A case study
Mary, 52, had quit every medication she’d been given — they made her feel awful, and her numbers kept climbing anyway. With levels this dangerous, my first job wasn’t to take her off anything. It was to get her safely back from the ledge — then go looking for what was actually driving the numbers.
A real client case · Shared with permission · Name changed to protect her privacy
The turnaround
The labs she walked in with
Two weeks into her protocol
90%
Time in range (70–180 mg/dL)
From a fasting glucose of 222
146
Average glucose (mg/dL)
Across the monitored week
−7 lbs
Body weight
And two inches off her waist
“Joy”
Energy & mood
Urgency gone, 100% — she giggled with joy on our call
The deeper bloodwork retests on a longer timeline. What you see here is her continuous-glucose data and her own measurements from the first couple of weeks. Across cases like hers, the early change is often almost binary, like flipping a switch.
Her story
A year on keto, Mary had felt better than she had in years — down 30 pounds, her hair growing back, her skin clear. Then a family falling-out knocked her off course. The weight came back, the depression set in, she was six months off work, and she was back on a stack of medications that made her feel so bad she’d stopped taking all of it.
When I saw her numbers, stopping wasn’t something I could support. A fasting glucose of 222, an A1c of 8.1, triglycerides at 724 — that last one isn’t just a heart number, it’s a real risk of pancreatitis. I’m not a doctor, so I didn’t touch a single prescription. What I did was urge her to do exactly what her own doctor had already advised: get back on her metformin and her Tirzepatide, at the right dose, right away.
That part is short-term, and I told her so. Medication can buy time — but only if someone is also fixing what’s driving the numbers. So alongside it we added targeted glucose support, put her back into ketosis, and got her moving morning and night. Then we put a continuous monitor on, so we could both watch her body respond instead of guessing.
Within two weeks: 90% of her readings in range, a 146 average, seven pounds and two inches gone. The bathroom urgency that had reorganized her whole life around the nearest restroom was simply gone — 100%, even after dinner out. The panic and anxiety had calmed down, she was sleeping, she felt lighter. Somewhere in the middle of telling me all this, she giggled — pure relief. The plan from here is to keep walking her back from the ledge, until the medication is something she needs less and less.
If you’ve been told to just manage labs that keep getting worse, there may be a cause no one has looked for. Let’s take a deep look at your case together.