What the numbers actually show
Fourteenth of December 2023. Eleven days before Boxing Day.
My HbA1c came back at 46 mmol/mol. One point off the diabetic range. Cholesterol 8.0, the highest reading in the entire record, and I’d been on statins and ezetimibe for the best part of a decade by then. ALT was 69, well above the top of the range. That’s the number that’s easy to leave off a page like this. So I’m putting it first.
The GP call that month was ‘everything looks fine, stay on your medications.’ Technically true. I wasn’t fine. That’s the gap I built this whole page to close. Normal-on-paper isn’t the same thing as healthy, and a record this long lets you see the difference
Twelve days later, I stopped waiting.
What happened next wasn’t medication. It was 18:6 fasting, cutting out ultra-processed food, and stopping all six medications myself, on my own decision, before I’d spoken to my GP about it at all. I told him afterwards, once I had the data to show him, and from there it became a genuine partnership: monitored monthly for the first three months, then quarterly. Twelve weeks in, first blood test since stopping everything, he opened the results, paused, looked up: ‘Your cholesterol is stable. Uric acid is optimal. Inflammatory markers are down. Whatever you’re doing, keep doing it.’ No lecture. No concern. That’s the moment this page is really about: not permission to stop medication, evidence that the numbers held once I did, and a GP willing to monitor it properly once he knew.
Fourteen months later, in April 2025, I compared the January and April blood tests side by side and nearly missed what was in front of me: eight different markers had moved in the same direction, in the same window. HbA1c down 19.6%. CRP down 84%. ALT down 67% from its peak. HDL up 15%. LDL down 32%. Not one lucky reading. Eight, together. My working theory (and it is a theory, not a proven mechanism) is that one root cause (insulin resistance, chronic inflammation) was driving most of it, and fixing the inputs let all of it move at once. I could be wrong about the mechanism. I’m not wrong about the numbers.
The two that didn’t behave
Everything above is the tidy version. Here’s the untidy bit, because a proof page that only shows the wins isn’t proof of anything.
April 2025: triglycerides jumped to 4.3. They’d been 2.3 the year before. Sixteen months in, HbA1c at a record low, and then that. I didn’t know why. Could’ve been diet, could’ve been timing off a recent fast, could’ve been nothing more than lab variation. I said so at the time rather than explaining it away. By November, back to 1.4, comfortably within range. I still don’t have a confirmed reason for the spike. I’m telling you that rather than inventing one.
Ferritin is the one I nearly got wrong in public. It went from 141 (normal, December 2023) to 18.4 in January 2025, to 8.9 by April, a genuinely sharp drop, and low enough that it needed a proper look. My first thought was fasting: restricted eating windows, less meat, not enough iron in the window I did eat in. I was ready to write that up as an honest limitation of extended fasting. Then my GP actually investigated instead of me guessing, and the cause turned out to be chronic blood loss from bleeding piles, nothing to do with fasting or diet at all. Piles treated, bleeding stopped in November 2025, iron supplementation under GP guidance since. If I’d published my first assumption, it would’ve been wrong, and it would’ve been the kind of wrong that puts people off a system that had nothing to do with the actual problem. That’s the whole case for getting things checked rather than guessed.
Most recent checkpoint: a GP letter dated 17 December 2025, Day 66 of the 70-Day Rhythm Reset. Every marker checked came back optimal. Twenty months fully medication-free. Off every risk list (cardiovascular, kidney, liver) that I was on in December 2023. There’s a difference between a home ketone meter telling you something and a GP putting it in writing. This is the second kind.
data going back to 2012. One person. Not a clinical trial. Make of it what you will, but at least you can see all of it.