If you are one of the millions of people with type 2 diabetes, losing weight can help reverse the blood sugar disease even if you aren’t overweight or obese, new research reveals.
Here’s the proof: 70% of people with type 2 diabetes who were a normal weight during the study went into remission after they lost roughly 10% of their body weight.
What is a fat threshold and how does it affect you?
Type 2 diabetes is the form of the disease most closely tied to obesity, yet around 15% of patients aren’t overweight or obese. They may, however, be pushing their personal “fat threshold.”
“Everyone has a level at which they can no longer store fat safely inside the body — that is determined by genes,” according to study author Dr. Roy Taylor, a professor of medicine and metabolism at Newcastle University in the United Kingdom.
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“If you can’t store more fat under your skin, the fat spills over and starts building up inside the liver,” he explains. When this happens, too much fat goes to the rest of the body, including the pancreas. Insulin-producing cells in the pancreas then stop working correctly, triggering diabetes.
“Type 2 diabetes happens to those who are susceptible, but only when they have become too heavy for their own body,” Taylor notes.
No test can say “you have exceeded your personal fat threshold” yet, but some blood markers of stress in fat may one day prove to be a reliable way to measure that threshold, he adds.
For the study, 20 people with diabetes who weren’t overweight or obese ate 800 calories a day (from low-calorie soups and shakes and non-starchy vegetables) for two to four weeks. They did these three times, with each cycle followed by four to six weeks of weight maintenance.
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They lost about 10.7% of their weight overall and kept it off for six months to a year.
Fourteen people achieved diabetes remission, based on their HbA1c levels. This provides a snapshot of average blood glucose levels over several weeks. Folks in remission no longer needed to take diabetes medication.
This mirrors what is seen among people with type 2 diabetes who are overweight or obese and lose weight, according to Taylor.
MRI scans showed declines of fat inside the liver and pancreas that were in line with
