The story you are about to hear is true. Only the names have been changed. But it is likely similar to that of someone you know, or perhaps yourself.
A pastor (let’s call him Tim), begins his sermon one Sunday with a personal story. He just visited his doctor and was told that he was “pre-diabetic” and he was concerned about what would be coming next. His message was about using the time we have on earth well, and the doctor’s report reminded him that his time here is limited. Tim basically took the news as something inevitable, part of life that we must not let distract us from what is really important.
Many of us lament the fact that we are aging, so we often complain how getting old stinks and means we will just have more health issues arise as we enter our latter years. Of course there is some truth in that because we all age, but how we age — we do have a choice in that. But Tim didn’t think that he had much control over his health, and this is also how many of us think. Tim thought he should accept graciously the fact that his health had to decline sometime and he should not focus on his health problems. This is the attitude of many of us: leave the health concerns to the doctors and nobly carry on with the life we have remaining. Take the medicines and follow the doctors orders: they are the professionals and will take the best care of us that anyone can. These days we have pharmaceutical wonders that can give us many additional years, right? So we should not obsess over our health, as God has numbered our days.
Whether we accept our physical decline as normal, or we spend time fearing it, we are missing the point. Our life is so much more than physical, but one thing is for sure: we do have a responsibility to take care of ourselves: life is a precious gift, not to be squandered by neglect.
Tim had gotten the message that he needed to stay away from sugar — his doctor told him that much. That was the extent of his knowledge, so he was trying to take care of his health and follow doctor’s orders, but simply staying away from sugar was weak advice. It was elementary school advice, but once he reached the pre-diabetic stage, he needed at least high school level advice. He wasn’t being told that sugar comes in many forms, and it would take serious effort to give his body the kind of vacation from insulin that would move him away from diabetes. He was overweight, and his body and appetites would fight against his efforts. Such elementary advice, while a good start, was not going to get him where he needed.
If you are reading this, you likely aren’t willing to settle for elementary advice. You seek good health and are willing to put effort into it. You just want to know what to do. If you are dealing with diabetes, obesity, or just an addiction to food, we’re giving you real action steps you can take. See, your body is tired of insulin: the standard American diet results in too much insulin for too long, and your body doesn’t get much rest from it. Sadly, most Americans don’t realize just how far down the insulin path they already are, and if you are eating like them, you need serious insulin vacations — not just occasionally, but daily. Even if you don’t seem to have any diabetic issues, this article still applies to you: almost everyone can do better with blood sugar management, and doing so is anti-aging and longevity-enhancing.
Not just any exercise
You know that you need exercise — that message has gotten out strongly, and just about everyone knows it. Health clubs recruit each year with starter memberships, and they get some new customers especially who are making New Year’s resolutions, then the membership trails off. Why? A big reason is time. We need to exercise without taking a lot of it.
All exercise helps with blood sugar, because the first nutrient the muscles use is free sugar. Weight and resistance training is great because muscles continue to burn more sugar even after the exercise is completed. Aerobics are great not only for using sugar, but also for building a stronger and better cardiovascular system. When time is limited, however, the most effective exercise for everyone, especially those with sugar management problems, is HIIT (high-intensity interval training). This form of exercise puts you in the aerobic range right away — so quickly in fact that HIIT requires only short intervals of all-out exercise, followed by more modest exercise or even rest. The all-out intervals require heavy muscle usage at high exercise levels so they have a strengthening aspect as well. HIIT has aspects of both programs, but requires little time.
HIIT the sweets
As in a study published in Diabetologia, scientists have studied the effects of exercise on diabetics. In this review study, the researchers note, “a single session of HIIT reduces same-day postprandial area under the glucose curve in those with impaired fasting glucose or type 2 diabetes.” Put more simply, HIIT is acute exercise that causes an acute blood sugar response initially, but effects last beyond the next meal when blood sugar spikes, muting the effect and lasting through the day. In reviewed research, some claim “it can induce health benefits of similar, if not superior magnitude to moderate-intensity continuous exercise, despite reduced time commitment.”
Barking up the right TRE
HIIT as rapidly become popular, and for good reason. Another very popular trend is intermittent fasting (IF). This is also sometimes referred to as time-restricted eating (TRE). TRE/IF is also a very powerful and effective technique for managing blood sugar. HIIT helps by consuming the sugar; IF helps by limiting the daily period of time when your body is dealing with a sugar load.
Time-restricted eating means that you only eat during a limited period of time each day, and abstain from any food or drink (except water, which you should have in abundance) during the rest of the 24 hours. IF does allow for shifts in the time period or alternate days of fasting and eating, but getting into a habit, a consistent rhythm for each day, is the easiest for most people.
Fasting forces your body to rely on internal sources of sugar, rather than external. You want insulin levels to drop to give your body a rest from insulin, and the horror of many diabetic protocols is to add more insulin, making your body even more determined to ignore the insulin overload. During fasting periods, insulin is naturally going to be at a low level, otherwise it would drive your blood sugar too low. Since your body is going to extra effort to get sugar out of storage, it isn’t going to then tell your body to store away the sugar (which insulin does) that it found in that storage (your fat cells). Insulin goes low, and your body can rest for awhile from the insulin alarm bells going off constantly. After a while, your cells stop ignoring insulin so much because they aren’t being bombarded with it so often. Your insulin sensitivity rises. Most pre-diabetics can then halt the downward progression towards diabetes and even reverse it.
Research bears this out. Of all the chronic diseases usually treated with medication — unless you count obesity — type 2 diabetes is often the most treatable naturally, and IF is a powerful treatment. Once your body has full blown type 2 diabetes, it is entrenched and harder to reverse, but IF/TRE will help. According to a study published in the Endocrine Society’s Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism, diabetics can reduce or cancel medication with IF: “The researchers conducted a 3-month intermittent fasting diet intervention among 36 people with diabetes and found almost 90% of participants, including those who took blood sugar-lowering agents and insulin, reduced their diabetes medication intake after intermittent fasting.” Fifty-five percent of these people experienced diabetes remission, discontinued their diabetes medication and maintained remission for at least one year. They also found that even among those with long-term diabetes (> 6 years), 65% achieved diabetes remission.
One-two punch
So, IF is a great tool, very effective in blood sugar management. Likewise for HIIT. What happens when you do both? Basically it’s exactly what you would expect: the effects are multiplied. One study, published in PLOS ONE(3) looked at this combination. Actually, they studied a modified HIIT protocol called HIFT (high intensity functional training) — similar to HIIT but incorporating a wide variety of joint movements and muscle-strengthening exercises into the basic HIIT. Its hard to improve on a great protocol like HIIT, but even IF can be improved as well by eating the best foods during the eating period. Combining the best of the best is the fastest, most powerful way to reverse a stubborn condition like diabetes.
This study examined the effects of just HIFT alone, IF alone, and both combined. “Total cholesterol, triglyceride, insulin, and HOMA-IR decreased in TRE-HIFT compared to both TRE and HIFT groups” was their finding. The study was conducted over a 12 week period. How much more effective might a lifestyle be over a mere 12 weeks?
Such results are typical when multiple health-promoting protocols are combined. This is the overall key to good health, and it applies to everyone. You would be a very unusual person indeed if you could not improve your health protocols in some way. But if you already have a condition, or your medical tests are suggesting a borderline condition is arising such as pre diabetes, you need to pay close attention to your lifestyle. What you give up, or the extra effort that you put out to improve your lifestyle will be well worth it. If the populace in general really believed that, we would be a far healthier nation. But you can buck the trend and avoid most of the health conditions that plague so many of your friends and neighbors well into older age, if you believe it is worth the effort. Both IF and HIIT are helpful to everyone. Investments in health pay great dividends.
Dr. Nemec’s Review
Briefly, what is intermittent fasting? It’s not eating anything for a period of time during the day and then eating everything in the rest of the time. Most people do very well with an eight hour eating window. When you reduce it to six it’s even better, and for some people, four hours of eating works just fine.
The longer you go without any food, the more your insulin production is not stimulated. The majority of Americans are either insulin resistant or on their way to being insulin resistant. This means they eat so many carbohydrates and sugars that the insulin is being secreted so often that the cells stop listening to the messages to secrete more. They are so overloaded they just shut off to the messages. How do you turn them on again? How do you make them sensitive to insulin messages? By intermittent fasting — because if you don’t eat any food for 16 to 20 hours out of a day insulin is not secreted, and the body can reset and become insulin sensitive again.
High intensity interval training, or high intensity exercise with short duration has so many benefits in a very short period of time. As the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism article showed 65% of diabetics can get off their medication permanently with just high intensity exercise with short duration done regularly. This is absolutely amazing. Just one lifestyle change that doesn’t even take more than 10 minutes a day can get you off of your diabetic medication permanently. Now to that we add intermittent fasting and the percentage is multiplied.
Imagine!
A life with no medication that feels at least 10 years younger than your actual chronological age. A life that takes no medication, and doesn’t see the doctor except for emergency room visits. A life in which you feel great, functionally operate great, and cognitively are at the top of your game.
Imagine this life! You ask, how can I get there? Well, this has been what we’ve been teaching for over 40 years at Revolution New Medicine. We call it the multiplied effect: Seven Basic Steps to Total Health. If intermittent fasting and high intensity, short duration exercise can get you off of medication permanently, can you imagine what would happen if you have personalized diets to your genetic make up, customized supplementation to your genetic blueprint? Can you imagine also adding the highest level of oxygen at the cellular level also combined with the perfect hydration at the cellular level? To that you can add the ideal sleep pattern to ensure maximum energy and vitality, and don’t forget a program to detoxify all the physical and mental-emotional toxins you have accumulated in your life!
Last and greatest of all
Imagine this life with all that we’ve just mentioned and to that add a life of prayer (which is listening to your heart, to your spirit as your Father in heaven speaks to you) and living fully in the moment.
This is the highest level of health, and at this level conditions and diseases cannot remain. So it’s all up to you.
You choose today
You can either choose to be proactive or reactive. Both are OK as long as you do them full out and don’t hold back. You don’t commit to intermittent fasting 70%. You don’t commit to high intensity training 80%.
You must commit 100% to get the outcome, because with anything less than 100% you will eventually decrease it until you’re not even doing it anymore. That’s the beauty of life. You do have a choice. You can steer the ship in the direction you want it to go and it will go in that direction as long as you keep it pointed in that direction and don’t allow it to wander. This is 100%.
I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. Now there is in store for me the crown…
Here are the ways we can help you in your health journey:
- Outpatient Comprehensive Teaching and Treatment Program-has the most benefit of teaching, treatment, live classes and personalized coaching. This program has the most contact with Dr. Nemec with 3- 6 month programs that can be turned into a regular checking and support program for life. This is our core program that has helped so many restore their health and maintain that restoration for years.
- Inpatient Comprehensive Teaching and Treatment Program-is our four-week intensive inpatient program for those that are not in driving distance, usually over 4 hour drive. This is the program that is an intensive jumpstart with treatment, teaching, live classes and coaching designed for all our international patients along with those in the US that do not live in Illinois. This program is very effective especially when combined with our new membership program support.
- Stay at Home Program-is offered to continental US patients who cannot come to Revolution New Medicine but still want a more personal, customized plan to restore their health. This program also includes our Learn Membership Program.
- Membership Program is our newest program offered for those that want to work on their health at a high level and want access to the teaching at Revolution New Medicine along with the Forums: both Dr. Nemec’s posts and other members posting. And also, to have the chance to get personalized questions answered on the conference calls which are all archived in case you miss the call. The Membership Program has 3 levels to choose from: Learn, Overcome and Master. The difference is at the Overcome and Master levels you received one on one calls with Dr. Nemec personalizing your program for your areas of focus.
