The Diabetes II diagnosis was in late March 2015.
I still take 500 mg of metformin a day because I think it is a good idea.
My PCP has officially classified me as non-diabetic for the purposes of calculating the prospective need to take other drugs that are typically prescribed when a condition interacts positively with diabetes (e.g., heart disease) because I am asymptomatic.
The A1c is still flat, and he’s only interested in collecting the data annually now.
Back in September 2016, I did that little (informal) glucose tolerance experiment, chewing up a set of my blood glucose test strips by measuring every hour to see how things were going after eating. The results were quite positive, in that all of the spikes were under any of the troublesome thresholds. The data are consistent with the way you see a pre-diabetic person respond to eating (high spikes that come down). Admittedly, a total of 64g of carbs and 14g of added sugars (64C/14S) is not the normal US diet, but it is mine.
For the 4th anniversary I decided to run that experiment again.
September 2016: eat at 9 (16C/10S), 12 (24/0), 4 (14/3), and 7 (10/1) [total 64/14]
March 2019: eat at 9 (16/10), 12 (14/2), 3 (20/2), and 7 (14/0) [total 64/14]
September 2016
March 2019
If real, the 2019 results are more consistent with the way a non-diabetic person reacts to eating. And while I am not going to try this at the normal US dietary levels, the comparison is as reasonably well-controlled as a pair of one-off days might be, and could be interpreted as an improvement (i.e., recovery of beta cell function) from 2016 to 2019.
My contention about the way diabetes is diagnosed remains the same as when I figured most of this out in 2015. People with a family history or other risks for developing diabetes, if they are interested in their health, should not wait until their A1c is elevated on an annual level. They ought to spend $30 on one of these testing kits and look at the hourly response to food intake, because the diabetic condition is going to show up a lot sooner than in the A1c value.
Again: if this 2-data point response change is real, it is a significant difference, and it is not picked up by my A1c, which has been constant. And that means that a person could go from detectably non-diabetic to pre-diabetic in their response to eating (my 2019 versus 2016, I just happen to be headed in the other direction) LONG before seeing the change in their annual A1c test result (if they even get it).
Within 5-10 years, blood glucose nano-bots will exist and feed this information in real time.
And some behaviors will change; and some will not.