Six Medications to Zero. Two Years Later: NHS Blood Tests Confirmed It.

“Six medications daily. Stopped them all October 31st 2023. Fifteen months later, here’s what my blood tests show. I’m Neil. My GP has documented everything. This is what the NHS blood tests actually say.”
“In the next 12 minutes: The 6 medications I was on. Why I stopped each one. What happened to liver, kidney, HbA1c. And what my GP said at 15 months.”
“Right. So let me back up a bit. October 2023. I’m sitting in my kitchen looking at six boxes of medication on the worktop. Atorvastatin for cholesterol. Ezetimibe — that’s the second cholesterol drug, because apparently one wasn’t enough. Allopurinol for gout. Two asthma inhalers — beclometasone and salbutamol. And cetirizine for allergies. Six medications. Every single day. Some of them twice a day.”
“I’d been on statins since 2016. Gout meds since 2000. Asthma inhalers since I was eight years old. 1978. Forty-five years of reaching for an inhaler before my feet hit the floor every morning.”
“And here’s the thing that was bugging me. I’d been fasting for about ten weeks at this point. Started Boxing Day 2023. Eighteen stone, couldn’t walk upstairs without getting winded, and something just… snapped. That Boxing Day mirror moment. ‘This ends now.’ But as I was fasting, I was reading. Research papers, books, anything I could find. And I kept coming across references to autophagy — your body’s cellular cleanup process — and these side benefits of fasting. Reduced inflammation. Improved immune function. Better insulin sensitivity.”
“And I’m looking at my medication boxes. Running low on most of them. Due for a repeat prescription. And I thought… what if I don’t refill them? What if the fasting is already doing what these pills were supposed to do? Stupid question? Maybe. But I rang my GP first.”
“Let’s start with the one that shocked me most. The liver. December 2023. Still on statins. My ALT — that’s the liver enzyme that tells you how hard your liver’s working — was 69. Normal range tops out at 40. So mine was seventy-three percent above the upper limit. Sixty-nine. On medication that’s supposed to be helping me.”
“Now, I’m not a doctor. But that number bothered me. Prof. Janet Lord — she’s a leading immunologist at the University of Birmingham — has talked about how statins do reduce inflammation, and they can improve immune function. That’s real. I’m not pretending statins are useless. For some people, they’re lifesaving. But my liver was screaming. Seventy-three percent elevated. While taking the medication.”
“So I stopped the statins and ezetimibe. October 31st 2023. GP knew. He wasn’t thrilled, but he agreed to monitor. March 2024. First blood test off statins. ALT: 28. Down from 69 to 28 in about twelve weeks. That’s a fifty-nine percent drop. I thought — right. Interesting. Let’s see if it holds.”
“November 2025. ALT: 10. Ten. Down from 69 to 10. That’s an eighty-six percent reduction. And 10 isn’t just normal. It’s optimal. Bottom of the range. My liver went from struggling on medication to thriving without it. Took about two years, but the trend was clear from week twelve.”
“Prof. Sarah Berry — she’s at King’s College London, works with ZOE — has published research showing that dietary changes alone can reduce cholesterol by about thirty percent. That’s comparable to what statins achieve. I didn’t know that when I stopped the pills. Found it afterwards. But it matched what my blood tests were showing.”
“Now the kidneys. This one goes back further. October 2016. My eGFR — that’s the kidney function score — was 66. Anything under 60 is Stage 3 kidney disease. I was at 66. Stage 2. Not great. My GP flagged it. Put me on a watch list. CKD monitoring. Chronic kidney disease. For years, that number hovered. Low sixties, mid sixties. Never really improved. I was on all the medications, doing what I was told, and my kidneys were… stuck.”
“March 2024. Five months off all medication. Five months of 18:6 fasting and non-UPF eating. eGFR: above 90. Excellent. Sixty-six to above 90. That’s a thirty-six percent improvement. Off the CKD watch list entirely. Twenty months later, still above 90. Sustained. I’ll be honest. I didn’t expect the kidney numbers. Liver, maybe — I knew statins could affect liver enzymes. But kidneys? That surprised me. Genuinely surprised me.”
“This is the one that scared me most. October 2022. HbA1c: 47. That’s your three-month blood sugar average. Pre-diabetic starts at 42. Diabetic starts at 48. I was at 47. One point from a diabetes diagnosis. One point. I didn’t know that at the time. Found out later when I started digging through my records. October 2022, I was one blood test away from Type 2 diabetes.”
“April 2025. HbA1c: 37. Optimal. Right in the middle of the normal range. That’s a twenty-one percent reduction. November 2025. Still 37. Sustained. Pre-diabetic to optimal. No medication for it. No metformin. Just fasting and real food.”
“Dr. Federica Amati talks about this concept called inflammaging — chronic low-level inflammation that accelerates as you age, driving conditions like diabetes, heart disease, dementia. It’s not one dramatic event. It’s years of slow damage. Prof. Janet Lord’s research confirms it — she calls it grumbling inflammation that goes on for years. That’s what I think was happening. Decades of inflammation, masked by medication but never fixed. The pills were managing symptoms while the fire underneath kept burning.”
“February 2024. Six weeks into fasting and non-UPF eating. I woke up. Reached for the bedside inhaler. My hand stopped halfway. Didn’t need it. Forty-five years. Every morning since I was eight. Reach, inhale, breathe. Automatic. Like checking your phone. That morning, my hand reached out of habit and just… stopped. Took a breath without it. Full. Clear. Easy.” “Next morning. Same. Week later. Same. After three weeks, I stopped reaching altogether. I haven’t used an inhaler in over twenty months now. After forty-five years of daily use.”
“Prof. Janet Lord’s research on fasting and autophagy gives a possible explanation. Fasting triggers autophagy — think of it like The Council Round. Your body’s cleanup crew finally turns up, clears out the damaged cells, the inflammatory rubbish that’s been piling up. You didn’t even realise how bad it was until it’s gone and you can suddenly breathe again. That’s not a guarantee it’ll work for everyone. This is my data. N equals one. But forty-five years of asthma, and fasting did what decades of inhalers couldn’t — it seemed to address whatever was driving the inflammation in the first place.”
“Gout since 2000. Twenty-four years. Allopurinol every day. Terrified of eating red meat, shellfish, anything that might trigger a flare. Stopped the allopurinol. Waited for the pain. Nothing. Eighteen months now. Not a single flare. Allergies. Fifty years. Couldn’t be near cats, couldn’t sit in grass. Cetirizine every day just to function. Stopped the cetirizine. No rashes. No wheezing. Sat in timothy grass for an hour in July with a cat on my lap. Nothing.”
“Five conditions. Six medications. All stopped. All documented. All stable or improved.”
“Here’s what I think the pattern is. And I want to be careful here, because I’m not a doctor and this is my experience, not medical advice. The medications were treating symptoms. Every single one of them. Statins for high cholesterol. Inhalers for inflamed airways. Allopurinol for uric acid. Cetirizine for allergic reactions. They were managing the outputs. But nothing was addressing the inputs.”
“The food I was eating — ultra-processed, inflammatory, driving insulin resistance for decades. The lack of fasting — never giving my body time to repair, to run that Council Round, to clean out the cellular damage. Once I changed the inputs — fasting, real food, consistently for months — the outputs started changing on their own. The biomarkers moved. The symptoms faded. The medications became unnecessary.”
“It wasn’t one heroic effort. Eighteen months of consistent 18:6 fasting and roughly eighty-five percent non-UPF eating. That’s it.”
“My GP sat me down at the fifteen-month mark. Opened my results. Paused. Looked up. ‘Whatever you’re doing, keep doing it.’ No lecture. No concern. Just the data, speaking for itself. That was the moment it properly clicked. Not just that fasting works — I already suspected that. But that my NHS blood tests confirmed it. Independently. Objectively. The numbers didn’t care what I believed. They just showed what happened.”
“It was nice to see the research working for me. To know that it does work. Not just in studies — in my actual blood, tracked by my actual GP, on actual NHS paperwork.”
“If I was starting again? I’d track from day one. Every biomarker. Every date. I’d have that conversation with my GP before stopping anything, not after. Which I did — but only just.”
“If you’re on medication and thinking about this, here’s what I’d say. Don’t stop anything without your GP knowing. That’s not a throwaway line. That’s the most important sentence in this video.”
“But do ask the question. Ask your GP: ‘If my biomarkers improve, can we revisit these prescriptions?’ Most GPs will say yes. They want you healthy. They’re not married to the prescription pad.”
“Track your own data. Blood tests every three to six months. Write the numbers down. Look for patterns over time, not single readings. One test means nothing. Six tests over eighteen months? That’s a story your GP can work with. This is my data. N equals one. Your pattern might be completely different. But the detective work? That’s universal. Track, question, discuss with your GP, and let the data lead.”
“If you want a simple framework for getting started with fasting and tracking your own biomarkers, I’ve put together a free 7-Day Fasting Blueprint. Link in the description. No email spam. Just the blueprint.”
“Educational content only, not medical advice. Speak to your GP before changing your fasting pattern, diet, or medication. All my biomarker changes are NHS-confirmed..”