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It's been awhile since I've posted my story, so I thought I'd write it out in one piece. Can't believe it's been 4 years now. I'm a former junk food junkie. I drank 12+ cans of Coke a day. Ate ice cream, cake, chips and candy for breakfast, lunch & sometimes dinner. It really shouldn't have been no shock that this is where I am now, cause I should have been here 10 years ago. When my doctor told me my A1C was 12.5 and that I was diabetic I was like no problem I know exactly what the issue is..... I'll quit the Coke and eat real food.... problem solved!!! I'm still to this day not totally convinced that I needed to do anything more than that but my doctor swears that's not how diabetes works. I changed my diet to basic foods like meats & veggies. Cut ALL simple carbs, white foods like bread, pasta, rice, potato, anything made with flour or sugar, and sugar substitutes. Literally all white food except cauliflower, mayo, sour cream, cream cheese and ranch. The only milk I use is Fairlife milk because it only has 6 carbs and 13 protein. I did a 21-day sugar detox. The first couple of weeks were rough. Headaches, cravings, irritability, and a few days where I felt nauseated. I pushed through because I knew the way I had been eating could not continue. I started on 1000mg of metformin the same week as the diet changes. Now the part I probably didn't share in my earlier posts. I am the kind of person who researches every single thing to death, and once I got the diagnosis I went down every rabbit hole I could find on Type 2. What surprised me most through all that reading was how much fasting glucose has to do with the liver. I had always assumed diabetes was mainly about the pancreas. Turns out the liver is the organ that is actually keeping your blood sugar steady day and night, storing sugar when you eat and releasing it back as your body needs it between meals. When you have been living the way I had been for years, that whole system slowly stops working the way it is supposed to. Which is where my 12.5 came from more than any one meal. I need to be honest before I go further. Years back during one of my many health kicks I had already tried a milk thistle bottle off Amazon. Someone had recommended it, I took it for a month or so, nothing happened, threw it in a drawer. So when I started reading about the liver during my diabetes research, my first reaction was that I had already been down that road and it did nothing. But Happy Liver ads kept following me around Facebook for a few weeks while I was reading in all these diabetes groups. I finally clicked one day just to see what they were about. My first reaction was that this was probably the same milk thistle I had already tried, just dressed up with better marketing. I almost closed the tab. But I did what I always do before actually giving up on something, which is look up the compounds separately and figure out what I was actually looking at. What I learned is that "milk thistle" on the front of a bottle does not really tell you what you are getting. The active compound is silymarin, and some brands list a standardized silymarin percentage on the label while others just list total milk thistle in milligrams. When I dug the old bottle out of my drawer to compare, mine did not list any silymarin percentage at all. Which probably explained why nothing had happened last time. The formula also included choline, which caught my attention because it plays a role in how the liver handles fat. I was skeptical of the European sourcing language too, so I ended up with 4 tabs open on my phone and a note going where I was writing down whether each formula listed a standardized silymarin percentage, whether choline was included, and whether the company did third-party testing. Most of them failed at least one of those, and a couple failed all three. That was probably the most useful hour I have spent on Amazon in years. I still left the tab open for several days before actually ordering because I had already wasted money on a milk thistle bottle before. The refund policy is what eventually got me to click buy. If it did nothing like the last one, at least I would not be out anything for having tried. I started it around week 4 of the whole overhaul, alongside the diet and the metformin. 3 months later my A1C was 5.7 from 12.5. My doc was on board with me quitting metformin at that point. For anyone who wants my honest read on what happened. Diet did the heavy lifting in those 3 months. No supplement is dropping an A1C 7 points on its own. The metformin was managing the numbers while my body adjusted. What I think the Happy Liver did was give me a chance to come off the metformin cleanly and stay off it, because it was working on the underlying organ that had been the actual problem for years. The metformin was just quieting the noise. It has been 4 years off metformin. I have stayed on the Happy Liver the whole time. My A1C has held between 5.3 and 5.7 for those 4 years. My CGM data has been stable. My carb allowance per meal is 30-35, I don't snack most days, every meal includes veggies. Every once in awhile I get curious and stop the Happy Liver for 2 or 3 weeks to see if my mornings drift. They do drift a little. So I go back on. Which is honestly the closest thing to proof I have that it is doing something. The biggest difference is that diabetes is no longer the first thing I think about when I wake up. I still check my numbers and I still watch what I eat, but it no longer feels like my entire day is organized around fixing the damage I did to myself. That is the change I probably underestimate the most when I try to sum up the last 4 years. I'm not saying this will work for everyone or even that it's ideal for everyone. I'm just sharing what worked for me. https://rituallabs.shop/products/happy-liver