One Point From Diabetes. Here’s What NHS blood tests going back to 2012 Actually Show.

My GP rang me with my blood test results and told me everything looked fine. I was one point away from a diabetes diagnosis. That was December 2023.

I’d heard some version of that phone call for eight years. Results back. Nothing to worry about. Keep taking the medication. Same call. Different numbers. And every year those numbers were a little bit worse.

I’m Neil. I’ve got NHS blood test printouts going back to 2012 in a folder and a GP letter that says every marker is now in optimal range. In the next ten minutes I’m going to show you the pattern in my data that I didn’t spot for eight years — and if your blood sugar has been creeping in one direction for a while, this mechanism is worth understanding, whatever your situation looks like right now.

First, the number that changed everything — the December 2023 blood test that told me I was running out of time. | Then the pattern across eight years that my GP and I both missed — the slow slide that happens quietly while everything’s technically “fine.” | And then what happened in the thirteen months after I stopped accepting “fine” as an answer.

So. December 2023. Blood test comes back. HbA1c 46. Reference range upper limit is 41. Diabetes diagnosis starts at 48.

I was two points off pre-diabetic upper limit. One point from a diabetes diagnosis.

And my GP rang and said everything was fine.

Now — to be fair to him — he’s right, technically. 46 is pre-diabetic, not diabetic. Not the call where he has to tell me something’s seriously wrong. Manageable. Watch and wait. Which is exactly what we’d been doing.

For eight years.

Because here’s the thing I didn’t see at the time. I had to go back through the records later to spot it. In 2015, my HbA1c was 38. Normal. In 2016, 40. Borderline. 2020, 43. Pre-diabetic. 2022, 47. Still pre-diabetic, but higher. December 2023, 46.

That’s — 38, 40, 43, 47, 46. One direction for nearly a decade. Slow. Quiet. Technically within the ranges that don’t trigger a serious conversation. But one direction.

And I didn’t see it as a pattern. I saw each result as a single number. Fine. Slightly high. Watch it. Fine. A bit elevated. Keep an eye on it.

The pattern only became visible when I laid them all out together. And by the time I did that — I was almost out of runway.

Let me give you the actual numbers. Because this is where the detective work gets interesting.

September 2015. HbA1c 38. Normal range. I was on statins by this point, on gout medication, on asthma inhalers. But blood sugar — fine.

October 2016. 40. Borderline. Noted. Nothing changed.Text

July 2020. 43. Pre-diabetic territory. First time that label appeared on my results. GP communicated it. I was told about lifestyle changes. I was also told to keep taking the medication.

October 2022. 47. Still pre-diabetic. One point below the threshold where a diabetes diagnosis becomes possible. My GP at the time noted it. Sent me information about the NHS Diabetes Prevention Programme.

December 2023. 46. Marginally down from 47. GP says fine.

That’s eight years. Five results. A slow creep from 38 to 47, then holding at 46. On paper — controlled. In reality — I was sitting at the top of the pre-diabetic range with nowhere further to go before it became something else.

And the whole time, I was doing what I’d been told. Taking the medication. Not doing anything dramatically wrong. Just — gradually getting worse.

Here’s what I was thinking at the time, and I want to be honest about this because it matters. I wasn’t scared. I wasn’t particularly focused on the blood sugar numbers. I had cholesterol medication, gout medication, asthma inhalers. Blood sugar was just another thing that was slightly off. I assumed the medication was managing it. I assumed if it got properly serious, someone would tell me.

That assumption — that the pills were sorting it, or at least controlling it — meant I wasn’t looking at the trajectory. I was looking at each result in isolation. Each one was manageable. The pattern wasn’t.

Then Boxing Day 2023.

No single trigger. Not the December blood test specifically, though I don’t think that helped. It was more — a culmination. I was fed up with where I’d got to. Fed up with how I felt. Fed up with the version of myself I’d ended up with. Eighteen stone. Multiple medications. Tired all the time. Something had to change.

So I stopped eating. Did some reading. Started again ten days later with a completely different approach.

Time-restricted eating — eating within a defined window and fasting outside it. And whole food — real food, nothing processed. I’d been reading Chris van Tulleken’s Processed People. That landed hard. The idea that ultra-processed food wasn’t just unhealthy but was specifically engineered to work against you. That reframed everything.

And then I kept reading. Books, blogs, YouTube. Went deeper. Much deeper.

March 2024. Three months in. Liver function — normal. Kidney function — better than it had been in years. eGFR over 90. That was the first sign things were moving.

January 2025. Thirteen months after Boxing Day. HbA1c — 40. Normal range. Down from 46 to 40 in thirteen months.

April 2025. Three months later. HbA1c — 37. Well within normal. The number that had been creeping upward for eight years had reversed, and kept going.

November 2025. Still 37.

To put that in context — WMTWL-EVID-102. The deterioration from 38 to 47 took roughly eight years. The reversal from 46 to 37 took thirteen months. The downward move happened sixteen times faster than the upward one. Without medication specifically targeting blood sugar. Without a plan or medical oversight. Without a plan — at least not initially.

I want to be careful here about what I’m claiming and what I’m not. I didn’t ring my GP before I changed my diet. I probably should mention that at some point and I will. But I want to be straight with you: I didn’t have a carefully planned medical intervention. I had a Boxing Day moment, some reading, and a decision to eat differently. The blood tests came later and showed what had happened.

NHS blood tests going back to 2012 — the actual numbers, the GP conversations, what changed and what didn’t. If you want to follow someone who documents this properly rather than just talks about it, that’s what this channel is. Subscribe if that’s useful to you.

So what’s the mechanism? Why did changing when I ate and what I ate move a number that medication hadn’t shifted in eight years?

The short version: HbA1c measures your average blood sugar over roughly three months. It’s not a snapshot — it’s a trend. Which is why it moves slowly in both directions. The medication I was on — statins, for cholesterol — wasn’t targeting blood sugar directly. So the blood sugar was drifting upward on its own, slowly, and nothing in my treatment was specifically addressing it.

When I shifted to time-restricted eating, I was giving my body extended periods with no food coming in at all. No glucose spikes. No insulin response to manage. The system got regular breaks. And when I switched to whole food — real food, nothing ultra-processed — the quality of what I was eating stopped working against the same system.

Professor Tim Spector, Professor of Epidemiology at King’s College London, puts it plainly. Studies in humans and mice show that people consuming identical total calories within an eight to ten hour window gain less weight than those eating the same calories spread across the whole day. When you eat matters as much as what you eat. That’s EXP-1223, if you want the reference.

That’s the timing piece. The food quality piece is separate but connected — ultra-processed food is specifically engineered to produce rapid glucose responses. Switch to whole food and you’re removing the thing that was driving the spikes in the first place.

Now — the GP conversation I didn’t have. I genuinely didn’t think to have it. I wasn’t scared, wasn’t worried about the medication interactions, just felt better and kept going. Looking back, I should have flagged it. If you’re on glucose-lowering medication specifically — metformin, insulin, anything targeting blood sugar directly — please have that conversation before changing your fasting pattern or diet significantly. That’s not a throwaway disclaimer, that’s a real interaction risk. I wasn’t on blood sugar medication, which is probably why nothing went wrong. But do check.

April 2025. Routine blood test. My GP looked at the results. Long pause. Then: “Are you back on statins?” No. “This is better than when you were on medication.”

That was WMTWL-MOM-239. That moment.

Eight years of gradual decline. Thirteen months of movement in the other direction. And a GP who — to his credit — noticed.

I’d have looked at the trend earlier. Not the individual numbers — the direction. 38 to 40 to 43 to 47. That’s a pattern with a destination. I was looking at each result in isolation and hearing “fine” and believing it. I’d have printed them all out, put them on a table, and asked: where does this line go if I do nothing?

The answer — for me — was towards a diabetes diagnosis. Probably within a few years. I just couldn’t see it until I looked at all of them together.

If you’ve got blood test results and your HbA1c has been moving — even slowly, even staying technically in normal or pre-diabetic range — that direction matters more than the individual number. A 38 moving to 40 moving to 43 isn’t dramatic at any single point. As a trend it’s telling you something.

If you’re on medication and your blood sugar is still drifting upward, that’s worth a direct conversation with your GP. Not “is this fine?” but “where does this go if the current approach continues?”

This is the part I find most interesting, and it’s the part I would have found useful at 38 or 40 when nothing was technically wrong.

Blood sugar dysregulation doesn’t start at 48. It starts years earlier, as a mechanism operating quietly in the background. Energy that’s off for no obvious reason. Weight that doesn’t respond the way it used to. Sleep that isn’t quite doing the job. Those aren’t separate things — they can all be the same process, showing up in different ways, before any number crosses a clinical threshold.

The thing is — this pattern in my blood tests isn’t unique to my situation. Insulin responding this way to the wrong food at the wrong time, across years, is a mechanism. Not a diagnosis. And it tends to start long before anyone puts a label on it.

If your energy has been off — not ill, not stressed, just not right — and your blood tests are technically fine but trending in one direction, that’s worth being curious about. Not alarmed. Curious. Because the pattern shows up in the data before the clinical conversation happens. And that’s a useful thing to know.

If you want to start tracking your own markers — HbA1c, cholesterol, the basics — I’ve got a free download in the description. The 7-Day Fasting Blueprint walks you through where to start with time-restricted eating, what to track, and how to read your own blood tests in plain English. Link below.

One important thing before you go: everything in this video is educational. It’s not medical advice. Before you change your fasting pattern, your diet, or anything to do with your medication — speak to your GP. All the biomarker changes I’ve shown you were documented by my NHS GP. Some of them happened without a prior conversation, and I’ve told you that honestly. Don’t repeat that part if you’re on medication that directly affects blood sugar. Have the conversation first.

Next Monday: a different pattern from the data, same detective process. See you then.