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Introduction

This section charts my trial of the Newcastle diet in 2021. I used Professor Taylor's books, Your Simple Guide to Reversing Type 2 Diabetes and Life Without Diabetes: The definitive guide to understanding and reversing your Type 2 diabetes (read my review), and Exante meal replacement shakes.

I ended the diet near the end of week three, after five days of extremely low energy. Refer to Day 19 for a more detailed explanation.

The diet

I've given a brief description of the diet here, and more info in the FAQ. For additional resources, refer to Resources - The Newcastle diet.

The practical details

The standard Newcastle diet is eight weeks on a very low calorie diet: three meal replacement shakes a day, and some non-starchy vegetables, totalling up to 800 calories. This is followed by four weeks gradually reintroducing solid food.

I'm tweaking it slightly. Week eight falls on a week when I'm on holiday. I'll aim to stay low calorie, but it would be much more convenient to be able to have a light lunch while out and about, with shakes for breakfast and dinner. Reintroducing solid food while away doesn't sound a good idea, so in practice I want to reintroduce a normal lunch in week seven. So I'll do:

  • Six weeks of three shakes a day, up to 800 calories
  • Four weeks of two shakes a day and a light lunch, up to 900 calories
  • Two weeks of two shakes a day and a larger lunch, up to 1200 calories

In accordance with the instructions in the book, I won't try and increase exercise or change activity levels (so my life will continue to be very sedentary!). Though the holiday week is likely to be quite active (but probably also not perfect on calorie count).

Timing it important for a diet, and arguably I shouldn't have started it knowing the holiday would fall in the middle of it. But motivation also matters, and I wanted to get stuck into it while motivation was high.

The blog

I started by logging my fasting glucose, weight, post-prandial glucose (2hrs after eating), and my glucose immediately before bed, daily. I also noted how I feel on the diet: energy levels, mood, and so on.

After day 10, I switched to weekly logging. I was finding the pressure of constant monitoring was making the diet harder, and much as I wanted the data, I wanted the diet to succeed more!

Note

All measurements are in UK units. This means blood glucose in mmol/L, rather than mg/dL (the USA unit). There is a handy conversion calculator on diabetes.co.uk.

Medication and medical supervision

A variation of the Newcastle diet is available, on prescription, on the NHS. If you can, I strongly recommend talking to your nurse/doctor/nutritionist. It is always safer to make changes with medical guidance, and (at least if you're in the UK) this route will save you money.

I am ignoring my own good advice, because:

  • Despite being referred to a nutritionist back in December, I still haven't heard from them (in May). This is probably due to COVID backlog.
  • I've done shake-based diets before, so am fairly confident how I ought/ought not to feel on them.
  • I'm comfortable monitoring my own blood glucose.
  • I'm a stubborn and irresponsible person whose example you should not follow.

Following advice from someone over on r/diabetes, I initially paused my metformin (they found they went low taking metformin while on this diet). Yes, I'm taking medical advice from some random person on Reddit. Again, changing meds without talking to my diabtetic nurse is a bad bad thing to do. I monitored my glucose multiple times a day, and found my post-prandials creeping up, so reintroduced 500mg metformin.