There are simple lifestyle-based approaches that will improve and even remit Type 2 diabetes: Intermittent fasting, minimal processed food and light exercise leading to weight loss all play a part in that – so what is the answer, why not ‘prescribe’ it? What follows are own opinions (based on research natch!) are in the slider below. Let me know what you think in the comments section…
Research clearly shows that poor diet, lack of activity, broken sleep and poor weight control are the most powerful drivers of type 2 diabetes risk. Improving these lifestyle factors can prevent the diabetic condition, slow progression and even reverse Type 2 diabetes into remission
Structured lifestyle programs consistently outperform medication for prevention | disease reduction | T2 remission as they form the proven foundation for metabolic repair.
Block
ℹ️
Research Papers
Below is a curated list of research evidence showing how lifestyle factors influence type 2 diabetes development
🎲
Random Selection
We have randomly selected a number of studies that relate to each disease stage with links to the relevant research articles
🔎
Personal Research
There are many, many more studies to research if you want to dig deep into the weeds and learn more – Google® or ChatGPT® will help you with that!
🔬 Research Papers:
🩺Title: Prevention of Type 2 Diabetes: ADA Position Statement
💬Extract: A comprehensive lifestyle-prevention overview covering diet, exercise, weight management, and behavioural counselling for maintaining normal glucose regulation. Patients’ perceptions about their own ability, or self-efficacy, to self-manage diabetes are one important psychosocial factor related to improved diabetes self-management and treatment outcomes in diabetes
👉 View Full Research
🩺 Intermittent fasting in the treatment of type 2 diabetes (Dyńka D. et al., 2025)
💬Extract: Summary: The review describes how intermittent fasting (IF) may improve insulin sensitivity, reduce post-meal glucose spikes and lower insulin secretion needs in T2D. fasting (among other lifestyle strategies) could aid T2D remission pathways, particularly when combined with weight loss, diet quality & exercise
👉 View Full Research
🩺Title: NICE UK Clinical Guideline (PH38): Preventing Type 2 Diabetes
💬Extract: include information or support to: improve their diet (including details of any local markets offering cheap fruit and vegetables); increase their physical activity and reduce the amount of time spent being sedentary (including details about walking or other local physical activity groups and low-cost recreation facilities)
👉 View Full Research
🩺Title: Physical activity and the risk of type 2 diabetes: a systematic review and dose-response meta-analysis.” European Journal of Epidemiology, 2015.
💬Extract: This meta-analysis provides strong evidence for an inverse association between physical activity and risk of type 2 diabetes, which may partly be mediated by reduced adiposity. All subtypes of physical activity appear to be beneficial. Reductions in risk are observed up to 5–7 h of leisure-time, vigorous or low intensity physical activity per week, but further reductions cannot be excluded beyond this range
👉 View Full Research
🩺Title: Trends in insulin resistance: insights into mechanisms and …” Signal Transduction and Targeted Therapy, 2022
💬Extract:… some modifiable lifestyle factors including diet, exercise, smoking, sleep and stress are also considered to contribute to IR. For instance, irregular daily eating habits or poor sleep are connected to elevated risk for both obesity and IR
👉 View Full Research
🩺Title: 5 year follow up of the randomised Diabetes Remission Clinical Trial (DiRECT) (Lean et al., 2024)
•
💬Extract: This is a follow-up of the DiRECT trial: people with T2D (≤ 6 years diagnosis) received a low‐energy diet replacement + weight‐loss support. At 5 years, participants in the intervention group had on average ~6 kg weight loss, and significantly more of them had HbA1c < 48 mmol/mol (≈6.5%) without glucose-lowering medications compared to controls. Key take-away: substantial weight loss (via diet) early after T2D diagnosis can lead to remission (or near-remission) and better health outcomes.
👉 View Full Research
🩺Title: Mechanisms of insulin resistance in humans and possible links with inflammation
💬Extract: Obesity is a very common cause of insulin resistance. As mentioned above, a potential mechanism for this relationship is ectopic lipid accumulation. However, obesity is also associated with a systemic chronic inflammatory response characterized by altered cytokine production and activation of inflammatory signaling pathways.48 Recent reports have linked this inflammatory response to the development of insulin resistance in 2 different ways. First, activation of inflammatory signaling intermediates may be directly involved in serine phosphorylation of IRS-1 within insulin-sensitive cell types such as hepatocytes and myocytes and thereby in inducing insulin resistance. Second, inflammatory cell infiltration within adipose tissue may be involved in altering adipocyte lipid metabolism (for example, tumor necrosis factor-α [TNF-α] is reported to promote lipolysis) as well as altering cytokine production by adipose tissue, which may in turn have downstream effects in other metabolically important tissues
👉 View Full Research
🩺Title: Efficacy of interventions that include diet, aerobic and resistance training in adults with type 2 diabetes: a systematic review and network meta analysis (Zhao et al., 2024)
💬Extract: This systematic review and network meta-analysis evaluated physical-activity interventions in working‐age adults with T2D and compared types of exercise (aerobic, resistance, combined) and diet/exercise combinations. Key findings: Combined exercise (especially aerobic + resistance) with diet has stronger effect in improving glycaemic control compared to either alone.
👉 View Full Research
🩺Title: Harvard School of Public Health — “Simple Steps to Preventing Diabetes”
💬Extract: The good news is that prediabetes and type 2 diabetes are largely preventable. About 9 in 10 cases in the U.S. can be avoided by making lifestyle changes. These same changes can also lower the chances of developing heart disease and some cancers. The key to prevention can be boiled down to five words: Stay lean and stay active
👉 View Full Research
🩺Title: Reduction in the incidence of type 2 diabetes with lifestyle intervention or metformin
💬Extract: The lifestyle intervention reduced the incidence by 58 percent (95 percent confidence interval, 48 to 66 percent) and metformin by 31 percent (95 percent confidence interval, 17 to 43 percent), as compared with placebo; the lifestyle intervention was significantly more effective than metformin
👉 View Full Research
🩺Title: Differential role of insulin resistance and β-cell function in the …” Diabetol Metab Syndr, 2019
💬Extract: Demonstrates that increasing insulin resistance is the primary driver of progression from normal glucose tolerance to prediabetes, prior to major β-cell failure
👉 View Full Research
🩺Title: Skeletal Muscle Insulin Resistance Is the Primary Defect in Type 2 Diabetes
💬Extract: Insulin resistance is a nearly universal finding in patients with established type 2 diabetes. In normal-weight and obese individuals with IGT and in type 2 diabetic subjects with mild fasting hyperglycemia (110–140 mg/dl, 6.1–7.8 mmol/l), both the basal and glucose-stimulated plasma insulin levels are increased
👉 View Full Research
🩺Title: Continuous Glucose Profiles in Healthy Subjects under Everyday Life Conditions and after Different Meals.” Journal of Diabetes Science and Technology, 2007
💬Extract: This study provided continuous glucose profiles in nondiabetic subjects and demonstrated that differences in meal composition are reflected in postprandial interstitial glucose concentrations. Regarding the increasing application of continuous glucose monitoring in diabetic patients, these data suggest that detailed information about the ingested meals is important for adequate interpretation of postprandial glucose profile
👉 View Full Research
🩺Title: Trends in insulin resistance: insights into mechanisms and …” Signal Transduction and Targeted Therapy, 2022
💬Extract:… No medications exist currently that are specifically approved to treat IR, but IR management91,448,449 is possible through lifestyle changes like dietary, increased exercise, and disease prevention in addition to alternative medications (Fig. 6). Among these treatments, lifestyle changes should be the main focus for IR treatment, with nutritional intervention to decrease calories, avoidance of carbohydrates, and focusing on aliments with low glycemic index (including vegetables, fruits, whole-grain products, nuts, lean meats or beans) to provide higher fiber, vitamins, healthy fats and protein are particularly helpful for people trying to improve insulin sensitivity.450,451,452 A healthy diet and regular physical exercise including approximately 30 minutes of exercise at least five days a week leads to activation of muscle
👉 View Full Research
🩺Title: Insulin and insulin resistance. PubMed Central (PMC), 2005 Journal of Diabetes Science and Technology, 2007
💬Extract: a large body of evidence supports the role of exercise in improving insulin sensitivity and its beneficial outcomes in insulin resistant states. Epidemiological studies such as the US Physicians Health Study have reported substantial decreases in the relative risk of type 2 diabetes with lifelong regular physical activity
👉 View Full Research
🩺 Diet in the management of type 2 diabetes: umbrella review” (2023) by E Szczerba et al
💬Extract: The evidence indicated that diet has a multifaceted role in the management of type 2 diabetes. An energy restricted diet can reduce body weight and improve cardiometabolic health. Beyond energy restriction, dietary approaches such as plant based, Mediterranean, low carbohydrate (<26% total energy), or high protein diets, and a higher intake of omega 3 fatty acids can be beneficial for cardiometabolic health in individuals with type 2 diabetes.
👉 View Full Research
Measure around your body midway between those two points
We use BMI as one input to your Type 2 risk score, but it’s only part of the picture
BMI is a simplistic way of relating your weight to your height to give an arbitary measure/estimate of your BMI status. It’s calculated as:
weight ÷ height².
The chart above shows the
typical ranges used to denote ⚖️ under-weight ⚖️ healthy-weight ⚖️ over-weight ⚖️ Obese (3 levels I to III).
Your BMI score is compared against the number ranges... so a score of 32 falls in the 30-35 range which in turn, means class I obesity and so on....
Why it’s not the full story:
It can’t tell the difference between muscle and fat
Very muscular people may have a “high” BMI but low body fat
More weight around the waist has a greater risk even at the same BMI
Age, sex and ethnicity also affect risk at a given BMI
⏱️ Intermittent Fasting sounds technical but is really simple – it’s an eating
pattern that alternates between set periods of eating and not eating
⏱️ Why fasting? When you fast, the body switches from using glucose from food
to using stored fat for energy. Over time this can improve insulin sensitivity and
metabolic efficiency
⏱️ Novice or a fasting guru? If you select novice, it will include longer eating periods at the start, reducing them over time. A fasting guru does not need these longer periods to adjust to fasting, they are experienced enough not to need it. Not new to fasting simply means it's balanced somewhere between novice and guru
Autophagy sounds complicated but it simply means your body is doing a
spring-clean at the cell level. Old or damaged bits are broken down
and recycled so new, healthier parts can be built. Autophagy is boosted by more than fasting — exercise, good sleep, lower insulin, and reducing constant snacking all support fasting to help your cells switch into clean-up and repair mode
However helpful and indeed important the other factors are, fasting is generally considered the strongest and most reliable natural trigger for autophagy. It helps clean up stressed or overloaded cells in the liver, pancreas, muscles and fat tissue — the same cells involved in insulin resistance — giving your body a chance to reset and work more efficiently
Autophagy typically begins to rise after around 12–16 hours of fasting, becoming more meaningful after 18–24 hours, and more pronounced beyond 24 hours — depending on insulin levels, liver glycogen and metabolic health
Periods of fasting give your body a break from dealing with
constant food and can encourage more of this “clean-up” work in the
background
🗑️♻️ Think of it as your cells taking out the rubbish and tidying up
🤸💪 It’s part of how your body stays healthy and resilient over time
This explanation is for general education only and isn’t a medical
recommendation. Always check with a healthcare professional if
you’re unsure whether fasting is right for you
🔍 Analysing data, preparing your Type 2 Assessment. Stand by…
⏳ Still working – OCR and CGM data crunching can take a couple of minutes.
Please keep this tab open.
🏁 Final stretch – compiling your personalised report now…
Use a flexible tape measure (Doh!)
Feel for your bottom rib with your fingers
Feel for the top of your hip bone
