HI! 53yo working to reverse borderline diabetes bloodwork

Hi all -- thought it would be helpful and motivating to introduce myself instead of lurk.

I am Sue, a Californian transplanted to Colorado a decade ago, a newspaper reporter in my pre-kids life, a SAHM/homeschooler since then, with a stint as a massage therapist in CA to help fill the family coffers and exercise the right side of my brain. I am now gently nudging my teens closer to the edge of the nest and wondering what incarnation comes next for me.

I had gestational diabetes in both pregnancies, so I knew that I should watch my weight and sugar intake, but apparently I didn't really believe it until the bloodwork finally shifted. With pre-diabetes fasting and A1C numbers and cholesterol reading spiking into statin-usage territory, and some unhappy liver markers, it is past time to make lasting lifestyle changes.

Funnily enough, when I opened the labs on my computer a weekend ago, I was strangely calm and processed them into enthusiasm pretty quickly -- I have wanted to lose 20 or so pounds for a long time but come from a family with dysfunctional relationships to food, yo-yo dieting, and tons of negative self-talk, so on some level, the goal of losing weight to be thinner was just too fraught for me.

Having a solidly health-based reason to change my eating and enjoy the side benefit of being thinner and more attractive in my own eyes suddenly seemed exciting and I was ready to go for it.

I reactivated my account here, set a pound-a-week weight loss goal, and began tracking. I felt the immediate energy stabilization of dropping added sugars from my diet and was feeling great, until I went in for the follow up with my doctor to discuss these results.

I bounded in, enthusiastic about how I was already feeling better, smoother energy, started to tell her the changes I had begun to make and she briskly brushed those aside and said, "No, what you really want to do is a keto diet! I've seen many of my patients turn all their labs around with it and I'm sure you can do it and it's really the only way to go!"

I am conscientious to a fault with authority figures (but have a life-long habit of not considering my own body/inner voice my prime authority,) so I set aside my enthusiasm for a healthy, reasonable eating plan, and went home to research for hours the latest developments in keto diets.

I'd done keto eating twice before, in what I consider to be an unrelated health saga of five years of slowly crescendoing chronic fatigue that left me bedbound for two months in early 2015, until I figured out what I needed to learn from the experience.

I'd gone keto-level carb in an early attempt to manage an intestinal candida overgrowth that an alternative health physician had diagnosed as a possible cause of my symptoms. As those CFS symptoms worsened into disabling autonomic disregulation, I lived for months on the autoimmune protocol, on which I shed many pounds but no symptoms. (I recovered to normal via Reverse Therapy, which is another long story, but it's been three years now and I am fully confident that I will never return to that state again.)

But for me, this diet was both familiar and evocative of a terrible, terrifying time in my life. I gamely embarked on it anyway last week and within a day I hit what I thought was a keto-flu wall. As that day progressed, I was in bed and non-functional and I realized how close it felt to some of my bad chronic fatigue crashes and I thought, either a) I'd been contributing to my CFS all along back in the day with my habit of choosing the hardest-possible/perfectionist path in any situation and had been taking ketosis side effects for CFS symptoms or b)my inner voice was telling me (as I came to understand about every one of my symptom flares) not to go down this path, not to follow the same habits of giving up authority to another, of taking the most difficult path, and of trying to follow that path with obsessive perfectionism.

So, I immediately ate some seeds and an apple and after a day returned to nearly normal energy levels and what felt to me to be a sane, reasonable, healthy caloric restriction plan. I am not sure I will stay with this physician (it will depend on whether she can be encouraging about other ways of reversing pre-diabetes besides the LCHF system she is so devoutly attached to), but I am giving myself the 3-4 months before my next bloodwork to lose weight moderately (with a no-added-sugar and carb-lessened diet and lots of fiber in the form of veggies, some fruits and perhaps an inulin supplement) and see what that does for my labs.

That's my story in a nutshell. I'm looking forward to finding people who have reversed pre-diabetes without throwing their bodies into a starvation-mode energy production mechanism that my body has made very clear is not for me.

I'm very glad this community exists and shares it's collective wisdom. =D