Before insulin was discovered in 1921, people with diabetes didn’t live for long; there wasn’t much doctors could do for them. The most effective treatment was to put patients with diabetes on very strict diets with minimal carbohydrate intake. This could buy patients a few extra years but couldn’t save them. Harsh diets (some prescribed as little as 450 calories a day!) sometimes even caused patients to die of starvation.
http://diabetesstopshere.org/2012/08/21/the-history-of-a-wonderful-thing-we-call-insulin/
We eat as much as we want of formerly “bad” foods. We do try to have a medium avocado a day. We use erythritol, xylitol, and other sweeteners to help.
Due to eating so much and to the general effect of what low carb does, we wind up skipping meals because we a still feel full.
We do not try to reduce any calories, and that is exceptionally “freeing.”
We started to lose a little weight before requalifying for life insurance. After two months, we both shot up to “preferred plus” rates and our total cholesterol to HDL was wonderfully good. Every marker said we were healthier than we could have hoped. My numbers looked as good as when I was working out every day, twenty years ago—and I don’t work out at all, now. I sit at a desk and barely move, but it doesn’t look that way to my life insurance company or to my doctor.
Don’t tell him what I’m doing!
In the book series Little Britches the main character (this is a memoir) Had diabetes in about 1905. He followed the diabetic diet and eventually the diabetes ended in a few years.