xyzzy
I think you have hit the nail on the head with your post.Diabetes is a progressive condition in that your insulin insensitivity gets worse and at particular points the medical profession draws a line in the sand and says you are pre-diabetic and then diabetic on your current blood sugar measurements,however in practice the condition does not have these steps.
I have never agreed with Sid Bonkers point of view and to nail my colours to the mast believe that caught early enough diabetes can be reversed,and provided you change your life style,will remain reversed.You were not born diabetic,you most likely got there because of the choices you made in life.The Newcastle diet seems to re-set your insulin sensitivity and give you another shot at getting the balance right.I also detect from their posted blood sugars and weight loss that some low carbers have so restricted their calories that they too have improved their insulin sensitivity,suggesting that there is more than one way to achieve an improvement,the Newcastle diet simply being the quickest.Possibly the optimum strategy is to Newcastle for 8 weeks and then low carb and calorie count until your weight comes down into a sensible BMI.I sometimes wonder if some of the tight control that the low carbers achieve is in fact due to their having normalised their insulin sensitivity,and what would happen if they kept up their diet but came off meds.
Yesterday was awful,rain and wind,and I took the day off everything.I got up ate breakfast,cooked some lamb pasta meals for lunch and the deep freeze,went shopping,finally walked the dog for 20 minutes,came home for tea which was cheese and tomato on crumpets (!) and then watched TV until bedtime.I woke up this morning with my average fasting blood level of 5.2,indicating that in the background my insulin was working away normally.I could have even had the proverbial sausage,mash and beans for tea and still got the same result.What we all know is that based on my previous history if I adopted that as my lifestyle I would eventually slide back into diabetes,but not today or next week,but at some time in the future.
Some people have assumed that I developed diabetes relatively recently.I cannot be sure when it kicked in,but I had cataracts in both eyes diagnosed in 2004,and the first question I was asked by the eye consultant was "are you diabetic".It is a known complication of diabetes and I have no family history of early cataracts.I was not diagnosed as pre-diabetic until some years after that,probably about 2006 or 2007,so I guess I had been sliding down the slope towards insulin insensitivity for a long time in that cataracts do not develop overnight.
I think my final word on this would be to say that we need to define reversible.If you accept that diabetes is a condition which primarily arises due to your bodies inability to use its own insulin (intolerance or insensitivity),then to reverse diabetes due to this cause you have to improve your insulin sensitivity back to normal levels.In the absence of a medical test for insensitivity (?) then you can only do this by testing your blood sugar levels.When your Hb,GTT and Fasting bloods are all coming back within the NICE defined levels for normal non-diabetics then you have succeeded.After that comes the difficult part,guessing what caused it in the first place and preventing it in the future.