How Changing Your Diet Can Help Reverse Chronic Diseases and Boost Your Health
- Sep 10, 2025
- 3 min read
Written by Olly Leicester, Health Coach
Olly Leicester is an experienced health coach. After 5 years working in the NHS he is now coaching online 1:1, and delivering corporate workshops on workplace wellbeing topics – food habits, stress management, sleep, and good energy.
What diseases did I see disappear when people changed what they ate over the course of weeks or a few months? (When I say ‘disappear,’ I mean that they no longer needed long-term medication for these conditions, and the person restored their health.)
Type 2 diabetes
Pre-diabetes
Fatty liver disease
Joint pain
Hypertension
Erectile dysfunction
And what other benefits did patients report while no longer on medication?
Better sleep
Smaller waist size (i.e., fat loss)
More energy
Less brain fog
More self-esteem
Increased self-confidence
A common ‘positive problem’ for people regaining their health, buying smaller clothes!
How was this all possible?
Mainly, it was about changing what goes on the food shopping list. Then, it’s simply a case of finding the foods you like that also improve your health outcomes. This can take a bit of exploration and experimentation to get things right for you, but boy, is it worth it. You can eat your way into chronic disease, but you can also eat your way into health.
How long did these results take to happen? It depends on where that person was to begin with, but you can see positive changes start to take shape within a month. However, I’ve seen all these conditions 'vanish' within a few months of changing fuels.
How would I rate the knowledge and training of the typical NHS GP or nurse on educating and helping people make proactive changes to reverse lifestyle illnesses? Really poor.
They don’t get trained on how to help people achieve health, their training only steers them to manage illness with medications. There is little or no emphasis, or opportunity to (from what I saw), to help people change habits to achieve different (and better) health outcomes.
Hippocrates said 2,000 years ago, ‘Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food.’ Sadly, I didn’t work with many clinicians who worked like this.
However, I did learn all of the above from the likes of Dr. David Unwin, a GP in Southport, by listening to plenty of his podcasts and seeing him speak at various conferences. One visual aid that I used on a daily basis is this one:
So many different symptoms can resolve simply by lowering blood sugar and focusing your plates on protein and non-starchy vegetables. It doesn't have to be too complicated! In fact, the solution can be incredibly simple, yet not necessarily easy, due to our environment, culture, food addictions, poor advice, food preferences, and more.
One crazy thing is that we do not need to eat carbohydrates to live. We need to eat protein and fat, but not carbohydrates. Why on earth do most food guidelines in the world recommend that most of the plate be non-essential carbohydrates?
Given the right conditions, the human body can thrive and live in health, not in illness. It’s certainly possible to enjoy food and enjoy good health at the same time. If you want to know more about how this is done, feel free to drop me a line.
Olly Leicester, Health Coach
Olly Leicester is an experienced health coach. Having coached hundreds of patients over five years in NHS doctor surgeries, Olly now coaches online and has designed 4- to 8-week health coaching programs to help busy working professionals prevent or reverse chronic lifestyle diseases.
