I'm fairly certain that I would not have been diagnosed as a diabetic in March 2014 had I not spent all of 2013 in a state of depression and hopelessness, eating whatever and whenever I wanted. I had lost my business and had to declare personal bankruptcy at the end of 2012. That resulted in my SAD eating habits going from bad to worse in the months that followed. Yet I can assure you that I started having health issues related to high blood sugar at least a decade before my diabetes diagnosis. So many issues I had were resolved within months of gong low carb.

I turned out to be in the IR camp of those T2 diabetes types. But I was also becoming ever reactive hypoglycemic as my metabolic condition deteriorated. Although I was not testing my BG at the time, I'm convinced that my blood sugar swings were wild, crazy, and totally NOT NORMAL for years before I achieved the standard definition of what constitutes diabetes. My presumed wild BG swings from eating carbs may have been my issue all along. I've been overweight since birth. I had a glucose tolerance test done when I was around 8 years old. I don't have the results of that test, but I do remember an argument between my pediatrician and my mom's doctor about the results. So, IMO, there was something unusual about the results.

I don't think that my pancreas has ever had any trouble producing insulin, nor do I have a problem storing sugar away as fat. If my response to carbs is a high blood sugar spike followed immediately by an episode of low blood sugar - as I suspect it was, then an A1C test would not be a good indicator of a problem. I could have damagingly high BG at times with an overall average BG in the non-diabetic range. I think that testing my insulin levels over the years would have been very revealing about the road to diabetes that I was on.

So what is my point here? Perhaps classifying more categories of pre-diabetes is in order, too. High blood sugar is bad, period. The idea that it just needs to get below XXX within yyy hours following a meal to minimize damage from high BG is not a healthy action plan. BG should never be too high. Intervention could begin much earlier if they actually caught symptoms that lead to diabetes at their infancy.