If you were losing weight, you were not eating enough protein and/or fat. One of the funny things is that (healthy) fats don't really make you fat. Glucose does. And even things like "diet drinks" makes your pancreas and other glands produce too much insulin. Insulin helps store glucose into fat cells, and diabetes just means you have exhausted that process so you can no longer make insulin (or your body can't use it properly anymore).

Being active or inactive does not have a big influence on diabetes, oddly enough. There are construction workers or very active people with diabetes. It really is (mostly) down to your diet.

Maybe it's the word diet that bothers you? The idea is not to lose weight (although losing fat is never a bad thing - up to a point), but to give your hormones a rest, which also gives your body the chance to heal your nerve endings.

I would still advise (I'm stubborn too ) to read up on this. There is a direct link between diabetes and PN, and you can't "fix" PN if you are still in pre-diabetic territory.

Metformin-induced vitamin B12 deficiency presenting as a peripheral neuropathy. - PubMed - NCBI

Maybe MrsD. can chime in, but medication like Metformin can actually make your PN worse. I'm not a doctor, but I have often discussed this with my GP, and she fully agrees with me on this.