My PreDiabetes Story: Overweight, “Sugar Crashes,” and Trauma (+ My Type 2 Diabetes Talk at Avaiya’s Free Online Summit)

This is my story of prediabetes and trauma. It is one reason for the series of posts I’m doing this month on type 2 diabetes, the most common form of diabetes and one that is at epidemic levels in the US and other developed countries.

The under-appreciated role of adversity as a risk factor is another. I pull the facts together in a talk I’m giving January 24th at Avaiya University’s free online summit “Reversing Diabetes,” which includes 30 other speakers on every topic imaginable (you can register here).

My goal with this post is to share an updated way of thinking about overweight and bigger bodies, prediabetes and trauma. And to explain why it’s not psychological.

Note: I use the loaded term “obesity” occasionally in the post for a few quotes and to make it easier for others to find this information through online searches. I recognize the stigma attached to this word and the prejudice so common for those in bigger bodies, including by doctors and the medical system. I’ve put it in quotes to signify a very conscious use of the term. Hopefully that will soften it a little and help us all cringe less when we read it.

Read this post in a PDF

The form will appear momentarily

My story includes a set of early experiences I haven’t talked about publicly and that I’ve been chewing on for a long time. As in my recent post on how I overcame years of severe food intolerances, it is challenging to share some of these details on risk factors for my weight. Some of the insights came only as I prepared to write this part of my story. Events once again relate to complex PTSD. They also include additional layers from ACEs+ (adverse childhood experiences plus) to APOEs (pre-onset triggers) to AAEs (adult adverse events).

Here too is an intro to the large body of evidence explaining how and why bigger bodies are not just linked to calories, overeating, sedentary lifestyle or lack of will power. And why it is not the cause of T2D but a marker of a common underlying risk factor. A risk factor linked to adversity for which the science has yet to reach mainstream thinking, much to the detriment, judgement, shame, blame, fear and traumatization of the almost 50% of the population that either has diabetes or prediabetes in the US and in other developed countries.

The metaphor I’m using today has to do with healing trauma using any and every tool that feels like a good fit. Because there are tools that help chip away at the effects of adversity. And when you plant seeds for healing, eventually, they sprout.

My Weight Story

I first became overweight in my teens. Nothing major, but chubby nonetheless. It got worse in college, where I sometimes also began to feel weak and shaky after eating sugar, which is considered a potential indication of prediabetes. My weight gain and sensitivity to carbs continued through medical school. Then, during my residency training to specialize in family medicine in the 1990s when I was in my early 30s, I lost what felt like all that “baby fat.” I became slim for the first time in my adult life and stayed that way for the next 25 years. In 2016 I started to gain weight again, reaching a weight similar to where I’d been in my teens. It’s now 2021 and I haven’t lost any of it.

The flabbergasting thing?

At the time I started gaining weight in 2016 I was months into a full-bore, never cheating, zero-carb ketogenic way of eating. I was also walking 30 minutes twice a day, every day. Interestingly, I hadn’t gained weight in the preceding 10 years when I had reached my deepest periods of reduced activity from chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS), not even when I was mostly bedridden (read “sedentary”) and eating mostly normally, including carbs, in 2009.

None of this fits the current model of overweight and “obesity.”

And even though I was 52 at the time, I suspected my weight gain was more than due to early phases of menopause.

If so, what was going on?

It certainly wasn’t a carb thing. And it didn’t seem to be a calorie thing either although, like most other ketogenic ways of eating, I was encouraged to eat until full, which I did. And what I was reminded of from readers the day after publishing this post is that during the years of my most severe chronic fatigue I was ravenous and ate 3 full meals a day – a full supper for breakfast, lunch and dinner – without weight gain. I was hungriest when my fatigue was the most severe. I’ve heard this from others with ME/CFS too.

But even with no calorie counting, Zerocarb and keto diets enable many if not most people to reverse their overweight or larger bodies, and to also improve or reverse type 2 diabetes.

Instead, I gained.

The fact that my weight gain happened while eating so cleanly, walking an hour a day and living with ME/CFS that limited my ability to exercise more intensively, triggered an old sense of helplessness. The sense there was nothing I could do to fix the problem.

My weight gain also triggered shame.

Getting overweight again did something else.

It made me curious about our cultural view that bigger bodies are all and only about calories, carbs, will power and “overeating.” And that the only way to heal “obesity” and overweight is to restrict calories and exercise more.

While calories and the comforting aspects of food play an important role in weight and weight gain, I have come to see this as only part of the picture.

The research shows that a common underlying risk factor between overweight, bigger bodies and type 2 diabetes is actually something else – something the data support but that has yet to catch up with medicine or with our fat-sensitive, fat-shaming, all-you-have-to-do-is-eat-less culture.

It has to do with the role of adversity – subtle, covert, and overt.

Here are the theories I’m working with so far.

#1 Sugar Crashes and Prediabetes

In college in the 1980s, I added to my teen overweight in part because of the all-you-can-eat meal service. My first “sugar crashes” involved getting a sense of weakness and shakiness after eating a densely sugary food such as a brownie, especially if I did so on an empty stomach (what some call “naked carbs”). This “reactive hypoglcyemia” indicates the body is responding differently to carbs than it does in regular states of health. For those of us who are not diabetic or on diabetes medications it means that our blood sugars don’t have to get low to cause symptoms, so there is often little evidence beyond symptoms.

It was thought then and still now that sugar crashes are a form of prediabetes.

They implied the body wasn’t handling sugars very well, perhaps because it was responding with too much insulin and leading to low sugars or a release of adrenaline. Or maybe because the normal first phase of insulin release was no longer operating, leading perhaps to a larger second phase of greater insulin release (Altuntas, 2019).

Ultimately, I was sensitive to carbs most of my life and always did better with hearty breakfasts rather than carby ones, leaving me with more energy and feeling better for the day.

#2 Weight Gain and Sugar Crashes Indicate Changes in Regulation

Whatever the name of the symptom (or the “cause”), being overweight and having sugar crashes are indicators of altered regulation. Of a nervous system and metabolism that is not functioning in an ordinarily healthy way.

These symptoms are clues that something is starting to go awry.

The presence of slightly raised blood sugars that stay a little high most of the time is now how prediabetes is diagnosed.

Having blood sugar levels that remain slightly increased most of the time indicates that nervous system regulation patterns have progressed to being abnormal enough to now be causing measurable abnormalities. To my knowledge, I have never reached this phase of prediabetes.

Weight gain and larger bodies are very commonly seen before the onset of type 2 diabetes.

While I was a student in college I went through a period of an even more noticeable increase in weight. Calories were part of it. But something else was the trigger for these behaviors and for the weight gain.

Doctors very rarely ever talk about this risk factor, even though the evidence is strong.

#3 The Roots of My Highest Weight

I reached my highest weight in 1985 during a semester abroad in Costa Rica. I still fondly remember the tiny open-air kiosk where a baker put out piping hot cinnamon rolls every afternoon. I got to know him a little given my regular visits. He told me at the end of my stay that he’d worried as he’d watched me slowly put on weight during my 6 month stay.

It’s been a little hard to prepare to share pictures and talk about my weight. I felt a recoil and revulsion when I looked at the above picture for the first time in many years. Thinking and writing about my weight digs up old feelings of shame, self blame, and “feeling dirty.” I have a better idea of why that is now, after spending the past few weeks chewing on this and gaining new insights.

I will start with something unexpected to lay a little ground for links between prediabetes and trauma.

Dr. Vincent Felitti, the co-investigator of the first Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) study, spent 25 years running a weight loss clinic where he and his team worked with over 30,000 people.

They made a series of unexpected discoveries.

First,

Our initial goal of teaching people to “eat right” was totally irrelevant to obesity, although it seemed a reasonable thing to do when we did not know what to do.

Felitti, 2010, p. 26

During detailed interviews to find out why they were having high drop-out rates, especially of those who were successfully losing the most weight, they made the discovery that would lead to the ACEs research:

[In] the life histories of 286 of our patients… we unexpectedly discovered that histories of childhood sexual abuse were common, as were histories of growing up in markedly dysfunctional households. It became evident that traumatic life experiences during childhood and adolescence were far more common in an obese population than was comfortably recognized.

Felitti, 2010, p. 25

Felitti and his team would come to find that a large percentage of their patients struggling with overweight had experienced sexual abuse as children. And other ACEs.

They would also learn that bigger bodies are a protective survival mechanism from these and other overwhelming, intolerable, traumatic experiences.

The weight gain was often unconscious. It tended to start abruptly and then to stabilize.

Over the course of interviewing 2000 of their patients over 20 years, they learned 3 more things:

1. many adults who were obese were born low birth weight and / or premature
2. major weight gain was related to life events
3. age of onset indicated something had happened that triggered the weight gain

#4 My Weight-Related Adverse Pre-Onset Experiences (APOEs)

Thinking of Felitti’s article is where my first insights into my weight gain in Costa Rica came to me, only the day before beginning this post.

While I’ve come to think about adverse pre-onset experiences (APOEs) as common for most chronic diseases, and I’ve wondered whether overweight and larger bodies might also be considered as chronic diseases, I’d never thought about my own experiences around weight. Perhaps because my weight wasn’t extreme. More likely because I knew I’d eaten more in college, eaten a lot of carbs in Costa Rica and had internalized the shame and self-blame so typical of our culture.

I had never even considered other possible risk factors.

It turns out that I had a major traumatic experience less than a month before going to Costa Rica, in early December while staying at my grandmother’s in Oakland California for a college work-study semester.

Trigger warning for the next paragraph.

At the end of my stay with my grandmother, I’d been wakened from a deep sleep by a stranger who had broken into the house in the middle of the night. He had physically assaulted me. He’d also attempted to sexually assault me but my grandmother had woken up just in time (Thank you Grandmaman!!!) and she had called out on hearing the tussle in the living room. He’d abruptly left.

After a brief acknowledgement from my worried parents when I’d gone home at the end of my semester a week later, I (and we) had done what people do when they know nothing about trauma. We’d “moved on.”

A few weeks later I’d cried myself to sleep the night before heading out to what was supposed to be an exciting adventure to Costa Rica. For the first time, I hadn’t wanted to leave home.

For years afterwards I experienced a shaky weakness whenever I talked about the experience, which was rarely. It was a lot like a sugar crash, and likely due to a spike in adrenaline. I usually described the event in a seemingly calm but actually dissociated way. These were indicators of unresolved trauma. They were indicators of a nervous system that was dysregulated around a specific event.

I ended up resolving effects from that event in the early 2000s as part of my healing through trauma work. My weight had been normal for decades by then. And I hadn’t developed type 2 diabetes.

Instead, I’d developed chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS), which reflects a body caught in a state of freeze.

#5 Teen Weight Gain Onset Triggers (ACEs+)

The knowledge that a significant number of people who are overweight or obese have experienced sexual abuse is sobering. It’s also shocking to think how common this makes sexual abuse, and how common medicine and doctors overlook this startling and disturbing statistic.

I don’t have any awareness of having experienced overt sexual abuse of any kind.

I have, however, come to see that I experienced a very subtle version of it. A probable link between prediabetes and trauma. Something that does not qualify as an ACE, where the question about sexual abuse is very specific,

Did an adult or person at least 5 years older than you ever… Touch or fondle you or have you touch their body in a sexual way? or Attempt or actually have oral, anal, or vaginal intercourse with you?

I am coming to see and recognize feelings that have to do with a more covert form of sexual abuse. And with forms of covert incest, which identifies emotionally invasive experiences outside of sexual or physical abuse.

I refer to both of these as ACEs Plus because they happen to children, do not qualify as official ACEs, and are known to have long-term effects even though they are subtle.

This process of opening my eyes has been growing because of my work on healing various kinds of adversity over the past 20 years. It’s also supported by what others such as David, who has worked extensively with children and adult survivors of sexual abuse and covert incest as a somatic trauma therapist, can see and feel. Both in me and in experiences he’s had with my parents.

My Story is a Way to Show How Subtle Adversity Can Be and Still Have Big Effects

As in my post on how I overcame severe food intolerances by setting boundaries as part of healing complex PTSD, it’s difficult to put this into words. It’s challenging to make it public. In part because I fear causing harm to my Dad who does not, to my knowledge, have any sense that he’s done anything inappropriate, and who might feel wrongly accused. In part because I have to work with my pattern of feeling more protective of him than of myself. And in part because it still feels like I am making a mountain out of a mole-hill, being too dramatic, or maybe even “making something out of nothing.”

But I share this aspect of my story because I want to move more fully into my life. Because I have been frozen for two decades with disabling chronic fatigue and don’t want to hold back from speaking up on things that are important to me.

Because my passion is to speak out for those who may be voiceless or who have experienced similar things but never been told that it’s real, that the effects are known and have been studied, and that it’s not psychological are “all in your head.”

The kinds of things I experienced seemed small, but I suspect it’s why I wore big, loose multi-layered sweaters and tops growing up. They may also have had something to do with my chubbiness as a teen.

Examples of My ACEs+

The first moment I can think of comes from something my Dad said to me when I was a child of maybe 7 or so.

I used to lean up next to him when sitting on the couch. I see it now as how I tried to get my needs for connection met in a family where there was little emotional connection and little physical contact or comfort. But one day he asked me to stop sitting so close. I don’t remember if he gave a reason but my interpretation has always been that it felt uncomfortable for him and maybe raised some concerns. It seems small but my Dad had always felt like my ally growing up. We were alike. We had intellectual conversations over the years. He helped me learn how to write (Thank you Dad!). He encouraged me to aim high and to become a doctor. He recommended I take time off after college to live and explore and experience life more fully before perhaps getting very busy with my career.

As an adult, it’s been little things in recent years that have made me wonder.

When he asked what that bit of fabric was, peaking through my top (it was my lacey bra strap). Just thinking of that makes me want to avoid wearing feminine, form-fitting clothes. I stopped wearing that undergarment after that.

When he focused a great deal on me while taking a lot of pictures (of me) swimming and afterwards while the whole family was at the beach a few summers ago. Then not recognizing or heeding my hand signal to STOP! (my fingers spread wide, wrist flexed, aimed directly at him and blocking the camera).

When he directs his words and focus to me when he and my Mom and I play cards during my visits and it’s as if mom isn’t there.

Not a big deal, my conscious mind thinks.

Yet it stirs up feelings of vulnerability, of being WAY too visible, and actually – of fear.

Not real, present-day, actual fear of any present threat. But old fear. Fear I only started to feel in recent years as I continued working on my health and healing effects of old trauma. As I started to FEEL more of the old, long-suppressed emotions that were once too overwhelming for me to feel as a child.

I had intense feelings of fear and a deep desire to flee that afternoon at the beach after my family left. I yearned to fly back home to David that very day.

FEELING is part of what has helped me begin to see things with a tiny bit more clarity. I’m beginning to feel the emotions from the past and to not be so overwhelmed by them that I have a fatigue attack or dissociate, which are symptoms of freeze.

Another indicator / validator comes from the Family Constellation work I did for healing multigenerational adversity (AMEs) in 2019. The moment my Dad’s representative stepped into the circle, the woman representing me had stepped completely out of the constellation. This is highly unusual. Stephen, the facilitator, had commented that this was significant and reflected that something was very off in the relationship with my Dad.

These recent events represent what are likely long-standing expressions of an inappropriate relationship from my Dad towards me. Subtle. Yet enough to influence my sense of self, sense of safety, sense of it being okay to be a woman with feminine attributes, sense of okayness in who I am, capacity for emotional and physical intimacy (and how I respond to intimacy), and that my boundaries will be heard, seen and respected.

Another layer comes from my mother. Who shared her frustrations with me about my Dad throughout my childhood, as though I were a best friend. This is not the way healthy parent-child relationships are designed to be. She also nit-picked and commented relentlessly, especially about my weight, what I ate, and what I should and shouldn’t eat throughout my teens. It had a deep impact on my relationship with food as well as my weight and sense of self. I thought I had gotten past that when I was slim for all those years.

When I was a college student my Dad also confided in me about adult relationship issues that were not for a daughter’s ears.

These are all examples of covert sexual abuse, covert incest and ACEs+. I suspect they played a significant role in my weight as a teen, in college, and afterwards.

With every increase in awareness I get I also gain more tools and skills.

I am setting more boundaries. Some of them energetic, more of them with words.

I am more able to differentiate from the fear because I recognize it as something old instead of something real that swallows me whole. And more. Each step helps me continue to heal. Each seed I’ve planted contributes to something new and vibrant emerging.

I’m not sure that my eating was all that different during my slim years compared with my years of being larger. I still had a sweet tooth. I was still careful. I stopped dieting in college after having started in my teens because it didn’t help and did nothing but make me feel deprived and frustrated.

And my most recent weight gain happened while on a ketogenic way of eating.

Weight is not only a reflection of input and output – calories and activity levels.

Weight (and eating) also reflect altered regulation.

Being overweight can add a buffer, a layer of physical protection.

And being overweight can also reflect survival responses from exposure to threat that cannot be successfully fought, escaped or avoided.

Weight can be a reflection of threat responses, in other words, that have gotten stuck in fight, flight or freeze.

#6 Weight Normalization in the 1990s (AAEs)

After med school I became a resident and lost the extra weight I’d been carrying since my teens. Maybe I ate less because I had less time, but I distinctly recall going on a Lucky Charms “bender” for months as an intern.

What also happened during this time as I started my medical career and became an assistant professor was the onset of my very first symptoms of chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS). I called the first experiences fatigue attacks.

I suspect my body experienced a threshold of too much additional stress during those years.

I suspect that adverse adulthood experiences (AAEs) added a slew of new layers to my growing states of altered regulation that had already been made visible in my childhood as weight gain, sensitivity to carbs, depression and asthma.

Stress is an important risk factor for type 2 diabetes. It is also more common in the 3 years before onset of T2D, which is during the prediabetes period (Harris, 2017). This is one way we can make the links between prediabetes and trauma.

Added stressors in my life as a doctor included:

• daily witnessing of trauma and suffering in my patients over many years
• working exhaustingly long hours
• having no time for resources, connection and self care
• years of repeated interruptions to my sleep when I was on call (which had also been interrupted during my assault in 1985)

What we know from trauma science is that the effects of adversity add up to increase risk (Felitti, 1998).

If we don’t have enough resources to balance out the amount of adversity we experience to enable our bodies to process the stress and adversities, survival pathways that were initiated when were babies or children grow and strengthen.

In time, if these pathways strengthen enough, they lead to symptoms such as chronic illness (Naviaux, 2014).

The other finding is that survival pathways caught in fight/flight can eventually progress into even deeper threat responses if stressors continue to stimulate the sense of threat. This is seen as late effects in long-standing PTSD, which change from fight/flight with high cortisol in the early years to more freeze with low cortisol in later years (Yehuda, 1998; Lehrner, 2016).

The default pathway of last resort is the state of freeze.

#7 Chronic Illness and States of Freeze

I suspect my weight change during my medical career reflects a change in patterns of nervous system regulation.

Changes from my body going from being stuck in a state of relative fight/flight, expressed through overweight, to a state of relative freeze. A state that for me expressed itself as chronic fatigue syndrome. A state found to represent a form of hibernation (Naviaux, 2016).

For others, the altered regulation resulting from the last straws of additional stress and trauma might lead to a different chronic illness such as type 2 diabetes.

Type 2 diabetes may also reflect or include a state of relative freeze like a bear in hibernation.

Many different chronic illnesses appear to represent different expressions of freeze. It may be partly from genes. In my rounder phases, for example, I have the same shape as my mother and maternal grandmother. Yet no one in my family has type 2 diabetes, which may be partly because we don’t quite have the classic apple shape associated with great risk for type 2 diabetes.

In my family, people on both my mother’s and father’s sides with chronic fatigue.

#8 Weight Loss: Another Phase of Dysregulation

In 2014 my sensitivity to carbs and other symptoms became so severe that I started a very low carb way of eating.

The GAPS diet reduced most of my symptoms for a while, although it did nothing for my fatigue. I had gentle weight loss and after about 2 years I was able to revel in fitting into clothes I’d always dreamed of wearing.

But the weight loss continued and after a few months I started feeling full all the time. My weight loss crossed a line and I started to look like someone who was chronically ill.

I realized my states of dysregulation were getting worse again and that my body seemed to be having trouble digesting and absorbing nutrients.

I also now seemed to be having trouble with carbs in even the tiniest amounts – such as in vegetables. Who knew kale or cabbage had noticeable amounts of carbs?

This was another example of a body that was struggling due to states of dysregulation. They represented a body that was still struggling to return to a healthy, unthreatened physiology.

To help it along, I discovered that I could eliminate all carbs, including veggies, and switched to ZeroCarb. It got me back to my baseline weight.

But then I continued to gain beyond the weight I’d been at for two decades.

Once again, something was shifting in my nervous system and my body’s ability to regulate. I suspect it was a shift out of freeze.

#9 Gain a Little Energy, ReGain Weight

I was on ZC for 2 years. Most of my symptoms calmed down.

I continued to gain weight.

It also helped improve my energy levels within the first 30 days.

It was the first time anything I’d done had ever made a quick and noticeable difference to my energy levels.

This is something I’d heard about and seen in my training and work as a trauma therapist.

Sometimes if you “remove” or alleviate one symptom, another takes its place. Sometimes it’s because we’re trying to “take away” a survival response, As a result, one symptom (such as plantar fasciitis or interstitial cystitis) sometimes gets replaced by another one (a return of migraines that had disappeared years before).

For the past few years this is what I suspected had happened for me. I had gained energy, and my body compensated by adding on a little weight to keep up its protective support.

Maybe my nervous system perceptions of threat shifted from one version of freeze expressed as exhaustion, into another threat response expressed as weight gain.

#10 Adversity in Babyhood

After publishing this post yesterday a reader shared her clinical experience that some of the people she works with who struggle with larger bodies had mothers who experienced a huge shock or loss during their pregnancy with them. I slapped my forehead, metaphorically speaking, because I know this from my own history. But as is so common when we look at our histories, it had “slipped my mind.”

I’ve even been writing about the decades of research on this in my draft of next week’s post on risk factors for type 2 diabetes.

The science finds that a mother’s prenatal stress has a significant impact on her baby’s longterm health, and sometimes also on her baby’s birthweight, which can be lower after prenatal stress.

The effects of prenatal stress include being large bodied later in life. They also include increased risk for type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, alzheimer’s, chronic lung disease (COPD) and more.

My mother’s big stress was moving to another country when she was pregnant with me. To a big, ugly, industrial city that made her cry the first time she saw the smoke stacks. And while she may have been excited about the adventure, it also meant leaving her entire support system except my Dad behind. I refer to these types of events as Adverse Babyhood Experiences or “ABEs.”

The other thing we know from the science is that a grandmother’s prenatal stress can influence risk for all pf the above chronic illnesses not only in her child, but also in her grandchildren. My grandmother had two miscarriages before her pregnancy with my mother. I suspect that, as for most if not every parent, these were big losses.

So here’s yet more evidence that weight gain and prediabetes are not your fault. Not in your head. Not psychological. Not just due to calories and the rest of our conventional thinking. They are also affected by epigenetics, fetal programming, tissue development and adverse events that happened before our births. Both multigenerational and in babyhood.

#11 Recent Weight Gain: A Sign of Progress?

My thinking about weight has started to shift as a result of some of the science I’ve been uncovering in the past month.

In brief it has to do with the 2 facts.

1. Bears in hibernation are in a state of relative “freeze.” They also look similar to humans with diabetes. They have insulin RESISTANCE. for example, which supports their bodies to use fat as fuel during the deep cold of winter when there is no food and survival cannot be achieved through fighting or fleeing.
2. Bears go through an important phase of weight gain in preparation for hibernation. This phase of weight gain may reflect a state of sympathetic nervous system activity and represent a form of mobilization. An intelligent survival state that is more mobilized than freeze and able to respond to and prepare for threat with ACTION rather than INACTION.

I’m beginning to wonder if my latest weight gain indicates a similar state of mobilization and action at some level.

I’m wondering if my body has crossed a threshold again – this time reversing direction from the one I entered in the 1990s – when I first lost the weight and developed my first symptoms of ME/CFS.

Reversing out of deep freeze and into a lighter, more mobilized threat response.

Still caught in a threat response, but one with more options. One with more capacity.

In support of that, my fatigue levels continue to gradually improve from all the seeds I’ve been planting over the past 20 years.

2 years after my weight gain on ZC I set new boundaries with my parents and recovered from severe intolerances.

I can now eat carbs and even dense sugars without symptoms most of the time, especially during periods of less stress. Even sometimes for breakfast or on an empty stomach. Perhaps they contribute to my weight gain. Perhaps not.

Being able to tolerate carbs without sugar crashes or drops in energy levels is a good sign.

Gaining more energy is a good sign.

I am starting to see that my recent weight gain may be a sign of progress too.

Coming Up

Next week I’ll share a blog post on the role of adversity as a risk factor for type 2 diabetes. Even in my wildest dreams I hadn’t realized just HOW MUCH evidence exists for the role of trauma as a risk factor for type 2 diabetes.

I’ll also present some of all this in my upcoming talk:

Introducing My Talk “Type 2 Diabetes Revolution: Trauma, Reversibility, and Why It’s Not Your Fault”

A Free Online Summit January 19th to 29th

My Talk is January 24th, 2021

available for 24 hours

Register Here

In my talk I discuss the following:

• 7 categories of adversity found to affect risk for T2D (ACEs, ABEs and beyond)
• why it’s not your fault
• how birth weight influences risk for bigger bodies and T2D and more
• why larger bodies are not the cause of T2D (it’s a sign of past adversity)
• new model of T2D (why it’s not from overeating, being sedentary or overweight)
• what a continuous glucose monitor looks like, that I tested on myself
• why it can be difficult to focus on blood sugars (has to do with trauma)

After you register, keep an eye out for AVAIYA’s email for specific details on accessing the expert classes.

Replays will be available for 24 hours for each talk.

To watch them all, or watch on your own timing you will have the option to buy lifetime access (around $30 I believe).

Hosted by Avaiya University with over 30 additional speakers. Topics include keto and low carb, gluten free; vagus nerve stimulation; integrative and holistic medicine; continuous glucose monitoring; emotions and stress; plant medicines, ayurveda; the autoimmune connection; Tai Chi and Qigong; and more.

Speakers include:

• Dr. Ameet Aggarwal
• Dr. Dan Kalish
• Dr. Tom O’Bryan
• Dr. Gabriel Cousens
• Dr. Christine Schaffner
• Niki Gratrix
• KP Khalsa
• Lisa Goldberg
• Jason Prall
• Dianne Bailey
• Dr. Keesha Ewers
• Craig Emmerich
• Dr. Marc Grossman
• Dr. Cheryl Woods Giscombe
• Robert Scott Bell
• Dr. Robert Silverman
• Dr. Manas Kshirsagar
• Dr. Shiroko Sokitch
• Dr. Molly Maloof
• Dr. Leslie Korn
• Chef AJ, Dr. Brooke Goldner
• Andrea Caprio
• Juliet Richards
• Michael Plumstead
• Richard Gordon
• Dr. Brij Makkar
• Dr. Peter Martone
• Tansy Rodgers
• Drs. Brent & Dr. Tiffany Caplan
• Sachin Patel
• Dr. Laurie Marbas
• Brandy Gillmore
• Dr. Darren Weissman

Register Here