quick follow-up to the marker-sequence post from a couple weeks ago. the lab numbers are still where i wanted them, a1c 5.6 holding, fasting insulin came back at 5.9 on the last draw (down from 6.2, though i’d treat that as noise on a single draw, fasting insulin moves enough between two consecutive draws on an unchanged protocol that i wouldn’t call a 0.3 delta a trend). the thing i didn’t expect to log is cardiorespiratory. i’m not a gym person, never have been. but i walk to a coffee shop about 1.4 miles from me, slight uphill on the way back, and i started timestamping it in january because i was curious whether the resting HR drop i was seeing on my watch (68 to 58 over five months) was showing up anywhere functional. january: 28 minutes back, HR averaged 142, had to slow down twice on the hill.
may: 22 minutes back, same pace feel, HR averaged 118, no slowing. that’s a real delta and it’s not weight alone, i’ve only lost about 4kg since january, the bulk of the loss was last year. so something else is doing work here. best guess is some combination of lower visceral load on the diaphragm and the trig side continuing to drift down (1.1 last draw, was 1.4 in january), but i’m honestly not sure, and i’m flagging the guess as a guess. the broader point i’d make is that the markers most people frame these updates around (weight, A1c) are downstream composites that integrate over months. a walk time on a fixed route is a weirdly clean functional readout, and it moved on a different curve than the lab numbers did. worth logging if you have a route you do regularly.