Personalized Natural Home Remedies for Diabetes Type 2

Have you experienced a diet purely from homegrown produce and locally sourced grains can drastically better your diabetes condition vs. buying them from grocery stores?

I am not sure about what others have experienced in this regard. It is remarkable that in 18 months eating homegrown and locally outsourced ingredients exhibited a drastic reduction in HbA1c and blood sugar control as confirmed by my laboratory tests along with the rest of the parameters within the limits.

 

The key factors to the change are:

1. The use of homegrown organic fresh produce and locally sourced ingredients (~95%) used in the daily preparation and consumption of meals using plate portion control
2.  Ayurvedic living and lifestyle
3. High-Intensity Walking as the single Exercise along with pranayama
4. Peaceful living and interacting within a small community with the like-minded mentality

I will share the details of these personalized practical natural home remedies that you may consider for your diabetes health in the later part of this post. Here are the highlights if you want to go away with it.

What Were the Natural Remedies that Altered my Diabetic Situation to Better?

Highlights

• Eat Home Grown and Eat Local: Eating homegrown veggies, leafy greens, and fruits daily. Used locally sourced whole grains
• Regular Sleep and Wake-up Cycle: Wake up at 4 AM every morning and sleep by 8 PM
• Water and Herbal Juice Therapy: Routine hydration after waking up, Asana or Pranayam, Drinking green juice made from medicinal plants grown in the backyard
• High-Intensity Walking Exercise and Yoga (Pranayam)
• Breakfast: Whole grain made sattu with nuts, and seeds, and topped with fresh fruits from the backyard, porridge, and cakes made from locally sourced finger millet made into powder
• Lunch:  Boiled aged brown rice made at home, veggies, and Fresh Fish from the pond. All the spices and spice mixtures used are made from herbs at home. The oil was machine-pressed using mustard seeds procured from local farmers. Cow ghee was homemade.
• Snacks: homemade poha, rice puffs, veggies chops, roasted lentils, and more 
• Dinner: Chapati made from whole wheat flour (prepared from machine grinding the clean, washed, and dry wheat at home), homemade veggies, Lentils cooked with fresh vegetables, Boiled and seasoned whole grains like green Moong, black grams, and other locally available grains
• Medications: Used 2X 500 mg of Metformin every day after breakfast and after lunch. Vitamin-D3 

What is diabetes and why should you take diabetes seriously and manage it well every day?

Diabetes is a progressive disease, and if not controlled, it can lead to chronic illness. A consistent higher-than-normal blood sugar in your body results in diabetes type 2. It can be pre-diabetes or truly diabetes, based on the guidance of the health industry. Lifestyle and dietary patterns play a vital role (1) in managing blood sugar in diabetes type 2. With so many types of diets keto, vegan, vegetarian, pescatarian, etc. it is hard to decide which one should you go with when you are suffering from Diabetes.

To make it even more confusing, a diet that works for one does not work for another. 

Here I share with you the natural home remedies that curbed and reduce blood sugar, and HbA1c, resulting in weight loss.

9 Tips of My Successful Personalized Diet and Lifestyle That Curbed Diabetes- The Home-Grown Produce and Local Source for Ingredients 

Before I share my tips let me give you some background.

My life and living were in the same boat as you were before I visited India and was trapped at home during the pandemic. My family has a small farm that grows organic vegetables that they use. The family followed an Ayurvedic lifestyle with some holistic rituals. After living in the USA for four decades, I was part of this with them. Here is daily my daily routine.

#1. Replenish your Brain and Body by Drinking Water- Right After you Wake Up

• Drink Luke warm water as you wake up and before you brush. 
• Drink it (rather eat it) sipping slowly and adding saliva from your mouth. It neutralizes the acidity of your system. Replenishes your brain, which needs 75% of water, and the cells and other organs. It was the scientific and Ayurvedic understanding behind this simple ritual. 
• Hydrate your body throughout the day. Learn your amount of water intake from the advice of the experts. Find your personal sweet spot in the water amount.

Follow your Ayurvedic-recommended Exercise after your water intake.

#2 Breath In and Exhale- Help Your Body to be Stress-free

• Breathing focuses your mind and center you better
• It fills fresh air with oxygen and purifies your blood in circulation giving away the clumsy state of your mind
• Move your mind with the inhales and exhaled air

There are methods of mind relaxation using breathing techniques on the internet. Take advantage of that.

I was following walking as my daily exercise in the morning

# 3 Move Your Body to Eliminate Sedentary Life- Walk

Walk simply. Work using high-intensity intervals-Walk: Walk fast for 1-3 minutes. Then, gradually stop over 45 seconds. Repeat 5-6 times.

Do it at least three days or 150 min a week. I enjoy walking and aim for 6000-10,000 steps per day.

Then do what after walking? Treat yourself with Leaf therapy.

#4 The Leaf Therapy at Home- Blend Diabetes Helper Fresh Leaves

What are those leaves? Are you ready? 

Here is the variety of fresh green learns we used to juice depending on the availability in our backyard depending on the season running in India)

• Paederia foetida (Skunk Vine, Pasaruni in Oriya)
• Punarnava (Puruni in the Oriya language)
• Bael (Bela in the Oriya language)
• Holy Basil (Tulasi in the Oriya language)
• Curry ( Bhrusugna in the Oriya Language)
• Moringa (Sajana in the Oriya Language)
• Chenopodium album-Bothua (Bothua in the Oriya Language)
• Cinnamon (Dalchini in the Oriya Language)
• Young Mango (amba in the Oriya Language)
• Mint (Podina in the Oriya Language)
• Bitter guard (Kalara in the Oriya Language)
• Fenugreek Leaves (Methi in the Oriya Language)

Pic: Personalized Diabetes Type2 home remedy- Mixed Geen Juice

Typically, holy Basil, Curry, Punarnava, Paederia foetida, and Bael leaves are always available. So we get 5-6 varieties, not more to make our juice.

It is fresh. We add cinnamon powder and ground peppercorn to spice up the juice.

My brother called this mixed green juice “leaf therapy.” 

It was a delightful addition to my health routine in rural India. My brother coined the term “Leaf Therapy.”

#5  Community Activities

Working in our garden-watering, making manure, feeding the plants, cleaning the garden. It homes ~100s of herbs, vegetables, greens, flowers, and, more importantly, medicinal plants and shrubs.

We talk, share ideas, discuss local problems about pandemics and recipes, and eat a fruit or two pickings fresh from the garden. You can imagine that it takes a village to grow a garden of this kind. 

#6 Don’t Skip the Prized Meal of the Day- Our Breakfast Which is Essential to Diabetic health

A subsequent post will detail the breakfasts.

The list provides the raw ingredients used in our breakfast routinely as per the consensus of all our family members (3-5 people) that I share in another blog.

Grains

Finger Millet 

Oats

Whole wheat flour

Mixed whole grain Flour with nuts and seeds

Sooji 

Semolina

Nuts and Seeds

Cashew nuts

Almond

Peanuts

Flax seeds

Chia Seeds

Pumpkin seeds

#7 Lunch

Our typical lunch plate was parboiled brown rice, a lentil soup (dal), sauteed mixed greens, and curries from vegetables fresh from the backyard. It is different in different seasons. However, there were papaya, plantain, squash, moringa, and yam.  Potatoes are always available either from the backyard or from the village market. We preserve pumpkins when they are ripe at home and use them in combination of vegetables. Simply boil and season, or use spices to curry them.  Cook by boiling the vegetables and lentils to make Dalma. We have a unique Dalma spice mixture to make it appetizing.

Freshly picked fish from the pond is used at home. We use fish 3-4 times a week.

I just placed some pictures for fun. There are so many. I picked a few.

Homegrown and Local Fruits with the Glycemic Index next to them inside the bracket. These are available in our backyard

Fruits are favorites at home. Besides that, we make chilla (not fried but tastes like Pkoda), Roasted Poha, veg chops sauteed, and some preserved breakfasts depending on what was cooked during breakfast. A separate detailed blog post will be published.

#8 Afternoon Snacks 

Guava  (12-24)

Raw Orange (40-46)

Ripe Banana (51)

Slightly under-ripe banana (42)

Jackfruit-ripe (50-60)

Mango- Ripe (51)

Chikoo-Ripe (37)

Papaya-Ripe (60)

Pineapple-Ripe (51-73)

Jujube (20)

Mehmeheka berries

We eat what is available in our backyard. Not everything is available all the time as they are seasonal.  The fruits on the higher side of the glycemic index are eaten in moderation, as much as we can control, not too much of them. 

#9 Dinner Dinner- We Eat Early Dinner

We make it simple by having one-sh made fresh or carried from the lunch. No one wants to eat the rice again. So we make fresh chapati or pancakes. Dama and sauteed vegetables are common to eat as dinner with chapatis. At times, we make vegetable stuffed Dosa from the fermented dough.

FQA

Why Does it make sense to have a personalized plan to treat diabetes?

Each of us as humans is different, as are the treatments for diabetes.

It is based on genetics, the environment we are born and brought up in, our food habits, and different lifestyles (different sets of the microbiome) that set us apart from one another. It makes good sense to have a personalized plan to deal with diabetes. It can be with or without medications. No wonder the experts are advocating for customized treatments for diabetes.

How important is it to know the source of your nutrition as a diabetic?

The short answer is yes, it is essential.

I never knew until my primary care physician asked the reason for my more than-perfect lab test results in her hand. “Where were you for the past year,” she asked. How could you get here? My one-sentence answer was that I was at home in the Indian state of Odisha.

Is there anything else one should consider? Yes, the source counts eating the same food, buying from the grocery store, and consuming homegrown and locally sourced ingredients. The former is worse than the latter, per my experiments.

What was the key to my better diabetes lab results?

The key to this change was using homegrown food with locally procured ingredients, and the Ayurvedic style of living at home captivated due to pandemics. It is worth noting that I was eating similar vegetables, spices, and ingredients in the USA, buying them from the grocery store.

The net change was from fresh homegrown produce, locally sourced grains, homemade spices, and spice mixtures. I knew what I was eating.

The reason can easily be genetic differences, microbiome composition, an unhealthy and incompatible diet, a stressful life with unavoidable situations, lack of body movement or regular exercise, inadequate hydration, and no-optimal vitamin D in your blood.

The general guidelines by the Diabetes Association do not work for everyone. It could be a starting line for some and an ending line for others.

With varieties of diets, keto, vegan, vegetarian, vegan, and pescatarian- Are you not confused about which one may work successfully with you to manage/control your type 2 diabetes? Here, I share the natural home remedies that curb and reduce blood sugar, HbA1c, and weight loss.

What Made this Kind of Intrinsic Difference?

These plants are not treated with hormones, pesticides, or herbicides. The taste of food differs from what is available in the marketplace. It is satisfying to know that you are eating healthily. We know what exactly we are eating.

Moving Forward

It took a home village and a community of like-minded people to accomplish what I am now with my diabetes type 2 status.

My HbA1c is 6.2, and my diabetes has reduced from 7 (, which never happened over years of suffering from the disease. If I continue with this, my metformin medication will be taken off from 2 of 500 mg to onetime 500 mg.

I am back in the USA and trying to mimic the living I used to have at home. My lab test is due in a few months. I am happy to write this post if anyone benefits from it.

Caution: Please talk to your expert healthcare provider and/or dietician before you start with another routine.