From the Editor’s Desk: Check-In (Premium)

I had been waiting for this.

On the last day of July, we returned home from Mexico City, and then I experienced a very different kind of doctor’s appointment the next day: thanks to about six weeks on what I’ll call a “healthy low-carb” diet, I had lost 25 pounds and normalized my blood pressure, and based on the data from a continuous glucose monitor, had also significantly lowered my blood glucose levels, dropping from pre-diabetic to normal levels.

Everyone was very happy about these changes---me, my wife, my doctor, and a nurse I’ve seen a lot lately---but I was also urgently curious about the next milestone: my next quarterly blood work, which would include a hemoglobin A1C test showing my blood glucose levels from the previous three months. Plus, other data from other tests, all of which are linked, in some way, to the glucose. We scheduled the blood workup for the very end of August (last week).

I went into that previous doctor's appointment knowing that everything would go well: I could tell I had lost weight and had successfully transitioned to this new diet while eating twice a day (no breakfast, with an intermittent fast between each dinner and lunch). But in the month since then, things have predictably slowed down. I didn’t feel like I was losing much if any weight, which is normal but not desirable, and I started seeing weird results from the glucose monitor in the second half of August, which reported my blood glucose levels rising over a few weeks before coming back down to normal this past week.

But I figured the three-month average provided by the A1C would still be a big improvement over my previous scores. And so I walked into the testing lab last Tuesday morning in a great mood. I went the gym afterwards, and the day proceeded accordingly. I figured I’d hear about the results in the next few days. And then promptly forgot about it.

Then my phone buzzed while we were watching TV the next evening. I looked down, saw that my test results were available, and immediately opened my healthcare network’s mobile app to see the good news. What I saw was ... not quite as good as I had hoped.

There were two sets of results.

The first, for hemoglobin A1C, showed an A1C value of 5.6 percent, which is just inside the normal (non-pre-diabetic) range (under 5.7 percent) but a far cry from the 5.0-ish I was expecting (perhaps nonsensically). That said, it had been 6.0 in June, so this is still a nice step in the right direction. However, my estimated average glucose was 114 mg/DL, which is much higher than what I’d been seeing over the course of five continuous glucose monitors and about 9 weeks: after falling into the very high 80s, I’ve been somewhere in the 90s ever since, excepting that weird two-week anomaly, and that’s within the normal (non-pre-diabetic) range; 114 is ... high.

I figured the second test, a lipid panel---a complete cholesterol test---would have good news, however, give...