TL;DR I’m ecstatic with my most recent blood lab results! The things that were most concerning on the original labs are either now corrected or showing significant improvement.

Over the past 2 months I’ve put in A LOT of work to become healthier:

• Started on Metformin and various vitamins and supplements
• Significantly cleaned up my diet
  • Whole foods (no processed or refined foods)
  • Keto (low carb, no sugar)
• Leveraged intermittent fasting
  • I’m averaging a 16:8 cycle. (This is 16 hours of daily fasting followed by an 8 hour window for my meals.)
  • Once per week I’m completing an “extended” fast ranging from 24 - 36 hours. I’m not pushing it beyond what feels “right”, for now.
• Targeted walking 20 miles per week

On with the results

I completed some more blood work this past week and finally have the results to compare to the original scary labs.

Problematic numbers that I’ve corrected back to normal range:

• Fasting Blood Glucose
• Sodium
• Calcium
• Platelet Count
• Triglycerides
• GGT

Problematic numbers that show improvement:

I’ve calculated some “improvement percentages” based on reference range for each result. I’m getting very close to the reference range for each of these though!

Numbers originally way out of range:

• A1c: 77% improvement
• Liver Enzymes
  • AST: 65% improvement
  • ALT: 120% improvement
• Bilirubin: 42% improvement
• Ferritin: 21% improvement

Not as far from range, so had less work to do here:

• Cholesterol
  • HDL: 5% improvement
  • CHOL/HDLC Ratio: 4% improvement
  • Non HDL Cholesterol: 1% improvement

Numbers that haven’t improved:

• LDL cholesterol

I actually expected to have more problems with my cholesterol with my low carb and high fat diet. Given that 1) I’m not far out of range for any related numbers here and 2) my ratio of “good” to “bad” cholesterol is healthy…I’m not super concerned with this right now. I do expect to see improvement over the upcoming months though.

More info from latest labs

There are also some new lab results which are helping to paint a better picture of what exactly is going on with my liver. I’ll save that info for another post.

I’m not done yet; there’s still progress to be made. For now, I’m very happy with the confirmation of the positive results from the work I’m putting in. It’s a great feeling having confidence I’m heading in the right direction.