After a few months of eating more plants, I traveled to Texas with my mother to consult with a physician who had come highly recommended to me from a trusted friend.
While we were waiting for the appointment to begin, my mother and I sat in his office preparing to ask him a laundry list of questions we had written over the course of many weeks.
My eyes scanned his bookshelf from top to bottom, which contained hundreds of textbooks, manuals, journals, and technical information.
I thought to myself, This guy must be really smart.
I’m excited about what we’re about to learn.
As my eyes scanned toward the bottom of his bookshelf, one book jumped out at me as if it were trying to speak to me.
The book appeared to be about 500 pages thick, it had a blue binding, and it had the word biochemistry printed prominently on the spine.
I stared at that book for about thirty seconds and was filled with an overwhelmingly inspiring feeling that washed over my body from head to toe.
I got goose bumps.
My eyes grew wide.
My gaze grew deeper.
I read the word biochemistry over and over, and knew instinctively that biochemistry was the very subject that I had been searching for from the moment I was a young kid asking myself questions like “Why am I eating this food, is it actually good for my body?” and “How does my body actually process this stuff I’m eating?”
The truth is that while at that very moment I didn’t know anything about the details of biochemistry, I was overcome with a strong sensation that biochemistry could be the gateway to helping me answer a collection of challenging questions I had asked since childhood. More important, I was overcome with a sense of hope that biochemistry would help me answer the ever-increasing list of detailed and technical questions about type 1 diabetes.
When I returned home, I mustered the courage to radically transform my diet from the ground up.
I sought out the guidance of Doug Graham, DC, a nutrition coach with many years of experience working with people with diabetes and with athletes, who instructed me to do the opposite of what I had been advised by my medical team.
I began eating large quantities of fresh fruits and vegetables and stopped eating meat, dairy, fish, poultry, and eggs entirely.
I was excited to experience positive change but was quite nervous that eating more fruit-based carbohydrate energy would increase my insulin use considerably.
In the first week of eating a strictly plant-based diet, my insulin requirements dropped by approximately 35 percent, my energy levels increased, and my blood glucose became significantly more predictable.
After performing a few back-of-the-envelope calculations, I determined that my carboyhdrate intake had increased almost sixfold, from about 75 grams per day to about 500 grams per day.
That meant that I was eating significantly more carbohydrate energy using less insulin, which went against everything that I had been told since day one.
This made no sense at all.
When I began eating more carbohydrate-rich foods, I found that my biological requirement for insulin dropped significantly and quickly, and naturally this piqued my intellectual curiosity.
I became increasingly convinced that the carbohydrate-phobic view of diabetes was either incomplete or flawed at its core, I just didn’t yet have the scientific knowledge to explain why.
Fascinated by the exciting “n-of-1” scientific experiment under way in my own body, I enrolled in graduate classes at the University of Hawaii and began feverishly studying human biology, chemistry, organic chemistry, anatomy, physiology, and nutritional biochemistry with a newfound excitement that motivated me to learn everything I could possibly get my hands on.
I considered myself extremely fortunate to be able to study the subject that would enable me to articulate the details of the exciting (and finally controllable ) biological experiment under way in my own body.
After a few years of coursework, I applied to PhD programs around the country and enrolled in a program to study nutritional biochemistry at the University of California at Berkeley to investigate the nutritional causes and effects of diabetes.
It was at UC Berkeley that I dove deep into the biological phenomenon known as insulin resistance, a highly misunderstood and intricate condition present in people with and without diabetes that helps to explain the ins and outs of blood glucose management as well as chronic disease as a whole.
I learned that simple nutrition strategies that reliably reverse insulin resistance apply to all individuals living with diabetes, including those with type 1 diabetes, type 1.5 diabetes, type 2 diabetes, prediabetes, and gestational diabetes.
Over the course of five years I taught classes on topics ranging from nutrient metabolism to disease prevention, and in the process I became a published author in peer-reviewed scientific journals.
I wrote a dissertation on the effect of calorie restriction on mitochondrial health and insulin sensitivity, and we’ll explore many of these concepts in the following chapters as it pertains to reversing insulin resistance.
What I love the most, aside from the rigorous science, is translating complex scientific information into bite-sized chunks that save you the time and effort of having to seek out reliable and credible information for yourself.
My mission is to educate, inspire, and motivate people living with all forms of diabetes and to turn an otherwise grim diagnosis into a rewarding experience that can transform your life from the inside out.
I strive to teach people with diabetes that the “tunnel vision” view of controlling your blood glucose using a low-carbohydrate diet is a dangerous game that can cause your overall metabolic health to deteriorate rapidly and decrease the number (and quality) of days you live on this planet.
I love giving people with diabetes the education that is both immensely helpful at the time of their diagnosis and required to take full control of their metabolic health by using food as medicine.
But most important, I want you to understand that diabetes is the best thing that ever happened to me, because it opened my eyes to a world of evidence-based nutrition that has transformed not only my life but the lives of thousands of people around the world. Type 1 diabetes was the gateway to discovering this information, and without this diagnosis I might have never found it.
Robby: The Seeker
On January 26, 2000, when I was 12 years old, I was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes.
Steven, my middle brother, had been diagnosed nine years prior, so I was familiar with the symptoms and the daily maintenance required to live a normal life.
I said to my mom, “I think I have diabetes, just like Steven,” and she responded by saying, “Don’t be silly, Robby.” Even though I listened to my mom, my symptoms persisted.
I was incredibly thirsty and urinated very frequently.
A few weeks later, my parents had left our home in St.
Cloud, Minnesota, to visit my grandparents in Florida and prepare for our upcoming move.
My mom called to check in, and I told her that I had difficulty sleeping the night before and that my legs were cramping, two more symptoms that convinced me that I was developing type 1 diabetes.
At this point she became concerned, so she instructed me to go upstairs and use Steven’s blood glucose meter.
He helped me prick my finger, and a few seconds later, I saw my blood glucose for the first time: it was over 400 mg/dL, more than four times higher than normal.
As we drove to our family doctor, I didn’t fully realize what was happening to me.
Even though my brother Steven had type 1 diabetes, I was too young to fully understand the gravity of the situation.
As soon as my doctor delivered the news that I did in fact have type 1 diabetes, Steven began crying, saying, “I’m so sorry that you have to deal with the same thing that I have to.” Upon hearing this news, my parents flew back to Minnesota immediately, and as I was lying in the hospital bed with intravenous saline and insulin, my dad reassured me that type 1 diabetes is merely an “inconvenience” and that I would still be able to do whatever I wanted.
To this day, those words are still in the forefront of my mind and are a daily reminder that I choose not to let type 1 diabetes get in the way of achieving my dreams in life.
In fact, type 1 diabetes has given me a newfound mission, which has filled my life with growth opportunities, community, purpose, and joy.
I’m a type A personality, and because of that I took my diagnosis very seriously from day one, managing my blood glucose to the best of my ability. As a child, I played tennis competitively and worked hard to become one of the top-ranked tennis players in the Midwest Region between the ages of 10 and 14. I grew up with the typical athlete’s mindset that “I could eat whatever I wanted, because I was getting plenty of physical activity.”
It wasn’t until after my diagnosis with type 1 diabetes at age 12 that I became interested in living a healthy life and paying attention to what I ate. Because I was new to this idea and quite young, I didn’t exactly know where to begin, so I started by taking daily supplements that my dad sold at the time. By the time I was 14, I had eliminated virtually all junk food from my diet, avoided food additives like MSG, and made an effort to eat as much unprocessed food as possible.
Despite eating a cleaner diet, I suffered from allergies every year, even though I routinely took medications like Claritin-D and Nasonex.
I also suffered from plantar fasciitis, a frustrating condition that made the soles of my feet tight and painful, and I wore big blue boots at night for passive stretching.
Throughout high school, I battled with cystic acne.
I tried to treat acne with everything I could get my hands on, from creams to oral pills to microdermabrasion to laser treatments and eventually Accutane, the medication doctors prescribe only if nothing else has worked.
Accutane is known for severe side effects, including depression and suicide, so I was hesitant to take it but felt like I didn’t have a choice.
While in high school, I stumbled across a book that changed my life forever called Natural Cures “They” Don’t Want You to Know About by Kevin Trudeau.
I remember walking away with the belief that I can and will reverse type 1 diabetes, and that one day I will no longer need insulin to manage my blood glucose.
It was the beginning of a series of desires to solve the mystery of type 1 diabetes, to learn about autoimmunity, to learn how stem cells could lead to new beta cell growth, and to try anything in my power to reverse type 1 diabetes in my own body. (Kevin Trudeau has since been imprisoned for misleading health claims and fraudulent advice.
We do not condone his advice; it was merely a book that planted a seed to learn more about evidence-based lifestyle change.)
I began visiting a naturopathic doctor in Tampa, Florida, on a regular basis, who used electrodermal testing to identify foods that were both compatible and incompatible with my body. After every visit, I left her office with many supplements and a long list of approved foods and guidelines that said things like “Eat chicken but not beef and eat bread made from millet but not spelt.” I followed her advice, and soon became the weird one at the high school lunch table.
Next, I came across the Weston A. Price Foundation and became convinced that it was smarter to drink raw milk instead of pasteurized milk and eat grass-fed beef instead of factory-farmed beef. Even though nothing dramatic happened to my health or diabetes management, I continued to follow this advice through high school because I felt like I was doing the right things to improve my well-being.