lost 40kg and finally got lean, then a routine panel still came back prediabetic (i thought the weight was the whole problem)

Three years ago i was properly overweight, knocking on 110kg, and i did the hard yards and lost about 40 of it, got properly lean for the first time since school, and somewhere in that i decided i'd fixed it, all of it, that the weight had been the whole problem and now it was gone i was off the hook for good, so when a panel came back through work and flagged my blood sugar in the prediabetic range i was completely thrown, because in my head prediabetes was a fat person's problem and i wasn't that person anymore.

My HbA1c, which is basically your average blood sugar over the previous three months, was still sitting in the prediabetic band despite everything i'd lost, and what nobody had told me is that years of carrying that weight can leave your insulin resistance and the fat packed around your organs lagging well behind long after the number on the scale has dropped, so losing the weight starts the repair but it doesn't flip a switch and undo a decade of damage overnight, and because i looked the part now i'd assumed the inside had caught up with the outside when it simply hadn't yet.

What stings is i'd spent the whole previous year being the reformed one, the guy who'd cracked it, lecturing other people about portion sizes and feeling superior in a way that's embarrassing to admit now, and the truth is the scale had told me a story my bloods flatly contradicted, i'd assumed thin equalled fixed and i'd have coasted on that for years, eating like the job was done, right up until it tipped over into full diabetes, all because losing the weight felt like proof enough that i never once thought to check what was going on underneath.

So if you've lost a lot of weight and you're feeling like you've put the whole thing behind you, that's exactly the moment to get your HbA1c and fasting insulin checked rather than assuming a smaller body means sorted blood sugar, because the scale moving doesn't mean your metabolism has caught up with it yet, and you'll probably have to ask for those markers specifically since a standard checkup skips them, so whether it's a big name like Medichecks or one like Lucis or whatever a smaller specialist near you runs, make sure your blood sugar markers are on the panel and not just cholesterol. Anyone else assume the weight loss had fixed everything and find out otherwise?

submitted by /u/PansexPancake
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from loseit - Lose the Fat https://ift.tt/gkcG1Ed