How long does it take for A1c to come down? When people start working on
lowering their blood sugar they want to see changes overnight. So we're going to
talk about how quickly you can expect A1c to start coming down. Coming right up
So quick recap on A1c. Hemoglobin is a protein in your red blood cell that the
more sugar you have in the blood the more of it sticks to the hemoglobin in
the red blood cell and we measure a percentage which is the number that we
see on A1c so that's the mechanism but how quickly the numbers change depend
then on how long the red blood cell lives. The beauty of the test is it
measures an average over about three to four months of the lifespan of the red
blood cells so I went looking and the only information that I could find on
how long a red blood cell lives said that it's about a hundred and twenty
days. So for this example we're going to use a hundred twenty days or four months
for our calculations to understand so if a red blood cell lives for four months
then that's going to influence how quickly this changes because it's an
average over four months. We're going to assume a starting point of a blood sugar
at 200 which means if you maintain a blood sugar of 200 for awhile you're
gonna have a measured A1c of eight point six and then we're going to assume that
you're gonna drop it down to ninety and someone who has had a blood sugar of
ninety for quite a while it's gonna have an A1c of four point eight so the
fastest this could possibly happen would be four months because if you could
theoretically if this isn't gonna happen but let's say that you went on an
all-out keto diet and intermittent fasting and somehow you managed to drop
your blood sugar overnight from 200 all the way down to 90 it would still take
four months for your A1c to go from eight point six to four
point eight so that's the absolute fastest that you can do it the only way
that it would happen faster would be if your red blood cells don't live as long
if your red blood cells live for two months then you could pull this off in
two months provided you could drop your blood sugar overnight okay that's not
gonna happen but this is going to be different for different people so just
keep in mind what the mechanism is and there's going to be individual variances
so we're to look at a time period in months so we start at time zero and then
for every month we're going to look at how this changes so let's assume for
this example that we can drop the blood sugar by 8 percent per week so we start
off at 200 and the next week it's 8% lower and then it's 7 and a half and
then it's a little lower so after a month you're dropping at 7% per week
after 2 months you're dropping at 6% and we're just assuming that it's easier to
get the changes to happen quickly in the beginning because you have such a large
number to work off of the corresponding number then if we start at 200 then
after one month dropping by about 8% and down to 7 per week you would have an
average blood sugar of 146 so again some people could do this a whole lot faster
but assuming that you're really insulin resistant and you're not ready to go
into full-blown long multi-day fasts right away then these could probably be
realistic numbers again some people will go faster some people go slower then
after 2 months your blood sugar would be 111 after 3 months it would be 90 so at
this rate it would take you three months to hit your target blood sugar of 90 so
let's look at what happens with the a1c so if you maintain 200 then you get an
A1c of 8.6 that means that the new red blood cells that are born at that
level they're gonna eventually end up with an A1c of 8.6
the blood cells that are born at the level of 146 they're going to end up
with an A1c of 6.7 and so forth but this blood cell is going to be measured
together with a bunch of older blood cells that were swimming around in a
much higher glucose concentration so by the time we measure the a1c if we
measure it initially and it's 8.6 and then we measure it a month later it's
only gonna have dropped to 8.3 because this new red blood cell here it's gonna
be mixed up with three-quarters of blood cells that live before we started this
procedure before we started changing a lifestyle even if we can drop our blood
sugar to our ideal in about three months it's going to take a full seven months
before we hit the 4.8 that corresponds to our new blood sugar level at ninety
so I just wanted to show people this to give them a realistic expectation so
that you don't go running off and after after two months and saying oh my my
blood sugar is so low my A1c is still high why isn't this working it is
working but that's the the mechanism of A1c that the value of they want to see
is that it measures your average but the drawback is that because the blood cell
lives for four months it's going to take a while okay you're not going to see the
full effect in the A1c value until four months after you have hit your desired
level and at the end it's going to change faster in the beginning and then
toward the end here it's going to be relatively slow so even though you hit a
five point two here in month five you're still going to be two months
off of hitting that that 4.8 A1c that corresponds to that low blood sugar so
today it's really easy because you don't have to order an expensive blood test
you can buy a little gadget for 20 bucks and then you can buy the strips that are
probably maybe a dollar or two each so you could check this yourself but don't
waste your strips and check it every day because it will be a waste of time I saw
a search term on Google that was how do I change my A1c overnight and I had to
laugh because the answer is you don't okay there's no point in measuring this
every day measure it every couple of weeks maybe
but you're not still not going to see too much changes so if you're curious go
ahead and measure but realize the timeframe that we're talking about so if
you have tried this if you have experience with this please share your
results I'd love to know some people can do it faster some may take even longer
just realize that it is a process and it doesn't really matter how long it takes
as long as you do the right things you will get healthier so please share this
video there's lots of people that need to know good information about health so
share it and help them get healthy as well thanks for watching