jjares reviewed on 6/29/2021 + 3413 more book reviews

A worrisome fact is that diabetes is such a complicated disease that a 10-minute (the standard meeting time of a doctor and a patient in today's managed care) meeting, twice a year, is not going to stem the tide of diabetes. My insurance company paid for me to take a class on diabetes when I was diagnosed with it. However, I was probably still in shock (no one in my family has ever had it except one distant relative with juvenile diabetes). This book is a wake-up call in many ways. I have a compromised heart and my cardiologist is constantly telling me to lose weight. Until reading this, I just thought I needed to eat less. What I need is to eat fewer carbs.

So far, the thing I'm coming away with is if the diabetic is not willing to exercise more (a lot more) and learn how to control carbohydrate intake, then things are going to get awful -- fairly fast. Amputations and death are high probabilities. A better title for this book might be SCARED STRAIGHT. Based on the research of the author, the Diabetes Foundation is not giving good advice.

Obviously, this author didn't think anyone would believe what he had to say on his own so he met with many experts in the field. I thought that made the story longer than it needed to be. Chapters one through nine were just for showing the scope of the problem. It wasn't until chapter ten that the author got to the good stuff - specifically glycemic index. This part is critical because all carbs are not the same. Choosing foods from the medium and low glycemic index is a very different issue from just cutting back on carbs.

I understood why the author wrote this book in the final chapters; he learned that he had reactive hypoglycemia. It was very important that he shared that diagnosis and how difficult it was to get the correct one. Then he explained how he had to tweak his diet to adjust to the new diagnosis. It is very interesting that a slender man could be prediabetic AND have reactive hypoglycemia. I am very glad I read this book and have made significant adjustments to my diet, based on the things I learned here.

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