How a Lady Reversed Her Diabetes and Lost 160 Pounds at Age 93:

What a better way to start this blog than to tell you all about a remarkable story of a 93-year-old lady who, at her age, reversed her diabetes, lost weight, was sick less often, and began living again.

Ms. Dorothy Graham came to me for help three years ago to treat her diabetes, which she has had for 11 years, along with congestive heart failure, high blood pressure, and sleep apnea. She had been on oxygen 24/7 and had not been able to walk for 12 years. At that time, she was taking 18 different medications, including metformin, glyburide, and 40 units of insulin twice a day. She was miserable. I told her that the only way she could get better is to change her diet and modify her lifestyle. To tell you the truth, I wasn’t really expecting her to heed my advice as most people of her age would not. They are in the twilight years of their lives, and change is not something they want. But to my surprise, she willingly joined my diet program . I saw in her eyes that she was yearning to regain the comfort she had been missing for years because of her condition.

She started the program on August 29, 2012. She did everything I asked her to do. She read my book from cover to cover several times. She asked questions and learned everything she could about diet. I taught her what to eat and what foods to avoid, how to handle stress, how to sleep better, how fasting could help, and which exercises to do. She ate the Reddy Bread , using our recipes for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Within three days, her blood sugar dropped too low so we had to stop her glyburide and insulin.

Ms. Graham followed the program “to a T,” and, by the end of three months, she was off all her medications, her blood pressure was normal, she was no longer a diabetic, her congestive heart failure had been resolved completely, she stopped needing oxygen, she was sleeping better, she had more energy, and she had lost 55 pounds. Eventually, by the end of one year, she went from a dress size 24 to a size 18 and lost a total of 160 pounds.

The most amazing thing of all is that, within less than six months, she was able to walk again with the help of only a walker. Her ambulation continued to improve through the years, and now, at the age of 96, she is able to walk and to go up and down stairs without assistance. She rides the bus by herself to go for physical therapy five days a week and occasionally does yoga. Overall, she is enjoying a better quality of life and is doing the things she could not do before. She even started learning how to use a computer for the first time.

I shared this story to you for three reasons.

1. Diabetes is more serious than we can imagine. The latest data from the National Diabetes Statistics Report state that 29.1 million people in the United States have diabetes, 86 million are pre-diabetic, and 8.1 million remain undiagnosed. Sadly, 9 out of 10 do not even know they are pre-diabetic. By 2050, up to 1 in 3 American adults will have full-blown diabetes, according to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Diabetes robs people of the capability to enjoy a good quality of life, incapacitates the workforce, threatens the economy, and burdens the health care system. We need to be aware where this disease is taking us so we can focus on what to do about it.

2. Diabetes can be reversed, but it is not through medications or weight-loss surgeries. It is only through diet and lifestyle changes. I am not undermining the value of modern pharmaceuticals here. I believe they are very helpful in moving you out of the danger zone of debilitating diseases like diabetes. But once you are out of this zone, you need to be able to discontinue the medications and start reversing the disease process naturally by eating the right food and changing your habits. Keep in mind that when you have an infection, you take antibiotics for only 7 to 10 days or few weeks–or months in some cases–but not for years or a lifetime.

Medications will never prevent the complications of diabetes. People have a false sense of security thinking that since they are taking maintenance medications, they can eat whatever they want. If diabetes is a disease of high blood sugar and a patient continues to eat foods that raise the blood sugar and must then take medications to lower the blood sugar, how is that helping?

3. I shared this story to let you know that it is never too late to change. Ms. Graham was 93 when she started to change her eating habits and her life style. She was not only advanced in age, but her diabetes had also progressed to the point where she was having complications. However, these didn’t stop her from taking the first step towards her recovery. If she can improve her health dramatically, then everybody can! Change your lifestyle today and start learning how to eat and live right. Join me and let’s battle diabetes together. I assure you, we will win this fight.

The key to Ms. Graham’s success was her dedication to the Eat This Lose That program and the Reddy Bread with its recipes. If you want to learn more about how our program changed her life, go to www.reddycardiology.com and click on her video.

How a Cardiologist Started a Diet Program: Physicians are not trained dietitians. Most medical students receive inadequate hours of nutrition education, and are not taught how food relates to cellular inflammation and chronic diseases. So when a doctor tells you to change your diet, he or she may not have the slightest idea of what exactly you need to change.

I am Dr. Kota Reddy , a cardiologist who has been in practice for the past 18 years. Back in medical school, we were taught to advise patients to change their diet and lifestyle in the treatment of diabetes and hypertension. We tell our patients to eat low-carb, low-fat, and low-salt diets; exercise; lose weight; and eliminate stress. That took me far, but I soon discovered that it did not take me far enough because when I started practicing, that vague advice did not help most of my patients. At the end of the day, patients would go home without a clue of what to eat and what to do, let alone have the understanding of why they needed to avoid certain foods.

We don’t explain what kind of diet our patients should follow, what foods are making them sick, or what lifestyle they should lead in order to get healthy because the truth is we ourselves don’t know. We just don’t have that particular skill set to point our patients in the right direction. We are trained mainly to medicate. We write script after script after script with much gusto. And when one pill doesn’t work, we either increase the dose or add another one, never realizing that diet is just as important or maybe more important than the drugs patients are taking.

In 2005, I began following the advice of the so-called ‘gurus’ in nutrition. I started an oatmeal diet and encouraged my patients to do the same. I ate oatmeal three times a day. During that time, it was perceived to be the best food to eat to lower cholesterol. After six weeks on the diet, I had gained weight and noticed that my blood sugar was slightly elevated. In addition, my triglycerides were high, my HDL (good cholesterol) was very low, and my LDL (bad cholesterol) was very high, with more than 60 percent of the LDL particles being small in size (which means higher risk for heart disease). That was the day I had to ask myself, “What is oatmeal?” Oatmeal is nothing more than a grain and full of starch like rice. If I have a fatty liver, eating starch will make it worse. It will make me gain more weight, increase my triglycerides, and make me at risk for diabetes and heart disease. If I already have diabetes, then eating starch will raise my blood sugar even higher.

That was my turning point in the way I practice medicine today. I started asking more questions about diet and looked for answers on my own. I even invested in a machine that measures changes in ‘endothelial function’ after eating a certain food. The endothelium is the innermost layer of cells found in all the blood vessels in the body and its function is easily affected by food. If the endothelium is unhealthy or dysfunctional, the rest of the body will be unhealthy. In fact, endothelial dysfunction is the earliest stage of chronic diseases, including heart disease.

My staff and I subjected ourselves to the following experiment. Every day we ate a specific type of food and measured its effect on the endothelium. After several months, we had tested hundreds of food items, and the results were unbelievable. It made me realize that most of the people in the field of nutrition had no clue what they are talking about. They were just quoting someone else’s opinion without checking it out. Even dietitians were giving advice without any knowledge of what they were saying. “Eat brown rice not white rice.” ”Eat fruits not sugar.” “Eat dark chocolate and drink alcohol in moderation.” “Do not eat eggs or red meat.” “Eat beans for fiber, blueberries for antioxidants, and bananas for potassium.” “Do not eat avocados because they contain a lot of cholesterol and fat.” “Fat will make you fat.” “You have diabetes because it runs in your family.” “You are gaining weight because you are consuming a lot of calories.” And so on and so forth…. All these statements are wrong.

After years of experimenting and searching for answers, I wrote a book entitled Eat This, Lose That! . It is an easy-to-understand guide explaining how the foods we eat affect us and what foods we should and should not eat to help reverse diabetes and heart disease and make us lose weight. I then went further and developed Reddy Bread. When patients eat this bread for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, their blood sugar and blood pressure drops, their cravings for sugar and starch disappear, and they lose weight faster even without exercise.

Finally, following the success of the book and the bread, I started a diet program that has helped so many people reverse their diabetes and heart disease, lose weight, and get off their medications. Now, you may ask, why is a cardiologist treating patients with diabetes? Well, for the past five years I noticed an increase in the number of patients in my practice who are either a diabetic or an undiagnosed diabetic. This is understandable, as diabetes and heart disease are part of a metabolic disease network that includes high blood sugar, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and obesity. Simply put, people with diabetes will eventually have or may already have heart disease and other complications. So treating and preventing diabetes is as good as treating and preventing heart disease. More so, when I began to analyze the process of diabetes, I became more convinced that diet has the greatest impact in the development of both. Hence, the Eat This, Lose That Program was born.

Dr. Reddy at the Diabetes Conference

My program is unique; you will not find it anywhere else. It is a product of my years of research and experience from thousands of patients. If you want more information, please visit our websites www.reddycardiology.com and www.reddybread.com . I encourage you to learn everything about diet. Ask questions and find answers yourself. Stop following other people, myself included, without reviewing the facts. In my program, I will teach you the basics of diet and lifestyle so you will have the tools to think for yourself and decide which ones are good for you. My job is to teach you more than to treat you.