My A1C Is 5.5: Where I Am Now After Going From 11.7

By: Ray Taylor. Not a Doctor.

If you just got a scary number, or you love a Black man who did, and you are sitting there being told this is a one-way street that only ends with more pills and more damage, I need you to read this one all the way through. Because I was handed that same story, and the number on my most recent lab says the story was not the whole truth. I am not a doctor. I am a regular man who got a number that should have scared the life out of me, decided to fight it with food, fasting, and movement, and kept the receipts.

This is the last draw in the series, draw number seven, and it is the current one. This is where I am right now. If you want to feel how far it runs, the lab right before this is the one that put me one point from a normal range. Read the 5.7 first, then come back to where I am today.

On March 4, 2026, my A1C came back at 5.5.

The whole arc, from 11.7 to 5.5

Let me put every dated number in one place, because this is the post people are going to find when they search, and I want it to be the honest, complete version. These are my actual lab draws, with the dates, in order.

• 8.6, July 18, 2018. The first number on record after I was diagnosed. They handed me Metformin and a pamphlet. I ignored it.
• 10.5, June 26, 2019. Getting worse. Organs under fire.
• 11.7, July 6, 2022. The crisis. A nurse called me on July 8 and told me it was extremely dangerous. Right around this time my blood sugar hit 450 in a hospital, and I found out I had 50 percent blockage in a heart artery.
• 6.3, January 29, 2024. The first lab that made a grown man emotional. The climb was real.
• 6.0, April 2, 2025. The proof. A second strong number, lower than the first. Not a fluke. A pattern.
• 5.7, September 23, 2025. One point from a number they call normal, and holding.
• 5.5, March 4, 2026. Where I am now.

From 11.7 to 5.5. Roughly three and a half years. Food, fasting, and movement, the entire way. No Ozempic. No insulin. No metformin. No surgery. Zero diabetes medication.

What an A1C of 5.5 actually means

Here is the part that matters. An A1C of 5.5 works out to an estimated average blood sugar of about 111 mg/dL. Back at 11.7, my estimated average was about 289. That is the distance I am talking about. A body that was averaging 289 is a body in a five-alarm fire. A body averaging around 111 is, on most days, a body that is just doing its job.

I am going to be precise about the words, because near these numbers people get loose, and I will not. The A1C that defines diabetes is 6.5. I have been well under that, off medication, for years now. The American Diabetes Association defines remission as an A1C under 6.5 percent, held for at least three months, with no diabetes medication. By that definition I have been in remission for a long stretch, and the 5.5 is the most recent confirmation of it.

I do not call it a fix and I will not pretend it vanished. This is something I manage every single day, and the day I stop managing it is the day it can come back. The right word is remission. The disease that was supposed to take me is not gone. It is sitting down, and I work to keep it there.

What I know now that I did not know at 11.7

When that nurse called me in 2022, here is what I believed. I believed the number only went one way. I believed diabetes was a life sentence and my only job was to slow the damage with medication. I believed my body was broken and there was nothing I could do about it but take what they gave me. I was wrong about all of it, and I want to hand you what I learned the hard way, so you do not have to wait three and a half years to know it.

The number goes both ways. They tell you what it is. They do not always tell you it can come down, a lot, and stay down. Mine did.

A1C looks backward. You get to look forward. When that nurse told me 11.7, I understood it measured the previous couple of months. It was a snapshot of where I had been. But I had already changed where I was going. The number you have today is a report on your old life, not a sentence on your new one.

The three pillars work together, not one at a time. Food, fasting, and movement. I am not allowed to rank them and I would not want to, because they pull the same rope. Here is the plain science, the way I understand it as a regular guy who read everything he could get his hands on. Type 2, in plain terms, is your body no longer listening to insulin while your liver keeps dumping sugar into your blood. Fasting, meaning a shorter eating window, gives your insulin a rest instead of working around the clock. Movement, walking and building muscle, pulls sugar straight out of your blood through a door your muscles open when they work, and they can open it without needing insulin. Fiber slows the sugar spike from a flood to a drip. Put all of that together and you are coming at the problem from every direction at once.

Start gentle. The hard stuff is the destination, not the doorway. This is the one I am most serious about, because this is where people hurt themselves trying to copy where I ended up instead of where I began. My eating window is tight now, but I did not start there. I started with a normal overnight window and stretched it slowly over years as my body got comfortable. If you are new, you start with something like a twelve-hour window and you build. You do not jump to the deep end. You wade in.

Imperfect and consistent beats perfect and brief. My road was not a straight line. I wobbled. Real life happens to everybody. What carried me was not being flawless. It was that the habits were strong enough to survive the rough patches, and the overall direction held. Progress, not perfection.

What I actually eat and do now

People always want the specifics, so here they are, honestly, with no magic attached to any single item.

My food is what I call Kinda Vegan, Kinda Not. Plant-forward, built on chickpeas, which are my staple, plus fish like salmon, cod, tuna, sardines, and mackerel. Vegetables fill the plate. My fats are olive oil and avocado. When I want something sweet I reach for berries. My nuts and seeds are walnuts, pumpkin seeds, hazelnuts, and raw peanut butter that is just ground peanuts. I added a few things back in moderation over time, like eggs and plain nonfat Greek yogurt and cottage cheese. I do not drink alcohol, at all. And I keep calling this flexible on purpose, because that is the whole point. It is my list, not the law. You will build your own.

My movement is still the engine. I walk every day like it is a game I am trying to win, thousands of steps, with a target I worked up to over time. I walk after meals. And I build muscle on purpose, with push-ups and hills and a medicine ball, because muscle is one of the biggest places your body burns and stores sugar.

My fasting is a tight rhythm now, but I will say it one more time because it is that important. I built up to it slowly over about two and a half years. It is where I arrived, not where I started, and not where you should start either.

Why this matters for us

I keep coming back to one thing, and it is the reason this whole series exists. When I went looking for proof that a regular Black man could take an A1C of 11.7 down to 5.5 without a pharmacy bag, I could barely find it. Nobody who looked like me was standing up with their dated labs saying it out loud. So I decided to be the proof I could not find. Seven dated draws, from 8.6 all the way down to 5.5, the bottom half of that arc done with zero medication. That is not a slogan and it is not a vibe. That is a paper trail.

I have to say the honest part, the same way I have said it in every post in this series. This is my result. It is my body, my years, my work. It is not a guarantee I can hand you, and I would be lying to you if I dressed it up as one. Remission is what happened to me. What I can promise you is this. The door is not as locked as they made it sound when I was at 11.7, and the only way I ever found that out was by walking up to it and pushing, one day at a time, for years. Consistent persistence overcomes resistance. I am living proof of that, and I am still going.

The full story is in my book

This series gives you the seven numbers and the shape of the road. The full story, the whole thing, the fear and the hospital and the day-one walk and every single step in between, is in my book. I wrote it because the labs alone do not tell you what it actually felt like to fight your way out, and I wanted to put the entire account in one place for the next person who gets the call I got.

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.

And if you want to start today, before you read another word, the free guide lays out the exact first day and the system I used to get this moving. Get the free guide here.

Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

This is not medical advice. Do not change your medication without your doctor.