Healthy Living by Willow Creek Springs
A podcast about practices to promote healthy lives featuring experts, businesses, and clients: we gather to share our stories about success, failure, exploration, and so much more. Our subscription episodes feature some personal and vulnerable, real-life stories that are sensitive to some of the general public.
Healthy Living by Willow Creek Springs
Reversing Type 2 Diabetes: A Telemedicine Revolution with Dr. Jeffrey Hawkins
Dr. Jeffrey Hawkins is transforming the landscape of diabetes treatment through his revolutionary telehealth platform, the Diabetes Reversal Group. With over a decade of functional medicine experience and a personal connection to the disease that runs in his family, Dr. Hawkins has developed the world's only patented system for reversing type 2 diabetes—not just managing it.
At the heart of type 2 diabetes lies insulin resistance, where years of poor dietary choices force the body to produce excessive insulin until cells become resistant to this crucial hormone. Rather than accepting this as a permanent condition requiring lifelong medication, Dr. Hawkins' protocol directly addresses the root cause through precise nutritional intervention and supplementation.
The program's strength comes from its remarkable simplicity and effectiveness. Patients follow a specific food protocol focusing on fruits, vegetables, proteins, and healthy fats while eliminating problematic foods that spike blood sugar. Combined with a proprietary blend of 87 nutrients that received patent approval in 2020, this approach has helped thousands of patients completely eliminate their need for diabetes medications.
What makes this telehealth model particularly powerful is its collaborative approach with primary care physicians. While many doctors aren't trained in diabetes reversal techniques, they recognize positive changes in blood work and must reduce medications as patients' blood sugar normalizes. This creates a transformative healthcare experience where objective data drives medical decisions.
Most remarkable are the comprehensive benefits patients experience beyond blood sugar control. Weight loss of 30-40 pounds, improved energy, enhanced sexual function, and elimination of early complications like neuropathy occur regularly for those who follow the program. The Diabetes Reversal Group is so confident in their approach that they guarantee results—an extraordinary claim in healthcare.
Ready to discover if diabetes reversal is possible for you or someone you love? Free educational webinars are available at ReverseYourDiabetes.com to learn more about this groundbreaking approach that's changing what we thought possible in treating one of America's most prevalent chronic conditions.
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Well, hello and welcome back to the Healthy Living Podcast. I'm your host, joe Grumbine, and today we've got a very special guest. His name is Dr Jeffrey Hawkins. He's the founder and CEO of the Diabetes Reversal Group, a telehealth community company that helps individuals reverse type 2 diabetes through personalized, evidence-based lifestyle coaching. This guy's got over a decade of experience in functional medicine. Author of two books on metabolic health, dr Hawkins is a pioneer in using real-time blood sugar data and patented protocols to achieve sustainable remission. Now that is powerful. Type 2 diabetes has become a plague and a scourge here in America and, I suppose, lots of other places, but here, where we live, I see it all around. Don't run into anybody who's like cancer. You don't know anybody who doesn't have it anymore. So welcome to the show, dr Hawkins, and it's a pleasure to share this with you. And why don't you tell us a little bit about how you came to this place?
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, I've been in healthcare for 35 years now, joe, and after our first 18 years of doing wellness and healthcare pain management my wife and I wanted to go in a different direction. So we sold four clinics we had in Southern California and decided to tackle type two diabetes because it runs in our family. I had an anti-diabetic when I was younger my wife's dad. He just passed away two years ago from it. So it's a real personal mission for us and since we know it's reversible, we created our own telemedicine program that could really help people. You know from A to Z exactly what you can eat, what you can't eat, what supplements to take, exercise to do, provide coaching, training, guarantee results all of that to make sure we get that reversal. So it's been pretty cool and it's been almost 16 years now we've been doing it.
Speaker 1:That's fantastic. So I think a lot of times we have listeners from all walks of life and you know all different reasons that bring us here, and a lot of times people think about diabetes and they don't really know what it is. You know, we got type one, type two. Now there's some new sort of version that they're talking about and I don't know if they're classifying something else as diabetes, but it doesn't matter. Why don't you explain to us what type two diabetes is?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so type two diabetes. Another name for it is insulin resistance. So what happens is when you eat the wrong food, joe, for 20, 30, 40 years, a lot of bad, a lot of the wrong carbs, a lot of sugar, a lot of dairy products, a lot of insulin to try and bring that blood sugar down. And so what happens is, with a type two diabetic, the insulin is getting so high in your body so constantly that now your body becomes resistant to your own insulin. So now your body's insulin is yeah. So now your body's own insulin is not bringing the blood sugar down like it's supposed to because it's resisting it. That's, that's what keeps your blood sugar high. And now you become a diabetic. So program like ours, when you change your lifestyle the right way, it can reverse that insulin resistance so you don't need to take medications any longer. And now your own insulin starts bringing the blood sugar down again like it's supposed to. For a front like a non-diabetic. So that's it.
Speaker 1:So you're? You're basically rewinding the clock a little bit, taking your body back to where it was before. You had the problem correct. Yeah, just throwing a bunch more drugs in it to try to get that cycle going, like a lot of I don't know western medicine likes to do exactly exactly. So why don't you tell us a little bit about your program? You know, I know there's a lot of interest in, you know, biohacking and anti-aging and a lot of that has. You know diet's a big part of a lot of that, but there's so many different types of diets. You know you got the keto diet, you got the vegan diet and you got the carnivore diet. You got, I mean, all these extremes that people are saying well, this is the thing that made me healthy. What's specific to type 2 diabetes?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so what we got patented Joe and we got that patent approval back in 2020, was we got patented the complete list of foods and drinks that are allowed for a diabetic to have. That's the first thing, cause there's a lot of nonsense, a lot of misinformation out there. Like, if you want to just manage your diabetes and keep taking your medications forever, then you can eat a lot of these foods over here, but you want to reverse it and get off the meds you got to eat over here and they're different. So a lot of not a misinformation. So that's one of the things we got patented, and also the ingredients and dosages of our nutritional supplements, and there's 87 different nutrients in the supplements our blend that we got actually patented. So that's our secret sauce is eat the right foods, take the right supplements, blood sugar starts coming down, your doctor is able to wean you off all your meds and now you're happy.
Speaker 1:So doctor is able to wean you off all your meds and now you're happy. So, nice, nice, and so I suppose it. It varies a lot from the level of. I mean, you know, you can be pre-diabetic, you can be a little bit diabetic, and you can be a lot diabetic and then you die. So there's this giant spectrum of diabetes that people are on, and then there's even just the predisposition to it.
Speaker 1:You know, some people the genetics say well, you go a little bit this way, you're going to get a lot of result. Other people, you know they can, for whatever reason, they can eat lousy and still be okay for a while. So when you're dealing with somebody, you know, on a telehealth basis. I have mixed feelings about telehealth but I think overall it's a really good thing because it puts people in touch with practitioners much easier than having to, you know, sit in a waiting room somewhere. So I'd rather have something than nothing, but still the ability to do, you know, blood tests and the different kind of things that would give you a really, you know, detailed diagnosis. How do you mitigate or manage that?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So when patients join our program, joe, they stay under the care of their primary physician. So we're not the ones diagnosing them, prescribing meds, taking them off the meds. So they're still going to get lab tests done two or three times a year from their doctor and they send that to us. When the blood sugar starts coming down, our coaches tell our patients hey, joe, it's time to call your doctor now so they can reduce the dose of one of your meds.
Speaker 2:So that's how they do it so and that way for our program. We don't have to have a doctor in every city in the US recommending our program. Right, we can do the marketing nationally. We sign them up online through a telemedicine platform, but they're still under the care of their doctor. So it's really nice. And again, these doctors even though medical doctors aren't trained how to reverse diabetes when they see the blood sugar start coming down, they have to start weaning you off your meds, otherwise you go hypoglycemic. So our job is to give that doctor the objective evidence they need to safely start getting people off their meds, and it's pretty cool when that happens.
Speaker 1:So how has been the response from the doctors, per especially? I mean, you know like I'm dealing with a cancer right now and I've done some very extreme research and treatments and we've had a. You know like I'm dealing with a cancer right now and I've done some very extreme research and treatments and we've had an amazing result. And the doctors are just like whoa, but they still don't want to deviate from their standard of care. So I'm having to find alternative ways around that to solve my problem. But with diabetes I don't think it's such a rigid standard of care as they do with cancer. So now doctors reacting when they start seeing. You know, yeah well initially.
Speaker 2:Initially they're a little skeptical when their patients join a program that they have no idea what it's about, right, they start seeing the results. They're like, wow, this is really good. You keep this up, joe, we're gonna be able to get you off all these meds. Yeah, and even if a doctor is skeptical, it doesn't matter, because we force their hand by having a blood sugar come down. They have no choice but to reduce the dose of meds, just like if your blood pressure starts decreasing, they get you off your blood pressure meds, right.
Speaker 1:Right, same concept, actually pretty cool, because with cancer it's totally different. They have this thing that says we're going to do this and they're not. You know, even if they get these crazy results, they're still going to do it because that's what they're trained, whereas this, the medication, has a direct response that you know. You have to keep it within a level. You just can't keep going in one direction, exactly. Yeah, that's fantastic. I love that. So when patients are coming to you, how do they find you?
Speaker 2:Well, right now, several ways. We're doing a lot of national advertising right now through Facebook, Instagram, Google, and we advertise one of our free webinars that we have pretty much five, six days a week right now. So somebody can watch a free webinar, learn about our program and if they're interested, they sign up for a one-on-one consultation with one of our reps. And now we're watching through the process. We customize a program for them and then they enroll and once they're signed up, then they get access to our online portal where they get all the weekly meal plans, recipes, training, videos. We send them the supplements you know our supplements that they need to take. They get assigned a one-on-one health coach to walk them through the whole process and hold them accountable, answer questions. So, yeah, it's a very, very detailed program, but it's all done right now, where they enter through this webinar process and watch the process.
Speaker 2:You know, as far as the, what we do, what we don't do, et cetera. Now we're also going into physician's offices now where they can become a distributor of our program and enroll their patients that way. That's going to be something that's really going to be big for us. And we're also going into privately insured corporations where the self-funded ones, where they're actually paying the bill for their employees. These employers are getting crushed with healthcare costs. We're spending about $15,000 per year per diabetic employee and we have a solution for that. So there's a lot of ways that we're getting the word out right now, but those are the main ones right now.
Speaker 1:That's beautiful. I love the idea of preventative healthcare. I mean, you know everything is always reactive. You know you don't go to the doctor until you got the problem and the problem has already gone too far because you didn't want to take care of it when it was little and I was the same with mine. And you know by the time you have a big problem to solve. It gets real expensive and you know it's much more difficult to solve. So when people are coming to you, what is the I don't know breakdown of where people are in their diabetes?
Speaker 2:Yeah, most people that join our program, joe. Unfortunately they've had it for a while, typically five years or more, and they join our program because they're scared, like they're already getting some symptoms like neuropathy in their feet, so they don't want that to go to an amputation. They're getting blurred vision, they don't want to go blind. They've got kidney damage. You don't want to go on dialysis or need. That's really extreme, that's like. So that's the motivating factor. The people that don't tend to join, or the people in their mid to late 40s just got diagnosed taking one pill, no symptoms. Yet, yeah, when I get worse, I'll give you a call right. There's no urgency for that person, it's just human nature. Like you said, a lot of people wait till there's a crisis before they stop screwing around and obviously that when you do that it's you know it's a lot more advanced, takes costs a lot more money to fix it if it can be fixed Right.
Speaker 1:So, so yeah, by the time somebody has gotten her up at the, I have a good friend of mine who passed away as a result of, you know, diabetes and it went from. You know I've got this abscess that won't heal to. They took off a toe to, they took off the foot and it just, you know, he ended up passing away and that was my first real big wake up call. You know my grandma had diabetes, but you know she was old and it wasn't what killed her, you know it was. It was one of the factors, but I became aware of it at that point at least. And but by the time something gets that extreme, you know it's like cancer that's metastasized. It's like okay, well, it's already gone so far. How effective is trying to reverse it with diet and supplements?
Speaker 2:at that point, yeah, again, there are limitations to some of the things, like if someone just has neuropathy in the feet, then we can reverse that and go away, but if they've already got gangrene in the feet, that's too far gone. That person might need an amputation. But even when that happens, they can still reverse their diabetes, got it. Some of the damage, though, can't be reversed right. Same with, like diabetic retinopathy in the eyes it gets too advanced and it goes to blindness. That's not reversible, but if you catch it at the blurred vision stage, it is reversible, right. So that's the thing. And with diabetes, as you know, that's why I mean, there's a lot more people dying of diabetes every year than is listed, because, to your point, some people can have diabetes but they die of a heart attack or a stroke, right, or they die of cancer.
Speaker 2:Because diabetes can cause cancer, I mean, but they don't count it as diabetes. They say they died of cancer. It's like a comorbidity. So that's the interesting thing. It's such an insidious disease that when you have diabetes it affects every cell and organ in your body and it's just it's like a nuclear bomb going off. So but the cool thing is it is reversible with the lifestyle changes. So we just want to make sure we get people in, have it happen, get off the meds, live your life.
Speaker 1:So that's fantastic. Why don't you tell us a little bit about you know the diet plan? I mean, I think most people would say, well, you cut the sugars out. Obviously that's a big thing, but beyond that, you know you're talking about. You know carbohydrates and dairy and all this other stuff. So, yeah, what, what is sort of a a textbook diet? That would be diabetes.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the biggest things that people should be eating is just fruits, vegetables, meat. They can do eggs, nuts and seeds, beans and that's pretty much it and then drink a lot of water. Those are the main things. Everything else you kind of avoid. So when people join our program, we give them what we call the enjoy avoid list. Right, that's what you can enjoy that you got to avoid, so you can still eat out of restaurants and have a social life. It's not a very restrictive diet, because here's the thing, it's not a weight loss program, right, a program is designed to reverse diabetes, so you're not going to be hungry, you're not starving yourself, not counting calories, as long as you eat from the approved list. You eat enough to stay satisfied every day, which is key. If you want someone doing this every day the rest of their life, you can't be starving every day. They're not going to last very long, yeah.
Speaker 1:It's. The whole problem with diets is they're not sustainable generally, yeah, and then when you cheat, you cheat hard and everything just goes sideways. Right, exactly, right, exactly. So you know, with diets, a lot of times, you know, I'm on a very rigid diet, you know, specifically tailored for cancer, which is even more extreme than yours. But when it comes to like you know, you got to live too, and so you know, when I do a little cheat, it's just a little teeny little bit of something that says, all right, I'm going to tell myself it's okay to have this little bit of thing that I shouldn't have, but I'm not going to eat a whole piece of it, I'm not going to eat a whole pie, I'm not going to do the whole thing. Is it kind of like that, or is it? Or is it very, you know, like you just don't go on that side of the.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so well. Again, when they're going through our program, joe, we put people on a three month, a seven month program based on the severity of their diabetes, and while they're going through those active programs they can't cheat. They got to be very, very strict because you got to reverse this thing, get the pressure off your body, get it all healed. Now, once that's done, then you can start bringing some things back in, you know, sporadically, and kind of see how your body reacts, but you can never go back to eating the same way that caused your diabetes. Of course, right, yeah, but while they're going through it, we don't let them have any kind of cheat day, because it's just, it's going to slow down the progress and make a three-month plan turn into a year-long plan, which is just it makes perfect sense.
Speaker 1:Um, and when you mention fruit, you know there's a lot of times people have a misconception about fruit because fruit's got a lot of sugar in it. Fructose is a difficult sugar but if you eat the whole fruit you get all the fiber in it and it gets processed slower through your body so you don't get the big spike. But people say fruit, so I'm going to drink a bunch of fruit juice. Yeah, exactly, that's a whole different thing.
Speaker 2:Right, that's 100% different. Yeah, so that's why no fruit juice is on our planet, but you can have the whole fruit, for reasons you just stated, and also because if you drink a glass of orange juice, that's like you know, basically squeezing five or six oranges, but you never sit down and eat five or six oranges. Right, it's like drinking blood sugar.
Speaker 1:It's like drinking blood sugar way too much.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I would say too if you're having fruit, always have some protein with it. So have some nuts with it, or have some peanut butter with it or something to balance out the sugar. And you always say, have that fruit before noon every day, then you have the rest of the day to burn it off Because, again, this is not an anti-sugar program, because your body needs glucose to survive. It's the wrong kind of sugar, which is the bad carbs and the dairy and the sweet soda and all that. That's got to go away.
Speaker 1:And also, like you said, the time of day is critical, Like with my diet, I eat a ton of fruit in the morning and then, after about 10, 11, I'm like, okay, well, there's my energy for the day and you know I go through the rest of my regimen. What about vegetables?
Speaker 2:I mean, most healthy diets are eat all the vegetables you want, yeah. So again, it's all veggies. So again, fruits, vegetables, meat, eggs those are the main things that are okay in our program. Um, yeah, because you want to have a lot of protein. That's a big thing too is high protein diet is the best thing you can do as well for for diabetes less carbs, even the good carbs, less of those, less of anything that's going to be fat.
Speaker 1:You want more protein in the diet for sure Okay, and that's very different from my cancer diet. So it's a whole different kind of thing, which is, it's, really interesting. As I'm walking through this you know healthy living program that I'm, you know, doing with this podcast, you find all these different angles and sometimes people have a combination of problems and then it becomes even more difficult to navigate when you're dealing with people with diabetes, like how often I mean you're dealing with mostly severe cases. The way I understand it, I am hoping that soon you'll get less severe cases and even pre-diabetics coming to you to do that.
Speaker 1:Now, generally speaking, how does somebody discover that they're diabetic? Like you know, most people are not living you know the health care life and you know going to a doctor every six months just for a checkup. Most people in working class are you don't go to a doctor unless you're sick, and so you know how, besides education, which is, you know, scarce for somebody who's just living a regular life and working a job and dealing with daily stresses, how does somebody become aware that they might even be in danger of being diabetic?
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, that's the dangerous thing, right? Because a lot of people don't go to their doctor once a year for a checkup, and so some people can have diabetes for two or three years and not even know it. It takes a while having it before it gets to the point where you start feeling some symptoms, like some numbness in the feet or et cetera. We're not like, holy crap, I better go to my doctor. They run some lab tests. Oh my gosh, your A1C is like 10, your blood sugar is 200. And he probably had this for two years, but they didn't know. So that's the scary thing. So there's really nothing you can do except, you know, hope that that person is going to go and so that they see it and catch it earlier. You know, before they wait until now, they're getting symptoms and they go and find out. It's been something festering for years. So, yes, anyone listening who doesn't go, at least go once a year to your doctor, blood work done, especially once you get into your forties. A hundred percent health issue.
Speaker 1:You know, when covid comes around, they've got all these psas about do this, don't do that, um, even aids, stds, all different types of you know endemic, pandemic sorts of issues that you know we're dealing with. There's all kinds of uh, health problems that are really plaguing americans and they'll put messaging out for that. I see a little bit of diabetic messaging. But how do you feel about, you know, raising that awareness? It seems like this is really a big deal the more I become aware as I get older too. You know I'm going to be 60 next year, so you run into a lot more people that have a lot of these sorts of problems as you get up in the age bracket a little bit, but you know you're down below 40 when you really need to make those changes. What do you see, as you know, bringing this awareness to people?
Speaker 2:Well, yeah, we have to. That's why we're trying to do this, joe, now by getting into thousands of physicians offices, because they're the ones that see all the diabetics, but they're not trained in med school that you can reverse diabetes. So that's what's really causing this whole thing is that when someone gets diagnosed, their doctor does what they're trained to do is they put them on medications to manage it and that's it. So that's why the most common thing we get question we get from patients when they join our program is like how come my doctor never told me about this? And I'm like it's not the doctor's fault, they literally don't know, right. So that's where we're kind of starting that process, joe, of educating these physicians. Like this is reversible.
Speaker 2:I know you don't know it, but it is getting into dental offices, chiropractor offices, optometrists, podiatrists, med spas, audiology centers mean pharmacists. So we're really working right now to go national again and get our distributorship model into thousands and thousands of offices, which will then help increase that awareness. Now we're also trying to go around and get a meeting with rfk jr. He's the one that's in control of what's covered by medicare, medicaid and the va. All right, we become a covered service for those, those, those, all of a sudden boom. Now we really make a really good impact on that way, so we're doing as much as we can right now to get that awareness up.
Speaker 1:Well, it seems like this guy might be receptive to this type of a treatment more than the other guys. I don't necessarily agree with a lot of things he says, but it doesn't mean that he doesn't have some good ideas as well. That's probably part of the problem. People are so polarized. I think it's either this or that, but most of the time there's this and that. You've started in California and you've been reaching out nationwide. Is there an area that you're really thriving in at this time?
Speaker 2:No, I mean diabetes is agnostic. Right, it affects everybody, you know, low income, high income, middle income, so that really doesn't discriminate. Now you might see, like some Southern states like Louisiana and Mississippi, where you know the obesity is higher, where there's a higher incidence of diabetes there, but not significantly enough to where we want to just target certain areas. That's that's why all of our marketing and outreach is like all 50 states. Now we're going to be expanding into India in a couple of months too and then going international. So, yeah, it's a very exciting time for us right now.
Speaker 1:Are there any areas where you're getting more traction than others right now?
Speaker 2:No, it's pretty much all across the USS, like when you see patients signing up. Because we're telemedicine, we'll have somebody from Atlanta, someone from California, someone from Texas. I mean it's all over. So, yeah, it's pretty neat to see.
Speaker 1:That's fantastic. Well, that means it seems like it's taken off, it seems like you're in the right place at the right time. That's fantastic, absolutely. I like to. Generally, before we close out, I like to hear at least one or two real success stories. Is there some stories that stand out as to? You know somebody that's coming?
Speaker 2:Yeah we have them every day coming in, joe, and it's just typical where someone comes in they're taking like five or six medications. They're about 50, 60 pounds overweight. A1c is up in the 9, 10 range. Right, thinking they have no hope. Five months later, their doctor's taking them off all their medications. They've lost 30, 40 pounds. Sex drive has improved, energy's improved, I mean. So it's just every single time it's something similar to that. They're very similar stories. Our website we've got thousands of testimonials that we've had from patients that are successful. So it's really just a matter of somebody wanting to do a bad enough and you know we have the solution.
Speaker 1:So Well, that is fantastic. Very seldom do I hear a program that's this solid and it doesn't seem like it's got. You know, a lot of programs require certain elements to exist for them to be as successful as they can be. This one seems like it's just pretty straightforward and bulletproof.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I mean we got patent approval too. Like we have the only patented system in the world that reverses type two diabetes and that took three and a half years to get. That approval Wasn't easy. Right Now we have it because we're able to demonstrate to the patent office that we do what we say we do and unique in the marketplace, and we also guarantee results with our patients too. So nobody else does that. So someone has nothing to lose by trying our program, which is really cool.
Speaker 1:I love it. So it seems like the only way it doesn't going to work is if somebody doesn't isn't honest with you, Exactly If they don't do it. Yeah, you can't. You can't control that anyway, so that's fantastic. Yeah, well, this is a place where I'd like to give you a chance to send out a parting shot and let us know how we can reach you.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so the easiest way, joe, someone's interested is we have webinars, as I said, free webinars all week long and they can just go to reverseyourdiabetescom Real simple reverseyourdiabetescom. They can register for one of our free webinars and see if it's something that they want to do.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. Well, I appreciate you joining us today and, as always, I extend an offer If anything changes, you got more that you want to share love to have you back. Perfect, and this has been another episode of the Healthy Living Podcast. I'm your host, joe Grumbine. I thank all of our listeners for supporting the show and we will see you next time.
