Why did it take me so long?

If you read yesterday’s post, you’ll have seen I hit an absolutely massive milestone in record time. I’ve effectively reversed my type 2 diabetes!

I went from a glycated blood sugar reading of 79mmol/mol in December 2025 to just 42 mmol/mol yesterday! Just 100 days, slightly over 14 weeks.

So what do you mean, “why did it take me so long?!” That’s incredible!

But you have to remember that I was originally diagnosed with Type 2 Diabetes in July 2023 – which is 2.5 years ago now!

The initial (double) diagnosis

I was exhausted all the time and didn’t know why. I’d beaten testicular cancer almost a decade earlier, and my initial thought was that it was low testosterone, a common enough issue in men in their 50’s. But bizarrely, my endocrinologist found that my testosterone, while a bit low, was well within “normal/healthy” bounds.

It was while investigating that exhaustion that we found my diabetes. And being the data-driven person I am, I did my homework and knew what the risks associated with Type 2 Diabetes could be. Fatigue is definitely one of symptoms. Diabetes makes your body work so much harder just to keep going. The human body is an incredible machine, but it can only take so much before something starts to give.

I restarted this blog at that time – on July 6th, 2023 – and even quoted this:

Untreated diabetes affects many major organs, including your heart, blood vessels, nerves, eyes and kidneys. Diabetes UK

On July 8th 2023 in a post titled “Shit got really, really real!” I talked about the link between diabetes and pancreatic cancer – the insidious cancer that took my dad’s life when he was younger than I was at that point, just 53 years old.

I was clearly motivated at that point – and lost 4.6lbs by the next weigh-in, started up my walk-run program, and was doing 36-hour fasts. But then something happened. I’m piecing it together by reviewing my blogs at the time, and what happened was I was diagnosed with chronic hypertension! My first reading was 180/108 – which is “hypertensive crisis!”

I was messed around by the NHS, but when I was finally seen by someone, partly expecting to discover that my home BP monitor cuff was wrong, but on their whizzy digital cuff, my BP came in at 206/112!! So I had to put everything else on hold while I dealt with this second, more imminent health crisis.

Just for context, “hypertensive crisis” readings are the point at which there is a fair chance of either stroke or a cardiac incident! At one point, my reading was as high as 201/128, with a headache and tingling in my fingers! I was, of course, stressing out about all of this, which didn’t help at all. I ended up taking a few weeks off work due to the stress, as I simply couldn’t focus at all.

I was immediately prescribed Losartan – just 25mg – which barely made a dent. It took some months of back-and-forth, an increase to 100mg, as well as two more prescriptions, before my blood pressure began to get back towards normal.

In fact, it wasn’t until February 2024 that my BP readings started to look consistently safe – 112/85, for example – still slightly elevated systolic pressure, but my diastolic was back to normal. I was told that once diagnosed with hypertension, slightly high readings would almost always be expected.

So I had put everything on hold while I dealt with this second, more imminent health crisis. I didn’t put weight on at this point, as I was being careful about what I was eating – reducing salt mainly – but I also wasn’t losing weight.

My diabetes seemed to have stabilised – I was hovering between around 52 and 57 mmol/mol – so about 4-9 points above the diabetic threshold of 48 mmol/mol – so it just seemed like a much less pressing issue at that stage.

I’m sure many of those who suffer with type 2 diabetes are aware that hypertension and T2D are often bedfellows. The increased insulin released to deal with high blood sugar often causes the kidneys to retain salt, which in turn leads to hypertension.

And it’s worth mentioning that one of the symptoms of hypertension is also fatigue. It’s a real double whammy, and no wonder I was struggling.

What were the root causes?

There were a few factors leading to my double-diagnosis of type 2 diabetes and hypertension – the most obvious was dealing with my dog Willow’s chronic illness. She had been diagnosed with and treated for cancer the year before, and it came back. This time, I missed the signs, and it was too late. Despite months of vet treatments – and vet bills, which exceeded the coverage my insurance offered – I ultimately had to let her go. It was heartbreaking as she was my baby. She was 12 years old, which for a German Shepherd is, sadly, not unusual.

While I was caring for her, the thought of cooking healthy meals went out the window – it just seemed like another chore, and I often relied on takeouts.

One of the other causes of my stress at that point was my finances – not just Willow’s vet bills, but I hadn’t been paying attention to the increasing mortgage interest rates, and I was on a variable rate. Before I knew it my mortgage payments spiralled from around £1,800 per month to £2,800! I simply couldn’t afford my house anymore at that level. So, I started a 9-month project to find a new house and sell my own – there was work that I had to do to my home before I could even market it, which saw me relying on my credit cards since Willow’s treatment had chewed through my savings, and my mortgage ate up all of my disposable income. I was in crisis mode.

A new home and a new start…and new stresses and diagnoses!

I literally just closed on my new house in August 2024, right before I maxed out the very last of my credit cards. Another month and I would have been in serious financial trouble.

It’s no surprise that during that time I was reverting to eating takeouts even though they were adding to my financial burden, as well as hurting my health.

Even after I moved house, my money worries didn’t end. There was work that needed doing to the new house. The former owners had hidden a number of things that I should have looked into more closely. I’d only taken a house buyer survey, and not a full survey, and this didn’t cover everything.

So 2025 started with more issues to deal with. More stress. More costs. And I was relying on takeout again.

2025 was also a busy and stressful year at work as I was piled with more responsibilities. The summer came around, and it was in June 2025 that I was suddenly diagnosed with shingles! At first, I thought it was just a regular flu, but it was way worse. I was coughing so hard I wound up fainting. Syncopic coughing is the technical term. What happens is, as you cough, you can’t breathe in, and as a result, your blood pressure drops. For normal people, their vascular system is flexible and resilient enough that it’s not a problem, but when you are on medication that artificially lowers your blood pressure, while also reducing your vascular responsiveness, you can literally cough yourself unconscious. I did. Twice.

The first time, in a panic, I sat up on the edge of the bed during my extreme coughing, which of course also lowered my blood pressure further, and like that I was gone. The next thing I knew I was lying on the floor with my partner anxiously hovering over me while dialling the emergency services number at the same time!

Fortunately, shingles is very easy to treat with a simple anti-viral, and I quickly learned to sit the heck down as soon as any sign of coughing began! 😂

It still took me a few weeks to recover, and that pretty much brings us back to where I restarted this blog, in December 2025, after my first actual symptoms of diabetic neuropathy. It was only at that point that I discovered my “stable” blood sugar had skyrocketed from 59 mmol/mol to 79mmol/mol.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again – “life gets in the way”. And sometimes it seems to do so quite aggressively.

A serious of unfortunate events

It all sounds absolutely horrendous in hindsight! I was literally prevented from exercising and fasting by my hypertension for the best part of six months, and after that, I was dealing with another stress and then another. I was moving from one crisis to another, with work stress, financial stress, and health crises.

It wasn’t until my diabetes became the biggest, most urgent crisis that I committed to taking drastic action.

And obviously I’m glad I did. Equally, I do wish I’d started earlier, but in hindsight, it’s hard to see when and how I could have started with everything else I was dealing with.

So what’s the point of this post?

The moral for me is – don’t give up. Definitely don’t give up hope. As hard as it seems, you can repair your health! And in the process of reversing my type 2 diabetes, I’ve already halved my blood pressure medication, which is a huge step forward. I’m not finished yet, but I know I have the tools necessary to get the rest of the job done.

But go easy on yourself! If life gets in the way – let it. Don’t beat yourself up because you don’t have the time, energy or emotional bandwidth to focus on your health.

As I mentioned, the first symptom I had of my diabetes and hypertension was fatigue. It’s really hard to do anything when you constantly feel tired. If you are feeling like that, then I feel your pain!

But it doesn’t have to be hard – there are a few key habits that you need to change, and you will get there. Maybe not in 100 days, but if I can do it in under 4 months, maybe you can do it in 6 months. Or 9 months. Even if you did it in a year, wouldn’t that still be an amazing achievement? To turn around your health to the point where you significantly reduce your risk of nerve damage, heart attacks, or strokes?

And I can tell you that one of the first changes I began to see after I started my aggressive protocol was that my fatigue began to lift. It was slow at first, sure, but now it’s almost entirely gone. I won’t say I feel 20 again, but I have no issue getting up to go for a swim or a run, where I might initially have dreaded it and had to really push myself. I can walk up stairs without getting out of breath. Which is great because I moved into a three-story townhouse! 😂

So start small if you have to, but know that you can do it. If you make some changes and you stick with them, you too can turn your health around.

You’ve got this! If I can do it, even despite all of the obstacles I found in my way, then you can too!