Newcastle Diet

[Cricket Lover]

I was diagnosed on 02/01/2013, but may have been diabetic for up to 18 months before this without realising looking back at my symtoms, when first diagnosed my bg was 28 & cholestral 23 (a record I was told for the surgery!) Once diagnosed I trawled the internet for more info on diabetes & found reports on the ND, I first saw a consultant in mid January & raised the diet with him but he was not at all supportive of it & seemed happier to go down the drug route via metformin which went from 1 x 500 to 3 x 500mg over a few weeks & 1 200mg Fenofibrate a day, along with a recomendation to loose some weight.

On my second visit in early May, my Hba had fallen to 8.1 & my daily bg readings were generally between 6.5 & 9 with the occasional reading of over 11. However my blood tests showed a reduced renal function which he felt may be due to the metformin. I again asked about the Newcastle Diet & he agreed that I could try it if I wished but would need to contact my GP. I had previously spoken to the local dietician about ND on a DESMOND course & she was very keen to run trials. I contacted her but she was unable to provide any support or time due to lack of funding & time, other than send some information to my GP, after a couple of meetings with my GP I finally started the diet a fortnight ago, as recommended 3 optifast meals a day (although I have also used build up it's cheaper) & one meal a day of vegetables, I have lost 9lbs going down from 12st 7lbs to 11st 12lb(giving me a bmi of 26 fractionaly above a healthy weight) & my bg is now showing a 7 day average of 5.2 & 14 day average of 5.9, with readings going as low as 4.4, my morning readings which previously were regularly over 8 are now running under 6 & have gone under 5, I have just reduced my metformin from 3 to 2 tablets a day.

I have just had another blood test & will be visiting my consultant next week to get results & discuss my medication further & hope to be off metforfin in the near future!

I have found the diet quite hard, especially in social environments especially resturants etc, but to date the results seem very encouraging, with my bg now in normal ranges. I have tried to increase my exercise level with swimming & gym sessions, I have found the reduced calories have not hugely reduced my ability to exercise & can still manage 45mins to an hour of intensive work in the gym. My GP suggested a target weight at diagnosis of 11st 7lb but the ND papers I have read seem to suggest 20% weight loss which for me would be 2st 7lb, which is probably unrealistic but I am hoping to get as close to 10 stone as possible while maintaining fitness & muscle mass.

My hope is that I will go back to a pre diabetic state & will be capable of controlling the diabetes by diet & exercise alone long term.

I would be interested to hear of other peoples experience of the diet & how there body reacted long term & if they were able to maintain a pre diabetic state.

 

[Sid Bonkers]

Hi Cricket Lover and welcome to the forum :thumbup:


Ive never undertaken the Newcastle Study diet as I went down an all together different route but still managed to loose enough weight to drastically reduce my medication and have maintained the weight loss now for over 4 years.

The NS diet will help you loose weight and in so doing so you will loose/reduce your visceral fat, that is the internal fat that is invisible to the eye that collects around our organs that is thought by Prof. Taylor to be the cause or on of the main causes of insulin resistance. So by reducing this internal fat you should theoretically be able to reduce your meds or come off them completely.

The tough part is what you do after the 8 week diet. If you return to your previous lifestyle you will simply put the weight back on and so the insulin resistance will return and you will be just another yo yo dieter!! You dont want that do you?

You need to choose a diet/lifestyle that you can stick with for the rest of your life that will maintain the weight loss that you have achieved through hard work and the NS diet. That will mean eating smaller portions than you were probably previously eating, but as your stomach will have shrunk after your diet this will help you. Try to eat smaller portions of everything especially the carbohydrate content, eat when you are hungry and most importantly stop eating when you are full and dont snack :thumbup:

Good luck with your diet and your maintenance diet/lifestyle :thumbup:

 

[Anonymous]

Re: Newcastle Diet Experiences

There are, by now, quite a number of people on the site who will have embarked upon the Newcastle Diet plan and/or who have decided to continue with it. It would be interesting to hear what experiences people have had with the diet, what they have done since, whether they would recommend it etc.

 

[janeecee]

Hey, Cricket Lover, that's a very impressive result and well done for sticking with what seems to me to be a very difficult regime. Total respect for your enormous self discipline. I'd be inclined to go with the weight loss as recommended by Prof Taylor's successes. Getting into 'healthy' BMI territory is one thing but from one study I have read, even a BMI of 24.0–24.9 puts people at a 50% higher risk of developing diabetes compared with a BMI of 23.0. That's only a risk factor for people who are not yet diagnosed with T2, but if you get back into non diabetic/prediabetic levels you still need to minimise your risks of moving back into the T2 range.

Your GP is probably giving you a target which is achievable and realistic for the majority, and sustainable long term, but if you have the willpower and self discipline you can go lower. The difficulty is keeping your weight down long term once you have returned to 'normal' eating. You don't want to be putting it all on again as fat, especially around the internal organs. So I would also keep an eye on your waist measurement, and stay within a healthy waist-to-hip and waist-to-height ratio, so as to keep visceral fat in check (even though we can't see it).

I admire your self discipline. I think it gives a lot of people hope that they too can turn their situation around, and that the power do do so may well be within their control. Well done with the exercise regime, too. That will undoubtedly do wonders to address your glucose metabolism. I'm a rather lean pre D who can't exercise due to disability (grrrr…the frustration), so I'm both impressed and envious that you can keep up the working out! Just keep on doing what you're doing. It's working!


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[autumn6464]

Well done. You seem to be doing the right things. Keep up the exercise. When I did the Newcastle diet everyone was supportive, but now, after, it's harder. People still see that I've lost weight but don't realise it is an ongoing thing. I keep on putting the weight back on, and it wasn't really about the weight, I wanted to lose the diabetes. I don't take tablets (was on metformin before but they made me ill) I take water to drink in the pub but have two halves of lager before, my sister in law drinks white wine and gets two glasses, one for my water. I ask for ham salad when we go for a meal and take a plastic bag and take the ham home and have for tea. or throw away sometimes. We go to a carvery and I have lots of veg and again I take the meat home in a plastic bag and have for tea, but if you are eating out (and friends and family expect to eat out) a carvery is a good way to get lots of well cooked veg. When I was young we had to eat everything on our plates before we left the table, I still tend to do this, so smaller plates, and no or small meat if you can. I try to cut out bread but I LOVE it. The hairy bikers did a set of programmes which motivated me. I seem to need constant motivation or I regress. For instance you can use lettuce leaves to wrap around "things" and pretend it's bread. I have part loaves out and the rest in the freezer, so no "better eat that up or it will go off" excuses. I don't know what a Desmond course is. My doctor is supportive, when I lost the weight (nearly 15 stone, down to 13 myself dieting, then down to 10st4 on the Newcastle diet now up to nearly 12 stone, but dieting down to below 12) he said many people tried and many failed and well done etc. It's very hard but it's very important. I have a diabetic book, which I bought when first diagnosed, tells me to eat carbohydrates, etc. The info out there is so mixed. If the metformin hadn't made me ill (the trots) I dread to think how much weight I would have put on, and how I would be now. Thanks to the Newcastle diet I am in control, even though I sometimes am not, overall I am.

 

[Cricket Lover]

Thought I would give an update on my progress, I am now 5 weeks into the diet & have stuck to it strictly, not a single laps!! my weight is now down to 11st 1 having been 12st 9 when I started & was 13st 9 this time last year. I am feeling much better in myself & have more energy & feel mentally better too.

I had blood tests done on the 9th July & saw my consultant on 16th, HbA1c was 7.4% down from 8.1% in Jan, Cholesterol 3.9, triglyceride 1.8, HDL 0.9 LDL2.1 not perfect but getting much closer to the right levels & I would expect them much better now as the bloods were only done 2 weeks into the diet.

I have now reduced metformin to 1 500g tablet a day, I am hoping that this will also be discontinued in October when I see my consultant again & also to come of my Fenofibrate tablet as well, my blood sugars are now averaging 4.7 for the last week, 4.8 last 14 days & 5.1 last 30, I am gradually increasing my exercise, trying to get in 2 1 mile swims a week & 2 or 3 visits to the gym.

At the moment I am really pleased with the results & believe I can achieve my target weight of 10st 7 & may even get down to 10st 4, my main concern is maintaining muscle so I am doing some weight & strength work to maintain & increase lean muscle. As a side note I had to invest in some 28inch waist shorts last weekend, my old shorts & trousers are starting to get rather too big! I will be very interested to see what my blood sugars do once I go back to a more normal diet, but at the moment I am very optomistic that I have turned it around.

 

[vertical188]

I have recently been diagnosed T2 and have come across the Newcstle Diet as a possible approach. What I am not sure about is whether it is important to follow the Optifast+veg programme, or if it is just as good to eat normal food with similar nutritional content. I have seen that Dr Taylor's latest posting in his faq section (on the Newcastle Uni site) says that it is more important to lose weight than to lose it quickly - so suggesting that you can get similar results and possible 'reversal' of diabetes if you take six months to lose 35 pounds (or whatever) as eight weeks.

Has anyone tried doing this, and if so, with what results?

 

[janeecee]

Well done Cricket Lover. I hope you make it to the end of the full 8 weeks. Just out of interest, do you check your BG readings 1 or 2 hours after these shakes? If so, what are the readings? Are you on Optifast or other shakes, eg Slimfast, Asda, etc? Some people use Slimfast but they contain a lot of sugar which would certainly spike some folk. I understand the Optifast contain less sugar. I'd be interested to know what your postprandial figures are on these shakes as I've never seen them mentioned in the studies.


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[Yorksman]

I have seen that Dr Taylor's latest posting in his faq section (on the Newcastle Uni site) says that it is more important to lose weight than to lose it quickly - so suggesting that you can get similar results and possible 'reversal' of diabetes if you take six months to lose 35 pounds (or whatever) as eight weeks.

Has anyone tried doing this, and if so, with what results?

I have and have lost 30 Kg since Christmas.

Things appear to function normally. Eating salads during this hot weather my bgs are mostly 4s and low 5s. Any highs that I get are in the 6s and return to the 5s in the hour.

The most interesting pattern is late night. A reading might be 5.5 before I go to bed. That drops during the small hours and if I bother to test at around 4 or 5 am, it will be somethng like 4.1. If I test at 6 it will be 6.6 as part of the homeostatic process and then by 8 am it will be 5.3. Yesterday was Yorkshire Day so I celebrated with fish, chips and mushy peas. Reading was 5.5 after 2 hours. On holiday I had a few ice creams, small amounts, 2 scoops, and on a couple of occasions, a piece of cake. No reading above 7 for a long time. Lots of wine and occasional beers, nothing above 6.

What I am careful about though is not pushing it too far. Roy Taylor states that we don't know how much damage has been done to the beta cell mass. What is damaged is lost. So, even if things appear to work normally again, whatever tipped me into diabetes before can do it again except this time, my tipping point will be lower than before, because of the beta cell loss. This is the point about finding a diet that suits you. Weight loss is one thing but it needs to be maintained so, find a diet where you enjoy the food you can eat. If that means never eating jam filled iced doughnuts again but allows me to eat plenty fresh fruit, I can live with that. Fortunately I enjoy cooking from fresh ingredients because I don't trust much that is processed. I eat only complex carbs, wholewheat pasta, brown rice, rye bread etc. They don't budge my BGs at all.

 

[janeecee]

Yorksman, it's great that you've restored normal BG levels, however in my case I have very little spare weight and can't seem to eat anywhere near normal amounts of food without high BG levels. In your case, the development of diabetes was probably weight related. In my case, I doubt it is weight related at all I may well have already lost beta cell function, but I can't tell.

I have no way of knowing whether the ND has any relevance in my case. The fatty liver/pancreas idea is all very well but as my fasting levels are normal then perhaps that suggests the fatty liver isn't so relevant in my case? I'd love to restore my 'first phase insulin response' if I can, but how exactly can I do that without extreme starving and possible loss of muscle mass due to inability to exercise? As I said, I wrote to Newcastle University and explained my situation—IGT, normal FBG, BMI of 20 or thereabouts, long term illness that prevents exercise, good BP, good cholesterol, no metabolic syndrome, no family history. But, I heard nothing back from them, and as I'm not the typical overweight/obese T2, I'm none the wiser. The fatty liver/pancreas idea sounds plausible but impossible to know whether it's relevant in my case.

All advice regarding diabetes is mostly about weight loss, and people who do well tend to shift a lot of weight, and combine it with exercise. There's no advice for those of us who don't fit that profile.


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[connie104]

I am type 2 and not over weight or obese and I do find it hard to take from another type 2 that we are all as portrayed on the channel 4 programme. There is not a typical type 2 we are all different.

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[janeecee]

The fact is Connie, many T2 diabetics are overweight on diagnosis. The figure often quoted is that 80% of T2s are overweight or obese, and the blanket advice to T2 and people at risk assumes that weight loss is an important part of treatment and/or management. If you look at the ND information, Prof Taylor says the most successful participants lost more weight than the less successful participants, although duration since diagnosis was also an important factor. Even if you look at many of the posts on this forum, many people report about their weight loss.

People who are not overweight are met with disbelief by the medical profession when they report that they have high blood sugar readings. This has been my experience and also that of Little Wolf. So it works both ways. No-one is outraged about the people of normal and low-normal weight who are not being screened for diabetes because it is assumed that they are not at risk, but in fact are undiagnosed and progressing without realising it.


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[Cricket Lover]

Hi Janeecee

I test normally 2 hours after a shake & readings are regularly under 5 highest I have had is 5.2 in last couple of weeks, my readngs in the morning when I get up range from 4.4 to 4.8. I tested myself once about 50 mins after a shake & was 8.8 but that was only 2 weeks into the diet.

 

[janeecee]

Sounds promising, Cricket Lover. I just can't decide whether 1-2 weeks on the shakes might help me. My fear is losing muscle mass due which is a strong possibility given my inability to exercise. Then I could end up even more insulin resistant.

Yorksman may correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems that if you have normal fasting glucose your liver is not likely to be insulin resistant, but high post prandial BG with NFG suggests peripheral insulin resistance which wasn't changed by the end of the ND experiment. Restored first phase insulin presumably happens when the pancreas loses fat and this happened later on in the diet whereas the liver lost fat within a week or so of calorie restriction. Your first phase must be working well if you are down to the 5s within 2 hours. The signs are good for you.


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[Cricket Lover]

Last day of my diet was yesterday, total weight lost 30lb down from 12st 9 to 10st 7, feeling great for the weight loss & exercise seems to be really working well, average bg from my meter 3 months is 4.7. Had a celebration breakfast this morning bacon, eggs, tomato's, mushrooms, potatoe farl cakes a muffin & cup of tea, with 1/3 spoon of sugar. So first meat, milk for 8 weeks. tested bg 2 hours after & was at 6.4.

I will be testing different meals over the next week or 2 to see how my body reacts to them, but reaction to breakfast seems good, no apparent spike.

Looking to use the 5-2 diet going forward, eating normally other days & increasing exercise as time goes on looking to eventually aim for 2, 1 to 11/2 miles swims a week & 3 to 4 gym sessions. Saw my trainer last night for first time in 7 weeks, he was blown away by my weight loss & really surprised by my energy levels, expected exercises to really fatigue me but could see no reduction in fitness levels, which went totally against what he would expect the results of the diet to be on me! Was expecting much greater muscle atrophy, little sign of it in the exercises I did, will be looking to increase exercise intensity to build up muscle groups & core muscles.

Hoping that my body will be able to cope with 1 or 2 unrestricted meals a week.... you have got to live a little & just love good food & cooking

Will keep this updated over the next few months & keep posted on fitness, bg readings & blood pressure which has also improved, due to see my consultant end of October to hopefully come of my last metformin tablet & fenofibrate, will get a HbA1c done end of October also because of reduced kidney function since started metformin also have this tested. Hoping all will be back to normal ranges by end of October.

At moment a very happy chappy & dead chuffed with what I have achieved so far

 

[murph524]

Well done cricket lover :clap: Fantastic results, I am looking forward to your next few weeks to see how your results keep up,Also it will be good to see how your bloods react to normal eating again,

 

[Cricket Lover]

Hi Nomistheman,

I used some build up at the start & some complan but finally settlled into just using optifast, the soup is ok but actually like the taste of the shakes, vanila & strawberry, didn't try the chocolate as hate chocolate drinks! Yes all reports I read was that optifast was only available on prescription as Nestle also said to me whenn I contacted them, when I saw my GP it was on his list of prescribably options but wouldn't prescribe! but popped into my local chemist to find out what it would cost on private prescription, he said it was available for him to order & was quite happy to do so! so have been buying it at £26 per box of 9 servings, more expensive than most, but I like drinking it & it would seem I have got all the nutrients & vitamins as I have had none of the side effects that some people report on this type of diet.

As a note, when I originally spoke to the dietician she felt there was little in it between the meal replacement products & suggested build up & complan as readily available options(the build up tomato soup is ok).

 

[carraway]

Hi

I would also like to follow your progress after the diet, to see how your blood levels are after eating ordinary food.

Well done and thanks for sharing the info and results.

 

[Anonymous]

Hi Nomistheman,

I used some build up at the start & some complan but finally settlled into just using optifast, the soup is ok but actually like the taste of the shakes, vanila & strawberry, didn't try the chocolate as hate chocolate drinks! Yes all reports I read was that optifast was only available on prescription as Nestle also said to me whenn I contacted them, when I saw my GP it was on his list of prescribably options but wouldn't prescribe! but popped into my local chemist to find out what it would cost on private prescription, he said it was available for him to order & was quite happy to do so! so have been buying it at £26 per box of 9 servings, more expensive than most, but I like drinking it & it would seem I have got all the nutrients & vitamins as I have had none of the side effects that some people report on this type of diet.

As a note, when I originally spoke to the dietician she felt there was little in it between the meal replacement products & suggested build up & complan as readily available options(the build up tomato soup is ok).

Sounds lovely. £2.80 per shot. Sounds like a bargain to me. Where would you get egg and bacon for that!

 

[Cricket Lover]

Quick update

Had a Chinese take away tonight, a treat!!! Tested my BG just over 2 hours after meal 6.9 obviously higher reading than they have been on the diet but still pretty pleased with it, as had pretty large meal, rice, sweet & sour chicken, duck with pineapple & ginger & chilli beef with honey sesame seeds & spring roll & a lager :!: so plenty of carb & sugars but no real adverse effect ......obviously won't be making this regular meal, but it would seem to indicate I can cope with reasonable levels of carbs & sugar in food.