I did not wake up one day and discover I had diabetes. For me it was a slow drift that started years before anyone said the word "type 2" out loud. My doctor had been telling me I was pre-diabetic since 2013. At the time it felt like background noise — a number on a lab report, a gentle "keep an eye on that" at the end of an appointment. I nodded, I meant well, and then I went back to living exactly the way I had been.

By 2019 the warnings got harder to ignore. My numbers had crept up to the edge of an actual diabetes diagnosis, and something about being that close finally clicked. I decided I was done drifting. I was going to get healthy, and I was going to do it on purpose.

The healthy stretch

So I started running. I was slow and out of breath at first, but I kept at it, and over time I built up to running somewhere between two and a half and five miles a day. Around the same time I went full carnivore — meat, eggs, almost nothing else — and my body responded in a way I had honestly never experienced before.

My A1c dropped all the way to 5.2. For the first time in years I was out of the danger zone entirely. I felt sharp, my energy was steady through the day, and — this is the part that still amazes me — my sleep apnea went away. I went from dreading mornings to actually feeling rested. I genuinely thought I had figured it out for good.

Then COVID changed everything

Then I got COVID, and the momentum I had worked so hard to build just fell apart. I stopped running. I drifted back to the Standard American Diet — the SAD diet, which is an unfortunately accurate name — and the structure that had kept me healthy quietly disappeared.

It got worse when I started studying for the bar exam. Stress, long hours, and convenience food are a brutal combination, and I leaned on all the wrong meals to get through it. I told myself it was temporary, that I would clean things up once the exam was behind me. The habits, however, had other plans.

The morning that got my attention

By 2021 I was waking up with a headache almost every single morning. It was persistent enough that I finally went in for a real workup, and after a lot of tests the verdict came back: pre-diabetic again. I had undone years of progress in a matter of months.

In 2022 the other shoe dropped. The diagnosis was no longer "pre" anything — it was type 2 diabetes. I was devastated. I had been here before, I knew what good felt like, and I had let it slip through my fingers.

But somewhere underneath the disappointment was something familiar: determination. I had climbed out of this hole once, and I knew I could do it again. How I started clawing my way back — and what I have learned about doing it in a way that actually sticks — is what I will write about next.