Power-couple Cindy and Richard turned to Virta to take on type 2 diabetes together

By Cindy and Richard, on Virta for 11 months

We have been married for 30 years. There isn’t much that surprises us about each other anymore, but our ability to both turn our prediabetes around simply by changing how we ate, well—that surprised me.

I first learned of Virta as a free benefit being offered by my employer, AmeriGas. The benefits information intrigued me. It said “Virta helps you reverse type 2 diabetes and prediabetes without medications or calorie-counting.” My first thought reading that was, “yeah, what’s the fine print?”

After looking a bit more into it we learned that Virta uses low-carb foods to help naturally reduce blood sugar. I figured that would be a challenge given our lifestyle. We both love to go out to eat, and we hate eating the same thing twice in a row. But after deciding that it was the right thing to do, we both signed up. Honestly, it really wasn’t that hard once we got the hang of it. You can learn to adapt. You can still go out to eat. We could make most of the things we loved with a few swaps here and there—we find something that we both can have on almost any menu.

We were amazed at how well those simple changes worked. In the 11 or so months we have been on the treatment, we have both lost a significant amount of weight (Cindy 30 pounds and Richard 65 pounds) and we have both either reduced or eliminated our diabetes medications.

Most importantly, the word “diabetes” was removed from our “existing diagnosis” field with our doctors. That feels amazing.

On top of logging our numbers with the Virta app, we started keeping our own food diary to track what we were eating and when. It helps us stay honest with ourselves and each other. Tracking our carbs and our proteins has become such a ritual for us that we barely think about it now. Virta really does become a lifestyle—we work at it, but half the time it doesn’t feel like work at all.

At the end of the day, we joined Virta because we want to be around for our grandchildren down the road and we didn’t want to keep adding medications to do that.

Joining Virta is like making an investment in yourself. It’s incredible what you can achieve when you have the right tools and support. We hope more people take advantage of it.

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