My A1C Was 8.6: The Number I Got and Ignored

By: Ray Taylor. Not a Doctor.

If you are a Black man and somebody in a white coat just told you that you have Type 2 diabetes, I know the feeling in your chest right now. You nod. You take the paper. You take the pills. And on the inside you are already deciding that this is just one more thing you will deal with later, like everybody in your family dealt with it. Later.

I know that feeling because that was me. So let me show you my actual numbers, starting with the first one.

On July 18, 2018, my A1C came back at 8.6.

I had been carrying this for a minute by then. Back in 2017 I had surgery on my foot, and six months later it still was not healing right. My primary doctor, not the surgeon, had a hunch and tested my blood. That is how I found out. A pamphlet, a prescription for Metformin, and an appointment to go sit in some classes. My grandmother used to call it Sugar Diabetes. Runs in the family. So I said the four words that keep a whole lot of us sick. It is what it is. Then I went right back to eating bad, not moving, and beating up my own body.

Here is the part nobody sat me down and explained, so I am going to explain it to you.

What an A1C of 8.6 actually means

A1C is not your blood sugar at one moment. It is a three-month average. It measures how much sugar has been riding around in your blood, stuck to your red blood cells, over the last 60 to 90 days. The higher the number, the longer your blood has been running sweet.

An A1C of 8.6 works out to an estimated average blood sugar of about 200 mg/dL, every hour of every day, for three straight months. A healthy number is under 5.7. The line where they call it diabetes is 6.5. I was at 8.6 and I treated it like a parking ticket.

That average is not just a statistic. That is the number that was quietly going to work on my eyes, my kidneys, my nerves, and the arteries around my heart while I was busy ignoring it. It does not hurt at 8.6. That is the trap. It does not hurt until it really, really hurts.

What I did next (which was nothing)

I want to be honest with you because that is the only thing that makes this story worth anything. I did not change one thing. I took the Metformin when I remembered. I skipped the classes. I kept the same plate, the same couch, the same habits.

I was not lazy and I was not stupid. I just did not believe a number could be that serious when I felt basically fine. And on top of that, like a lot of us, I did not fully trust the system telling me the number. That distrust is earned, and we can talk about that another day. But here is what I learned the hard way. You can distrust the messenger and still respect the message. The message was 8.6, and it was true.

If I could go back and grab 2018 Ray by the collar, I would not give him a lecture. I would give him one small thing to do that day. Skip the sugary drink. Take a ten minute walk after dinner. Read one food label. One concrete move, started immediately. That is the whole game, and I did not know it yet.

Why I am putting my real labs online

Here is something I noticed when I finally got serious and went looking for help. Almost nobody telling the diabetes remission story looked like me. The before and after pictures, the success stories, the calm voices explaining it all. White women. White men in their sixties. Doctors. Good people with real information, but not my face, not my kitchen, not my family, not the way I talk.

Black men show up in the diabetes conversation in one way. As a statistic. We get diagnosed more, and we do worse, and then the story moves on without ever letting one of us be the guy who actually beat it and can prove it.

So I decided to be that guy. Not with a motivational speech. With my actual LabCorp results, draw by draw, dated, the bad ones and the good ones. You do not have to take my word for anything. The lab took my blood. I am just showing you the receipts. The 8.6 is the first receipt, and I am not proud of what I did with it. But it is real, and that is the point.

The number did not stay at 8.6

Here is the truth I have to leave you with, and it is a hard one. When you ignore a number like this, it does not sit still and wait for you to get serious. It climbs. Mine climbed, and the next draw was worse than I ever imagined.

I am walking you through every single A1C I have, in order, with the dates, because I want you to see the whole arc and not just the happy ending. This was draw number one.

If you want the free guide that breaks down the very first day I finally changed something, instead of the years I wasted, get the free guide here. It is the exact starting point I wish I had in 2018.

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.