Six months after receiving a type 2 diabetes diagnosis during a routine health check-up in early spring 2016, Adams says he completely reversed the disease. Today, Adams, 57, has a new lease on life. He’s 30 pounds lighter with normal blood glucose levels of 5.7 percent — at diagnosis, his hemoglobin A1C level was at a high 17 percent, which is about three times the healthy percentage — and says he feels more energized than ever. RELATED: 5 Ways to Lower Your A1C Levels How did he get here? “I used exercise to improve my health, but I had used exercise beforehand,” Adams says. He incorporates a regular exercise regimen in his busy work day. Adams has a standing desk and a stationary bike, he lifts 15-pound weights, and has a TRX suspension trainer that he uses every day in his Brooklyn office. While this has been crucial to his dramatic change in his health, it all goes back to food. “At the heart of all of it was my diet," he says. “My plant-based diet is the No. 1 reason that my diabetes was put into remission.” Now, Adams, who focuses on eating whole, fiber-rich foods, says he is on a mission to share his story. The aim: to inspire people to take control of their health and, like him, save their own lives. That means avoiding all of his old indulgences, from steaks and burgers, to drinking lots of soda, to salt and sugar-heavy midday candy snacks.
Missing the Warning Signs of Type 2 Diabetes
At first, Adams didn’t make the connection between his symptoms and type 2 diabetes, but he showed the classic signs, including tingling fingers and feet, constant urination, and declining vision. “I was ignoring the symptoms, like many men do, until I really had to confront them,” Adams says. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), while 30.3 million people have diabetes (the majority of them type 2), 7.2 million of them are undiagnosed. Sometimes, people with insulin resistance — the hallmark of type 2 diabetes — won’t even have symptoms at all in the early stages of the disease, called prediabetes, according to the Mayo Clinic. Because type 2 diabetes is most common in people 45 and older, the American Diabetes Association (ADA) recommends adult men and women begin getting screened for the disease at this age. An A1C test or a fasting blood glucose test, where you must fast for eight hours prior to getting your blood sugar levels checked, can diagnose diabetes, the Mayo Clinic notes. Adams never thought to get screened, though, because he didn’t think of diabetes like he did cancer — as something “bad” or deadly, he says. “We have equated a cancer diagnosis to ‘death,’ but we look at diabetes as ‘something that you get when you get older,’” Adams says. “But look at diabetes — it’s the leading cause of limb amputation, heart disease, kidney failure. Many people don’t equate diabetes with these other destructive things. “I didn’t equate it to those until I started reading about it,” he says, “and that was my ‘Oh, shit’ moment. It wasn’t when the doctor told me I was a diabetic. It was when I read about it, and then I was in this fearful place. I had some of the [symptoms of] advanced stages.” RELATED: What You Need to Know About Diabetic Heart Disease
Staying Alive in the Face of a Diabetes Diagnosis
After realizing the potential complications of type 2 diabetes, Adams sought more information wherever he could find it. He checked out the American Diabetes Association’s website and consulted with different doctors. Right away, Adams says he sought a “cure,” but his research and conversations with doctors weren’t satisfactory. Eventually, he came across the work of Michael Greger, MD, a Washington, D.C.–based proponent of following a whole-food, plant-based diet for preventing and reversing disease. Adams credits Dr. Greger’s book How Not to Die, which promotes this eating approach, for helping save his life. “I came across Dr. Greger, and he was speaking the language of reversing and not the language of ‘living’ with this [condition]. I decided not to listen to my regular doctors and [instead] focus on my body. The big thing is your body is your body, and you must take control,” Adams says. “Your doctor might have better training of how the body operates, but that shouldn’t stop us from seeking out other opinions.” RELATED: The Best and Worst Foods to Eat in a Type 2 Diabetes Diet Greger’s bestselling book centers on food and lays out what people can eat to help prevent and reverse the top 15 causes of death, including heart disease, cancer, and type 2 diabetes. He highlights specific foods that can help with each condition, moving away from a diet rich in animal fat and processed food, which he says contribute to so many of the health problems plaguing Americans. “Most physicians tell me they’ve gotten involved in this movement because a patient educated them,” Greger says. “It can be inspiring for some of these physicians when a patient will come to them and say, ‘I found this study or read about this diet’ — and then it can be so heartwarming to see people get better because of that.”
The Connection Between Weight Loss and Reversing Type 2 Diabetes
Utpal Pajvani, MD, PhD, an endocrinologist and assistant professor at Columbia University Medical Center in New York City, who hasn’t treated Adams, says communicating with your primary care doctor is critical if you’ve been diagnosed with type 2 diabetes. He or she can help you devise a weight loss strategy or treatment plan to get your blood sugar under control. An article published in September 2017 in the journal BMJ suggests reversing type 2 diabetes through weight loss is possible. And another study, published in February 2018 in the journal The Lancet saw similar results: Following a low-calorie diet helped 90 percent of study participants who lost 30 pounds or more put type 2 diabetes in remission — some of whom had been diagnosed with the disease six years prior. But anyone, whether they have type 2 diabetes or not, knows that often losing weight is easier said than done. The body has a tendency to want to reset itself to your prior weight, but physical activity can help, Dr. Pajvani says. “Exercise can change that set point a bit, and it can convince the body and the brain that weight loss is intentional and not because you are starving.” RELATED: How Much Should You Lose if You Want to Reverse Diabetes Through Weight Loss? To help lower your A1C, Pajvani suggests reducing your caloric intake coupled with getting up and moving more. He has even seen tried and true methods, like the Weight Watchers Diet, result in weight loss for his patients with type 2 diabetes. Pajvani says he isn’t that surprised to hear of Adams’s diabetes remission. He cites the Brooklyn politician’s improved diet — with a lowered carbohydrate intake — and increased exercise as the hallmarks of improving blood sugar levels, even without the kind of weight loss that Adams achieved. “I have patients who had similarly high HbA1c [another term for A1C] that completely normalized when they stopped drinking juice and soda, which are quite sugar-laden, even without weight loss. Of course, the additive effect of weight loss to the change in diet will go a long way to prevent the type 2 diabetes from returning,” Pajvani adds. “If Mr. Adams is able to keep the weight off long-term, that would be the most surprising and impressive aspect of his case, as many studies have shown that people are highly susceptible to weight regain due to a slowing of metabolic rate mediated by the brain.” Greger says that it is sometimes hard to convince skeptics to make these rather radical shifts in their diets because it’s hard when they have so many outside influences — from TV ads to fast food — that promote unhealthy eating habits. “Look, there are no ads on TV for broccoli; there are no Super Bowl ads for sweet potatoes. No one makes money out of it — it’s not a branded product,” Greger says. “The whole system is set up to support crappy food.” But when public figures like Adams share their stories, they help raise awareness about the power of healthy eating, Greger says — and that’s something.
How Type 2 Diabetes Can Run in the Family
“In three weeks of being on my diet, my vision got better, the tingling in my fingers cleared up, these awful sores on my side were gone, the nerve damage in my legs and thighs were gone,” Adams says. “It’s unbelievable.” When Adams talks about his dramatic health turnaround, he talks faster, his tone more energized. This is personal for him — it goes back to family. “Look, it’s not [just] my DNA; it’s my diet,” says Adams. “The dinner is in my family. My grandmother hands down the recipe to my mother, and she hands down the food, and so on, and so on — the disease is handed down, and it affects our life. Particularly for African-American people and Caribbean people, the foundation of our diets was the soul food that our ancestors had to use while living on the plantation, and it turned into a delicacy.” This dynamic in Adams’s life sheds light on a reality for many black families in the country. African-American adults are 80 percent more likely to be diagnosed with diabetes by a doctor than non-Hispanic white adults, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of Minority Health. What has been particularly heartening for Adams is seeing his 79-year-old mother adopt his newfound approach to eating. She also has type 2 diabetes, and was raised on fried chicken, pork, and gravy. “Imagine the excitement I have in watching my mother, who has been injecting herself [with insulin] since I was 2 years old, now hear me tell her that she can reverse her condition,” Adams adds. “I can’t even express the emotions that are attached to that.” His newly adopted diet has spread to other family members, too, including his younger brother, who is 52. “My kid brother is also a diabetic. I spoke with him, and he and his wife just started on a program and been on it a month. His wife gave my sister a kidney, and my sister lost her kidney to diabetes,” he adds. “My mother went down South for a reunion and she forgot her medicine one time, and she would’ve been two or three days without her medicine. Well, my sister said, ‘Thank God I’m diabetic. Use some of my medicine.’ That needs to change for so many — families are all sharing the same medicine. It’s because they stay in the same habits.” RELATED: Having a Parent With Type 2 Diabetes: What to Know About Your Risk
Adams’s Plan to Help Others Avoid Type 2 Diabetes
Back in September 2017, Adams invited Greger to Brooklyn Borough Hall for a talk called “The Doctor That Saved My Life.” Greger says he “had a blast” at the event and adds that even though Adams doesn’t have the power of City Hall to spread the word about healthy habits, he still has a big platform to help enact change. Of course that could change down the line. He has gone on the record saying that he wants to run for mayor of New York City, possibly in 2021. During a healthcare summit in November 2017, Adams says the city and its hospitals needed to do a better job of addressing diabetes. “If we really want to reverse this condition, there needs to be a clear infusion of resources and we need to look at what we are doing to feed this crisis,” he said at the conference. “The city does not have a clue on how to do it right.” There are about 987,000 New Yorkers who have diabetes, and about 19 percent have no idea they even have it, according to the NYC Health website. When asked if diabetes awareness, treatment, and prevention would be a part of a potential mayoral run, Adams says “it would be one of the foundations and pillars of my platform.” “Having a serious ailment or serious disease, it hijacks your life,” he says. “You’re thinking about the next result, the next test …. My goal is really to use my position as the borough president and any higher-profile position to empower people, to let us all know how we can control our health.”
