe flare it could well take longer than that. With my last severe flare, I did a 7-day water fast, after which time the pain had subsided. but I was still feeling unwell, so after a 2-day break, I followed that with a 5 day fast, after which time I felt completely fantastic. If you try it, then exercise caution in reintroducing foods, as the wrong foods (in my case animal products) will take you straight back into extreme pain and you will lose all the benefits you gained from the fast.

My next challenge

I am not as well as I was in that first remission back in my 30s, but that is due to other conditions I have developed as a result of stress, the effects of inflammation from the RA and diabetes I developed, partly from following the wrong diet guru. With more dietary changes I have also been able to reverse conditions related to diabetes and get my blood sugar under control. I plan to reverse diabetes completely and I’ll cover that in the next post.

First things first..

April 9, 2019 By Sue Moseley

I’ve been planning to write a blog documenting my journey to recover my health for quite a few years now. Every time I felt ready to launch, something would happen to knock my health for six and make me question everything I thought I’d discovered about nutrition, health and fasting. On top of those issues, there was a confusing array of information from those promoting a low-fat, plant-based lifestyle, and those promoting a high-fat, high-animal-protein-based lifestyle.

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Much of this on each side outright contradicts the other side and both sides are subject to biases and agendas other than wanting the best for people. To add to the confusion, many of those who have benefited from a particular diet have become filled with zeal, claiming science to back up their every argument, while rarely actually reading or understanding the research for themselves. They have based their opinions almost entirely on what they’ve been told by people in authority and they attack anyone who disagrees with them with a disturbing degree of fervour that smacks more of religion than science. Science is evidence-based and does not need irrational, frenzied fanatics to defend it, the facts speak for themselves. Some of the authority figures in the respective nutritional movements are guilty of this behaviour themselves and incite hatred against and personal attacks upon the ‘opposition’, dragging what should be reasoned scientific debate into the playground. I’d like to put them all in detention and make them sit and think about what they’ve done because while this is going on and they are feeling smug about themselves and jostling for the upper-hand in the debate, people are dying for want of correct nutritional information. One of those who died was a friend of mine. Dead, in my opinion, because he followed the incorrect advice of one of these authority figures.

Science is not just another opinion

I’ll discuss why science matters and what constitutes valid science in other posts, along with why you should look at the research for yourself and not just take anyone’s word for it just because they sound confident or come with medical credentials. Don’t take my word for any of this either, just look at the research. Sure, listen to people’s experiences. I love listening to how others have recovered their health, or learning from their mistakes so I can avoid them myself, but it is dangerous to make life-changing decisions that will impact your health without fully understanding potential complications. I’ve made this mistake twice, both times with serious consequences.
The diet I have found to transform my health might not be the best diet for you and I’m merely documenting what I’ve done, the good and the bad, along with my reasons for doing so. What you take away from this is your responsibility. Look at the research, decide for yourself. What I will commit to, is that the message I’ve heard from doctors, that ‘diet makes no difference‘, in terms of controlling autoimmune disease, is flat out wrong.
I recently received a letter from my rheumatologist at hospital confirming that my rheumatoid arthritis is now in remission and being controlled with a plant-based diet and fasting, along with a small weekly dose of Methotrexate. It’s no fluke that I have been able to come off anti-inflammatories and another DMARD (disease modifying anti-rheumatic drug), while substantially lowering my CRP level (C-reactive protein – an indication of how much inflammation there is in the body). I have been systematically working my way towards this goal for about 10 years. Maybe others will be able to use what I’ve discovered to get themselves into remission within weeks or a few months. My current diet and fasting work faster than the drugs that I’ve been on, in terms of controlling flares (now occasionally triggered by eating tiny amounts of animal products inadvertently), and the only side-effects have been good ones. Obviously discuss any experimentation you plan to do with your doctor before-hand, as some of what I do in terms of fasting and eating large quantities of vegetables could be life-threatening in patients with certain conditions. My long-term hope is that the NHS in the UK will put nutrition and fasting on the front-line of medicine, that both subjects will be taught in medical school, and that the nutrition advice given to doctors will be correct.
Having the correct diet and lifestyle for you, including regular fasting can have a massive impact on the likelihood of you developing one of the UK’s 5 biggest killers: coronary heart disease, respiratory disease, stroke, liver disease and cancer, as well as autoimmune diseases and type 2 diabetes. Once you’ve got one of these diseases getting the diet and fasting right might just save your life.