My A1C Was 5.7: One Point From a Normal Range

By: Ray Taylor. Not a Doctor.

If you have ever gotten a good lab back and then immediately thought, fine, but can I hold it, this one is for you. Because there is a difference between dropping your number once and keeping it down for years, and almost nobody talks about the second one. Anybody can have a good month. The question that actually matters is whether the new way of living holds when the novelty wears off, when life gets busy, when the excitement of the early wins fades into just being your regular Tuesday. That is the question this draw answered for me.

This is draw number six. If you are just joining the story, the lab before this one is the one that made remission undeniable for me. Read the 6.0 first so you can feel where this is heading.

On September 23, 2025, my A1C came back at 5.7.

From 11.7 to 5.7 with no medication

Let me put the whole arc on the table so a first-time reader has it. July 2022, my A1C was 11.7 and a nurse told me it was extremely dangerous. January 2024, it was 6.3. April 2025, it was 6.0. And on September 23, 2025, it was 5.7. Food, fasting, and movement, the whole way. No Ozempic. No insulin. No metformin. No surgery. Zero diabetes medication.

I want to be careful and honest here, because this is the kind of post where it would be easy to get carried away, and I do not do carried away. I do dated lab reports. So here is exactly what I can tell you and nothing I cannot.

At 5.7 I was one point away from a number that gets called normal. I am not going to dress that up into something it is not, and I am not going to tell you a single food or a single magic week did it, because that is not how A1C works. These draws are months apart. The number is a slow three-month average. What I can tell you is that years into this, off medication the entire time, the number was still creeping down, not snapping back. That is the part I had been most afraid of, and it just kept not happening.

What an A1C of 5.7 actually means

Here is the part that matters. An A1C of 5.7 works out to an estimated average blood sugar of about 117 mg/dL. Set that next to the 11.7 I started at, where my estimated average was about 289. From a body in a fire to a body that is, on most days, just handling its business. That is the distance between those two numbers.

I want to be straight with you about the line, though, because numbers near the edges get talked about loosely and I will not do that. There is a zone right under the diabetes cutoff that doctors keep an eye on. At 5.7 I was sitting in the lower part of my own arc, off medication, well under the 6.5 that defines diabetes. Whether you want to call that approaching normal or holding strong remission, the honest headline is the same. The number that almost ended me had moved most of the way back toward where a body without this disease lives, and it had stayed there.

Durable remission versus short-term control

This is the part I actually want you to sit with, because it is the difference between a diet and a life.

Short-term control is when you crack down hard for a few weeks, see a number move, and then drift back to your old self. The number drifts back with you. That is not remission. That is a temporary truce that ends the second you stop paying attention.

Durable remission is different. Durable means the number stays down because the way you live has actually changed, not because you are white-knuckling a diet you secretly hate. The American Diabetes Association puts a real definition on it. They call remission an A1C under 6.5 percent, held for at least three months, with no diabetes medication. The key word in that whole definition is held. Not hit once. Held.

By the time the 5.7 came back, I was years past 11.7 and still off the meds. That is not a sprint result. That is the result of the same three habits repeated so many times they stopped being a project and became just how I eat, how I time my meals, and how I move my body. The fasting was not a phase. The walking was not a kick I was on. The food was not a thirty-day reset. It was my life now, and the lab kept confirming that a changed life produces a changed number, and keeps producing it.

I also have to be honest about something, because I will never sell you a straight line that did not happen. This road was not perfectly smooth for me. There were stretches where I wobbled. Real life does that to everybody. The point is not that I was flawless. The point is that the overall direction held, the habits were strong enough to survive the rough patches, and the number on the page kept telling the truth about the direction I was pointed.

What I was actually doing at this point

There was no new trick between 6.0 and 5.7, and I am not going to pretend there was. By now the three pillars were just my normal.

The fasting had matured into a tight, comfortable rhythm, but I have to keep saying this because it is where people get hurt. I did not start there. I started gentle and built up over a long, long time. If you are new, you begin with something like a twelve-hour overnight window and you stretch it slowly as your body adjusts. The long stuff is a destination, not a starting line. The whole idea is just giving your body real rest from a constant flood of sugar.

The food was settled into what I call Kinda Vegan, Kinda Not. Plant-forward, built on chickpeas and fish and vegetables, olive oil and avocado for fats, berries when I want something sweet. I keep calling it flexible on purpose. It is my list, not the law, and you will build your own.

And the movement was still the engine. Walking every day, thousands of steps, treated like a game I am trying to win. Plus building muscle, because muscle is one of the biggest places your body pulls sugar out of your blood, and it can do it through a door your working muscles open without needing insulin to do it. Food, fasting, and movement. Same rope, same direction, year after year.

Why this matters for us

I keep coming back to one thing. When I went looking for proof that a regular Black man could not just lower his A1C but keep it low for years without a pharmacy bag, I could barely find it. So I am putting my own labs out loud on purpose. 11.7 to 5.7 is four dated draws walking in the same direction over years. That is not a slogan. That is durable. If it can hold for a guy who walked himself out of a 450 hospital reading, durable is possible for more of us than anybody is telling.

And I will say the honest part, the same way I always do. This is my result, held over my years, with my body. It is not a guarantee I can hand you. What I can tell you is that holding it is possible, that the early wins do not have to evaporate, and that a changed life is what makes a changed number stick.

What came next

There is one more draw in this story. The most recent one. Where I am right now. And it took the arc one more step into a place I did not believe was on the table for me when that nurse called in 2022. I am going to show it to you with the date on it, and I am going to put the whole journey together.

If you are doing the work and waiting on your own proof, the free guide lays out the exact first day and the system I used to start this. 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. Do not change your medication without your doctor.