After a mild plateau – I finally broke through – under 230lbs!

Persistence pays off.

I’m currently somewhat stressed about my recent “job restructuring” – as an example of how it’s affecting me I packed my swim stuff last night, went to the swimming pool for my regular Monday evening swim, and realised once I arrived that I’d left my swim bag at home! 😂 Easily done, especially when you’re over 20 hours into a 36 hour fast, but add in anxiety about your job and forgetting things due to distraction is perfectly understandable.

Lane swimming at my pool is strictly a 45 min session on Monday, and I generally don’t allow myself much extra time to get changed, since I wear my swim gear and just have to peel everything off and put it in a locker. So by the time I got home and picked up my bag it would have been pointless heading back for what would have amounted to just a 20 or 25 minute swim.

As I’ve said before, life gets in the way sometimes, and you just need to learn to roll with it. I’m definitely not going to beat myself up right now when life seems to be doing that quite handily all by itself! 😂

But there are often silver linings to the darkest clouds, and this morning’s weigh-in was one of them. I was expecting to correct the 2.7lbs I put on while on business in Barcelona last week, but was delighted to see I’d done far more than that.

My weight today – 16 St 4.4 lb (228.4 lb / 103.8 kg). That’s a loss since my last weigh-in of 5.1lbs! Even if you take out the 2.7lb I put on in Barcelona, that’s still a respectable 2.4lb lost this week.

This takes me through the 230lb barrier into the 220’s, and I’m getting very close now to another really big milestone – a few more weeks like this, and I’ll be under 100kg!!!

I’m now just shy of losing 30lbs in total since I started this program in December – actually 29.5 lb (13.4kg) to be exact.

That also brings my average weight loss since December back to around 2.04 lb – still slightly behind my target of 2.56 lb per week but a very respectable average when you consider the business trips, birthdays, periods of illness, and other events that have gotten in the way. And remember this week’s weight loss when you account for the Barcelona trip was actually 2.4lb – very close to my 2.56 lb target.

And if we look at my progress since diagnosis, that’s a grand total of 37.1lb (16.8kg). So I’ve now lost almost 14% of my body weight from diagnosis – and 10-15% is the target given by diabetic clinicians as the target weight loss required to reach type 2 diabetes remission!

The landmark DiRECT study (Diabetes Remission Clinical Trial) showed that:

• Loss of 10–15kg resulted in remission for 57% of participants.
• Loss of 15kg+ resulted in remission for 86% of participants.

Since I’ve now lost 16.8kg since diagnosis (37.1 lb), statistically, I am now in the “86% success” bracket for remission. I’m therefore now all the more excited to see the results of my self-administered HbA1c test from yesterday. While I posted it yesterday afternoon, it likely will take 48 hours at least to see the results back, but given my weight loss and my overall consistency with keto, fasting and exercise, I’m still confident that this will be somewhere under 60mmol/mol.

I was speaking to a fellow type 2 diabetic yesterday, and they told me their HbA1c is currently at 52mmol/mol – they were very proud of themselves since they had cut out bread, pasta, potatoes, sugar etc, but went on to talk about still eating chocolates and desserts occasionally, as well as eating lots of fruit! They didn’t seem to be aware that many fruits – like bananas – are very high in sugar. For him 52mmol/mol was a blip, as he had been around 48 mmol/mol for his last two tests, and I can’t argue with him as long as he has no other symptoms. For me I will not be satisfied until I’m safely under 42 mmol/mol. I might allow myself to get over 42 on special occasions, with careful planning, but I will immediately be aiming to return to that sub 42 mmol/mol mark.

Given my strict adherence to a much lower-sugar approach, combined with the fasting and exercise, which effectively burns out any glucose rapidly, I think getting into the low 50’s or even as low as high 40’s might well be achievable. Watch this space!