- Joe, it's fantastic to be here with you. I've been obviously following you online for a number of years now, and I've kind of seen the
highs and lows of your journey. Do you wanna give a little
bit of an introduction? - So, my name's Joe and I
have been on a very long and amazing journey with
diabetes and binge eating. They're the two pillars that
are very difficult to manage. I used to be a banker, I used
to work for Goldman Sachs and that in itself is
quite an amazing story. But I ended up at Goldman Sachs and over that period of eight to 10 years, I just started gaining
weight over that time. And at some point it got to a level where I was diagnosed with diabetes. I was in my house, I felt very,
very thirsty and delirious and I didn't know what was going on. It was very late at
night, one in the morning. So I went to a 24 hour pharmacy over by, in a place called Paddington. And I went there and they
checked my blood sugar and it was about 800. So they immediately said, "Go
to the hospital", which I did. Went to the hospital and they said, "Right, this is an emergency" 'cause they take it quite seriously, and they put me on insulin and
they gave me a hospital bed and I'd knew nothing about
diabetes at that point. And the first thing that
happened was the next morning someone came in and checked my
blood sugar and it was high. Then another person came in, who's the person who brings food and they brought me toast and Weet-Bix, and they brought me just
English breakfast stuff. And then the other person come and measured my blood
sugar about an hour later and said it's very high,
and gave me insulin. And they did it again at
lunch, and again at dinner. And after about three days I
was like, "This is nonsense." This is like, "You're literally, you're giving me food that's
making my blood sugar go high, and then you're measuring it and then you're injecting
me with insulin." And I said to the lady at the time, and this is 20 years ago,
things have improved, but I said, "Do you have a diabetic diet?" And back then they would say,
"No, there's no diabetic diet. You are diabetic and we give
you medication to solve it." Which is very different today. So I checked myself out. Three days of that, I just
walked out the hospital, they told me that I shouldn't go, and I said, "I'm not staying here." And that began my inquiry
into what this was. And it just took me a
very, very, very long time to figure this out because there wasn't
much information then. When I did figure things out, I couldn't do it because I had
this binge eating affliction. So it was like the way to solve this, I knew in my mind, the way to
solve this was through diet and what's the one thing I can't control, which is diet, right? So it's like ride down
the hill on this bicycle and you'll be free, but you've got a bicycle that when you turn this way,
the wheel goes that way. So it was just such a conundrum. - I guess the first question would be, what makes you uniquely positioned to provide this information? And I guess if you could just talk about your story a little bit,
that would be great. - In 1999 I got an ulcer, and I was working as a
trader in Goldman Sachs, and I had a thing called H-pylori, which creates ulcer like symptoms. And I'm sitting at my desk
and I'm at Goldman Sachs and we had free food all day. They come around in the morning, they give you a massive menu, you took off whatever you want, they just bring you food. And, 'cause of the way this is, when I digest food, it hurts, when I eat, the pain stops. So I started gaining loads of weight 'cause I'm eating to stop
the pain of the last meal. So now I'm in this loop. I asked a friend of mine,
she was an ex-partner, my first vegan girlfriend. And when I met her, she
told me she was vegan, this is 10 years before or so. I said, "Where's that?" I thought it was a place, I kid you not. So anyway, she said to me, "Go to Ko Samui and do
a fast and a cleanse." I went there and it's the whole story about some places that I tried, but I ended up at a place
called the Dharma Healing Center with Hillary and Greg, who were old school raw food,
has been doing it 40 years in Ko Samui. And I walked in there and they said, "Do you know you're supposed
to eat your food raw?" And it just struck me as a truth. So I got into the whole raw
food thing, went back to London, started looking online,
found a group of people, early pioneer raw foods,
The Fresh Network, whole bunch of people. We started all hanging out
together in London and around, there was maybe a 100 of
us all doing raw food. And from there I went on a journey where I went raw food, raw gourmet, I met Doug Graham, I hung out with him, I learned about fruitarian lifestyle. There were these two competing camps, David Wolf and Raw Food,
Doug Graham Fruitarian. And they really didn't like each other. And I knew both of them and
I went for that process, and I went through almost
every kind of plant-based diet and non plant-based diets
that you can imagine over the course of 20 years. So I've tried it all. I've tried it all deeply, intimately, I've also failed at it all because that's also valuable information, and I've had times when
I've been successful. So I know these diets inside out from my personal perspective. - And what would you say
caused your diabetes? Was it the high meat diet or would you say it's
part of a wider culture? For example, you are a banker so you might
be in like a high stress environment which may have contributed. - Yeah. So when it comes to diabetes, I've got a little bit
of a different take to, it's not too different, but
it's a little bit different, which is, I don't consider
diabetes to be a disease. I consider diabetes, the effects
of diabetes is a disease. But what diabetes for me
is in how I look at it, it's a reaction to manmade food, right. Everybody gets a reaction to manmade food. If you took a 100 people and you fed them, as an extreme, you fed them
on fast food from birth, maybe 30 would get diabetes, 20 might get arthritis,
30 might get cancer, 30 might become overweight. I know it adds up more than a 100, but we're all overlapping here. So these are effects of
eating a plant based diet. A small amount of which would occur if we wasn't living in this, sorry, the effects of a manmade diet. A lot of that wouldn't appear if we lived a natural diet in nature. So these are reactions. So I don't consider it a disease. I'm one of the people where
when I eat manmade food, my body reacts by becoming diabetic, producing the effect of diabetes. And that is how I think
these things come about. So to reverse the sort of cause of it is eating a manmade diet, but the animal fats are,
I can't give you numbers, but I would say they're
10 times as more potent at causing diabetes than plant-based fats. I actually believe if you don't become, if you was born on a plant-based diet and you ate lots of plant-based fats, you would never become diabetic. But once you are diabetic
from animal fats, trying to change the diabetes to have this mechanism go away, you've got to cut the
plant-based fats as well. And once that's done for a
while, you can bring them back. Is that clear? 'Cause it can be quite confusing, but. - So when you say plant-based
diet has saved your life, or are there any other factors? - I would absolutely say the
plant-based diet saved my life because that is where the
rubber meets the road, is that you're putting
that food in your body. But there's so much more around it and a lot of people come
under a lot of pressure trying to adopt this diet because one of the things we do as humans is we project onto everybody
else our own experience. So if I find it easy, why
don't you find it easy? But I have to say this was
one of the hardest things that I've ever done. And for a while you start
to feel quite embarrassed, like why do I find it so easy? But when you look into
the research behind it, you start to understand that people have different
hormonal drivers, different, I won't use technical terms
'cause I never remember 'em, but like your dopamine,
serotonin, reward system, behavior, it's different for everybody. So to dial it down to your question, what really saved my life was
me persistently finding a way to overcome extremely strong cravings in the face of people not
understanding what's going on and thinking you're just being lazy or you don't care about
animals or whatever it is. But it's really, it's a personal journey to be able to understand
your own triggers, your own sense of desire
for different foods and working with that to be able to eat what you want to eat that
you know will make you well. - Is it true or false, you believe that a low
fat vegan diet is great, but your main message, the main thing is to get people
to shift from animal fat, animal protein to plant-based diet, right? - The main thing, that's a very good way
to put it concisely, 'cause it's quite elaborate for me 'cause I've been so close to
it, the main cause of diabetes is combining animal
fats with carbohydrates. - Mm-hmm.
- Those two together are I consider to be the sad diet, and that will create diabetes. The simplest solution
to try if you are new is to swap out all of
the animal-based fats. But if you've been
doing it for a long time and you've been diabetic for
more than say three years, two years, you've gotta cut, you've gotta go for a low fat
plant-based diet for a while. But then once you've done that, a lot of people don't realize this, you can start bringing back the fats. - And let's talk about where you are now, so you've successfully tackled this. - Yeah.
- This chronic illness. What does a typical breakfast,
lunch and dinner look like for you at the moment? - Right, okay, so my diet is quite fluid and I think this is really
helpful for people to do this because if you become too
rigid in your program, it starts to impact you
emotionally and socially. So when I have control, and this is what I teach
people who learn from me when I have control of my space, so I'm back at home in
Thailand in my house, I have a heavy above ground vegetable, so above ground vegetable,
plant-based diet, meaning large bowls of
steamed broccoli, cauliflower, greens, mushrooms and things like this. And I'll add to that smaller
amounts of plant-based proteins and then sauces. It's very simple. And I also eat fruits, right? But when I first started doing it, I had to give rid of the fruits
as well and most of the fat. But that's what I tend to eat now. But I've come to the UK, I'm hanging out with my family, I'm hanging out with friends and I've been going through
quite an extensive gourmet feast 'cause England has become
amazing for vegan food, like it's everywhere and I've really enjoyed it
and my blood sugar is fine. If I carried on doing this
for me the way my body reacts, like six months, I'd get into
a lot of trouble I think, not a lot at all, but I'd probably start
drifting a higher HBM and C. So when I control my life,
I eat bowls of vegetables, they take me five minutes to make, I put big bowl of vegetables, sauce and a side of vegan protein, and I call it plant healed. Okay. And it's just the formula
that I come up with that allowed me to overcome my addictions and overcome diabetes, which
are two different things that required two different processes. So I'm just gonna quickly add this in, on the side of binge eating,
which is what I suffered with, you want to increase your choice of foods to break these locks around
limited extreme diets. To become diabetic free, you've got to move towards
a very limited extreme diet, if you're really diabetic as I was, and these things come back, and so all the time that
you knew me on YouTube, I'm swinging between these, I would go into one of
these extreme vegan diets and my diabetes would improve, but then I would start
getting lots of cravings, then it would collapse and I would swing all the way
back to much more rich food, then my diabetes would get worse. And it was just boing-boing-boing. And I couldn't find a way out. And this plant healed
process was a way out because it was large amounts of food which helps with the binge eating, but it's completely empty calories. And then I started making
it really stimulative with lots of chili and peppers, which really helps with the satiation. And then a little bit
of plant-based protein for entertainment. I know it sounds weird, but when you go vegan,
there's no middle, right? With traditional diets,
there's always a middle, steak and chips, beef bowl and yong. There's always the middle, when you go plant-based and you're like, "Well, where's the middle?" So I have always have a
side that it's protein 'cause it's just for fun, and then this was what worked
and it worked pretty quickly. - And what do you say to people that say it's hard to be vegan but you can, if you have loads of Tempe, loads of tofu, loads of these high protein foods, you're actually, like that's
not necessary the whole time, but you'd have all of those foods kind of like as a little bit of condiment and entertainment, right? - I absolutely feel that
the whole of the way in which nutrition has been examined scientifically through nutritions, there obviously is some value to this. But I'm not seeing anybody
generally becoming unwell who have access to a small
variety of plant-based foods. You do come across these afflictions in countries where people are starving, but no one in the west is becoming sick because they didn't have enough beans or they didn't have
enough of anything really. It's mostly because of over consumption. So I just think, if you
are not already unwell, then pretty much any plant-based diet that is whole foods is
going to do you well. Even if you was to put some
manmade foods in there, you'll be fine. It really is, the word I came up with
to describe this concept is carbability, right? And it's a nice word because people have different
levels of carbability. If I'm diabetic, my
carbability is so small that I eat a potato and my carb stores, which is what? 500 grams, a pound. - Mm-hmm.
- Right, it's full. And I start, I don't have the insulin, I have the insulin resistance. So once I've eaten a few potatoes and I've got the fat in the cells, I have very low carbability. So then my blood sugar starts to go up, which is the overflow. An athlete, they can
eat the carbohydrates, which is what we was doing
when we was all in Thailand, eat as much as you can, that works if you are an athlete because your cells are
clear, you've got low levels, you've got high insulin efficiency, so your carbability is massive. So my point is this, if
you've got low carbability, you can't go in to these high carb diets and try and find a way out because you'll just be getting sick. And that's what happened to me. I started to burn out my pancreas trying to force in carbohydrates on the basis that as long
as I cut the fat out, I'll get well. So it depends on the
individual and you'll know. And what I've noticed is that
when I went onto this low, this vegetable, which is a low, it's a low carb diet in
a way with also low fat, so it's a bit of a trick,
I'm eating big meals that throughout the day
might be 2000 calories, but I'm not thinking that 'cause the body doesn't really
register calories as much. And what would happen is my carbability would start increasing and I think, "Oh, I really fancy a couple of dates," I'd eat them, nothing would happen. And I'm like, "Wow." But if I did it for a few days, it would start going up and I thought, "Oh, this is how I
improve my carbability." And that is what you need
to do to not be diabetic. You need to get to the point where you've restored your
ability to process carbohydrates, 'cause that's the part
that gets damaged, right? - So the advice that we've
had over the last 20, 30 years from plant-based doctors and
certainly in the last 10 years from a lot of the vegan community online is you just need to carb up. I need to be really low fat. Are you saying that's true? I think what you're saying is
it's more nuanced than that, right?
- Yeah, it's where you are at and how long do you need to do that for? This was always, the issue that we have is when people present
these healing diets, they make it a forever diet. But it's nothing, everything
is always changing, right? And it was like you had to become the
identity of that diet. If you was, I don't know, a raw fooder, I'm a raw fooder rather than
I'm eating raw food right now. If you become high
carb, I'm a high carber, it was all these permanent
identities but nothing, everything is always changing. So it's just where you are
and how do you get out of that and then do some healing
and then you can start 'cause your carb, which was never talked about
'cause I've just made it up, and not just now, but I've thought about it, as
your carbability increases, you get more ability to be
able to eat carbs and fats because your ability to
process it becomes better. But you can't go all the way into that, but you can have quite a nice enjoyable, 'cause fat is very satiating. You can bring in enough fat to enjoy it. I remember at one point
there was a massive argument over an avocado, right? 'cause someone started adding avocado, like one or half of one
to their high carb diet and it caused ruckus. And I do that all the time, right, now. But if I notice it's not
working, I'll simply, so to answer your question very clearly, no, there is no permanent way to eat that you need to do to fix this. You need to look at where you are and what do you need to
do to heal your diabetes. And one thing I'll add to that, when it comes to this reaction that people have to diabetes
that I spoke of earlier, that I call it a reaction,
every human, and this is, I never remember names of anything, this is not my finger,
but people can Google it, there is a scientist in the UK
who did studies on diabetics and he discovered that every
diabetic person has a point, a fat percentage above which
they become diabetic, right? For some people it could be 350 pounds. So they might never trigger
the diabetic response. And some unfortunate people
who are type two diabetics, but lean, their trigger to
become insulin resistant could be 170 pounds, right? But once you get below that, the rearview response stops happening. I've discovered for me,
it's about 220 pounds, which is why I'm 220 pounds, 'cause once I stop being diabetic
and then come to England, I'm having a yummy time. But to be even more safer, I'd probably want to get below 200 pounds. So it is that line. And most people will, might not, you can't really predict
it, but you'll notice it. - So do you think weight status
is the most important thing then in terms of tackling
type two diabetes? 'Cause my understanding of
it was people can be obese and then they go on a certain
protocol intervention diet and then they can still
technically be overweight, but have massive success reversing or tackling
their type two diabetes by removing a lot of the fat, specifically animal fat from their diet. But are you saying actually
whilst that is kind of true, weight status being like a normal weight is the most important thing? Or are both important? - No. So it is two separate things and both can be true at the same time. Right, and I agree with both of them. So I got my diabetes under
control at around 235. It started to feel like it was easier. I've even got it under control sometimes at like 250 pounds. So what I'm, so I did,
I was quite surprised that I could get my
diabetes looking better while I was still
technically obese, right. What I'm saying is that when you get below the level of which your diabetes is being triggered, you can eat pretty much like
high fat, high carb diet. Like someone who's not
diabetic and sort of be okay. I don't recommend it, right? But I didn't have Christmas
'cause I was in Thailand, I had Christmas just now in Newcastle with my brother's family and they were, I was eating everything, and I checked my blood sugar every day, it was never above 5.1. I was having, 'cause UK vegan food is just mental. I was having vegan cheesecake,
vegan biscuits, vegan milks, oat milks. I just like took off all the breaks, 'cause I think it's very
good emotionally to do that with your diet. Nothing happened 'cause I'm
no longer above the level of which I'd be diabetic, and I didn't even put on any weight. - Yeah.
- Which if I was back at 280 pounds or 260 pounds, I would've put on 20
pounds that week easily because the insulin goes high, you can't process fat
when you have high insulin and I'd have ballooned out. But once you get down to lean levels, whatever your lean level is,
you can start breaking rules. But it's kind of dangerous, you don't wanna do it too much, you still gotta be responsible. But there is a level, so both are true, there's a level below which you can get back to eating normally, don't recommend it, but you can. And if you're very obese right now, you might be able to just
cut the fat out of your diet and wait a while and you'll start to see
your blood sugar improve even while you're still obese. So both are true. - And so can you just talk
about what happened then when you were diagnosed
with type two diabetes? Because I remember I started
following you in I think 2013 or 2014 when you were in Thailand, but you'd had diabetes before that. So if you could just talk about
your journey a little bit, that'd be great.
- So, one of the things that
was important for me with the diabetes was I didn't
wanna take any medication. And because I was dealing
with both diabetes and binge eating, I know myself, and this is what takes a lot of courage, I know if I was given insulin, I would literally eat to the max and use insulin to cope, right,
that's what I would've done. So I refused any medication. So I needed a replacement for insulin. And I came up with the
idea of using cycling. And I was in Goa, which is not somewhere
where you can ride a bike. And I'd been, I'd left England and I'd been
traveling around the world trying to find a solution,
I went USA, India, I went everywhere basically. And I'm in India and I asked this girl, "Where can I go where
there's a flat warm city that I can ride a bike?" And she said, "Chang Mai." And I'd never even heard of it. I was always going to
Thailand to the beaches. I looked it up, I thought
this would look great. And I started booking my flight. And while I was doing that, I saw that there was a cycling
and raw food festival in Cha. I was like, "This is destiny", right? So I booked it, 2014,
I went to Chiang Mai. And the initial reason was I knew if I could ride around
on a bicycle between meals, it's just gonna make my life a lot easier. And that's why I ended up in Thailand. And then I just discovered
it was great for fruits, great for vegetables and it
was just a nice place to be. So that's how I ended up being there. - And how long has it
taken for you to understand what's the actual way you can
heal your type two diabetes? 'Cause this has been a
bit of a journey, right? - Okay, so when it comes to learning
about your own diabetes, you're in it for life. There is no breaks, there's no days off. You are in it for life. It's waiting all the time to create harm. But I started to look at it
that this is the greatest coach and teacher I will ever come across, which is the duality of
binge eating and diabetes. Because if you don't
sort the binge eating, you're going to die. It's not a vanity game. This isn't about, I wanna look better. This is, if you don't do this, you'll be getting amputated at some stage and then you will die of a heart attack. A 100%, right? So I just decided that this was going to
be my coach for life, And so it's taken me forever to do this. It took me 15 years to
even understand what I had. 'Cause they don't know, they don't know, they know a bit more more now, but 20 years ago, they don't know. And it's taken me all of this
time to figure it out myself because you don't really get, there is a lot more support now, but there wasn't at the time. So it took me about 15 years even just to begin to
understand what was going on. The solution I ended up
coming at was a combination and an improvement for me on
everything I'd ever learned. And what it was is I needed to have food that I could eat a lot of. So I went for vegetables, 'cause vegetables are the
bulkiest, lowest calorie, lowest carbohydrate, lowest sugar foods
above ground vegetables. This is the phrase that I arrived at. And then I needed something
that would be stimulative, so that I could be, not
be bored with my food. So I started using lots of spices. So big vegetable bowls with spices that I could eat
as much of, I could truly eat, 'cause a lot of people tell you, you can't eat as much as
what you want, the fruit, but vegetables you can. And there was very big bowls. And then I wanted something
that was entertaining. So I started adding very small amounts of plant-based protein that would be pretty much
predominantly grilled. And then I would make a sauce. And I first started off with five or six bottles of brown mustard and I just made mounds of this food. And I would cover it in mustard and I would have this small bowl of plant-based protein on the side that, and I would eat the whole
thing with chopsticks. And that over the course
of six to eight months, just eradicated, well, the blood sugar
went down very quickly, but this one also took the weight with it. And that's how I solved this. - And why is this taking so long? Because people watching
this will be thinking, "Okay, he's talking about how he's been on this new intervention
of like high vegetable, low fat, plant-based diet for the last six, nine, 12 months." But they'll remember you from YouTube eight or nine years ago. - I spent years trying to change. So there is an evolution
that goes along with this where you become better
at managing yourself. So that is the fundamental basis of this. So you may not be at the
level of self-control that you can overcome this right away, but you have to keep trying. And for me, I noticed my power
to change kept increasing. But what really did it was when the whole thing that happened where we weren't allowed
to go out or travel, all that stuff, I pretty much ignored it. I was living in Chiang Mai and I was going around on my
bicycle doing my kind of thing, there was, for some things were closed, but it didn't really impact me. And then one of my friends in England got very, very, very unwell. Seriously unwell. And it made me take it seriously because I trust her information. And she said to me, if you are diabetic, if you are African descent,
if you have low vitamin D, if you are obese, if you
have a high CRP index, which is about heart health, you are in the high risk category of having a very bad outcome
for that whole thing. And I was like, "Well, she is really
smart and I rate her", I researched it, got
all my blood work done. My vitamin D was 17, which is really low. Like all the bad outcomes, low vitamin D. I was obese, I was overweight, diabetic, my HBM and C was about eight at the time. And I came up with this
word I said, "You know what? this whole thing has cost
me so much in my life, my career, my like
relationships, my health." So what I did, I decided that I was
going to become hug proof. I know it's really quite funny, right? So I'm in Chang Mai and there was lots of issues
around the world at that time. And one of them was to do with communities turning on each other. And that simultaneously
happened in Chiang Mai as I'd found this information out. So I was like, "You know what? Why don't I just do a year on my own?" I quite like meditating,
I'm into spirituality. My whole community has gone
through some kind of kerfuffle, and I need to fix this
to become hug proof. So I decided I've got this big house that used to be a retreat
center, it's now just me. So I did my own retreat. And the first six months
it didn't work, right? 'Cause I'm trying to do the
whole fruit thing or high carb or all this kind of
stuff and it's just not, I'm gaining weight and my
blood sugar is not coming down 'cause of the carbability issue, which basically means you can't, you try to get this food in
and you're reacting so much, it just doesn't work quick enough. So I thought, "I dunno what
to do, I'm trying everything, it's still not working." Then a very really lovely raw food coach came into Chiang Mai, and she
said, "Hey, are you around?" And I've not seen anybody for six months. And I was like, "You know what? I'll meet up." We met in the park and I was telling her about how I'm struggling to
do the diet that she teaches, which is, you know, what you see
around the vegan communities, high carb, raw fruit, et cetera. And she said, "What you've gotta do is
you've got to find someone that you can hire and they
can come to your house and they can make your food and they can give you a timetable and they can do three meals
a day and, like that." And I was like, "That's
a really good idea. I can do that, I'll do that." And I went home and I
was like, "You know what? If I need a babysitter to
come and feed me this food, it can't be the right diet for me." So I went 180 degrees, and in the past I would've
already followed that 'cause I was committed to that way. And I thought, "You know what, I'm gonna throw everything out
and I'm gonna start again." And I thought, "Right,
I've got this ADHD thing, which makes making food
really hard", right? Because you're just not planned enough. So all of the raw food
world was out for me, 'cause that requires planning, timing, lots of equipment, out. The fruit, right? If I eat it, I gain weight. I don't care what anyone says that you can't gain weight on fruit, if you are diabetic, you can, right, because you cannot lose
weight under high insulin. I said fruit's out, right? So no raw food, gourmet
stuff, no fruit, right? What about some, like normal vegan? Right, okay, I can do that, but it doesn't make me well,
as I was and I thought, "What do I really like?" I like mustard." It sounds so basic. I like mustard. So mustard on the table. "How do I like to feel after my meals? I like to feel full." So broccoli, cauliflower,
aubergine, tomatoes, courgettes, everything like that. And I bought, it's really radical, I bought a steamer and I
thought, "Okay, that's worked." And I started off with a bowl, it looked like a horse's trough, it was so big. And I would fill it with this. I thought, "Right, it's not quite enough." What else do I need? Okay, I need something
that's stimulating." Because these other foods, when you are hunting
serotonin and dopamine, which I'll talk about
a little bit in a bit, most people who are in some
kind of addictive process, they're having very low levels
of serotonin and dopamine, and they're hunting it. So when you're hunting that, you keep getting drawn back
to the most stimulative foods. So I thought, "What can
I do instead of that?" I'll make it really spicy. So I started getting Korean chilies and then I started getting
things like nutritional yeast and pepper and taco seasoning and anything I could find that would give this mound of vegetables a kick. So that would go on top. And then I'm eating, I'm
like, "Right, I used to like, I used to like eating animal foods. Right, I used to like eating
meat and burgers and stir fries and those kind of stuff." And I thought, "Well, that's why I
can't do the fruit diet because it's literally, it's so unstimulating the lip
'cause it's our natural diet, our pure natural diet is fruit. It's so unstimulating but it's
too much of a jump to go to." So I thought, "What can I do to make like
foods that I used to enjoy?" I started off with tofu,
chuck it in a bowl, put some marinade on it and air fry it. Then I thought, "Wait
there, I'm in Chiang Mai, you can get mushroom meat here." So I started going to the vegan shops and buying like five kilo, five packets of half a
kilogram each mushroom meat, which is absolutely delicious. Yes, it's got soy sauce
in it and a bit of salt, but that's not what's making me diabetic. So I started arming with those. Then I Googled and I found out how to
make my own mushroom meat using, I can't remember them,
but these chunky mushrooms. So now I had a variety of
these meat like things, right? And see, it's not meat that
I crave, it's the salty, hot, flavorful modules, what to call them, right? So now I've got this thing, which is a big bowl for stomach satiation 'cause it's big food
that's very low in calorie. Then I've got the stimulative
sauce and chilies and stuff to give this serotonin
satisfaction, right? And then I've got this entertainment, 'cause it's entertainment, right? And of this meat like thing. And the reason why I
say it's entertainment because that's what chimpanzees do, right? They live off a fruit-based
diet but they get together and they all get a bit excited
and they hunt the monkey and it's not filling them
up, and they all share it. It's an entertainment thing. Bad for the monkey, right? But that's what chimpanzees do. And I was like, "Right,
I need that there." So now I've got this bowl
and it's three circles, one big one for the vegetables,
little one for the sauce and a medium sized one for the protein. And I just started doing that. And what happened was very interesting, the bowl started off like that big, right? A full salad bowl. And over a period of time,
they started doing that. Why? Because I'm hitting all of
the nutritional requirements and everything is calming down, right? And it just shrunk to regular sized meals. And I started having
that three times a day. My blood sugar went completely normal. My HBA1C went down to 5.1, was the lowest. And at that point I started
adding in little bits of fruit, and I started having sometimes
fruit for breakfast instead. And there was absolutely
perfect blood sugar. - And I guess your message,
correct me if I'm wrong, but it's morphed from over
the last 10 years, high carb, low fat kind of plant-based
diet, to now high vegetable, and that's the focus, low
fat, plant-based diet. And it's this shift that's
transformed your life, right? - So yes, from the perspective
of where I am right now, what got me out of the of diabetes was a low fat, low carb diet, right, because above ground
vegetables are low carb. It didn't work If I put in sweet potatoes, it didn't work if I put in rice, it didn't work at first if
I put in too many beans. So I was so diabetic for so long that I needed to do something that would allow me to not eat carbs and also to not eat fats, but be full. And it worked. So to clarify this, the biggest myth was that
everybody has the same metabolism. That is where I think
the biggest confusion and the biggest harm is done by telling people to
eat as much as you can. Because some people that can be damaging and some people it doesn't
even touch the sides, right? So for me it was extremely damaging 'cause my metabolism was so destroyed that eating as much as I want would always make me very diabetic. So this, to clarify, when you are that deep into
this process with diabetes, what is quite extreme,
diet is what's needed. But the point I want to emphasize is as you start to heal, as you start to increase your
capacity to consume carbs, as you become less fat in the cells, the more fat you can have in your diet, the more gentle it becomes. So you're not stuck on this thing forever. You've got to use this as the way out. Imagine that, it's like this, we're all in different
areas of this garden and someone is here
and they just walk out, and someone is in the bushes
here, then they just walk out. I'm literally behind that, right at the back behind all these woods. I've gotta find a different way out. But once we're all here, we were all here. And that's what it is. The whole problem with the
diabetic vegan movement was, it's being sold as one
process for everyone. And it just doesn't work,
right, it doesn't work. You've got to look at
how diabetic are you, how responsive are you to the
program you're being given. So some people they go on fruits, they eat fruits, and
the diabetes goes away, they're like magic or
they crash on potatoes and they eat loads of rice, and that goes away quite quickly. They might have only been
diabetic six months or a year, but if you've been in this a long time, that's gonna make you pass out, which is what used to happen to me. - And do you think the mistake you made was you took a kind of vegan athlete diet and then tried to apply
it to a type two diabetic? - Yeah, absolutely. I think that, well, I'm gonna rephrase
it slightly differently, everybody loves being told they can eat as much as they want. Particularly a binge-eater. That was so appealing to me. And I'm not the only one
that's ever said this. And I'm sitting there in
London and so I'm being, I'm learning that I can
eat as much as I want and a lot of people put a
lot of science behind it. You can never get fat eating carbs, right, and stuff like this. It's just not true. I actually went through this
very funny experiment research where I looked at these plant-based diet, get you the diabetes
and I love these people, but just to be clear, Neil Bernard, plant-based diabetes, plant-based
diet gets with diabetes, McDougall. So I got their programs
and I looked at the recipes and they were 1700 calories for the day. - So do you think the people
that you in Chang Mai with, they took that message from plant-based doctors over
the last 10, 20, 25 years, and then misinterpreted it. - So what happened is another athlete who's a
good friend of mine, right, Doug Graham, right, who
came up with the 80/10/10. I knew him when he was writing his book. We used to hang out in Surrey at his place and he was all about, eat
as much calories as you can. When I went to visit him,
I was probably 320 pounds. And when I showed up he said, "I've been working out for two hours just so that we can work out together, and it's kind of close." And I was like, "Wow." He's amazing, right? And his program does work
if you are an athlete, but most people who aren't
athletes like myself, we take the good part of it that we think is good
to eat as much as we can and then we don't move, right? So I had to make it more realistic. I'm not gonna go and run for two hours and so I can have a kilo of rice. And I saw it in Chiang Mai. People are like eating like athletes and only the athletes
would actually do anything. And most people are sitting
around in the park going, "I can't wait for the next athlete meal." And they're not doing a thing. - Is the following true or false because word on the street, the rumor is when everyone in Chiang Mai, every morning used to wake up
cycle to the top of the hill and then have the meet up
at the top of the hill. You put your bike in the taxi and then got a lift all the
way to the top of the hill, had the meet up and then cycled down. Is that true or am I making that up? - Okay. That's not quite true. It was a bit unfair that they said that. So what was happening is I
used to cycle up all the way. It would take me two and a half
hours to three hours, right? And I weighed twice as
much as those dudes, right? So I was like 300 pounds,
they were like 150. So I worked out, so what would happen is
when I would get to the top, they'd all finished. The whole thing's ended. The party is finished, and
I thought, "You know what", it only takes them an hour to get up. So how far do I have to get a taxi up for it to take me an hour? So I started getting a taxi halfway up so that I would
start, when they're down there, they would all pass me and I would meet at the top with them. And I explained to them, "I
weigh twice as much as you, so I'm burning the exact
same amount of calories for you to go twice as far, right?" But in that community,
everything was an opportunity to take the most negative view of that. So that caused a lot of heat. But yeah, I did do that and I'm totally proud of
myself for being so ingenious. - And over the last few years
there's been a few influences and people that have struggled to stick to a plant-based lifestyle. What would you say about those people? - Over the last 10 years, I've seen many, many
people come out and say, "I'm no longer eating a plant-based diet." And then they give a
whole bunch of reasons that blame the diet. And I sit there 'cause
I'm so intimately aware of the struggle with cravings, I sit there and I see people
who have succumbed to cravings. I'm not saying they're being disingenuous, they may actually believe the reasons, but I've also worked with a lot of addicts and one of the key things that addicts do is they lie to themselves, "I'm just gonna have
one, I'll quit tomorrow. This is the last time I'm doing that." So when you go onto a plant-based diet, you may have a high level of
motivation in the beginning, but you've basically gone
cold turkey on your cravings. For some people, their
love of animals is so high that even in the face of those cravings, they will never turn back. And some people have
lower levels of cravings, but the longer that you do it without a really strong reason, the more you'll face these cravings and you have to solve them. And if you don't, it's gonna
start with something like, "I'm gonna make a joke, I'll just stand next to an
egg or I'll look at a fish. Well, I'll just have a little bit of fish, I'll just have a little bit of egg. I'll just try that one
thing at the barbecue because I'm feeling a bit
weak and I need iron." So you just start searching out excuses. It's almost like if someone
went from cold turkey smoking to breathing oxygen and they're saying, "Oh, I just need a little bit of nicotine just to get me over this
little bit of stress." And they take it and they get a boost. So what happens is that when
they have that old animal diet, the first thing they get is stimulation. Because an animal diet is more stimulative
than a plant-based diet. And that stimulation feels good. Billy Connolly, the comedian, he says, "When I gave up alcohol, it was horrible. But when I had that first
drink, it was amazing." And alcohol is a poison. And it's the same with these foods. When you've not been having it for a while and you start craving it, when
you eat it, it feels amazing, so it satisfies all your excuses. And the last thing I say on it is that because the addiction to food is so, it's like a quasi addiction,
it's so, and you have to eat, it's so fluid that it's not clear, if I'm smoking something very strong, I know when I've gone back, but with food, you've not gone back, you've just gone back to a different club. And all of these groups, all the doctors, all the hospitals don't
think they're addicts. Nobody thinks they're an addict. So you've got to become
so self-aware that, "Oh, I'm doing this for addiction." And when you do that,
you can stay plant-based. It's got nothing to do with the nutrition and there's something
in this and that and, there's none of that. It's just you've got a craving
and eventually you gave in, and that was it. And there's nothing wrong with that. But most people don't like to admit that. Particularly when they're influencers, they want to come across as winners. One of the weird things
I did on my channel is I got a following by losing, right? Most people don't want to be a winner, so they can't turn around and say, "I failed a vegan diet,
'cause I had cravings." They have to say, "I
found something better." And there's one dude out there,
I'm not gonna say any names, but it was really funny,
but what I noticed, whatever diet they was
doing, that was the diet, like the best thing ever,
the best thing ever, 'cause they need to come across as this. So those two things together,
to be seen, to be winning. So turning cravings into a win. That's all it is. - And what would you say
the lowest moment has been over the last 10 years if you had to pick like one thing or one event? - I don't have low moments. I know no one believes me, but I think it's all been incredible. That's why I did this because I think that every
single moment in life is an absolute gift, and
I don't say that lightly. - And what would you say
the highest moment has been over the last 10 years? I guess it's been in the last 12 months when you've successfully
reversed your type two diabetes, right? - So I'm gonna give you a
slightly different answer, so I don't really have
high moments either. It's all equanimity. So what I'm gonna answer
you instead then is not what's high and low, but what has been the most challenging, 'cause I think I can give you
a more interesting answer. The most challenging was this infinite frustration
of, if I eat for diabetes, my binge eating starts. And if I eat for binge
eating, my diabetes starts and not knowing what to do
and having a whole audience telling me what to do. But no one really looking
into the situation. So I felt really on my own. It's like I'm being
ridiculed at some stage for these things. Why don't you just do this? Why don't you just do that? People were even saying
binge eating doesn't exist, you're just being greedy. Some people were even saying
diabetes doesn't exist, and I'm sitting there watching this thing, and I can't figure it out. That was the most challenging
thing to overcome. And what that took, that
took for me to turn away and start to just enjoy being
a diabetic person who binges, like find enjoyment in that path. So that's why I solved that. The high was when I came back from that meeting with
my friend and I realized, "I mean, if I need to get
a babysitter to feed me, I'm eating the wrong food." That was liberation. That was like, "I can start from again." And I threw out everything I'd
learned up until that point and looked at me, 'cause your biggest, your
biggest, people often ask me, or I see people saying, "Can I eat this? Can I eat that? Can I eat this?" I'm like, "Look at your meter, 'cause you can't say whether like, can I eat this on this program? Can I eat that on this program?" I say, "It's not the program
that's gonna tell you that, it's your blood sugar meter." And some people can do, they do great with sweet
potatoes, sweet potatoes for me, it just might as well be a bag of sugar and they're really great. Not anymore, I can eat it, but at the time they
were like a bag of sugar. So you've got to focus on yourself. So the biggest liberation for me, the biggest high from
a practical standpoint was just discovering it's all in the bin. And I'm starting again with a bottle of mustard
and a bowl of broccoli. The biggest tip I can say
to anyone who's on this path is you have to be really courageous to commit yourself to enjoying
your life exactly as it is. You can't keep projecting into
when I'm no longer diabetic, or I hate being a diabetic
or I hate being overweight or I can't do this 'cause I'm too fat. I started a detox company when I was 320 pounds called
"I-Detox Holidays", right? And I took athletes running in Cornwall. I was massive, and I did that, 'cause a bit before
then, this is about 2008, the big change for me
in this whole process was I committed to
enjoying my life as it is. And that is what fuels this, because if you treat it as an
affliction, you will burn out, right? But if you treat it as an adventure, it just keeps giving, it keeps giving. And that was the change for me. So you have to embrace
that you are diabetic or if you're a binge eater,
you have to embrace that, and you have to treat this as an adventure and a puzzle that you will solve and enjoy it.
