It’s finally here. UPS just delivered the first copy of my second book, Losing Weight with Your Diabetes Medication. The subtitle, “How Byetta and Other Drugs Can Help You Lose More Weight than You Ever Thought Possible,” tells what the book is really about.

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Now, for the first time, medical research has shown that a diabetes drug “has direct beneficial actions on human T2DM [type 2 diabetes] islet cells.” The researchers, a group of nine doctors in Pisa, Italy, call the drug exendin-4, but we know it as Byetta.

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I was fortunate to start my journalistic career in sports and to move on to small business and now to write about health, specifically diabetes. So I avoided the cynicism that seems to come with the territory. Until now.

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The best strategy to save our eyes is to keep our A1C and blood pressure levels as close to normal as possible. But when that strategy doesn’t work, we’ve got to stay ahead of the dangerous changes that can hit us.

That’s the key message that Dr. Niles Utlaut, my ophthalmologist here in Boulder, Colorado, told me a few days ago. The good news, he says, is that eye doctors like him have new tools to fight against those changes.

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Any exercise can help us control our diabetes. But when we get 45 minutes each of aerobic exercise and resistance training for just three days a week, we can reduce our A1C a lot. In fact, this combination works about as well as any prescription drug can.

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Life is full of vicious circles. The opposite, virtuous circles, are all too rare.

The first virtuous circle I ever remember finding was the positive relationship between Byetta and exercise. “The more weight I lost and the more I exercised, the more energy I had,” I wrote in my forthcoming book, Losing Weight with Your Diabetes Medication. “All this feedback gave me more motivation than ever to keep on losing weight.”

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Raise your right hand if you don’t take any herbal supplements.

Gee, I don’t see any hands, and I probably wouldn’t see more than a handful if you were here with me literally instead of virtually.

People with diabetes probably take more supplements than other people. About 36 percent of American adults use complementary and alternative medicine (CAM), much of it in the form of supplements. We spend $20 billion a year for supplements.

Aside from the drain on our bank accounts, we don’t have any good proof that any supplements work. None of them.

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The new nutrition recommendations that the American Diabetes Association issued last week budged the premier American diabetes association into the 21th Century. It gave its limited — and probably reluctant — stamp of approval to low-carb diets.

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