Richard Shaw - Conquer Type 2 Diabetes: how a fat, middle-aged man lost 31 kilos and reversed his type 2 diabetes

This book is a personal account of my battle with type 2 diabetes. Theres an extended introduction that chronicles my journey through the diagnosis and an action plan that explains what I did to banish this disease and come off medications.

Theres a short section about a light exercise regime that happened towards the end of the programme. And the last section is a collection of low-carb, low-sugar recipes that I hope might be useful.

Some of the recipes are incredibly simple and others are a little more involved, but all are within reach of an experienced domestic cook. I wanted to eat food that I enjoyed so Im not ashamed to admit that some of the recipes are more elaborate than you might find elsewhere, but they worked for me.

I owe a great debt of thanks to the Kitchen Guru, Tracie Dudley Craig, one of my closest friends and a wonderfully talented chef, who has immeasurably improved the recipes and even come up with several of her own. You can follow her online at @tracie_dudley_craig.

If youre only interested in how this is done you can skip the next few pages and jump straight to the section headed The Plan (see page

I wrote this book as a record of what I did to overcome this disease. But it is different for everyone and Im not a healthcare professional, nor am I qualified to give medical advice. There can be some very significant risks associated with changing your diet and for some people these risks can be far greater than the original diagnosis itself. What worked for me may not work for you. Despite the fact that its called the same thing, your medications may be different and your outcomes may be radically different from mine.

A type 2 diagnosis disguises a huge range of complications and underlying causes and as I started to understand a little more about this disease and talked to other people about their condition it became ever-more obvious that there is no one-stop shop thats right for everyone.

Before you do anything to challenge your diagnosis you must talk to your doctor or a professional dietitian or nutritionist and stay in touch with them throughout the process. Nothing in this book is right for children, adolescents, the elderly, those taking insulin, or pregnant women or those planning pregnancy, women who are breastfeeding, people in poor mental health or with other significant medical conditions, or people with type 1 diabetes or those with a very long-standing type 2 diagnosis. Trust me: Im not a doctor.

Where I can offer some advice is on food, not only because I love to cook but also because Ive faced down my own type 2 diabetes by radically changing my eating habits. Food has played an enormous part in both my professional and private life. I was trained at one of Londons leading cookery schools. Ive made food programmes for TV in both the UK and the USA, Ive helped publish cookbooks and I even appeared on Masterchef. And in tackling this disease, Ive wrestled with the complicated psychological hold that food has over us. And the good news is that, although Ive dramatically changed my diet, my love affair with food endures, it is no longer toxic and I enjoy healthy, nutritious and delicious food that I know is nourishing my body.