In part 1 of my interview with David, he and I discussed his journey to obesity and diabetes. If you’ve already read that, then skip the introduction below and go directly to the interview that follows it. In part 2, David and I talked about his dramatic weight loss and how he gained control of his health.

Introduction

My friend David Mendosa writes on the HealthCentral Diabetes site. Although we have not yet met, David and I have become friends because we share a common bond – we each were fat and sick with diabetes and other obesity-related diseases. And each of us has taken similar, yet slightly different, journeys to wellness.

The common thread is that we each lost a significant amount of our body weight, and have made lifestyle and dietary changes to maintain that weight loss for the long term. This has affected the remission of our diabetes and improved our overall health and quality of life. I cannot stress that last point enough: Improved our quality of life.

Oh yes, and our journeys have led us to health activism. David is well-regarded as a diabetes advocate. In this interview, David and I discuss his transformation from fat and sick to total wellness and his health activist endeavors. In fact, David and I talked about his journey in such detail that I had to break the interview into several parts to make it easily to digest. Believe me; you do not want to miss a word he says. David has a fascinating patient journey conquering not only obesity but also several obesity-related conditions. Please read on…

David before and after dramatic weight loss.

Interview

Q: By 2007, you had lost a significant amount of weight and went off all of your anti-diabetics. Please expound upon this fascinating change in yourself.

A. Even though in 2005 I had been writing solely about diabetes for a decade, I was still fat. My blood sugar level wasn’t too bad, about 6.5 or so. But my weight had crept up in the previous five years until I weighed 312 pounds, taking me right to the border of being morbidly obese. Then the first of a new class of diabetes drugs, GLP-1 agonists, became available. This drug, Byetta, changed my life. By late 2007 my weight was down to 168, and I was so jazzed about Byetta that I wrote a book about it.

Still, I wanted to manage my diabetes without any drugs at all. The only way that I know that we can do that is on a very low-carb diet. It is carbohydrates, after all, that raise our blood sugar levels. So since late 2007 I have followed a low-carb lifestyle exclusively. In fact, I eat fewer grams of carbohydrates now than I did then, about 50 grams each day. That’s because I can see that it works for me both for better weight control and better blood sugar control and because I combine my very low-carb diet with two other diets.

One is the Paleo diet, modeled after Loren Cordain’s book The Paleo Diet. That’s the recommendation not to eat anything that our ancestors didn’t eat before the agricultural revolution. That was only about 10,000 years ago, not a long time at all in terms of the ability of our bodies to genetically adapt to new foods. I actually follow a variant of the Paleo diet, called the Primal Diet, because I do eat yogurt. MBL note: dairy is not eaten within the Paleo Diet guidelines. Read about the Primal Blueprint Total Body Transformation