Thank you everybody for the wonderful comments and accolades. It has been an amazing ride and I'm not sure that I could have done it without all the wonderful support and information that I've received from this wonderful forum. I plan on sticking around. I've got a maintenance goal to accomplish.

I surpassed my original goal weight of 210 pounds this week and I'm still losing. And to cap an awesome week, I had that doctor visit that I mentioned in my milestone and it was a very happy visit. The results were in with my new cholesterol numbers. IMO - the results could not have been any better. Here is an update of my cholesterol chart with the added numbers.


One thing I didn't mention in the milestone was that I did have an NMR done in December 2015. That test actually measures LDL cholesterol as opposed to the estimated LDL/VLDL numbers on a standard lipid panel. An NMR also measures partial size where the standard test does not. The results were good and as expected for a low carb diet. The particle size was large and fluffy and the count for small, dense (bad) LDL cholesterol was very low. All good news. But my LDL particle count was still very high. I'm sure would be better now given my most recent lipid panel.


The results from the NMR:

LDL-P was at 1577 -- at the high end of the "Borderline High" range.

The other results from the NMR were as follows:

• My HDL-P was 29.7 (a little lower than normal)
• My LDL Size was Pattern A - Large (which is good)
• My Small LDL-P was < 90 -- which is outstanding. Low (which is good) has a cutoff of <117 and the 50th percentile is 527.
• My Insulin Resistance score was < 25 and the cutoff for low is < 27. I'm not sure how meaningful this score is, but the results were very good.

I don't know if my high cholesterol issues was a cardiovascular risk or not. But I'm still glad that I was able to change my numbers for the better. I chose the "better safe than sorry" approach to this. My doctor was happy about the results of my year long experiment. She was amazed in fact. Twelve months ago she was talking about prescribing a strong statin. There is no talk of that now.