For eight years, my blood tests came back normal. The GP was happy.I made that decision myself. Everything looked fine on paper.
Insulin resistance was running the entire time.
That’s not a complaint about my GP. The numbers were real, the thresholds were real, the monitoring was real. But what the monitoring couldn’t show was what was quietly building underneath the readings that weren’t flagging anything. I’ve got NHS HbA1c data going back to 2012 to look back on now. Ten tests across ten years. And when I laid them all out, the deterioration had started in my early 40s, years before any number crossed a clinical line.
I reversed it in 14 months. But what I want to show you here is the part that came before, because that part is probably more relevant to you than the reversal story is.
What the NHS Actually Tells Us About Insulin Resistance
The framework is reasonable. HbA1c below 42 millimoles per mole is normal. Between 42 and 47 is pre-diabetic, worth watching. Over 48 is type 2 diabetes territory.
I believed this completely, and why wouldn’t I? Blood test normal, process not started. Blood test pre-diabetic, process beginning. It’s what every GP uses. It’s in every leaflet. And on the surface, it makes complete sense.
The thing the threshold doesn’t capture is what’s happening in the years before the number moves outside the range. That’s the part nobody talks about much.
Casey Means, a doctor who has spent years studying metabolic health, looked at where the real risk sits on the HbA1c scale. The finding that stopped me: the lowest all-cause mortality sits at HbA1c 5.0 to 5.4 percent. Not below 5.7, which is where the NHS draws the normal line. People told they have a perfectly normal HbA1c may already be carrying meaningfully elevated risk. The threshold was drawn for clinical management, not for optimal health.
That’s not a criticism of the NHS. The threshold exists where it does for practical reasons. GPs are managing risk across millions of patients. But it does mean that “normal” and “no process underway” aren’t the same thing. And that distinction matters more than most people realise.
Why the Process Starts Long Before the Flag
Here’s the mechanism. And this is the part that, once I understood it, changed how I read every blood test result I’d ever had.
Insulin resistance isn’t an event. It’s a gradual process. The cells in your body hear the insulin signal so often, for so long, that they gradually start ignoring it. Think of it like knocking on your neighbour’s door 40 times a day. First week, they answer. By month two, they’ve stopped. They’ve tuned you out. Your cells do the same thing. They’ve heard “let glucose in” so many times that the signal starts losing its effect.
The problem is, this happens slowly. Over years. And during all of those years, your HbA1c can be sitting comfortably inside the normal range. The signal is becoming muffled long before the readout changes. By the time a number crosses a threshold, the process has usually been running for a good while.
Gin Stephens, who has written extensively about insulin resistance and fasting, uses a classroom image that I’ve found sticks. A teacher who yells constantly. Initially the class responds, it’s loud, it’s urgent. After weeks of it, the class starts to tune it out. The teacher has to yell louder to get any reaction at all. That’s the same mechanism, described differently. Constant signalling produces diminishing response. And the test that measures the result of the signalling doesn’t show you how worn down the response has become until the damage is already done.
What data going back to 2012 Actually Showed Me
Here’s what it looked like in my case. WMTWL-EVID-0191 covers the full dataset: ten HbA1c readings over ten years.
September 2015: 38 millimoles per mole. Normal. No flag.
October 2016: 40. Still normal. Borderline, but normal.
July 2020: 43.2. Pre-diabetic. First flag.
August 2020, recheck: 43.2 again. Confirmed pre-diabetic.
October 2022: 47. One point from the diabetes threshold.
December 2023: 46. Still pre-diabetic. Still one point from diagnosis.
That’s eight years from first reading to last pre-diabetic reading. And what struck me, laying them all out in a row, was that the trajectory was there from the beginning. Not flat, not random fluctuation. A steady, incremental climb. Roughly 1.2 millimoles per mole per year.
This is the point that’s important. Every reading is on my NHS record. Blood tests were happening. The numbers were being monitored. And during all of that time, nothing in the process was flagging what the direction of travel meant. I wasn’t being told “this is moving consistently in one direction.” I was being told “normal, then pre-diabetic.” The threshold system doesn’t show you the slope.
By 2022, I was one point from a type 2 diabetes diagnosis (WMTWL-EVID-0212). And to be completely honest about what was happening during those years: I wasn’t ignoring advice. I wasn’t eating terribly by conventional standards. I was broadly doing what the NHS recommends. Balanced meals. Under monitoring. The problem wasn’t that I wasn’t trying. The problem was that the map I was working with couldn’t show me what was building.
The Difference Between a Single Reading and the Trend
There’s a way to look at blood test results that I think most people don’t use, and it made the biggest difference to how I understood my own data.
Watching a single HbA1c like a day trader watching a stock price is exhausting and misleading. Every reading looks significant in isolation. A number that came down feels like a win. A number that went up feels like a crisis. But a single reading is noise. What matters is the trend across months and years.
Think of it like a long-term investor instead. A good investor doesn’t panic at one bad quarter. They’re watching the direction of travel over years. A single HbA1c reading of 43 looks alarming if you’ve only got one data point. Put it in a 13-year sequence and you can see whether it’s part of a steady climb, a plateau, or a reversal. That context is everything.
What my data going back to 2012set showed was a system under steady pressure for nearly a decade, followed by the pressure being removed, followed by the system correcting faster than it had deteriorated. I couldn’t have seen any of that from a single appointment.
What Changed, and How Fast It Reversed
October 2023. I moved doctors, from the Isle of Wight back to Yorkshire. My last prescriptions were around that time, and I didn’t renew when I changed practices.
Then Boxing Day 2023, and if you’ve seen any of the other videos you’ll know this part. I looked in the mirror and decided something had to change. That was the beginning.
What actually changed in January 2024 was the food. Ultra-processed food went. The eating window opened up. I moved to 18:6 time-restricted eating, then tried extended fasting through January. I discussed everything with my GP at Boston Spa. Dr Ashton’s position from April 2024 was that my cholesterol was elevated but medication wasn’t currently indicated — lifestyle first. She knew I was tracking everything.
The thinking behind the change was straightforward. If the cells have stopped responding because the insulin signal is too constant, the answer is to give them periods of quiet. Fasting windows do that. Non-UPF eating reduces the frequency and size of the spikes. That’s it. Two changes, consistently applied.
The first real data point came in January 2025, 14 months after Boxing Day 2023. HbA1c is a 3-month average, so there’s no shortcut to the readout.
January 2025: HbA1c 40. Normal. First time below 42 in years.
April 2025: 37. Down again. Lowest reading in the entire data going back to 2012set.
November 2025: 37 again. Sustained.
The before trajectory, running since at least 2015: rising at roughly 1.2 millimoles per mole per year, consistently, for eight years.
The after trajectory, following the dietary and fasting changes: a drop of 9 millimoles per mole in 14 months. Sixteen times faster in reverse than it moved forward.
There’s something worth sitting with in that number. If the process moving in the wrong direction was slow and silent, years of “normal” before any flag, then removing the inputs that were driving it produced a response that was disproportionately fast. The cells hadn’t lost their sensitivity permanently. They were waiting for the signal to quiet down.
MOM-018 covers the full 18-month picture: pre-diabetes reversed, all medications stopped, over 60 pounds lost. Not through any single dramatic intervention. Through consistently changing the inputs, tracking the results, and staying in the conversation with my GP.
What This Means if Your Tests Are Coming Back Normal Right Now
Modern medicine is extraordinarily good at putting out fires. A crisis arrives, the team responds, the patient survives. That capability is genuinely remarkable.
But nobody’s job is to go around beforehand noticing the slow smoulder before it becomes a blaze. The smoke clears. The fire brigade moves on to the next one. And the conditions that produced the first fire haven’t changed.
That’s not a criticism of the system. It’s just what the system is built for. And it means that if you’re in the pre-fire stage, the monitoring that’s designed to catch fires might not be giving you the earliest possible picture.
If your last HbA1c came back normal and your GP said nothing to worry about, there’s probably nothing to worry about right now. But if you’re also noticing things that feel off, if energy isn’t what it was, if you’re wondering about insulin resistance and you’re not even pre-diabetic yet, this is the part of the story that’s most relevant to you.
The mechanism doesn’t wait for a diagnosis. The underlying process, the way cells gradually stop responding to insulin when the signal is too constant, tends to show in the data years before a number crosses a threshold. Understanding that mechanism before the clinical conversation happens gives you something to work with earlier, when change is easier and faster.
I’ll leave that with you.
A Note on Your GP and Medication
This is not a case for ignoring your GP or for deciding that a normal result means something’s wrong.
If you’re already diagnosed with type 2 diabetes, if you’re on insulin or metformin, if you have other metabolic conditions, then any conversation about changing your eating pattern or fasting is a GP conversation, not a YouTube conversation. Full stop.
If you’re thinking about introducing fasting or changing how you eat, bring your blood tests. Have the conversation. Track the numbers. That’s what I did. It’s slower than going it alone.
Key Takeaways
- “Normal” and “nothing happening” are not the same thing: The clinical threshold is drawn for managing risk across a population, not for identifying where optimal health sits
- Insulin resistance is a process, not an event: It develops over years before a number crosses a line. The slope matters more than any single reading
- Track the trend, not the moment: 13 years of HbA1c data told a story that no single appointment could. The direction of travel is the signal
- Reversal was faster than deterioration: A process that took eight years to build reversed measurably in 14 months once the inputs driving it were removed
Want to Start Tracking Your Own Numbers?
If this has made you think about your own HbA1c trajectory, the 14-Day Rhythm Reset Guide covers the fundamentals of eating windows, non-UPF eating, and how to build the habits that gave my own data the space to shift. It’s free, it’s straightforward, and it’s a better starting point than diving into extended fasting on day one.
The biomarker tracking piece, knowing what to ask your GP, and how to read the trend rather than the single reading, is coming as a dedicated resource. Watch this space.
👉 Get the 14-Day Rhythm Reset Guide (free)
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⚠️ Important: This is educational content based on evidence and personal experience. It is not medical advice. Speak to your GP before making changes to your fasting pattern, diet, or medication.
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