A monologue by Dr. Patricia Patricia Restrepo describing her personal journey from fear-driven diabetes management toward rebuilding health by trusting the body’s regenerative processes. She links chronic fear and sympathetic activation to raised cortisol, inflammation, altered microbiota, and impaired healing, and describes shifting into parasympathetic states (reduced cortisol and insulin) as a core step in reversing her diabetes.
Chapters
So redefining what health meant to me. For my health, it was much more than not being diabetic. It was having energy. It was having a wonderful digestive system, which also had digestive issues, which I hadn't realized because I was so focused on diabetes, diabetes, diabetes, that constipation didn't matter anymore, that the king of pain didn't matter anymore, because I had an autoimmune issue that I had been diagnosed with, that I hadn't wanted to start treating. I lived in fear of my body, in fear of the moment when I would no longer live without insulin. I lived in fear that I would end up in the emergency room again. I ended up in the emergency room many times. I lived in fear that I would repeat the story, story of my grandmother's. And I lived in fear of the next injection, of the next blood test. It was a constant fear. With fear, the sympathetic system is activated, which increases cortisol, inflammatory markers. The entire microbiota is altered not to regenerate, but to be in a state of fight or flight. Regeneration occurs in the exact opposite branch of the nervous system with the parasympathetic system. When you enter this parasympathetic mode, then cortisol begins to drop, insulin begins to drop, which is what I was trying to improve. Inflammatory markers begin to drop, and regeneration begins to occur. That you don't have to do anything about. The body does it all by itself. And look, a very simple example. You've cut yourself. What do you have to do to heal it? Well, you wash it, put on a band aid, and leave it alone. And you leave it alone. Imagine you didn't do anything to disinfect it internally, to knit the layers back together, the different layers of the skin it did itself. The moment I internalized that, I didn't have to micromanage all of my body's physiological processes. That was the first step to beginning to reverse my diabetes. And it was incredible, because trusting my body wasn't something I had learned. I had learned the complete opposite from my family. And here you have to do everything to your body. You have to inject insulin, you have to measure your insulin level, you have to measure your glucose level. You have to calibrate, you have to adjust after meals, before meals, at night, before going to sleep, when getting up. It was a constant process of managing your body. And that is what is done a lot in the conventional system, because the conventional system saves lives. And for that, you have to manage several things. But here, what I wanted was to build health the first step was to fall in love with and be amazed by the body that I had, that I had never realized. All the things I had never recognized consciously, everything the body could do, that was the first step. And that, and seeing other cases that had managed to heal themselves, I was like, oh, yes, it can be done. Just knowing that it can be done opened a different door. Then comes an internal process of mine. But putting it in the parasympathetic branch, I think, was one of the most important things. And then it was this issue of not managing and fighting my body. I am not going to fight diabetes. My goal, my health, is not to not have diabetes. It is much more. So I no longer saw my body as something that I had to take away or manage diabetes. It was already a body that I wanted to build health. Yeah.
