As my weight and fitness are improving I’ve also seen improvements in my health.
Firstly, I went back to my GP last month and had a follow-up blood test for my diabetes. As you may recall when I last posted about this my HbA1c blood test came back with a score of 51 mmol/mol. That’s a measure of how much glucose is in my blood. 51 was 5 mmol/mol DOWN from the previous test results of 56 that I’d had with a private blood test a few weeks before.
But my latest test results were 48 mmol/mol! It’s only 3 points difference – BUT – this is actually the borderline between prediabetes and diabetes. I only have to get to 47 mmol/mol and I’m no longer diabetic – just prediabetic. As per the diagram that still of course means “at risk of diabetes” and is not an excuse for slacking, but it’s still good news that I’m so close to the border. I need to get down to 41 mmol/mol to reach the “normal” bracket.
At the same time I had my blood pressure retested in August at my GP and it was still very high – 158/110 (23rd August on the chart below).
Now, that said, it hadn’t been up in “crisis” level since 17th August so there has definitely been some improvement.
But my GP put me on a second daily tablet to help reduce my blood pressure – and what’s really exciting about the chart is that I can see an even more significant improvement since then.
The chart is taken from my blood pressure tracking Excel spreadsheet and what I’ve done is formatted the cells such that the lowest 10% of all results are highlighted in green. Red of course represents the highest 10% and these are all in the dim distant past now except for that one on the bottom from 17th August!
As you can see all of the greens for the lowest BP readings are quite recent and since my medication was changed.
I also had an ECG last week – just to check that the increased blood pressure hasn’t put strain on my heart and caused lasting damage. This was one of my concerns since I have no real way of knowing how long my blood pressure has been this high – it could have been months, even years – in which case my heart would have become enlarged since it’s a muscle, and this can lead to all kinds of complications.
So I was very relieved to see that my ECG results were completely normal! 🙂
I obviously feel a lot better with those results, especially now that I’m not regularly at the “crisis” level. Between the diabetes results and the improvements in my hypertension, it’s all heading in the right direction.
In just another few months, as my weight continues to drop, I am confident I will see both my blood sugar and my BP drop to normal levels.
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