My ongoing type 2 diabetes recovery

I blogged last year about how I had a diabetes relapse and was making a recovery. I'm really pleased that at my follow up check up today, my recovery from type 2 diabetes was well established. 

My HbA1c - the measure of blood glucose over time that shows if you have diabetes - was down to 38. (It needs to be below 42.) 

At the end of April 2025, my HbA1c was 54, so I have dropped it by 16 points in 13 months. The nice practice nurse, Fiona, printed out my graph for me. Check it out:

This graph doesn't have the very first HbA1c result that got me sent to hospital way back in January 2015. But it wouldn't fit on this graph anyway because my score then was 91. (Strangely that first result doesn't seem to be on the system at all, which might explain why I keep having to tell my diagnosis story every time I see a different healthcare professional.)

Anyway, this is the lowest my HbA1c has been since 2020. I'm not saying the pandemic is to blame, but the shift to home working didn't help my waistline much. Losing 11 kg since April last year is what helped me drop my diabetes score. (I recommend canvassing - my foot mileage in election week was quite high!) 

I feel I can now safely say I have reversed my diabetes twice. The challenge will be keeping it this way. That's why I like to refer to it as Recovery. Every day I have to make the conscious decision to make choices that are better for me - what to eat and when to exercise. 

Some days are easier days to make that positive choice to stay diabetes-free. But on the hard days I now have a graph to remind me what's possible.

My May 2026 round up

Well, May has gone by fast and finished as a very hot one, setting new temperature records. I was hotter in Cardiff than in Kefalonia the week before!

Cooler in Kefalonia 

I have blogged multiple times about the two big events in May: the Senedd election and my Three Seas Cruise. You can catch up here:

Election

• Senedd Election post
• Celebrating the election win (and seeing my friend Sara get sworn in as member of the Senedd)
• Plus, if you're nerdy, my updated election leaflets graph

Cruise

• Dubrovnik to Malta
• Sicily and Kefalonia
• Corfu and Kotor
• The Red Museum in Dubrovnik

I also had a cinema trip to see The Mandalorian and Grogu with Cathy, and posted a Japanese novel as my Book of the Month.

I had a fun return to work after the cruise. On my first day back I drove to the Wellcome Centre for Human Genetics in Oxford to learn about how the team there are using a natural protein that dampens inflammation to protect insulin-producing cells, which could potentially open a door for a cure for type 1 diabetes. 

It's very early days in the science, with loads more work to do. I put on a white coat to lend a hand.

Towards the end of the month the time had also come round for another diabetes check up. My blood test was booked for the week after the cruise.  I will find out in June how much high seas living has affected me.

(Funny note - when I checked in for my blood test the screen told me I was booked in with "Mrs Phlebotamist", which is a very odd case of nominative determinism!)

I was unable to attend the Keep Grangetown Tidy litter pick this month as I was away that weekend. But the local church, St Dyfrig's and St Sansom's invited KGT volunteers along for a special environment-focused service on 31st May. I heard Fr Richard talk about the history of the church at Grangetown Historical Society last month and it piqued my interest.

The service was high church anglo-Catholic with lots of incense and some of the liturgy was sung. Fiona from KGT did one of the Scripture readings. It was also Trinity Sunday and Fr Richard admitted he was going to dodge the question of explaining how the Trinity works in his sermon. Sensible move there. 

After the service we were invited to proceed outside for an additional prayer for the environment by the statue of St Francis of Assisi. It felt like a post-credits scene in a movie.

Later, Cathy and I took advantage of the good weather to visit The Meadows Wildlife Park. Back in November we went there for Cathy's birthday and met Roly the armadillo. It was nice to go back when it wasn't so cold. 

We didn't see Roly, but I got to pat some friendly pigs and goats.

And I met a fabulous chicken!

Sports-wise it was a football-free month. I did get some free football stickers, despite my personal World Cup boycott. I drew my monthly Blood Bowl game with Bryan. And I played some rounds of mini-golf on the cruise ship. 

I can't promise these will be the last photos from the cruise I post on my blog, but they are the last ones in this blog post!

Blood themed Friday

A blood test and Blood Bowl - what a day. 

The blood test was a routine follow up to see whether I have been able to have an impact on my diabetes. Since being told my diabetes was back six months ago I have been mindful of what I am eating and doing more exercise. So far I have lost over 10 kilograms and am back to the weight I was when I originally recovered from diabetes 10 years ago. 

There are some added bonuses to losing weight. Walking is easier. More of my clothes fit me, including my favourite suit that I was able to wear last week for a situation where I wanted to wear a suit. But the main aim is to get my blood glucose back to where I want it. I will find out next week whether it's worked. 

It wasn't too painful. We have some good phlebotamists working out of our local surgery. She patched it up very securely. 

And so on to Blood Bowl. Firstly, a word on the game snack situation. I took a risk and bought a new snack - gingerbread flavour Doritos. 

I was dubious but curious. Bryan, my Blood Bowl opponent, was dubious but curious. Elaine, Bryan's wife was dubious but curious. 

We all liked them. They have a proper gingery taste. They aren't too sweet. You could probably try them with a dip of some kind. Definitely the best novelty Christmas-themed snack I've tried and the first where they have got the gingerishness right in a 'gingerbread flavour'.

The game itself was a weird one. We used the same teams as last month: skaven v lizardmen. I had permission from Bryan to start with both my  two star players, Hakflem Skuttlespike and Glart Smashrip. However, Nuffle, the capricious demigod of Blood Bowl, had other ideas and Hakflem ended up in the seriously injured box on the very first turn.

Despite that setback, the skaven scored twice in the first half. Their gutter runners breaking through the lines of lizards and running in two downs. 

There was a rat on the pitch in the Wales international game last Monday and someone nicknamed it Joe Rodent after Joe Rodon, the Wales player. I've decided to call one of my gutter runners Joe Rodent when I get round to naming them. 

I moved Glart after the restart. Instead of having him stuck in a face off with Roxy the Kroxigor all game, I put him out on the wing, where he caused mayhem clobbering smaller opponents. 

Unusually for a skaven performance, my team ended up inflicting more injuries than they sustained, with six lizardmen players injured during the game. This unbalanced the lizardmen team as it was the smaller, faster, more agile players that got battered and had to leave the field leaving the lumbering saurus players to try and do everything. The second half turned into an ongoing melee in a small area of the pitch.

When the ball finally broke free I only had one turn to go and just could not get a player into the end zone. 

Bryan had dreadful luck with his dice rolls during the game. He got away with a foul, but that didn't cause any injuries. He had players flub picking up the ball. Injuring Hakflem was the high point of his game. Nuffle giveth and Nuffle taketh away, as they say. (Mainly taketh!)

Final score: skaven 2-0 lizardmen

Six years in recovery

It’s my 6 year “diaversary” today. 

6 years ago I had an unexpected and unwelcome diagnosis of Type 2 diabetes.

The kit I came home with from hospital

I had gone to the doctor because I had pains in my legs. I had been on a flight on a small plane and at the end of the flight I could barely walk as my legs had been constricted for over an hour. I went to the GP who looked at me quizzically and told me to come back for blood tests.

I went and had blood taken on the Monday. At about 9.30am on the Tuesday I had a phone call from the GP surgery and told to come round to the surgery immediately. When I got there I was told I had a very high blood glucose level and was sent to hospital. 

I was told it was very serious – the only thing I enjoyed hearing was that they didn’t know if it was Type 1 or Type 2 diabetes because I was “on the cusp of being young”! I was 38 years old. It felt good to still be on the cusp of youth.

As I sat in the hospital my blood glucose levels were checked hourly and they started to fall, which ruled out Type 1 diabetes. The following day I saw the diabetes nurse and a consultant. I came home on two types of medication, one of which meant I had to check my blood glucose levels regularly.

My Hba1c, the measure of glucose in my blood over the preceding three months, was 91 at diagnosis. It was over double the level regarded as normal or safe, which is 42.

When I returned to the consultant 3 months later my HbA1c was down to 43. I discontinued one of the medications; the one that often made me hypoglycaemic. After 6 months, in June 2015, my HbA1c was 39 and I was discharged from the diabetes clinic at the hospital.

My HbA1c has not been above 40 since I was discharged.

In those six months I had changed what I ate. I reduced my carbohydrate intake considerably. I lost 10kg in weight, about 2 and a half stone, which was over 10 per cent of my body mass. I was still taking daily doses of metformin, which is one of the most common pharmaceutical treatments for Type 2 diabetes.

In June 2018, after regular HbA1c scores of 40 or below, I halved my dose of metformin. In January 2019, after checking with my GP, I stopped taking it altogether.

Since then I have lost my dad, supported my mum through her bereavement, and experienced ten months of pandemic life. My Hba1c was 38 in the summer of 2020, and my most recent score, received last week was 38 again.

I was surprised to score 38 again as I was expecting it to be higher. In hindsight I could have maybe eaten more mince pies at Christmas, given my HbA1c score.

So, what does this all mean? Well, Type 2 diabetes does not have to be a permanent condition. I have had a non-diabetic HbA1c for 5 and a half years. I don’t feel like I’m special or unique in terms of my metabolism. I feel if I can achieve this, then other people could as well.

But I have wondered a lot why I have been able to do this and so many people don’t. I think there are some things that really helped me to achieve this.

One of those things is a sense of personal agency and a lot of support to change. My wife Cathy has really helped me as I sought to change my eating habits. She became carb-aware alongside me. I was already in the habit of checking food labels from being vegetarian, so looking at carbohydrate levels in food wasn’t a completely novel thing. 

I received some diabetes education, which my employer allowed me to attend, and that helped me in my appreciation of what carbohydrates did, and how much carbohydrate I should be eating.  I am literate and retain information that I have been presented with, so was able to learn about diabetes and some of the things that affect blood glucose levels. I realise lots of people don’t have positive feelings towards education and maybe struggle to process new information.

I felt I could change and I did. Not everyone has that freedom.

When I was diagnosed I usually walked to and from work, about 20 minutes each way. In the morning I walked faster than in the evening because I was always a little bit late. Once I started regulating how much carbohydrate I was eating, that daily walk really helped me shift the weight. It’s not easy to lose weight, but suddenly having to buy new trousers because I’d lost 4 inches off my waistline and buy t-shirts in a medium instead of XL felt good.

Something else that contributed was being proactive about my healthcare. I make appointments to get blood tests and other various checks done. I don’t just wait for my GP to get in touch. It’s my health and I take a proactive role in managing it. Talking to the practice nurse, and the different GPs in my surgery, not everybody does that.

I also had a blood glucose monitor – given to me to help manage the effects of my initial medication – which I have used a lot over the years. It’s useful to know what is happening in your bloodstream but I know the majority of people with Type 2 diabetes aren’t given a monitor so have no way of checking.

Six months after my diagnosis I started a new role working in the NHS supporting a clinical network caring for people with diabetes. I have absorbed a lot of information about diabetes in that time, the causes, the effects, how to live with it. I have met a lot of people who have inspired me in my own challenges. Some have become friends. Some have become more like family.

There is a stigma attached to Type 2 diabetes. Media stories and online commenters often blame people for bringing diabetes on themselves. I have been cautious about talking about it, sometimes not wanting to tell people, for fear they would equate my illness with poor life choices, moral failure, or weakness of character.

A chap called Paul, who has Type 1 diabetes, helped me rethink weight gain. Fat is just stored energy. Our bodies are very efficient at not wasting energy and storing it for later. My body was doing a very good job at laying up stores of energy for use in future lean times. But those lean times never came.

So when I put on weight, it wasn’t that my body was somehow failing. It was that it was too good at doing its job! I was too efficient for my own good.

And that’s why I got diabetes. Because the blood cells brought glucose to the muscle cells and said ’Hey, do you need any energy?’ and my muscle cells looked around and saw all the stored fat and said ‘No, we’re good, thanks.’ And so the glucose-energy stayed in my bloodstream, unneeded, and the body had to get rid of it another way. (Which is why I needed to wee a lot!)

For me, looking at weight gain as efficient use of energy – and diabetes as the result when the body has been really efficient with energy – is a much more positive approach. It means I need to reconsider the energy I am putting into my body, the amount of fat and carbohydrates in my food.

That’s a mindset change that cuts through the stigma that other people try to attach. I’m not sorry that I have a superbly efficient metabolism. I make no apology for learning late that I need to monitor my inputs because I have a superbly efficient metabolism. At least I learned it.

And an approach I’ve developed myself to describe my current state as a person with diabetes and a non-diabetic HbA1c is not to use the word ‘remission’. It sounds too medical and, again, as if something has been done to me to cause remission, rather than it being something I’ve done to myself.

I prefer to think of it as recovery rather than remission. I am a recovering diabetic. Like someone who is in recovery and is sober, it’s a choice every day. A choice of what I eat. Some days are easy. Some days are not. But the choices I make today determine my overall health both now and in the long-term.

I am six years in to my recovery. I have kept the weight off and I have kept my HbA1c at a range where healthcare professionals have told me that I don't have diabetes any more. I just smile at that. What they mean is it doesn't show now. And I want it to stay that way.

 

Word of the week: obesogenic

I've been helping promote Champions for Health in work, recognising that my being unhealthy and working in the healthcare sector is incongruous.

Today we had an update day for people involved in the campaign (I went along to interview them). I heard a brilliant word - apparently we live in an "obesogenic culture", i.e. an environment that makes us put on weight by letting us eat more calories than we need.

Now there are two responses to that. You can either accept it and say 'Well, I'm overweight, but what do you expect? I live in an obesogenic culture." Or you can say "I'm not going to let living in an obesogenic culture define me."

Being involved in Champions for Health has been fun. Last year I even ended up on the ITV news.

Political blog post: unemployment

One of the unexpected side-effects of working in a job tangentially linked to public health is that I keep discovering new things. I’ve become a gatherer of noteworthy trivia and factoids that actually scare me when I think about them.

One of the more shocking was this: chronic worklessness has an equivalent debilitating effect on a person’s health as smoking 20 cigarettes a day. That means that if someone is unemployed for a long period of time, they are statistically more likely to die at a younger age than someone with a job – to the same tune as if they puffed a packet of death-sticks every 24 hours.

We know the effects of smoking, and most sensible people would support a total ban if any government had the balls to do it. Lung cancer is a truly horrible way to die. I've seen it kill someone I care about, so I know that. But we don’t see the wasting disease of the soul that is unemployment in quite the same way – its impact is hidden.

And yet draw a map of disease and early mortality in any part of the country and the map will always follow a pattern: low mortality = poverty = high smoking = high obesity (i.e. poor nutrition) = low child birth weight = chronic or prolonged unemployment = poor housing = higher cancer rates, more heart diseases, more illness per se.

Poverty and suffering from ill health go hand in hand on any public health map drawn up ever.

And poverty and worklessness go hand in hand on any demographic map drawn up ever.

Just before Christmas the Government announced it was going to put over £400m into efforts to tackle ‘problem families’ – i.e. dysfunctional families with ‘feckless’ dads, tearaway teens, benefits cheats and criminal genes. This wasn’t new news, but it was reported as such. The Government previously said it was going to spend over £300m in October. Inflation means everything costs more a few months later.

A Daily Mail article that ran in October carried the headline “How Britain's Shameless families cost the taxpayer £8bn every year.”

It went on to say:

“The summer riots have convinced the government that drastic steps are required to tackle a hardcore of workless neighbourhoods where no-one has a proper job.

The coalition says Labour’s welfare legacy means there are many parts of Britain where three generations of families have never worked and live a life funded by state benefits.

Some neighbourhoods, particularly in inner cities and on large estates, are so blighted by long-term unemployment that no-one on a street has a job and children never see anyone getting up and going to work.”

We have a scenario, then, where generations of young people are growing up in workless households, where to be unemployed is the norm. There’s a reason for that. Good jobs – and by that I mean jobs that will enable you to pay the rent or mortgage, buy nourishing, nutritional food, pay for insurance, pay for heating and lighting, clothe your kids and yourself, and maybe have enough left over to pay for a monthly night out at the cinema – are hard to come by.

Whose fault is that, exactly?

According to Government, and reproduced faithfully by the bleating Mail, Labour’s welfare policies are responsible for “three generations of workless families”.

I know it feels like forever since Tony Blair’s New Labour victory in 1997, but that wasn’t three generations ago. It must be linked to whoever was in charge before Tony.

And what is Labour’s record when it comes to employment, anyway? One of the sea-changes in British politics came after the Second World War. The newly-installed Labour Government is still, I think, the only British Government ever to state a commitment to full employment. There would be jobs for people as Britain rebuilt itself – that was the plan.

It was ambitious, but it wasn’t a pipe-dream. It was founded on an ethic that saw the social good in employment. Work wasn’t just about earning money – or even a cynical exercise in keeping the population occupied. Work was something that drew communities together. If the majority of people in a community work in local business or manufacturing, it creates cohesion. Never mind the individual health benefits that we now know accrue from being engaged in work.

Another sea-change was the Thatcherite revolution of the 1980s. The privatisation of national industries – gas, telecoms, electric – were all justified using economic arguments. Nationalised industries were inefficient, they had too many employees, they were monopolies that kept prices high.

So they closed the pits and the steelworks, the mills and the mines.

Interesting story – when my Dad was 16, my Granddad had a word with a friend and got my Dad a job at the steel mill that loomed above the small Welsh village where he grew up. Dad had other ideas – he wanted to study medicine and become a doctor, but many of his contemporaries went to work there.

In many respects, Dad chose a hard path. Studying medicine was even more brutal in the 60s than it is today – and I know enough junior doctors to know it’s pretty brutal today. He worked long hours, and later in hospitals and as a GP worked all hours of the day and night caring for people.

But he wasn’t thrown on the scrapheap when the steelworks was shut down in the name of efficiency in the late 1980s. He wasn’t forced, like so many people in their late 40s, to retrain for a new career and cross your fingers there would be work at the end of it. Being a doctor was a stressful career choice, no doubt about it. But he wouldn’t have traded places with the people facing an uncertain future before a retirement in penury.

That’s the thing about ‘efficiency’ – it’s only a benefit in the short-term to the balance sheet of the company. In the long-term, and we’re talking the inter-generational long-term, the social efficiency of keeping ‘inefficient’ industries going is far greater.

So, now the Tories are irked that billions are being spent on benefits for workless communities. Well, you reap what you sow.

Of course, the middle class tax-payers who senselessly vote Tory and equally senselessly read the Daily Mail are regularly up in arms about the work-deprived communities their taxes now subsidise. But Tory policy created those areas blighted by unemployment. Here’s an idea: Stop voting for the short-term, slash-and-burn, quick-buck opportunists.

The history of Tory economic policy is about short-sightedly sacrificing social capital and infrastructure for a few pence. There was never a golden egg they weren’t willing to kill the goose for. As a frivolous example, in the 60s they axed hundreds of picturesque railway routes throughout Britain, never thinking that one day heritage railways could potentially be money-spinners. (The Severn Valley railway once ran through the Ironbridge Gorge into the heart of Shrewsbury – think what that would be like as a tourist attraction now!)

When you are blinkered by the balance sheet you only see the money you will ‘save’, not the opportunities you will miss out on.

That was the 60s. In the 80s they hammered heavy industry – creating poverty blackspots that have drained the public purse for decades in the process.

What are they doing now? Youth unemployment is heading towards an all-time high. Incidentally, so are domestic fuel bills – ending those monopolistic nationalised industries certainly didn’t work in the consumers favour. The NHS is in a process of privatisation; with plans to corral off half of NHS beds for paying customers.

We’re told the NHS, like so much else, has to change because it is ‘inefficient’. But there are different ways of defining 'efficiency'. The NHS is actually very efficient at delivering a central element of what makes a society civilised – care at the point of need for all members of society, regardless of their economic status.

That principle is a bottom line worth more than any balanced books will ever be.