The Great Physician's Rx for Diabetes - Hardcover

Rubin, Jordan; Brasco, Joseph

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 078521397X ISBN 13: 9780785213970

Publisher: Thomas Nelson Inc, 2006

Synopsis

Bestselling author Jordan Rubin, with David Remedios, M.D., shows how to adopt the 7 Keys in The Great Physician's Rx for Health and Wellness to focus aggressively on diabetes and develop a game plan against it.

About this title

About the Author:

Jordan Rubin is the author of the New York Times bestseller The Maker's Diet with over 2 million copies in print. His story and his previous books have been featured on Good Morning America, NBC Nightly News, Fox and Friends, and Inside Edition, and in USA Today, Time, and Newsweek. Jordan also founded the Biblical Health Institute to empower the church to live the abundant life that glorifies God.

Dr. David Remedios is a bi-vocational pastor, general practitioner, and general surgeon who is also a decorated veteran. He is a member of the Southeastern Surgical Congress and the Society of American Gastrointestinal Endoscopic Surgeons and is a part of the Major Medical Corps of the United States Air Force.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Introduction: Time to Make a Change

In early 2004, Joey Hinson sat attentively while I spoke at a Wednesday night service at my home church, Christ Fellowship Church, in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida. That evening, I described how a thirty-nine-year-old acquaintance of mine had suddenly died from a heart attack, leaving behind a beautiful wife, four energetic kids, and a thriving ministry. "I had been asked to speak to this father and husband about getting on God's health plan, but we never connected in time," I said that evening. "How would his life--and those who mattered most to him--had changed if he had managed to turn around his health in time?"

A year later, my church asked me to speak again, and this time Joey introduced himself after the service. "When you spoke a year ago, that story about that thirty-nine-year-old guy really did a number on me. You see, I'm also a husband and a father, and I felt like you were speaking directly to me. I knew I had to do something."

"Tell me about it," I said, intrigued, but humbled by what I had heard.
After he finished describing the events of the past year, I asked Joey if we could share his story with readers of the Great Physician's Prescription for Diabetes. Here's what happened in his words:

Throughout much of 2003, I began feeling horrible. This was something new for me because I thought I was in good shape, even for a guy who had turned fifty. I had played football in college--I lined up as an offensive lineman at Mars Hill College in North Carolina--so I was encouraged to "eat big" when I was growing up. It was hard to get away from that mentality after my college days were over, however. Over the years, I gained some weight--probably a good twenty or thirty pounds extra on my six-foot, two-inch frame. When I tipped the scales at 250 pounds a few years ago, I told myself to do something about it. I attended so many Weight Watchers meetings that I received a lifetime membership, but once I went off their food, the weight always came right back.

I think it's because I liked to eat Southern foods too much. My weakness was fried chicken, black-eyed peas, and collard greens with the ham bone cooked in, or country-fried steaks dripping with gravy and yellow rice. Dessert had to be a rich chocolate cake or pecan pie.

Cheeseburgers and fries worked just fine for lunch. I worked as the transportation director at King's Academy, a private Christian school near my hometown of Royal Palm Beach, Florida, and a couple of times a week I borrowed the school's golf cart and drove to the Wendy's or Burger King located next door to school. People looked at me funny when they saw me ordering lunch from my golf cart, but I didn't mind. I was having fun.

What wasn't fun was the shortness of breath and lack of energy that I began experiencing after turning fifty. Our house has a good-sized lawn that normally takes me several hours to mow. In the muggy Florida summer heat, I was too pooped to tackle the project. I'd lie down on the sofa, gasping for air and frightened by how fast my heart was beating. I felt really bad.

Donna, my wife, was naturally concerned, and I was bothered that I didn't have the energy to keep up with our youngest son, a ten-year-old. Then one Sunday night in August 2003, I was sitting in church, listening to the pastor, when beads of sweat formed on my forehead. My heart thumped like a bass drum, and I feared that a heart attack was imminent. "Lord, what should I do?" I prayed. Things got so scary that I thought about signaling for an usher to call 911, but I didn't want to create a scene in the middle of a church service.

I thought I was having high blood pressure problems since hypertension ran in the family. My symptoms calmed down a bit, so I toughed it out. I knew I should see a doctor, but I decided to wait a week or two for my annual physical. After my doctor poked and prodded around, he ordered tests on my blood and urine.

I'll never forget the phone call from the doctor's office informing me that I had type 2 diabetes.

Diabetes? That sounded serious. "Wait a minute," I said to the nurse. "I had my physical in the afternoon, so I'm not sure if I fasted for my blood work. I want to get this checked again."

A repeat visit confirmed the test results. "I'm going to write you a prescription," my doctor said, handing me a slip and sending me on my way.

My prescription was for thirty milligrams of Actos daily to treat type 2 diabetes. As the months passed, however, I can't say that I was feeling better or that the medication helped me regain my energy. My concerns were raised by newspaper stories that Actos could cause liver damage.

Then I heard Jordan Rubin speak about the Great Physician's prescription for good health, and his message inspired me to make huge lifestyle changes in what I ate and how I lived. I asked Donna if we could buy our groceries at the health food store and purchase some of the whole food nutritional supplements that Jordan recommended. I think she fell over in shock because she had been encouraging me for years to live a healthier lifestyle.

I began eating a healthy diet filled with fruits, vegetables, and the right type of dairy, eggs, and meats. The days of passing through the Wendy's drive-lane in a golf court were long gone. Energy returned to the point where I could mow my big lawn again and keep up with the kids. After a few weeks, I felt so good that I stopped taking my diabetes medication. Within a year, I had lost forty pounds and got down to my old high school playing weight.

When my annual physical came around in August 2004, I visited a new physician, but I did not disclose that I had been told a year earlier that I had diabetes. I wanted him to treat me with no preconceptions. So you can imagine my surprise when the tests results from the lab confirmed that my cholesterol was good, my blood pressure was normal, and everything else was fine, meaning I didn't have diabetes.

Wow! Jordan Rubin was right. He said that if I followed the Great Physician's prescription, there would be a good chance that I'd reverse the damage I'd done to my body, and that's exactly what happened.

The Latest Epidemic

Meeting people like Joey Hinson and hearing their stories is awesome, but my ears always perk up when someone says they have diabetes. You see, I had my own battle with diabetes back when I was a nineteen-year-old student at Florida State University a little more than a decade ago.

I chronicled my health odyssey in The Great Physician's Rx for Health and Wellness, where I described how my 185-pound body was attacked by Crohn's disease--a debilitating digestive disorder--along with a grab bag of other ailments: arthritis, chronic fatigue, hair loss, amebic dysentery, chronic candidiasis, prostate and bladder infections, as well as diabetes. Within a year, I wasted away to 104 pounds and feared an early death.

Because I was fighting battles on so many medical fronts, I wasn't your typical diabetes patient, but I've never forgotten how both of my lower legs turned purple from extremely poor circulation. Now that got my attention. Although my doctors never suggested that I was a candidate for amputation, the thought of losing a leg crossed my young mind. If my health degenerated to a point where amputation was necessary, I really thought I would be better off dying.

Fortunately, and with great gratitude to my Lord and Savior, my health gradually improved, and the circulation in my legs returned to normal. Ever since I got well, I've carried a healthy respect for how diabetes impacts people's lives, and that impact is expected to double worldwide in the next twenty-five years. Researchers at the University of Edinburgh in Britain are projecting a global rise in diabetes from 171 million in 2000 to 366 million in 2030. The greatest relative increases will occur in the Middle Eastern Crescent, sub-Saharan Africa, and India, matching a similar rise in obesity rates.

Here in the United States, the alarm has already been sounded regarding diabetes. According to the most recent government statistics, around 18 million Americans--or 6.3 percent of the population--have been diagnosed with diabetes, and researchers estimate that there may be almost as many undiagnosed diabetics. The disease displays a strong ethnic bias based on its prevalence, in terms of percentage, among Native Americans, African-Americans, and Hispanics, as well as the aged.

Diabetes kills more than 200,000 Americans every year, ranking it as the sixth-leading cause of death. Health authorities, however, believe that diabetes is underreported as a cause of death because many families and doctors, for one reason or another, choose not to enter the disease on the death certificate. A probable reason is that people often die of complications relating to diabetes--heart disease, strokes, high blood pressure, and kidney disease--so that disease becomes recorded as the cause of death.

Thus, many people are unaware that they even have diabetes. Although the affliction trails cancer and heart disease by considerable margins in the cause-of-death department, medical practitioners are calling diabetes a runaway epidemic because an estimated 41 million Americans have pre-diabetes, according to government estimates. Pre-diabetes is the period when people at high risk for developing full-blown diabetes demonstrate signs of intermittent elevated blood sugar levels. While their bodies are still capable of processing glucose--the energy that fuels the body's cells--their blood sugar levels are spiking like an aggressive teen driver running up the RPMs on his tachometer.

The "redline" image is apropos, especially since the American Diabetes Association has come out with red plastic wristbands as a way of creating awareness for the disease, just as cyclist Lance Armstrong introduced the canary yellow "Live Strong" wristbands as a fundraiser for cancer r...

About this edition

• Publisher: Thomas Nelson Inc
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 078521397X
• ISBN 13: 9780785213970
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 101