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were also out of whack.As I’d suspected, my thyroid was not okay. Dr. Atkins took me off my medication and put me on natural alternatives. As of my last visit, my thyroid was normal, my cholesterol was down to 160, my blood sugar was within the normal range, and all of my other lab results had dropped from high-risk levels to within a normal range. My weight is 205 pounds—42 pounds less than I was—and I’m still losing about a quarter of a pound each week. I have lost 72 inches and am wearing a size 16 or 18. It’s a very slow process, but I have to look at the big picture. It’s not so much the change in my weight that matters, it’s the improvements in my blood sugar and my cholesterol. Recent labs measured a fasting blood sugar level of 96, cholesterol of 164, triglycerides of 72, HDL of 55, and LDL of 95. Dr. Atkins said that when I first came to him, I was three months away from a heart event.
    Thanks to Atkins, I now exercise and can walk up and down the stairs of my house without becoming out of breath. Best of all, at age 57, I have a general, overall sense of well-being that I never had before. I also like what I see in the mirror. Recently, I was packing for a trip to Florida and I tried on a top that was a size 2X or something. I turned to my husband and said, “Look how big this is on me!” He smiled at me and said, “You just lit right up when you said that.” I’m going to save that top forever as a reminder to never go back to that size again.
     
    Note: Your individual results may vary from those reported here.

Chapter 3
    WEIGHING IN: THE NUMBER ONE RISK FACTOR
    As we have stressed, the road to diabetes is a long one and at any point along the way, you can tip the balance back in your favor and stop the progression. That’s because you have a good deal of control over most of the risk factors for diabetes. The warning signs are there, if you have the knowledge and awareness to recognize them. In fact, if all this book does is help you notice these signs before you—or your doctor— would have otherwise, it will have been well worth the purchase price.
    The number one risk factor for both men and women for developing diabetes is obesity, although you do not have to be overweight to become diabetic. 1 There is a clear relationship among weight gain,age, and the risk of developing Type 2 diabetes in women. The younger a woman is when she begins to gain weight, the higher her lifetime risk of getting diabetes. The good news is that studies show that over- weight women who slimmed down were able to lower their risk. 2
    Research findings on men show the same trends.The long-running Health Professionals Study looked at the relationship between obesity and weight gain and Type 2 diabetes in more than 51,000 men, ages 40 to 75. Researchers found that men with a BMI of 35 or greater were42.1 times more likely to develop diabetes compared with men at their ideal weight with a BMI of 23 or less. 3
    Preventing normal individuals in certain populations from becom ing overweight has also been shown to prevent diabetes.Maintaining a healthy weight would result in a 62 percent reduction in the incidence of Type 2 diabetes in Mexican Americans and a 74 percent reduction in non-Hispanic whites. 4 Genetics and other factors—which we’ll discuss later—can lead to Type 2 diabetes in people whose weight is within the normal range.
    WHAT DOES OVERWEIGHT MEAN?
    How heavy do you need to be to be at risk? That depends. The terms normal weight, overweight, and obese are really ways of describing weight ranges, not exact weights. That’s why the medical profession has stopped using the old weight-for-height charts to determine a person’s level of excess weight. The charts took a one-size-fits-all approach that defined the normal range too broadly and did not take body composition into consideration.
    Since 1998,doctors have used the body-weight guidelines issued by the National Institutes of Health. These