THERE IS NO SINGLE DIET THAT FITS ALL

Dr Arbinder Singal employs digital therapeutics to achieve weight loss and diabetes remission. He started Fitterfly for personal reasons-he had lost two cousins to diabetes. In an exclusive interview with THE WEEK, he talks about his innovative technology that tackles diabetes. Excerpts:

- Nirmal Jovial

In the last decade, there have been a lot of studies on diabetes reversal. How is Fitterfly contributing to that?

When somebody talked about diabetes reversal a few years ago, I used to laugh about it as a doctor. Because as medical professionals, we never believed that diabetes was a reversible condition. But when we started building the Fitterfly digital therapeutic programme, I was the first patient on it. I was pre-diabetic.

But as a doctor, I am a little wary of using the word reversal because it can mislead. And now a lot of companies, which are not run by medical professionals, are using the word reversal very casually to lure the patients. I am just worried about where we are headed in terms of clinical accuracy when we use the term 'reversal'.

I think the most important thing to understand about diabetes remission is that it is a whole lot of effort. People get diabetes because of two reasons. One, it runs in families. Second, the environmental impact in terms of bad food choices, less exercise, stress and sleep issues. And most of the time people just focus on a low-calorie diet. But that by itself is inefficient, because people can do bouts of low-carb or keto or low-calorie diets for maybe two or three months, and get into a state of diabetes remission. But eventually, if they cannot sustain it lifelong, it is going to come back. So from that perspective, our research over the last three years has shown that if you just give a diet plan, that is often not sufficient for long-term results. So, we decided to tackle this in a very different way.