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FREE FROM DIABETES
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DR. SARAH TOWNLEY WORKS WITH OTHERS TO REVERSE THEIR TYPE 2 DIABETES
DR. SARAH TOWNLEY is a pharmacist, someone who has overseen the medications of thousands of people over the years and is passionate about patient care. She says she cares so deeply that a little more than three years ago, she ditched her pharmacy career to do something that sounds counter-intuitive: She has built a business helping those with Type 2 diabetes get off their medications.
“I talk very directly about the fact that this doesn’t have to be a chronic disease, even if you’ve had this disease for a while,” Townley says. Her mission is to inspire and empower people to reverse their Type 2 diabetes. “That’s not a message that most receive when they get their diagnosis,” she says. “They’re told that they are going to have this for the rest of their life and there’s nothing they can do about it except take medication and monitor their blood sugars.”
Townley says while working as a pharmacist, she’d often consult on some of the most complex and uncontrolled cases of Type 2 diabetes, reviewing medications to try to stabilize blood sugar. Over the years, however, she started to dig deeper into metabolic health. She says she started to realize that the more insulin people with Type 2 diabetic receive, the sicker they get over time.
“How do you get your insulin levels down? It’s not going to be a medication,” Townley says. “It’s going to be learning what you are doing to drive your body to constantly secrete insulin. It’s all lifestyle.”
Townley says Type 2 diabetes is a disease where the body doesn’t make proper use of insulin. Unlike a Type 1 diabetic who is insulin deficient, Type 2 diabetics usually make plenty of insulin, they just don’t respond to it anymore.
“Insulin is a hormone and like all hormones in the human body, it’s a signal, telling the body what to do,” Townley says. “Insulin is supposed to rise when you eat, deliver the message to take up nutrients for fuel and to build new things. Extra energy is stored and then insulin goes away until the next time you eat. It falls dramatically.” Townley says the problem is, many of us don’t let our insulin levels fall. We’ve become a nation that constantly snacks, eating refined carbohydrates and sugars that cause a “massive spike” in insulin.
“In pharmacy school and medical school, a lot of us were taught that obesity causes diabetes. It isn’t true. Obesity and diabetes have the same root cause, which is hormonal dysregulation, extremely high levels of insulin sustained over time,” Townley says.
That’s why Townley says it doesn’t make sense to rely on insulin shots to help control a Type 2 diabetic’s blood sugars long term. She says, “How can the problem be the solution?”
Looking into the issue, Townley discovered the books “Obesity Code” and “Diabetes Code,” both written by Dr. Jason Fung. Fung looked at how intermittent fasting and the types of calories consumed play a big role in diabetes and obesity prevention. Fung counsels against eating refined carbohydrates and sugars. He also believes strongly in intermittent fasting to let insulin levels fall and, as a result, let the body heal.
“There’s a process called autophagy,” Townley says. “It happens when you are fasting, where the body literally heals itself. It does a spring cleaning and gets rid of garbage cells that aren’t performing optimally and uses them for energy. If you fasted for 72 hours, you would completely replace every cell in your
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immune system.”
Before ending her career in pharmacy, Townley remembers trying to counsel patients on what they were eating as a way to control their diabetes.
“I started getting questioned by my medical supervisors,” Townley says. “People would ask, why are you telling people how to eat? You aren’t a dietician, you are a pharmacist.” her own coaching business, Sarah Townley, The Type 2 Diabetes Coach. She feels the time has come to educate people on a completely new approach to the disease.
“In 1950, we started measuring our population levels of diabetes and in the adult population in the U.S. — Type 1 and Type 2 combined — we had one million people who had either type,” Townley says. Today, according to the Centers for Disease Control, there are more than 100 million living with prediabetes and diabetes. “A recent national survey showed more than 80 percent of our population had one marker of metabolic disease or more,” Townley adds.
Since opening her coaching business, she says she’s had plenty of proof she was on the right path. One of her current clients, when he began, was on four injections of insulin daily. Diabetes was starting to claim his eyesight.
“In the week before we had our first session, he started cutting out refined carbs. He didn’t snack and stayed in a fasted state if he wasn’t hungry,” she says. “One week after our first session, he had reduced his mealtime dose of insulin by 50 percent and by the second session, he eliminated his mealtime insulin. He went from four injections to one injection a day with normal blood sugars.”
Lalla Chadwick, 72, sought out Townley in the summer of 2022 after a period of grief derailed her health. After her oldest son died unexpectedly, she gained weight. Her blood pressure was high and her A1C, a test that reflects a person’s three-month average of blood sugars, showed she was pre-diabetic.
“I was absolutely falling apart,” Chadwick says.
She took the 16-week journey with Townley, learning how to cook, what to eat and when and even how to breathe to reduce stress.
totally changed. There are only two places I go in the grocery store — the fresh produce and the dairy sections. All the middle sections with all the packaged foods, I don’t go there anymore.”
In mid-November, her annual checkup with blood work proved her hard work was paying off.
“I’m no longer insulin resistant,” Chadwick says. Her A1C dropped. She’s no longer prediabetic. Her blood sugar is now comfortably in the normal range and she feels incredible. “It’s like night and day. I feel like life is worth living.”
During her sessions, Townley will learn her client’s habits, find out what they’re eating, help them come up with a meal plan and be there to help avert any slip-ups.
“It needs to be sustainable,” Townley says. “We are looking for lifetime results.”
If you ask Townley, she’ll tell you she practices what she preaches. As a mom of six kids with one on the way, she would often gain upwards of 60 pounds with each pregnancy only to have a bear of a time getting it back off. After reading “Obesity Code,” she learned how to cut out refined carbs and sugars. She stopped eating breakfast and quit snacking. One or two times a week, she’d do a 42-hour fast, eating dinner on Sunday and then not eating again until lunch on Tuesday. The change helped her shed the post-baby weight and gave her a needed boost in energy.
“Once you start to understand the process that’s happening in the body and the messages that you are sending to your body by the choices you’re making, you get to start manipulating whether your body is in fat burning mode or fat storage mode,” she says.
And that’s why she loves sharing this knowledge to help others conquer something they never thought possible — reversing Type 2 diabetes.
“It’s a joy,” Townley says. “It’s pure joy.” ✻
TO LEARN MORE about Sarah Townley, The Diabetes Coach, visit her at sarahtownley.com. She has plenty of free resources plus she hosts a diabetes related podcast on her site as well.
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