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I was angry with her at first. How dare she suggest something so simple? Didn’t she know that I had been to the best doctors? That I was on the best medications? That I was injecting myself with insulin, that I was on the best diet, that I was working out?

But I did take her advice to heart. I started searching for new answers and came across a few books that talked about healing diabetes naturally. I had always been completely against the idea of doing anything “natural.” I thought the approach was absurd. As I read, though, I couldn’t ignore the facts or the science. So many of the books described my situation exactly.

I decided to stop doing what was not working and to try something completely different.

My reading led me to a 100 percent healthy plant-based diet. After years of eating all that meat, I decided to make the leap.

For the first three weeks I felt as though I was ridding myself of much more than animal products. I realized that I had many powerful addictions to food. Food had a hold on me that I could not even conceptualize prior to those three weeks. I would sit in my car and cry outside of sub shops, just wanting a tuna melt.

Before that first three weeks I was on over 100 units of insulin per day, and in three weeks I was taking no insulin.

In about a month, I was once again in my doctor’s office, watching as they looked at my numbers in utter amazement. When they asked me what I did, I told them I had adopted a completely plant-based diet. They didn’t seem surprised at all and told me that plant-based diets were helping to reverse diabetes. When I asked why they had not suggested it, they told me “because it is not practical.”

There I was, morbidly obese, taking nine drugs, shooting insulin into myself multiple times per day, suffering nerve damage and severe pain, and yet they thought that changing my diet in a fairly easy way would be less practical?

It was at that moment that I took my health into my own hands. I found out everything I possibly could about plant-based nutrition. I learned everything I could about how my body works and which foods were meant to go into my body and which foods never were.

Everything changed from that moment. I slowly decreased all the other diabetes medicines I was on. I lowered my cholesterol without drugs, I lowered my blood pressure without drugs, I corrected my hormonal problems without drugs. And that infection on my leg? It completely healed. The arthritis in my feet? It went away.

After years of battling with the scale, the weight finally started to come off. I’ve lost a total of 160 pounds. While still obese, with over 100 pounds left to lose, for the first time in my life, I can see the light at the end of a very dark tunnel.

Today, I am medicine free. I have been on a complete plant-based diet for a little more than a year. This journey took me to places I would have never imagined. It took me to a place beyond myself. When I became aware of my body and what I was feeding it, my life changed. For years, I consumed death, and for that I almost lost my life. The way I lived my life, the way I looked at foods, was such that I was not an active participant in my life. I was not living, I was barely surviving. I was not experiencing life, I was going through motions, hoping that someday someone would find a magical cure.

It wasn’t until I discovered that I was the key to my health that my life completely changed. Today I live with hope. I live with knowing that I am in complete control of my health and preventable disease. I live with knowing that I cannot rely on anyone except myself to make conscious choices every single day that either give life or take life away. Once I let go and made the decision to live, my life changed completely.

Today, both my husband and I live and thrive on a complete plant-based diet. Our lives have become filled with hope. We thrive, and we continue to learn.

There is an answer to type 2 diabetes, an answer that is found not in a doctor’s office or pharmaceutical lab, but in our gardens. Today,