@Bunnylover1973 welcome to the forum,
As you can see people are knowledgeable and helpful here.
My two cents worth
1) Don't panic! While your Hb1Ac of 53 is diabetic, it could be much worse, I started at > 100.
2) Take control - this is your body and your life. We are all different
and you have to find out what works for you.
3) While not yet properly recognised by health care professionals,
there is lots of evidence that lowering your carb intake will reduce your Hb1Ac.
Many people on this forum are doing exactly this.
While some here only eat very low carb,
others get by with up to 150g per day, and that might work for you, too
you need to try it out yourself.
For this you need to measure your blood sugar.
Your doctor might resist, but you should insist, you don't want to do this blindly,
if this fails, you can buy your own.
4) LCHF stands for low carb, high fat and this works for many of us here,
i.e. we only eat full fat and have ditched anything low fat, margarine, ...
By replacing carbs with fat we are going back to eating what our parents or grandparents ate,
before fat was wrongly shamed and replaced by artificial and sugary stuff.
Diet coke and the like is not good for us either, so I would ditch it.
Tea or coffee without sugar is fine, coffee apparently is good for losing weight.
5) Be careful with dieting, most diets will make you hungry and don't work.
You don't give information, e.g. if you are overweight or not,
so it is not clear if you want/need to lose weight.
The good thing is that by lowering carbs you will likely lose weight anyway
Jason Fung's book - the Diabetes Code - is very informative,
His book discusses intermittent fasting, which is what I am doing,
other useful diet info is available at
https://www.diabetes.co.uk/forum/blog-entry/the-nutritional-thingy.2330/
www.dietdoctor.com
6) Your doctor is a mixed bag, she seems to understand that
lowering carbs is good, so try to discuss your plans,
There is no link between dairy/ eggsand cholesterol,
and afaik also not for red meat
@bulkbiker do you have links to studies for this?