Category: Mindset

By: Ray Taylor. Not a Doctor.

A note on links: Some links in this post are Amazon affiliate links. If you buy through them, I earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. I only link to products I actually use or would credibly recommend. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

You were doing it. You had it rolling. The numbers were finally moving, the weight was coming down, and for the first time you thought maybe this time is different.

And then you fell off.

A rough weekend turned into a rough month. The weight crept back. And worse than the weight was that voice in your head going see, you always do this, you were never going to keep it up, you might as well quit. You think falling off is proof the whole thing was doomed from the start.

I want you to hear this from a guy who is not perfect and never claimed to be. I fell off too. Years into this. After everything I am about to show you, I still fell off.

And the reason I am telling you is simple. Falling off did not end my story. And it does not have to end yours. The key was never whether it happens. The key is what you do next.

First, the truth about my numbers

I am not a doctor. I am just a guy who got sick and tired of being sick and tired.

In July of 2022 my A1C was 11.7. I was on metformin, glipizide, and insulin, all three at once, and I was still getting worse. My blood sugar hit 450 in a hospital bed. By January of 2024 I had climbed all the way back to a 6.3. As of March 2026, my A1C is 5.5. That is in the normal range, and I take zero diabetes medication. The whole climb took about three and a half years, and if you are wondering how long it actually takes to move your own A1C, I wrote about that too.

But that line from 11.7 to 5.5 was not a straight shot. Nobody’s is. Somewhere in the middle of it, I fell flat on my face.

I had it going. Then I heard the vanilla wafers calling my name.

Here is the part nobody puts on the highlight reel.

By early 2024 I was rolling. The A1C was down, the weight was off, I felt like a different human being. And then I got comfortable. That is the trap, by the way. Not the bad days. The good ones, where you think you have got this beat and you can let your guard down.

I let mine down. I started creeping back toward the processed junk. Oreos. Vanilla wafers. The stuff I swore was behind me. I literally heard the vanilla wafers calling my name from the cabinet, and I gave in.

One box became a habit. The habit ran about five months. And in those five months I put 14 pounds back on.

I tell you that not to scare you, but to be straight with you. I wrote in my book about “the cookies calling you from the cabinet,” and then there I was, living it, years into my own turnaround. Slipping up is not a beginner mistake you outgrow. It is just part of being a human being who likes cookies.

The difference is never whether the wafers call. They will. The difference is what you do when they do.

The all-or-nothing trap is more dangerous than the cookies

Here is what almost got me. It was not the 14 pounds. It was the thinking that comes with the 14 pounds.

That voice that says you already blew it, so you might as well blow it all the way. You ate the cookies Friday, so the weekend is shot, so the week is shot, so what is even the point. That is all-or-nothing thinking, and it is the actual killer. The cookies are nothing. The story you tell yourself about the cookies is what sends you all the way back to square one.

In my book I put it as plain as I could:

“You’re going to slip up. The key isn’t if it happens, but how you respond when it does. Ditch the All-or-Nothing Thinking. This is critical. One bad meal, one bad day, even one bad week does NOT mean you’ve failed.”

Read that again. One bad meal is not failure. One bad day is not failure. One bad week is not failure. Failure is deciding the slip is permanent and walking away. As long as you do not do that, you have not failed. You have just had a Tuesday.

So when you fall off, the first thing to fix is not your plate. It is that voice.

How I actually got back on (no magic, I promise)

People want the secret. There is no secret. When I climbed back out of that five-month hole, I did not do anything clever. I went back to the same three things that built the result in the first place.

The food

I stopped buying the junk that was calling me. You cannot eat the wafers if the wafers are not in the house. I got back to real food, stuff with ingredients I can pronounce, minimally processed if at all. I am not sitting there counting carbs and counting calories. I just eat my vegetables and I keep the garbage out of the cart.

The window

I got back to my eating window. I eat my one meal in the evening, after work, and I keep the rest of the day fasted. That is my practice, and it is the destination, not the on-ramp. I would never tell a newcomer to jump to one meal a day. You start gentle, an overnight fast, and you stretch it only when it feels easy. The point is just this: I got back to a structure, instead of grazing all day on cookies.

The walking

And I moved. Not a gym membership I would never use. Walking, with purpose, every day. That is the most underrated thing on this whole list and the easiest one to restart the day after a slip.

That is it. No grand restart. No punishment. No three-day cleanse to “make up for it.” Just back to the basics that worked the first time. There is a full playbook in the book for getting back on after a setback, the whole method for learning from a lapse instead of drowning in it. But the bones of it are right there. Food. Window. Walking. Repeat.

When you are climbing back, you do not need a perfect plan. You need a couple of dead-simple things you can lean on without thinking. When I have no plan and no energy, I open a can of Eden chickpeas and just eat those. Real protein, real fiber, no syrup, no decision to make. And the simplest reset meal I lean on is a bowl of plain Bob’s Red Mill rolled oats with a little fruit, eaten in the evening, one ingredient I can actually read on the bag. Boring food is what gets you back. Boring is the whole point.

If you want the rest of the no-think staples that make getting back on easy, the simple stuff I actually keep in the house, I put all of it on my remission toolkit page. That is the cart you copy when you have no energy to think about it.

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.

Now look at what the numbers did

This is the part I need you to actually sit with, because it is the whole reason I am telling you about my worst stretch.

I fell off in 2024. Five months. Fourteen pounds back on. And here is what my A1C did across that whole mess:

• 6.3 in January 2024, right before I got comfortable and slipped.
• 6.0 in April 2025, after I got back to the food, the window, and the walking.
• 5.5 in March 2026, normal range, zero medication.

The relapse did not break the line. One fall did not undo years of work. The trajectory kept going the right direction because I got back on instead of giving up. That is the entire reassurance, and it is the truest thing in this post. A slip is a dip in the road, not a cliff. You do not have to be perfect. You have to refuse to quit. If you want the whole arc, the full story of how I went from 11.7 to 5.5 and into the normal range is its own post, relapse and all.

You will fall off. Plan to get back on.

So let me say the thing I wish somebody had said to me before my slip instead of after.

You are going to fall off. Not maybe. You are. Life is going to happen, a craving is going to win, a hard week is going to knock you sideways. That is not a character flaw. That is Tuesday. The people who get better are not the people who never slip. They are the people who get back on the next morning instead of waiting for the perfect Monday that never comes.

Consistent persistence overcomes resistance. Every. Single. Time. And persistence is not a clean, unbroken line. It is falling off and climbing back, falling off and climbing back, until the climbing back becomes the habit. I fell off after years of progress and gained 14 pounds, and my A1C still went from 11.7 to 5.5, drug-free. Not because I was perfect. Because I kept coming back.

You may not get all the way to remission like I did. But you can absolutely get better. Lower numbers, more energy, maybe less medication down the road, all of it with your doctor in your corner. And none of it requires you to be flawless. It just requires you to not quit when you stumble.

If you fell off this week, you did not fail. You found out you are human. Now get back to the food, the window, and the walk. Tomorrow. Not next Monday. Tomorrow.

Tell me about a time you fell off and got back on. Or tell me you are climbing back right now, today. Either way, I want to hear it in the comments. I read them.

P.S. New here, or climbing back from a slip? I put together a few free guides that are a clean, simple place to restart, no perfection required. Start here.

This is not medical advice. Always talk to your doctor before you change your diet, your movement, or your medication.

By: Ray Taylor. Not a Doctor.

A note on links: Some links in this post are Amazon affiliate links. If you buy through them, I earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. I only link to products I actually use or would credibly recommend. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

You promised yourself this morning. You meant it with your whole chest. And by nine at night you were standing in a gas station under those ugly fluorescent lights with something in your hand you swore off twelve hours ago, hating yourself the whole way home.

I know that drive home. I took it more times than I can count.

You have probably decided by now that everybody else got handed willpower and you got skipped. That the people who keep the weight off and keep the numbers down have something in them you were just born without. And somewhere underneath all of it, you have started to believe the diabetes itself is a verdict on your character. That you did this to yourself because you are weak.

I need to tell you something it took me years to understand. That is a lie. Not a comforting lie I am telling you so you feel better. A flat-out factual lie about how your own body works.

What you are fighting at nine at night is not a missing virtue. It is biology. And once you understand the actual machine you are up against, the shame starts to come off you like a wet coat.

First, let me tell you who is saying this

I am not a doctor. I am just a guy who got sick and tired of being sick and tired.

In July of 2022 my A1C was 11.7. I was on metformin, glipizide, and insulin, all three at once, and I was still getting worse. I landed in a hospital bed with my blood sugar reading 450. Around that same stretch a catheter found a 50 percent blockage in my main heart artery. I was forty-something, fat, sick, and five years deep into Type 2 diabetes, and my body was failing in real time.

As of March 2026, my A1C is 5.5. That is the normal range. I take zero diabetes medication. That whole climb took about three and a half years.

Here is the part that matters for this post. I have zero willpower. I am not being humble. I am the guy who used to shotgun sugar packets at the Wawa like a maniac. I did not out-tough this disease. I did not white-knuckle my way to a normal A1C. I stopped fighting the wrong fight. And I am going to show you what the right fight actually is.

The shame is built on a lie about your body

Here is the lie, stated plainly. The world told you that Type 2 diabetes is a moral problem. That it is what happens to people who do not care, who have no discipline, who let themselves go.

That framing is everywhere, and it is poison, because it points you at the wrong target. If the problem is your character, then the fix is to “try harder,” and when trying harder does not work, the only thing left to conclude is that you are broken.

You are not broken. The cravings, the food noise, the nine o’clock pull toward the cabinet, none of that is evidence of a weak character. It is the predictable output of a biological cascade that has been building in your body for years. I wrote it down in my book this way, and I will say it to you straight here too. You have not failed as a person. You are having a predictable, and frankly intended, response to what is happening inside you and what is being marketed at you. There is a difference between those two things, and that difference is the whole ballgame.

I refused the shame from the very beginning. Not because I was tough about it, but because shame asks you to accept one premise first, that you did this to yourself on purpose. I never accepted that premise. I want you to refuse it too.

What is actually happening inside you: rusty locks

Let me give you the picture that flipped the light on for me.

Insulin is a key. Your cells are doors with locks on them. When everything is working, insulin the key slides into the lock, the door opens, and the fuel from your food gets into the cell where it belongs.

In Type 2 diabetes, the locks rusted shut.

That is it. That is the root of the whole thing. I called it “rusty locks” in the book because that is exactly what it feels like is happening. Here is the line, word for word.

“Rusty Locks (Insulin Resistance): The ‘locks’ (on the cells) are rusty so the ‘keys’ (insulin) can’t open them and let the glucose (fuel) in.”

Picture what that does. The key does not turn. The door stays shut. The fuel has nowhere to go, so it just piles up in your blood, circling around with no exit. That is your high blood sugar. It is not the fuel’s fault and it is not your fault. The locks are jammed.

And the rust did not appear because you are lazy. It builds from specific physical conditions, things like deep belly fat that gums up the signal and years of inflammation from processed food. There is more to the full cascade, what happens next when your pancreas starts working overtime trying to force those rusty locks open, and eventually what happens when it burns out. I walk through the entire chain in the book. But you do not need the whole mechanism to feel the relief right now. You just need the picture. Rusted locks. A key that will not turn. A problem in the machine, not a flaw in the man.

Why “try harder” was never going to work

Now look at what that means for willpower.

If the actual problem is rusted locks and a system under strain, then “just use more willpower” was doomed from the start. You cannot white-knuckle a biological mechanism back into working. You cannot grit your teeth hard enough to un-rust a lock. It is like being handed a key that does not fit and getting yelled at for not opening the door.

I said it plainly in the book, and I will repeat it here because it is the line I wish someone had handed me years earlier. Fixing what you eat is critical, but it is not a physical fight, it is warfare of the mind. The cravings at night are real. Sometimes, in my own words, the cookies are calling you from the cabinet, and telling yourself to “have more discipline” in that moment is useless advice. I know, because I was the guy it never worked on.

So the cravings are not proof you are weak. They are proof you are a normal human being with a normal brain that got trained, since you were old enough to watch cartoons, to reach for sugar when you want comfort. Real thing. Real wiring. Not a character defect.

This is the liberating turn, so do not skim past it. The lever was never “try harder.” The lever is changing the conditions that caused the rust in the first place. Food. Movement. Fasting. You do not fight the mechanism. You change what you feed it. That is a completely different fight, and unlike the willpower fight, it is one you can actually win.

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.

Here is the part to hang your hat on

Because it is biology and not character, it can change.

That is the hope, and it is not a slogan, it is mechanical. Rusty locks can be cleaned up. Insulin resistance is driven mostly by the things you do, your food, your movement, the rest you give your body, which means the things you do can drive it back the other way. When you clean up what you eat and you move and you give your body real breaks from constant eating, you are not just chasing a lower number on a meter. You are literally helping those cells open back up and take in the fuel the rusty locks were keeping out. You are easing the strain on a pancreas that has been screaming for years.

I am living proof the locks can be cleaned. I went from an 11.7 A1C and three medications, from a 450 in a hospital bed, to a 5.5 and none. Not because I found willpower at fifty. I never found it. I changed the approach. I stopped trying to out-discipline a machine and started fixing the machine instead.

And let me be honest with you about your part in this, because I am not going to blow smoke. You may not land all the way in remission like I did. I cannot promise you my exact result. But you can absolutely get better. Lower numbers, more energy, maybe less medication down the road, with your doctor in your corner the whole way. That is real, and it starts the second you stop believing the lie that this was a character flaw.

This is not medical advice. Always talk to your doctor before you change your diet, your movement, or your medication.

You can put the shame down now

You have carried the shame longer than you have carried the disease. I know, because it was the single heaviest thing I hauled around too, heavier than the diagnosis. And it was built on a lie the whole time.

You are not weak. You never were. You were fighting a biological cascade with a tool, willpower, that was never going to touch it. That is not a failure of character. That is just aiming at the wrong target. Now you know where the real target is.

Consistent persistence overcomes resistance. Every. Single. Time. Notice that the mantra does not say “willpower overcomes resistance.” It says persistence. The boring, repeatable, un-heroic act of doing the next right thing for your body and then doing it again tomorrow. That is the thing that cleans the rust. Not a clenched jaw. A pattern.

So put the wet coat down. Then go read your own story in a new light, the one where the nine o’clock pull was never your fault, and getting better was always inside your reach. Read the next step here.

What time does your shame voice usually show up? Mine had a schedule too, right around nine. Tell me yours in the comments. I read them.

P.S. New here? One of my free guides is built for exactly this moment, putting the shame down and seeing the disease for what it really is. Start here, it is free. And when you are ready to stock the kind of food that actually cleans up the rust, my real grocery list is in My Remission Toolkit.

By: Ray Taylor. Not a Doctor.

A note on links: Some links in this post are Amazon affiliate links. If you buy through them, I earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. I only link to products I actually use or would credibly recommend. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

Let me say something the commercials will not. The question with these shots was never whether they work. They work. The weight comes off, the numbers come down, that part is real. I am not going to stand here and pretend otherwise.

The question nobody reads to you is what happens the morning you stop.

When the prescription lapses. When the price jumps. When your insurance taps out, or you just decide you want your life back without a weekly injection. That is the fine print. That is the part that should drive your decision, and it is the exact part the ad skips while the music swells and the people dance in the kitchen.

I am not here to tell you what to do with your body. That is between you and your doctor. I am here to read you the part they left out, because I went looking for another door and I found one, and I think you deserve to know it is there before you sign up for something forever.

First, the truth about my numbers

I am not a doctor. I am just a guy who got sick and tired of being sick and tired.

In July of 2022 my A1C was 11.7. I was on metformin, glipizide, and insulin, all three at once, and I was still getting worse. My blood sugar hit 450 in a hospital bed. As of March 2026, my A1C is 5.5. That is in the normal range. I take zero diabetes medication. No shot. The whole climb took about three and a half years.

I am telling you that for one reason. The drug-free part is the whole point of this post. I got to remission without the injection, which means I am not a hater yelling from the sidelines. I am a guy who walked through the other door and came back to tell you it opens. That is the standing I am speaking from. If you want the full play-by-play of that climb, I broke it all down in how I went from an 11.7 A1C to 5.5 and back into normal range.

What the shots actually are (and what they are not)

Here is the honest version, the one the non-stop commercials skip.

These drugs do not fix the thing that is broken. Type 2 is a problem of insulin resistance, an engine that has stopped running right after years of damage. The shot does not repair that engine. It manages the symptoms while the engine stays broken underneath.

I wrote it plain in my book. They are “chemical band-aids, managing the symptoms… while the fire of metabolic damage smolders underneath.” You might see better numbers on the meter. But you are not healing the core problem. You are silencing the alarm while the house keeps burning.

The picture I keep coming back to is this one. “These GLP-1’s in particular, are the equivalent of painting a car with a bad engine. It LOOKS better, but the engine is still bad, and eventually it breaks down.”

That is not me trashing the people taking them. That is me trying to be straight about what a fresh coat of paint does and does not do for a motor that is shot.

The morning you stop (this is the fine print)

Here is the part that should be on the commercial in big letters, and never is.

For most people, the shot is not a thing you take for a while and then graduate from. It is a thing you take for as long as you want the results. In my book I call it the pharmaceutical leash. Stop the injections, and “the appetite comes roaring back, the weight piles back on (quickly), and blood sugar control vanishes.”

That is not my opinion. The studies say the same thing, and I will give you the numbers so you can check them yourself.

When people in the big semaglutide trial stopped the drug, they regained about two-thirds of the weight they had lost within a year, and the heart and blood-sugar improvements drifted back toward where they started (STEP-1 extension, Diabetes, Obesity and Metabolism, 2022). Two-thirds. Back. In a year. Because the engine was never fixed. The paint just came off.

And a lot of people do stop. In a study of nearly 100,000 patients, about two-thirds of the people taking these drugs for weight loss were off them within a year (Truveta data, 2024 preprint). Not because they failed. Because life happens. The cost, the side effects, the insurance, the sheer grind of a forever shot. The drug only works while you are on it, and most people are not on it for long.

So the real question was never “does it work.” It works. The real question is the one the ad will not ask with you. What is your plan for the morning you stop?

The part I will be fair about

I am not going to lie to you to win an argument. If I did that, you should not trust the rest of this either.

These drugs have a real upside, and one of them is big. In a major trial of people with heart disease, semaglutide cut the rate of serious cardiac events, things like heart attacks and strokes, by about 20 percent (SELECT trial, New England Journal of Medicine, 2023). That is a real benefit and a real number. For some people, with a real doctor weighing a real risk, that matters a lot. I am not going to wave it off.

There is also a quieter cost worth naming. A meaningful slice of the weight you lose on these drugs is not fat, it is muscle. In the two biggest trials it ran around a quarter of the total loss, and other studies push that share higher in people who are not eating enough protein or moving much. Why should you care? Because your muscle is your glucose sponge. Skeletal muscle soaks up roughly 80 percent of the sugar your body clears after a meal (DeFronzo, Diabetes Care, 2009). Lose the sponge, and you have handed away one of the best tools you had for handling blood sugar in the first place.

So it is not all bad and it is not all good. It is a trade. My only ask is that you see the whole trade before you make it, not just the part with the dancing.

The door I walked through instead

Here is the thing about the road I took. Nobody can cancel it.

There is no refill. No needle. No monthly bill. No insurance company that can decide next quarter that you are not worth covering. The road is food, fasting, and movement, and once you learn it, it is yours. It works on the engine instead of the paint, because losing the fat and giving your body a real break is what lets the engine start running right again. I dug into the science of why that engine can actually recover in what remission really means, if you want the deeper version.

I will be honest here too. It is harder than a shot, especially at the start. It asks for effort and consistency and a stretch of uncomfortable. The slow way took me about three and a half years and more than fifty pounds came off along the way, not in a month, not without work. But when it holds, it holds with no prescription, no rebound, and nothing anyone can take away from you.

That is the difference I want you to sit with. One door rents you better numbers for as long as you keep paying. The other door, when it works, hands you the keys.

In my book Type 2 Ain’t My Type I lay out the whole honest breakdown. How these drugs actually hijack your gut signals, the full side-effect picture the ads gloss over, why the shortcut is really swapping one addiction for a costlier one, and the exact food, fasting, and movement road I used to get off all three of my medications. The fine print, all of it, in one place.

This is not medical advice. Always talk to your doctor before you change your diet, your movement, or your medication.

You have more power than the ad lets you think

You are not a sucker for being tempted. The desperation is real and the marketing is built to find it. I get it. For a long stretch I was trapped too, a slave to the cravings, terrified by the diagnosis, wishing for the easy button.

But you have more power than the commercial wants you to believe. You always did.

Consistent persistence overcomes resistance. Every. Single. Time. That is not a slogan I print on a mug. It is the thing that took me from an 11.7 A1C and three medications to a 5.5 and none, without ever picking up the shot. The boring, repeatable work beats the chemical shortcut, because the work fixes the engine and the shortcut only paints the car.

You may not land all the way in remission like I did. That was my result, not a promise I can make for your body. But you can absolutely get better. Lower numbers, more energy, maybe less medication down the road, all of it with your doctor in your corner and nothing anyone can cancel on you.

Before you take the shot, read the whole fine print, including the morning you stop. The complete breakdown, and the free road I took instead, is in Type 2 Ain’t My Type on Amazon. If you want the whole map, that is where it lives.

And if you want to see what I actually use instead of a shot, the food, the gear, the simple stuff that does the daily work, it is all in one place on my remission toolkit. No needle on the list.

Are you on a shot right now, or thinking about starting one? Tell me in the comments the one thing nobody has been straight with you about. I read them.

P.S. New here? Start with my free guides. I put together a few that walk you through the first steps, no shot required. Start here.