The problem with changing five things at once
Two weeks after a diagnosis, most people have cut the bread, cut the fruit, started walking, changed their breakfast and dropped the wine. Their numbers look different. They have no way of knowing which change is responsible — so they keep all five restrictions, forever, including the four that were doing nothing.
It is an expensive way to live, and it is avoidable. Change one thing. Test it. Keep it if it worked.
It starts with a week where you change nothing
The workbook opens with a baseline week. You eat exactly as you normally eat, take a fasting reading each morning and one pair of readings a day around a meal, and write down what you ate in enough detail to recognize it in a month.
That week is the only one you cannot reconstruct later. Once you have started changing things, your before is gone permanently — and every improvement you think you have made afterwards gets measured against a number that was never true.
Twelve weeks, twelve tests
One change a week, each with a way to check it
- Week 0 · The baseline — measure without changing anything, and find your three numbers.
- Weeks 1–3 · The order and the shape of a meal — what happens when only the sequence changes, and how to test a single food properly.
- Weeks 4–6 · Mornings, movement and repeats — why morning readings behave differently, how to design a walking test that actually answers something, and how to repeat a meal identically.
- Weeks 7–9 · Snacks, drinks and the hidden carbohydrate — the categories most people never test, and the mistake I made blaming the wrong ingredient.
- Weeks 10–12 · Review, record and the conversation — a one-page summary built for your doctor, and the questions to take with it.
- A printable record page for every week, so no separate tracker pack is needed.
- A troubleshooting table for when the numbers won't move.
- Twelve referenced sources, with the limits of each stated plainly.
Worked through with my own data
Before writing this, I wore a continuous glucose monitor for sixteen days and logged 7,665 readings. Those readings appear throughout the book as worked examples — what a bowl of cereal did compared with half a pizza, why breakfast behaved differently from dinner, and what happened when I tested the same meal twice.
Including the week I got it wrong. I designed a walking test badly — three meals, chosen after the fact, by the person being measured — and produced a result that appeared to contradict the published research. The fault was entirely mine, and it is printed in full, because learning to spot that mistake is more useful than any single finding in the book.
What it isn't
It isn't a diet, and it isn't a promise. It will not tell you what to eat; it will teach you how to find out what your own body does with what you already eat. Bodies differ, and how far anyone gets varies — the book says so rather than offering a headline figure. It also isn't a substitute for your doctor: the final weeks exist specifically to send you back to them with something worth showing.
Who it's for
People recently diagnosed with type 2 diabetes who want to understand their own numbers before deciding what to change. You will be writing in it — it is a workbook, not a book you read once.
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Try the baseline week first, free
The baseline week is the part of this that matters most, so it is available on its own. Join the newsletter and you'll get The Baseline Week — the instructions, the recording table and the three numbers to calculate — as a printable PDF, at no cost.
Our guarantee
Use it for a full 30 days. If it doesn't help, request a refund and you'll get every cent back — no forms, no questions. See our Refund Policy.
Where this fits
Measure First is the first book of the Type 2 Series — it is about finding out what your body does. The Six-Month Program is the week-by-week plan that follows, and The Maintenance System is about holding onto the progress afterwards. If you have had type 2 for years and are not chasing remission, Living Well With Type 2 is written for you instead. Breaking the Pattern, the companion for the first weeks after diagnosis, is published on Amazon Kindle.
Important
This workbook is for education only and is not medical advice. It does not diagnose, treat, or cure any condition, and individual results vary. Do not start, stop, or change any medication — or begin fasting — without your clinician, particularly if you take insulin, a sulfonylurea or an SGLT2 inhibitor. Testing more often can reveal readings that need a medical conversation rather than a dietary one.