How to Stop Taking Metformin, Insulin, and Ozempic for Good, with Dr. Jeffrey Hockings

Why do doctors put people on meds? Because their cholesterol is too high on the labs, right? Or their blood sugar is too high, or their blood pressure is too high. So once those numbers start coming down, the doctors really don't have a choice. Like, they have to start reducing because what, you're going to let the cholesterol go down to 80? You don't want the blood sugar going down to 50. You don't want the blood pressure going down to like 60 over 40. So we basically force their hand with the objective numbers that say, wow, I better get this person off this med because they don't need it anymore. So doctors are okay doing that, but we got to give them that objective evidence where they feel comfortable doing that.

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Ed Levitan, MD.

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Hello and welcome to this episode of the Feel Freaking Amazing podcast. I'm Wendie Trubow, MD, and today we have Dr. Jeffrey Hawkins. He is the founder and CEO of Diabetes Reversal Group, which is a telehealth company helping individuals reverse type 2 diabetes through personalized, evidence-based lifestyle coaching. With over a decade of experience in functional medicine and as the author of 2 books on metabolic health. He's a pioneer in using real-time sugar data and patented protocols to achieve sustainable remission. That sounds like a whole bunch of mouthful, but I think this is going to be really cool. So, Jeff, welcome to the show. And I just have to say, here's my new CGM that I put on last night. I was thinking I should buy a thing for it. They have all these little cute covers that it can elevate your experience. I was like, we're going away next week. I should elevate it and make it look nice. But anyway, Welcome to the show, Jeff. We're so happy you're here.

I should probably start next week with mine. Okay.

Totally.

All right. So this is a really important subject that affects so many people.

How big of a problem are we talking about here?

Oh my gosh. Diabetes right now, just in the US, there's over 38 million diabetics. And check this out, 96 million prediabetics that are literally like 70% of those actually turn into diabetics. That's just the US. Worldwide, it's 425 million people that have diabetes, and it's costing $966 billion a year. It's almost a trillion-dollar industry worldwide.

Yeah, that's crazy. I just saw— 2 days ago, I saw an 18-year-old boy who very health— like, externally very healthy, got a pre-diabetic diagnosis. I'm like, what's going on there?

Well, yeah, now let's talk about— we've seen 12-year-olds that have type 2 diabetes, 12-year-olds, because they're obese, because their knuckleheaded parents are feeding them Happy Meals 7 nights a week and they're not exercising, they're not going out and playing. I mean, it's really getting insane. So yeah, it's a big issue.

Okay, there's a lot to unpack here. I'm sort of thinking, where do we want to start with this? So I think what I would like to start with is when I grew up, my grandmothers, they didn't talk to each other, but they would talk about the same things, that essentially diabetes is something you get when you get older. Now we're in functional medicine, so the inevitable aging and dysfunction is not a conversation that we buy into. But that is, I think, something that people believe, like, oh, you just get diabetes when you're older. That's what happens when you get older. Is it inevitable?

No, it's not inevitable. But typically, you know, people don't get type 2 diabetes until they're in their kind of late 40s, early 50s, because you need to be eating the wrong foods for a couple decades typically before your body develops the insulin resistance, which leads to diabetes. So you can kind of get away with a lot of bad habits in your 20s and 30s because, you know, we're all active, not as much as we used to be. But when you're burning off 7,000, 8,000 calories a day, running around doing all these things, you can get away with some things, right? But as you get a little bit older and you get a little more sedentary, now your metabolism slows down and now those bad habits start to catch up with you. So it's not inevitable for sure, but it is something that you see in like our average age patient for our program is 65 years old. That doesn't mean we don't have younger ones, but the average is 65, so.

I mean, think about it. You see, so I only see women and you can see the harbingers of diabetes in this elevate in PCOS. So all the women with PCOS and dysfunctional menstrual patterns, you can start to see that this is coming down the pike. And we, we do a lot of work with metabolic health with our patients because you should never get diabetes on our watch. You know, that's, that's like a nonstarter.

So, and just to put a plug in. So for us, doctors really look at most conventional doctors look at people when they're already diabetic as a problem. Some doctors are really interested in that when they're pre-diabetic, they have a problem. For us, if people are close to pre-diabetes, we're starting to freak out.

So, oh, forget— how about just their insulin is a little bit higher than ideal? I'm already like, oh, okay, we got to figure this out. So we're looking at What is your food? What is your movement? What is your stress? What is your sleep? Do you have toxic exposures? Are you getting a lot of plastics in your life? Do you have all of these endocrine disrupting substances that you're— all these patients show up with a coffee from Dunkin's in the plastic thing. And I'm like, if you're going to drink the moldy coffee that's not organic, at least put it in a metal cup. Don't walk in here with a plastic cup because it's endocrine disrupting. But hold on one second. Can we back up 10 steps, Jeff? Yeah. What are the problems with untreated diabetes?

That—

because, like, diabetes, sure, that's bad, but what is it for people that matters to reverse their diabetes? What are the consequences of diabetes?

Gosh, yeah, the consequences are brutal. I mean, you can literally get blurred vision that can go to diabetic retinopathy that can lead to blindness. You can get kidney stress that can lead to dialysis or needing a kidney transplant. You can get high blood pressure, high cholesterol that can lead to a heart attack or a stroke. You get neuropathy in your feet that can lead to an amputation. It causes ED, causes low sex drive in women, can cause cancer, can cause Alzheimer's. I mean, it's like, it's brutal, right? So those are the reasons why.

Yeah, I'm double-clicking on that type 3 diabetes now, which is now we're calling Alzheimer's, because people, people like don't care about their eyes per se. That's a long-term thing, but they really They've seen so many people get— so many of their families get Alzheimer's, and they don't realize that the elevated blood sugar is massive thing there.

So what I'll tell you too, guys, like what I've seen with our doing this for 16 years, like 90% of our patients that join, they join because they're scared, right? Something happened, they start getting some kind of symptom, they're like, holy crap, like, okay, now I'm scared. 'Cause when someone's like in their mid-40s, just got diagnosed, taking like 500 milligrams of metformin, no symptoms, feeling pretty good, like, eh, I'm okay, there's no urgency for them. Like, unfortunately they gotta get worse before they stop screwing around. 'Cause like you said, nobody wants to change their lifestyle, right? They want the shortcut. So we see people that see our webinars and hear about us and say, eh, when I get worse, I'll give you a call. And then 5 years later they call us, yeah, okay, I'm just kind of scared now. Can I join? Like, yeah, you could have 5 years ago, but. It's interesting, right? So people— I learned a long time ago, like 30 years ago, it's very hard to sell prevention because it's just human nature, right? People wait until it's almost a crisis before they want to do something. It'd be better if you can get somebody before they're pre-diabetic or get a pre-diabetic to reverse that. But again, I've seen that be a very, very difficult thing. But when someone's got those symptoms and like, whoa, I don't want to get my foot cut off. What do I do? Help me. That's when they say, okay, I'm ready to change my lifestyle now. So that's what I've seen in my experience.

So yeah, and I wanna emphasize, unfortunately, you can definitely reverse diabetes, but you can't always, if you have diabetic retinopathy, that may not be reversible if it's gotten that bad.

Right, you can reverse the disease, but not the consequences of the disease.

Sometimes, I mean, hopefully, other times you can.

Right.

Yeah, so it's all on the timeline, right? Like you said, if you get blurred vision caused by high blood sugar, that's reversible. If you catch the retinopathy in the early stage, we've seen that reverse. But if it's, you know, there a while, yeah, it's not going away. Just like kidney damage. You catch kidney, like in stage 3 kidney failure, 100% you can reverse that, right? Getting them off the meds. But they're in stage 4, like already on dialysis, that's not reversible, right? With your feet, if it's already gangrene, can't reverse that. But if it's just neuropathy, that's reversible. So you got to catch it before it gets really bad. But I think luckily for a lot of these people, just the minor symptoms is enough to make them go, holy crap, I need to do something. And that's why they join our program.

So that's the bad enough philosophy that I call it. Is it bad enough yet? If not, come back when it's bad enough. We'll talk about it.

So you've been in this world for a long time. Yeah. Even though you're only 30. So it's really Thanks, that's good. Yeah, what have— what are the lessons you've learned? What are the things that people may not think about? What are— what are the key ingredients to your program that really makes the work stick? Because we all know eat less carbs, but we— most of us can't do that. So what are the things that are actually work in your program? You said you've got a patent, so I'm actually really curious what that patent is.

What did you patent?

Yeah, yeah. So first of all, what, you know, people need to know is that it's 100% reversible. If you're a type 2 diabetic, it is 100% reversible with proper lifestyle changes, right? So now, now the next thing is, but it's 100% based on compliance, right? If you follow the right program, you'll reverse it. You screw around and you cheat, you're not going to get better, right? It's like joining a gym. Like you got to go to the gym to actually get the benefit. No one's going to do the push-ups for you, right?

Shoot, now you're telling me.

My example is it's like a condom. It only works if you use it, which drives my kids nuts. They're like, do you say that out loud? I'm like, yeah, I'm a gynecologist, of course I say that out loud.

Yeah, what we got patented was our specific list of foods and drinks that are allowed for a diabetic, right? Because as you guys know, there's so much nonsense out there. Well, yeah, as long as it's whole grains, you're good to go. Dairy's okay, oatmeal is great. You can have artificial sweeteners, no problem. There's so much nonsense out there that you can do if you want to manage your diabetes and keep taking your meds. But if you want to reverse it and get off your meds, there's a whole list of things you got to do over here. So we got that patented. We call it our Enjoy-Avoid list, right? What you can enjoy, what you can avoid. And there's also the ingredients and dosages of our nutritional supplements. So that's what we got patented. That's our secret sauce. Eat the right foods, take the right supplements, And the supplements, we have 87 different nutrients in our supplements. It's not just 5 things like cinnamon and chromium and blah, blah, blah. It's like 87 different things. So it took us a long time to figure that out. And that was really the thing that kicked us over the edge with the Patent Office, because whenever you get something patented, number one, you got to show them, can you do what you say you do? Right? So we had to show that we could demonstrate we can reverse type 2. And then what's unique about you in the marketplace? And that's where the supplements came in because nobody has our blend because we made it. It's not sold anywhere. We went to our manufacturer, said, this is what I want in them. So that's— those two things got us patented. Like, you just want to patent like a way to eat, you can't do that. It's got to be a lot more unique than that. So that's what our patented system is.

So that's amazing. So what have you seen? Like, how many people do you see a year or a month? Or— and what— how— what are the results?

Yeah, we've helped over 10,000 people today completely reverse their diabetes. And so for us, the definition for reversing is an A1C of 5.9 or lower, taking no diabetic meds. So that's what our goal is. Um, it's not 6.5 or 6.2. It's like, are you still taking metformin? Like, one of our competitors, their definition is A1C 6.5 and you can still be taking metformin. Like, how is that reversal? That's masking.

I have a PR question, potentially bad PR question. Does that include taking berberine, which is similar in action and mechanism as metformin?

Yeah, but it's not a medication though, right?

It's not a—

that's not prescribed.

So I have no problem with that, definitely. I just wanna—

yeah, so it's completely no prescription medications and A1C of 5.9. That means insulin, Ozempic, none of that garbage. They're just completely gone. And your A1C is 5.9 or lower. So you have an A1C 5.9 or lower, taking no diabetic meds, you are good to go. You'll never develop a complication. You're fine. That's kind of what our benchmark is. And we actually guarantee results too with our program, which is really cool.

That's amazing.

So basically though, when— if people do your program, do they have to stay on all the components of it for the rest of their life, or are there things they can pick and choose and ease up a little?

So when they're done, like we put people on, there's 3 different programs. It's a 3-month, a 5-month, or a 7-month program based on the severity of their diabetes, right? So that's like a mild, moderate, severe case, right? So average one is a 5-month. So once they're done with the 5 months, right, and the A1C's back to normal, their doctor's got them off all their meds, then they graduate. So now they have to keep eating the right way for the rest of their life, but they don't have to keep taking our supplements every day. That's just there to kind of help speed the healing and help heal some of the damage from the high blood sugar. But they do have to keep eating the right way forever. But we do say, hey, you can have it. We call it a treat day, not a cheat day, a treat day, one day a week once they're done. So eat well 6 days of the week, have that one treat day, and you're good to go as long as you keep doing that. And again, most of our patients don't even bother having the treat day because they feel so great. They've been eating the right way for so long now, they've seen the results, and they want to just stick with it because they don't ever want to go back to the way they were. But I think one of you asked a question earlier, like, as far as the difficulty of it, one of the reasons why they can do our program is because number one, it's not a diet. So they're not restricting calories at all. Like, we give them that enjoy/avoid list. Say, look, eat as much as you want from that enjoy/avoid list to stay satisfied. Like, don't overeat, but don't undereat. Right? Because we don't want you ever hungry. Because if you're hungry, they're never going to stick with it long term. That's why most diets fail, because you're starving 1,000 calories a day. And nobody can do that. It's all based on willpower. So because it's not a diet, that's why most people can do it for the rest of their lives. And our supplements, some of them have some components in them to help eliminate cravings too. So those are the two reasons why we've had patients do our program every day for the last 15 years, you know, because it isn't, isn't as restrictive as people think. You can still go out and eat in restaurants, you know, have a social life, not eating like, you know, chicken breast and broccoli, you know, 3 days, 3 times a day. Because no one's going to follow that, right? So you got to make it pretty easy to do, but yet still get rid of those bad things that they can't eat.

So, so you can go.

Well, I'm wondering, how do you deal— you talk, you talk a lot about medication and insulin. How do you work with patients if it's a telemedicine model? How do you work with patients getting them off safely if they're, if they're dramatically changing their diet, those medications can become dangerous if it's too, too low blood sugar. So how do you, how do you work with that?

Yeah, so the cool thing with our program is we're never— we're not stepping in the primary care role. So we're not diagnosing anybody, we're not prescribing their meds, we're not taking them off the meds, right? They're always under the care of their primary physician. We're just coaching them through the wellness program, right? And when the blood sugar gets below 110 in the morning fasting, their coach says, hey, Wendy, it's time to call your doctor so they can reduce the dose of one of your meds because it's getting too low. So they'll just call their doctor. They don't even have to go in for a visit. And they might talk to the nurse or talk to the doc. Hey, my blood sugar is like 95. Like, what should I do? Oh yeah, we'll cut your metformin in half. You know, so they do that over the phone, and that way they're getting that, you know, a lot quicker response than, yeah, I go see my doctor once every 3 months.

Right, right.

Yeah, because you're right, if it— because you can get dramatic results and we recommend our patients on insulin, if you're taking, say they're taking 50 units of insulin per day, we tell them, look, if you start our program, literally talk to your doctor. We recommend you cut your insulin in half the very first day you start our program because when you stop eating the wrong foods, your blood sugar comes down very quickly and we don't want them going hypoglycemic, right? Having a reading in the 40s or 50s. So that's how fast things turn around when you do the right things. And you guys have seen that, right? The human body has such a miraculous ability to heal when you stop screwing around with that, right? Just like, put in good food and guess what? Your body's— it's pretty healthy pretty quickly. So it's not real rocket science, but it's getting people to do it is the hard part.

Do you have any patient stories that are out of the norm that really stick out for you?

I mean, I guess probably the craziest one, because again, we get so many sick people coming in our office. I say office now, but it's like in our in our program. I'm so used to the offices, right, where I'm like, I look, I'm like, I don't know if I can help this guy. Like, he literally— I started doubting myself. We had a guy who was 450 pounds. He was taking over 300 units of insulin per day. He was on 13 medications. I'm like, I don't know if I can help this guy. 6 months later, A1C's under 6, off all his meds, lost 100 pounds. I'm like, wow. And we've had people with kidney transplants, heart transplants, lung transplants. I'm thinking, I don't know if they can be helped. We help them too. So I've literally stopped doubting how much the body can heal when you put the right stuff into it. I mean, it's proven over and over again. That's the biggest one, that guy. But we have people like a guy, one of our patients, Scott. A1C was 12.6. He was taking diabetic meds, blood pressure meds, cholesterol meds, aspirin. And after 4 months, his A1C went down to 5.8, and his doctor took him off all of his meds. Not just diabetic, but blood pressure, cholesterol, aspirin. Clean sweep, zero medications. He was on— in stage 3 kidney failure with his GFR on his labs completely back to normal. Because as you probably, guys, you probably know, right, the biggest reason why diabetics start to have kidney issues is because of all the medications they're taking. These people taking 6, 7, 8 medications per day for 10, 11 years, your kidneys are going to get affected. It's like try to smoke 2 packs of cigarettes a day, what's going to happen to your lungs? I mean, your body can only handle so much toxicity before it actually starts having effects. So that's what's really cool. You start seeing kidney improvement by people getting off their meds. So it's just, it keeps blowing me away every single day. You can tell I'm kind of fired up about this because when we see people's lives change, that we're saving their lives. I mean, it's really that important. So it's pretty cool.

I mean, that's amazing. The thing that is— truthfully, one of the things that got me was that I'm— I was surprised that doctors would be willing to take people off their statins because they had the diabetes diagnosis, that most doctors, I would think, would not be comfortable taking off Not that I wouldn't be, but—

well, here's the thing, Ed, is that we basically force the doctor's hands, right? Because it's all based on the objective evidence, right? Why do doctors put people on meds? Because their cholesterol is too high on the labs, right? Or their blood sugar is too high, or their blood pressure is too high. So once those numbers start coming down, the doctors really don't have a choice. Like, they have to start reducing, because what, you're going to let the cholesterol go down to 80? You don't want the blood sugar going down to 50. You don't want the blood pressure going down to like 60 over 40. So we basically force their hand with the objective numbers that say, wow, I better get this person off this med because they don't need it anymore. So doctors are okay doing that, but we got to give them that objective evidence where they feel comfortable doing that. So that's what we've seen in our experience.

Yeah, that's great.

Do you, Jeff, do people ever come to you and feel I'll call it stuck. And if so, what's the first step that you get them doing when they come to you and they're just feeling really mired down in the diagnosis and the possibility?

Yeah, well, the first thing we do is kind of the mindset, right, is really making them believe, like, look, guys, you can reverse this. We give them all the evidence, we show them testimonials, say, look, they did it, you can do it, right? And we've had people way worse than you So, you know, stop being anxious now. Like, be inspired. Like, wow, like, you can do it too. That's the first thing we got to get them to believe, that it is reversible. Because once they know that, they say, okay, here's what you do the first 30 days. Stop eating this, stop eating that, and you watch how fast your blood sugar comes down. And because it happens literally the first day, they're like, holy moly. So it gives them that instant feedback, especially if they have the CGM. Like, oh my gosh, I've never had numbers this low in like the last 5 years. So that's what we do. This is the first step is we don't even have them take supplements initially. The first 30 days is just teaching them how to eat the right way. Take away this, take away that. And once they see that feedback, it gives them that encouragement that, wow, this is really working. I can do this. That's really the first step with people when they're feeling stuck when they join the program.

That's awesome. I'm just thinking out loud. You said you don't need to take the supplements. But I know for, from our point of view, uh, everybody needs to be on a vitamin D because nobody gets enough vitamin D, and that actually helps with blood sugar control. Uh, a lot of people need omegas, not everybody, but a lot of people do. And a good multi may not be a bad thing, especially one that helps with detox, because we have all sorts of—

well, to your point, Ed, like, again, we provide our supplements going through that 3, 5, 7-month program, right? But when they graduate they don't have to keep taking those. Now we do have a maintenance supplement protocol that we actually sell to patients, you know, and say, hey, 'cause we, I agree, like everybody should be taking something, you know, again, definitely vitamin D, fish oils for sure. I mean, those are like the top of the list for me as well. But again, a good multi, which we have, and all of our vitamins are whole food vitamins. There's chelated minerals, there's nothing synthetic in our ingredients, which is one of the big things that we wanted with our supplements. So that we can get a lot better results for that way, in my experience. So, yeah, so we recommend it, but we don't say, hey, you have to keep taking our supplements, because most people have their own kind of one a day they like to take. So as long as we think it's okay, then we'll say that's fine because we can't force people to take ours. But we definitely recommend them for sure, Ed, that they should be taking something 100%.

Is there anything we haven't asked you, Jeff, that you want to make sure that we tell the listeners?

Um, you know, the biggest thing I see is that— and you've probably seen this as well— is that the biggest question we get when people join our and hear about our program is like, how come my doctor never told me about this? You know, and that's a huge thing because I have to— and I defend their— now look, it's not your doctor's fault. They're just not trained in med school how to reverse diabetes. It's like they literally don't know. That's why you've never heard about it, because they're not trying to hide it from you. It's like they just don't know how to do it. They're trained to diagnose it and then prescribe medications to manage it. So that's one of the biggest things. Like, that's why you don't know. That's why it's not as known as it should be, because again, probably 99% of diabetics have no idea this thing is 100% reversible. And that's because their doctor never tells them that because they're not trained to do that in med school. So that's one of the biggest things I want to— people, if people are listening, like, this is reversible, you know. It's— it is, no matter what your doctor says, no matter what somebody else says. Oh, you can't reverse it. Yes, you can. You know, I always joke around saying just because somebody doesn't know how to do something doesn't mean it can't be done, right? Like, I don't know how to ride a unicycle, but guess what? People know how to ride a unicycle. I just don't know how to do it. So, you know, so it's just you don't know what you don't know. So that's one of the biggest things we get. So it's really exciting to see people's eyes go, wow, this is reversible? Holy cow, you guys got a patent to do that? Yeah, it's like, it's very, very fun to see that. So yeah, it just keeps— my wife and I were so fired up about this. And again, we have that mission is we want to save millions of diabetics' lives around the world. And we're going to be expanding our company into India in a couple of months and then start going international. So it's really growing and it's all because we get results. And again, to have that guarantee is— that's one of the things that I want people to know too, is that at least with our program, try it. If it doesn't work, we give you your money back. You know, so there's like, there's no risk in trying it. And because we get such good results, we're able to offer that kind of a guarantee because, you know, if we didn't get results, we'd be out of business, right? Because everybody want a refund. So it's really nice that we have that. So the only patent in the world, we guarantee results.

It's—

yeah, those are the things I want people to know, that it is reversible for sure.

Amazing. How can people find out about you? What, what's— where can people get more information? This, this sounds like an amazing—

it's all in the show notes too. So Yeah.

So we just— again, our website's real simple. It's called reverseyourdiabetes.com. Really simple. You can go there. They watch a free webinar. It's about 15 minutes long. Kind of explains more details about our program and how they can have a consultation with one of our reps to see if it's a good fit.

Yeah.

So just reverseyourdiabetes.com. Really simple. Yeah.

Amazing.

Awesome. All right. Jeff, thank you for being here and for being on the Feel Freaking Amazing podcast. Like, this is great information for people.

This is pretty awesome, man.

Thanks. I just love the name of your podcast too. That's awesome.

Yeah, our podcast producer loves it too, especially when I changed the name of the podcast in the middle of a podcast. He was really happy with me on that one. But thank you. Thank you for being here.

You're welcome. Thanks, guys. Great to meet you.

You too.

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