In a healthy body, your pancreas secretes insulin, to manage the level of glucose in your bloodstream.

As you gain weight, eat poorly, and remain inactive, the amount of glucose circulating in your body increases. So your pancreas has to work overtime, secreting more and more insulin to try and keep up.

After a while, however, your pancreas basically just burns out. It stops secreting insulin altogether, leaving toxic levels of glucose circulating. That’s called type 2 (or adult onset) diabetes.

Type 2 diabetes is bad news. It increases your odds of death in a given year by 2.5x, and it leaves you vulnerable to all kinds of non-lethal but still crappy complications, like going blind and having your toes and fingers amputated.

By now, about 10% of the US has type 2 diabetes, and another 30% have blown out their pancreases sufficiently to be classified as ‘pre-diabetic’.

According to new research, however, those people aren’t permanently screwed.

In a group of patients who lost weight through six weeks on a very low calorie diet, and who then maintained that weight loss for six months, nearly 50% reversed their diabetes entirely. Their pancreases ‘woke back up’, and started secreting insulin again.

This extends research by the NIH on pre-diabetics, who similarly reversed the disease by losing weight and getting active.

In other words, if you’re pre-diabetic or even have full-blown type 2 diabetes, it’s not too late. You can take matters into your own hands, get in shape, and cure yourself.

Sure, that takes hard work. But let’s be brutally honest: it’s still much better than being blind, toeless and dead.