Yes you can (and should) reverse prediabetes. When your body sends the signal that it is not managing sugar in your blood effectively, that is a warning sign to heed. In this article, you will get a plan to reverse diabetes that you personalize to your body.
- What does a prediabetes diagnosis mean?
- How do you figure out why your body is not handling blood sugar optimally?
- Which foods and supplements will help you reverse prediabetes?
- How long will it take you to optimize your blood sugar levels?
Understanding Your Prediabetes Diagnosis
Historically and still today, prediabetes is diagnosed with either of these two or a combination of fasting blood sugar and or hemoglobin A1C (90 day assessment of average blood sugars). These results indicate that your body is not able to successfully clear sugar in your blood. While these labs are the standard, there are more personalized ways to diagnose blood sugar dysregulation earlier (i.e. “early prediabetes”). By using these additional labs and tools, we also get better insights about a personalized plan to reverse prediabetes.
- fasting insulin
- triglycerides
- continuous glucose monitoring (CGM)
Knowing the Cause(s) is Essential to Reverse Prediabetes
Once you have a diagnosis, you need to know why your body isn’t clearing sugar from the blood effectively. There are 40+ factors that affect blood sugar levels! To successfully reverse prediabetes, you need to have understanding which are issues for your body today. These are all the different potential triggers for prediabetes.
- Consuming too much sugar at one time
- Not enough insulin to connect with the amount of sugar in your blood
- Insufficient GLP-1 hormone so insulin signals are slower
- Deficient or insufficient levels of nutrients in the cells to bring sugar inside
- Sub-optimal digestion so nutrients don’t get where they are most needed
- Absorption of water and nutrients not sufficient for cells to get what they need
- Excess inflammation (can be from an autoimmune disease too)
- Chronic elevated stress leading to insulin resistance and impaired blood sugar levels
Building Your Personal Plan to Reverse Prediabetes: Phase 1 Investigate
A comprehensive investigation is essential to build a truly personalized plan to reverse prediabetes. Here are the different tests and experiments we suggest.
- Micronutrient panel
- Continuous Glucose Monitor (CGM) w/experiments
- Nutrigenomics test
- Nutrition tracker (experiment)
- Lifestyle tracker (experiment)
- Digestive evaluation (quiz)
- Stress check-ins (experiments)
- Absorption Hydration test (experiment)
- Sweet Taste Bud test (experiment)
- Optional: uric acid, CRP, essential fatty acid panel, fiber evaluation, complete thyroid, complete iron panels
Our comprehensive plan includes all of the experiments, invites you to upload any labs, and you can add-on labs and continuous glucose monitoring if you don’t have that current data (no longer than 6 months old).
Why are Digestion and Hydration Critical to Reverse Prediabetes?
The better approach to optimizing blood sugar is multi-pronged. You need optimal digestion and hydration to ensure your body efficiently absorbs nutrients needed (hydration is NOT just about water into the body but water and nutrients into the cells). The hormones made in the digestive tract lining of the intestines known as incretin hormones – more well know as GLP-1 and GIP – regulate appetite hormones and also insulin secretion. Thus, if your digestion and hydration are not not better, your body won’t have enough of the nutrients needed to reverse prediabetes. You can use the BNP Digestive Evaluation quiz and the Hydration experiment to see if yours are optimal. And if not, you will learn how to optimize them using better nutrition choices. If you are not a member, join now to get access to these tools.
What Foods Do I Need to Reverse Prediabetes?
Once you optimize digestion and hydration, you are ready to focus on getting in nutrients that help promote the hormones needed to reverse prediabetes. Overall, your nutrition is about the foods you choose, exclude. We use the 4 pillars of Better Nutrition – quantity, quality, nutrient balance and frequency – to create your optimal blood sugar plan. Quantity is important to get enough of as well as avoid too much. Quality is so that your body easily can use what it gets in. Nutrient balance helps address satiety so you don’t over-consume but most importantly slows the pace at which your body gets sugar so that it can manage the load. And frequency is about making sure you are giving your body nutrition as it needs it (and not too often). Think of your body like a race car with pit stops vs a street car where you fill up the tank just once then run it to empty.
Watch this video to learn more about a nutrition plan to reverse prediabetes by Optimizing GLP-1 hormone production naturally.
Get our Optimizing GLP-1 guide as part of our BNP Health™ Membership.
What Supplements do I Need to Reverse Prediabetes?
There are three reasons to take supplements. If you have gaps in your food choices, if you have deficiencies or insufficiencies identified through labs and testing, and for therapeutic medicinal reasons, you may want to use a supplement as part of your total nutrition plan. At BNP, we take supplements very seriously as they are an investment and they also are solely to improve your health. We need to see that they are working, and as your health changes, supplement protocols should be adjusted. Make sure you have a plan to see how any supplement you take is working before you invest in it. BONUS: All programs, plans and BNP Health™ Memberships include 20% off our personalized supplement recommendations for you.
What about Stress, Sleep and Exercise to Reverse Prediabetes?
Did you know there are 40+ factors that impact blood sugar? And only 10 of them are nutrition?! Yes your stress, exercise (which can produce stress in a good way), sleep, recovery and mood as well as medications and even your personal genetic design all impact your blood sugar so they are part of a plan that helps you optimize blood sugar to reduce diabetes. If you are active after a meal your body may use that sugar better than if you are sedentary. If you don’t sleep well, your body may call out for sugar as energy early and all day thus impacting your levels and your choices. If a medication makes it harder for your body to absorb nutrients – even a Tylenol can be a factor – you need to know that and optimize your levels so nutrient insufficiency doesn’t affect your blood sugar.
Feeling overwhelmed and stressed about your plan to reverse prediabetes? Let’s work together to create a deliciously doable plan and the support to make those choices work in your lifestyle.
