Vegan-EASE?

You can ease into vegan eating (and you do not have to go along with any orthodox agenda) to see how it works for you. At least reducing reliance on meat and fish as protein sources will bring in more plant-based options to try. Our protein needs are not as drastic as many carnivores assume and easy to meet on a normal vegan diet.

Type 2 diabetes seems to be primarily a disorder of insulin resistance. You may not have to worry so much about the complex carbohydrates in a healthy vegan diet, just meeting usual guidelines may not be as hard as some think. There are a lot of low-carbohydrate foods in a vegan diet, and higher-carb foods can just be eaten in lesser amounts if needed.

But your pancreas is working in Type 2 diabetes, the problem seems to be that the cells are shutting off entrance of insulin with its cargo of sugar from the blood and the pancreas is actually working overtime on churning out more insulin in response. You might find avoiding too many insulin surges by not eating too often to be a successful strategy. Just making sure that there are long enough periods of not eating (so-called “intermittent fasting”, but it doesn’t have to be drastic) has helped many to normalize their bodies’ use of insulin.

You might look for videos and articles/books by Jason Fung, a Canadian nephrologist who has treated many diabetics and has a lot of suggestions for how to deal with insulin resistance. He says all the info in his books is available for free on his website and videos, so no $ needed. He says any dietary approach works for weight loss if you just don’t eat all the time.... So he has good explanations about how to do that today.

Fung is definitely right that back in the less obesity-prone 1950s, we just weren’t snacking as much as today. I lived through it. We were supposed to get what we needed at meals, mostly. Now children and adults have food pushed at them much more frequently. Nobody thought we needed a snack while playing sports back then. Every time you eat protein or carbohydrate, that triggers insulin release by the pancreas and too much of that seems to mess up the natural process of getting sugar from the blood into the cells where it belongs.

Anyway: Eating more beans and less animal food should help reduce dietary cholesterol, although most of our cholesterol is actually synthesized in our bodies. I wouldn’t count on a vegan diet to make you slim, there are other factors at work. What you eat and how much still counts, but a plant-based diet with minimal vegan junk food might be a helpful reset. But even just aiming for mostly vegan eating on a gradual schedule should help encourage you to eat more foods that we know help us stay healthy, which includes normalizing our appetites to match our activity level.

I’ve eaten mainly vegan for decades (vegetarian allergic to dairy and egg) and use a food tracker to record what I eat (among other useful things like if a cat is inside or outside) and it’s really hard to not get enough protein if you eat a variety of plant foods. But actually experimenting for yourself will show you if that’s true for you. We are not obligate carnivores, just optional ones, so our bodies are built to be quite sustainable on other food sources. But growing up in a meat-centered culture, we don’t always know how to eat properly from plant sources. So it might take some time for you to figure out what works best for you.