Two clinicians explain why your symptoms improve before your lab numbers do. Insulin resistance and A1C can stay elevated for months even as you feel better, because reversing decades of metabolic damage takes time. Stick with the plan.
if we get a quick win, or we start to feel change and progress, I would love for you to speak to the fact that our labs can sometimes lag and take a while to change because this is one of the things that we hear, we get pushback from women. "I'm still insulin resistant. My hemoglobin A1C is still prediabetes." It's like, you've literally done this for 2 or 3 months. We need to give it time.
So I like to educate patients on this as well, um, because just setting expectations, right? Like, what is the expectation here? If it took you 40 years or 50 years to get where you are, it is not realistic for us to think that we can reverse that completely in a month or 2 months or 3 months. And so, um, one of the big things that I will explain to them is that symptoms are typically our first sign that something is wrong, and then the labs will start to change for the worst. And the reverse is true as well. So first our symptoms feel better, and then eventually the labs are going to change and improve as well. But symptoms are usually going to come ahead of the lab change, which is why it's also so important to make sure you're addressing those symptoms, because if symptoms are improving, we're going down the right track. We're going to get there. And so hang tight, keep going.
