Find a way back from diabetes.
Michael Mosley went to his GP about a skin complaint in 2012. Blood tests brought a different diagnosis: type 2 diabetes. The BBC science presenter had watched his father suffer complications of the same disease. He began looking into intermittent fasting and persuaded the BBC to let him investigate it for a documentary. The research now concerned his own future. [1]
- 2011
A study offered another way to lose weight.
Mosley’s 2012 investigation brought him to neuroscientist Mark Mattson, a co-author of a 2011 trial. [2] Michelle Harvie and her colleagues had assigned 107 overweight women to restrict calories either two days a week or every day. After six months, weight loss was similar. Measures of insulin resistance, the difficulty the body has responding to the hormone that helps control blood sugar, improved more in the intermittent group. The study offered a possible approach to weight loss and blood-sugar control. It had not tested diabetes remission in men like Mosley. [3]
- 2012
He tried it, then asked why it worked.
Mosley adopted a pattern of eating less on two days of the week. He later reported losing about nine kilograms in eight weeks and bringing his blood sugar back to normal. He wanted to understand the change. Diabetes researcher Roy Taylor pointed him toward the weight he had lost and research on fat in the liver and pancreas. Mosley’s improvement gave him a reason to investigate that explanation; one person’s result could not isolate an effect unique to fasting. [1]
- 2017
Make remission a treatment goal.
Taylor and Mike Lean’s DiRECT trial tested a weight-loss programme delivered through GP practices. After a year, 46% of the intervention group were in remission, against 4% receiving usual care. Participants had relatively recent diabetes and were not using insulin. The result supported remission through structured weight loss. The trial used a different diet from Mosley’s fasting pattern. [4]
- 2024
The next question was how to keep it.
The five-year follow-up made maintenance part of the story. Some participants sustained remission for years, while many regained weight or saw their diabetes return. The new evidence gave people considering remission a further question to ask: what support would help them maintain the weight loss? Following the research meant learning both that remission was possible and what made it hard to sustain. [5]
Mosley found research that gave him something to try, then sought an explanation for his result. Larger studies established a route to remission and exposed the work needed to maintain it. Health Claim Watch brings you new findings on the health questions you choose, with an explanation of what changed and links to the studies. You can discover an option worth discussing with your doctor, then keep learning as the evidence develops. A diagnosis can give you a reason to follow the research closely; a new finding may give you a different future to work toward.