What my nurse said about reversing it

I would say do not let a number become the whole of how you think about yourself. I did that for about six months and it was not useful.

My review is annual now and it is a five-minute conversation, which is exactly the amount of attention I want this to have in my life.

I found the family history conversation useful and slightly upsetting. It explained a great deal and it also meant talking to relatives about things we do not discuss.

What helped was having something to measure that was not a body. Steps, sleep hours, a walk after dinner. All of those were things I could actually influence.

Reading and nodding. Nothing to add, and I wanted you to know somebody had read it.

I had assumed this was a straight line to something worse and my GP was clear that it is not, and that framing changed how I approached the whole year.

Calla has already said most of this and I want to add the one part that was different for me.

Something practical: I got a copy of every result going back six years and put them in one place, and the trend told me more than any single figure.

My nurse asked what I thought I could sustain rather than what I thought I should do, and that question produced a much more honest plan.

The bit I got wrong was treating it as an emergency for a fortnight and then forgetting about it for four months. Steady attention beat intense attention.

The thing I would flag is that other things can move this figure, and mine turned out to have a second contributor that was worth investigating separately.

Coming back to what Juno wrote further up, because it is the bit I keep thinking about.

I found the group programme's most useful feature was that everybody in it was in the same position, which is a very similar reason to why I am here.