A Review of Roy Taylor’s “Life Without Diabetes”
Understanding and Reversing Type 2 Diabetes, With Caveats
Reviewers Note: I am not a doctor or a physician. I am a mere book reviewer and am just giving my thoughts on this book as a layperson affected with type 2 diabetes. I would strongly advise that you get advice about the disease and the book author’s course of treatments not from me or this book review, but by consulting with your family doctor or a nurse first.
I’m sheepish to admit this — after all, there are probably certain things you shouldn’t admit on the Internet — but for this book review, dealing with a book offering treatment of a deadly disease, I probably need to say that I suffer from type 2 diabetes. I had it once, lost a lot of weight and went into remission, but then gained the weight back and my “friend” showed up on my doorstep once more. I’m now trying to lose weight through a combination of killing myself at the gym (which, as you can tell, I hate) and trying to eat healthier (non-breaded fish on the menu tonight, yum). My dad has been after me to read books from the library on the condition, but, you know, I already have too many books to read (and review)! However, just the other day, a book came up over the usual ways I snag pre-release copies of books titled Life Without Diabetes, and I thought, “How wonderful! I can learn something about my type 2 diabetes and how to reverse it, and please my old man at the same time!” Hence, this review.
Life Without Diabetes told me nothing new — I need to lose weight and keep it off. The book, however, is interesting that it goes into the reasons why people like me develop type 2 diabetes, and, according to the book’s author, a British doctor named Roy Taylor, it is rather a new and novel way of looking at the disease. According to Taylor, type 2 diabetes is caused by, of course, your liver cranking out too much glucose and your pancreas not pumping out enough insulin to match all the sugar your liver is producing. Beta cells in the pancreas are involved, but that part kind of went a bit over my head. The basic run-down is that, according to Taylor, people who have this liver and pancreas problem tend to have too much fat on both organs. That’s the part of the research that’s relatively new.
Taylor has found that if people with type 2 diabetes lose at least 33 pounds, getting it off their internal organs, your diabetes magically goes away. However, how much it will go away depends on how long you’ve been diagnosed with the condition or disease. If you’ve had it for 20 years, the results of losing weight might be more minimal. Still, even then, it is possible to get things under some semblance of control, at least. So far, so good, right? I found Taylor’s research to be fairly sound, and, as the author of more than 300 research papers, there’s nothing in this section that led me to believe that he was a “quack doctor.” He seems to know what he’s talking about and has the research that he has conducted himself to back his findings up.
Then he turns a corner, and that’s where I had trouble with this book.
You see, Taylor wants you to lose that weight as fast as possible. I can see where he’s going with this because the faster you lose the weight, the faster your body returns to normal from a more metabolic standpoint. However, he claims that the real reason he wants you to lose that weight in the span of two or three months is that it’s easier for most people to lose a lot of weight quickly and then keep it off. Hmmm. I don’t know about that. Anyhow, Taylor advocates using meal replacement powders and eating via these protein shakes no more than 800 calories a day to keep the weight going down, down, down. He even claims that most of his patients lose an average of eight pounds a week at the outset! Now, this I have a problem with. Why? I used to be a member of WeightWatchers (and I’m thinking I should dust off that membership and rejoin) and we were told, point-blank, in our information sessions that losing more than 2.5 pounds a week is dangerous for your health. I not sure who to believe. WeightWatchers, whose program generally works, or Taylor? My money’s on WeightWatchers as they’ve been around a while. (Not to say that Taylor hasn’t but, you know, he’s hardly a household name at this point.)
Taylor seems to understand this skepticism as he includes a whole chapter of the book on diet “myths” such as eating eggs is bad for your heart. However, in this section, he also claims that breakfast is optional and that you shouldn’t snack during the day. Both of these things fly in the face of advice I have received from a dietitian. Certainly, it has been advocated to me that snacking on an apple between meals is optimal for your body’s overall health. So I get where Taylor is going with this — he wants you to keep the weight off — but he seems to be advocating starving yourself to do so. That doesn’t seem healthy. At all.
The book is helpful, though, in that it contains recipes that you can use to help keep the weight off, and some of them — such as those involving eggplant, leaks and other exotic non-starchy vegetables — appear to look yummy on the page and they all seem to have minimal prep and cooking time. For that reason alone, I am thinking of buying the book when it is released just to have them on the printed page for easy reference, as opposed to existing on my Kindle. So my mileage on this book varied. I thought some of it was useful and interesting. However, I also have some real concerns over some of the advice given in the book. Don’t get me wrong — I think Taylor is right in that people such as me need to lose weight and keep it off to put your diabetes at bay. That seems to be universally accepted knowledge based on discussions I have had with my family doctor because even she agrees with that sentiment.
I just question and treat with a great deal of skepticism the ends that Taylor advises you go to to meet that goal. He seems to, for instance, downplay the role of exercise, and even tells you not to do any when you’re on your two- to three-month diet to get the weight off. So there’s a lot of stuff in this book that I wonder about, which is too bad because it seems as though Taylor has found the formula for what causes diabetes. I just wish he backed up his recommendations for weight loss with the same scrutiny he brought to his research, because, in the end, Life Without Diabetes reads as though it could have been written by Dr. Oz. As I consider Dr. Oz to be a quack doctor, that is no compliment. Proceed with this book with caution and be sure to talk to your family doctor about the methods employed here before trying them out. That’s all I can recommend.
Roy Taylor’s Life Without Diabetes: The Definitive Guide to Understanding and Reversing Type 2 Diabetes will be published by HarperOne on March 17, 2020.
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Get in touch: zacharyhoule@rogers.com
