The Food My Grandmother Cooked Is Not Why I Got Type 2

By: Ray Taylor. Not a Doctor.

If you have ever sat at a table full of food that smells like your whole childhood and felt a little knot of guilt in your stomach, like the love on that plate is the same thing that is slowly killing you, I want to talk to you. Because I carried that guilt for a long time, and it kept me stuck. I am here to take it off you.

My grandmother called it Sugar Diabetes. It ran in the family, and when I got diagnosed in 2017, the first thing I did was look back at every Sunday dinner and quietly blame the people who fed me. I was wrong. The food my grandmother cooked is not why I got Type 2. And the shame I felt about it did more damage than any plate of greens ever did.

If you want the receipts on where this all went, start with the day a nurse called me with an 11.7. This post is about the lie I had to unlearn first.

The shame that keeps us stuck

Here is what nobody says out loud. When you tell a man that the food his grandmother made with her own two hands is the reason he is sick, you are not motivating him. You are shaming him. And shame does not make people change. Shame makes people hide.

I hid for years. I got my diagnosis, a prescription for Metformin, a pamphlet, and an appointment for some classes. Then I went right back to living how I lived, partly because deep down I had already decided I was a lost cause. If the problem was my whole family, my whole culture, the whole way I grew up eating, then what was the point. That feeling, that “it is too deep to fix” feeling, is the single most expensive lie in this whole thing. It cost me years.

So let me be clear before we go one sentence further. You are not the problem. The food your people made out of love is not the problem. Let us go find the actual problem.

What actually drives Type 2

Let me give you the plain-language version of what is happening in your body, because once you understand it, the shame has nowhere to stand.

Type 2 is not a moral failure. Your body stopped listening to insulin, and your liver keeps dumping sugar into your blood even when you have not eaten. That is the machine breaking down. The question is not “who do I blame.” The question is “what is putting the most strain on that machine.”

And the honest answer is not a pot of beans or a piece of fish. The heavy load comes from a short list:

• Ultra-processed food. The stuff built in a lab to be eaten fast and never fill you up. Most of it did not exist when my grandmother was cooking.
• Refined carbohydrates. White bread, white rice, the cakes, the cookies, the pasta. These hit your blood like a flood.
• Sugary drinks. Soda and the “juices” that look healthy and are anything but. You can drink a day’s worth of sugar before you even sit down to eat.
• Seed oils and “bad” fats packed into processed and fried convenience food.
• Sitting still. Not moving. Inactivity might be the most underrated driver on this whole list, and I will come back to it.

Look at that list again. Notice what is on it and what is not. The villain in the diabetes story got pinned on grandma’s kitchen while the industrial food that actually loads your blood sugar walked away clean.

Real food gets blamed while factory food walks free

This is the part that makes me hot. Cultural food, our food, gets dragged into every conversation about diabetes. Soul food this, soul food that. Meanwhile the soda company, the snack aisle, and the drive-through that sold me a lifetime of refined carbs and sugar do not get so much as a stern look.

I am not going to pretend everything that ever came out of a Southern kitchen is health food. Fried everything, sugar in the tea, white rice at every meal, that is real and it adds up. But here is the difference that matters. A pot of collard greens is greens, which is fiber. Black-eyed peas are a bean, which is protein and fiber. These are not the enemy. The enemy is the processed, refined, sugar-loaded stuff that got slipped into our diets over the last few decades and sold to us as cheap, fast, and normal.

Fiber, plain and simple, slows the sugar spike down to a drip. The greens and the beans your grandmother put on the table were doing you a favor. It was the soda, the white flour, and the boxed convenience food that snuck in behind them and did the real harm.

So when somebody tells you your culture’s food is why you have Type 2, you can hand them the actual list. Real food made from scratch is not the same as factory food made to sell.

What I actually cut, and what I kept

I did not throw away where I came from. I want you to hear that, because I think the fear of losing your whole culture on a plate is exactly what keeps people from starting. You do not have to become a different person. You have to swap the heavy load for the things that let your body breathe.

Here is what I cut first, the obvious stuff. Soda. White rice. Bread, and man, I love bread. Candy, cakes, cookies. The fast food. That was the refined-carb-and-sugar flood, and cutting it is where the numbers start to move.

Then over time I learned about the sneakier stuff, the processed meats and the “bad” fats and the sugary drinks dressed up as healthy. That part took a while and it was not perfect. Progress, not perfection.

Here is what I built my plate around instead, and it is not exotic:

• Fish and seafood as my main protein. Salmon, cod, tuna, sardines, mackerel, flounder.
• Chickpeas as a staple. Cheap, high in protein, easy to cook, and they fill you up. A bean, just like the ones already in our cooking.
• A plant-forward base, with low-sugar fruit like berries.
• Olive oil and avocado as my fats.
• Walnuts, pumpkin seeds, hazelnuts, and raw peanut butter that is just ground peanuts.

I added a few things back in moderation later, like eggs, plain nonfat Greek yogurt, and cottage cheese. I do not drink alcohol, so that was never part of the picture.

I call my way of eating “Kinda Vegan, Kinda Not.” And I want to be honest with you about what that means. It is not a rulebook. It is flexible, it keeps changing, and it is mine. This is my list, not the law. You will find your own version. Notice how much of it rhymes with the real, from-scratch parts of the food we grew up on. Beans, greens, fish, simple fats. I did not leave my culture. I left the factory food that got smuggled into it.

The piece that has nothing to do with food

I have to say this loud because it gets left out of every “what should I eat” conversation. Movement carried a huge part of this for me.

Walking became my engine. I walked every single day like it was a game I was trying to win. Then I started building actual muscle, push-ups and hills and a medicine ball I slammed like it owed me money. That part is not about looks. Muscle pulls sugar straight out of your blood through a door your cells open when you move, and it does it without needing insulin to beg. The more I moved, the better my body handled the same food.

So before you tear your whole pantry apart in shame, know this. Inactivity is on the list of real drivers. A daily walk is one of the most powerful things you can do, and it has nothing to do with what your grandmother cooked.

Where this leaves you

I went from an A1C of 11.7 in July of 2022 to 5.5 in March of 2026. No Ozempic, no insulin, no metformin. Food, fasting, and movement, over about three and a half years. Those are dated lab numbers, not a slogan.

I am not telling you that to promise you my exact result. Remission is what happened for me, and I cannot hand you a guarantee. What I can hand you is the truth that got me off the starting line. The food my grandmother cooked is not why I got Type 2. The shame about it was holding me back, and the real load was the processed, refined, sugary, sit-still life that got sold to all of us as normal.

You can honor your grandmother’s table and still get well. You just have to know what to keep and what to put down.

If you want a clean, no-shame place to start, the free 24 Hour Reset guide walks you through the exact first moves I made. Get the free guide here.

And if you want the whole story, every number and every step of how I rebuilt my plate without throwing away where I came from, it is in my book, Type 2 Ain’t My Type: The True Story of My Divorce from Diabetes Using Food, Fasting, and Movement.

Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

This is not medical advice.