My A1C Was 11.7: The Phone Call I Will Never Forget

By: Ray Taylor. Not a Doctor.

There is a specific kind of fear that shows up when the doctor’s office calls you instead of waiting for your next visit. You see the number on your phone and your stomach drops before you even answer. If you have lived that moment, or you are scared you are about to, this is the one I want you to read. This is the day everything turned, and I am going to give it to you straight, with the real numbers.

If you are just finding this, I have been laying out every A1C I own, in order. Start with my 8.6 and my 10.5 so you see how I got here. Because where I got was the edge.

On July 6, 2022, I had my blood drawn. On July 8, a nurse called me with the result. My A1C was 11.7.

The phone call

I will never forget it. The nurse did not ease into it.

“Mr. Taylor, your A1C is 11.7, and that is extremely dangerous.”

I tried to explain. I told her I had already started fasting and walking, that my daily blood sugar was coming down, that I had stopped my medication because I wanted to see if I could actually fix this. She was having none of it. She cut me right off.

“Mr. Taylor, do you understand what diabetes is? You cannot stop taking your medication. With these numbers, and the high cholesterol…”

And the call ended. Honestly, I am not even sure if it dropped or if I hung up because I did not want to hear it. I heard her, though. Loud and clear. Here is the thing I understood that she could not have known in that moment. An A1C looks backward. It measures the last 60 to 90 days. She was looking at where I had been. I was looking at where I was going.

How bad it really was

That 11.7 did not come out of nowhere. A few weeks before that call, my blood sugar had hit 450 in a hospital. Four hundred and fifty. If you know, you know. That is the kind of number that comes with a hospital bracelet, not a pamphlet.

I had just flown back home, back to the place where my health had completely unraveled, and I was 47 years old doing the math in my head. This felt like my last real shot to get it right. I had no car and no license, so I literally walked to the doctor’s office for that blood draw and walked back home. That walk home, I did not know yet that the number waiting for me would be the highest of my life.

What an A1C of 11.7 actually means

Let me put it in plain numbers. An A1C of 11.7 works out to an estimated average blood sugar of around 289 mg/dL, every hour, for three months. Healthy is under 5.7. They diagnose diabetes at 6.5. I was sitting at 11.7.

At that level you are not managing a condition, you are running out of road. That is the level where the damage to your eyes, kidneys, nerves, and heart stops being a future problem and becomes a right-now problem. I had a 50 percent blockage in one of my heart arteries. My body was sending the bill for every year I ignored the earlier numbers.

What I did next, and what I have to warn you about

Now I have to be very honest and very loud, because this part matters more than anything else on this page.

I had been on three medications for this disease, including insulin. They were not getting it done. So a few weeks before that 11.7 draw, I made a decision that I do not recommend to anyone. I stopped taking all of them. Full stop. I wanted to know, in real time, if changing my behavior could change my body. In my mind the only way to know if the new way worked was to actually test it.

Hear me clearly. I am not a doctor. What I did was risky, and it probably was not smart. Do not stop your medication because a guy on the internet did. If you are going to change anything about your medication, you do it with your physician, not behind their back and not because of a blog post. I am telling you what I did. I am not telling you to do it.

What I put in its place was simple, and it is the whole system I still use. Three pillars. Food, fasting, and movement. Equal partners, none of them more important than the others.

Day one

The first real day, I went all in, mostly out of desperation. I was in central Florida, where the sun and humidity will cook you, so I walked. And walked. I ended up putting in 18,000 steps. I had only planned a modest fast, but I blew right past it and hit 20 hours without eating, without passing out, without collapsing on the sidewalk. The fasting itself felt suspiciously easy. It came, I felt it, I kept going, and it passed.

Before I finally ate, I got curious and pricked my finger. That morning my fasting number had been north of 300, which honestly was a good morning for me back then. After the walk and the fast, the meter read 196. I was down over 100 points, and all I had done was walk and not eat. That was not just a win. That was the first glimmer of hope I had felt in years.

A few weeks later I pushed it further and did my first 48-hour fast, from 6 PM one day to 6 PM two days later. Those two days changed how I thought about all of it. Thirty days in, the weight was already coming off, my blood sugar was living under 200 instead of over 300, and I had a new habit and a new chapter.

The nurse was not wrong. And neither was I.

I want to be fair to that nurse. With the information she had, she was right to be alarmed. An 11.7 is an emergency. I am not anti-doctor and I am not telling you the medical system is the enemy. I am telling you that I respected the message, I just refused to accept that the only answer was more of the same thing that had not worked.

I put my faith in the process, in the work, and in the proof I could already see on my own glucose meter. I went forward.

What came next

Here is the bridge, and it is the whole reason I am telling this story. About six months after this terrifying 11.7, I could already see real, measurable change in my daily numbers. But the number that made it official, the first A1C lab that proved the whole thing was working, came a year and a half later. And when I saw it, a grown man got emotional.

That is the next draw, and it is my favorite one.

If you want the exact first day I used to dig out of this, step by step, the same starting point that turned my 11.7 around, 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. I am not a doctor. Stopping prescribed medication on your own is dangerous. Do not do what I did without your physician.