By: Ray Taylor. Not a Doctor.
Maybe you have watched your A1C creep up over a couple of years and told yourself the same thing I did. It is not that bad. The doctor did not seem panicked. I feel fine. So you let another year go by. I need you to see what that year did to me, in actual lab numbers, so you do not lose the years I lost.
If you have not seen where this started, go back and read the first number, my 8.6. This is the next one, and it is uglier.
On June 26, 2019, my A1C came back at 10.5.
A year and change after my 8.6, I had not fixed a thing, and the number told on me. I had crossed out of the regular danger zone and into a place I now call Organs Under Fire. That is not a medical term. That is just the truest way I can describe what a 10.5 means.
What an A1C of 10.5 actually means
Remember, A1C is a three-month average of the sugar in your blood. An 8.6 is roughly a 200 mg/dL average. A 10.5 works out to an estimated average blood sugar of about 255 mg/dL, around the clock, for three months straight.
At that level, the sugar in your blood is not just a lab value. It is a slow fire. High blood sugar that stays high damages the smallest blood vessels first, the ones feeding your eyes and your kidneys and the nerves in your feet. It stiffens and narrows the bigger arteries too, the ones around your heart. This is how people end up losing toes, losing eyesight, going on dialysis, and having heart attacks they never saw coming. None of it announces itself. You do not feel your kidneys straining. You do not feel a nerve dying.
That is what 10.5 was doing to me while I told myself I felt fine. I felt fine the way a house feels fine while the wiring is cooking behind the wall.
What I did next (still nothing, and then it got dark)
I would love to tell you the 10.5 woke me up. It did not. I kept the same plate and the same habits. Stubborn, scared, and in denial all at once.
Then 2020 hit. I ran down to central Florida, partly to get away from how bad Covid felt back home. By April of 2020 I was 45 years old and felt like I was 62. I was fresh off another surgery, soft and out of shape at 213 pounds, with my blood sugar through the roof, and worn out before I reached the end of the block. I will be straight with you. I was genuinely not sure how much longer I was going to live in the condition I was in. I was holding my grandson, feeling like crap, doing the math on whether I would see him grow up.
That is what a number you ignore turns into. Not a scary lab printout. A grown man holding a baby and quietly wondering how much time he has left.
Why I keep showing you the bad numbers
It would be easy to skip this one. Start the story at the comeback and let you think I was always disciplined. But that would be a lie, and lies do not help anybody who is actually scared.
I am laying out every A1C I have, in order, with the dates, because I need you to see that I was not some health guy who had it together. I was deep in it. Double digits. Two years of doing nothing. If the man at 10.5 in 2019 could still turn it completely around, then so can a whole lot of people who think they are too far gone. Stay with me and watch it happen in the labs.
The number was still climbing
Here is the hard part. A 10.5 should have been my floor. It was not. I kept living the same way, and the next time I got my blood drawn, the number was the highest it had ever been, and a nurse said the word dangerous to me on the phone.
That is the next draw, and it is the one that finally changed everything.
If you are sitting on a number like this right now, do not wait for your own rock bottom. The free guide lays out the exact first day I used to start digging out. Get the free guide here.
Want the whole thing in order? That is exactly why I wrote the book. Type 2 Ain’t My Type lays out the full system the way I actually did it. The 12 week plan, week by week, plus the toolkits for the parts that trip people up. The food swaps. Reading labels. Beating the cravings. Eating out. Staying in remission once you get there. It is everything I wish someone had handed me at 11.7.
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This is not medical advice.
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