Within Normal Limits : What Your Lab Results Really Mean

Your lab results came back normal. Your body may already be changing.

Blood glucose can stay normal for years while the body produces additional insulin to keep it there. The pathologist Joseph Kraft showed that abnormal insulin responses can exist even in people with normal glucose tolerance. Routine diabetes screening measures glucose or HbA1c, not the insulin required to maintain those values.

More than two in five American adults have prediabetes, and eight in ten of them don't know it. In 2022, diagnosed diabetes cost the United States an estimated $413 billion in medical expenses and lost productivity.

Within Normal Limits explores what conventional testing can reveal, what it can miss, and why the earliest signs of metabolic dysfunction may appear before a diagnosis of prediabetes or type 2 diabetes. Drawing on four centuries of research, it follows the scientists and patients who changed how we measure and understand the human body.

Across 32 chapters, the book connects weight, insulin, glucose, fat tissue, the liver, the kidneys, hormones, and the heart. It examines insulin resistance, prediabetes, type 2 diabetes, GLP-1 medications, why weight so often returns after weight loss, and what research shows about preventing type 2 diabetes and achieving remission in some people who already have it.

This is neither a diet plan nor a medical textbook. It helps you understand what your lab results can reveal and what they cannot, why changes over time matter, and which questions are worth asking.

The book draws on nearly 800 references, more than 600 of them linked to PubMed records. AI tools were used to search and curate the research behind it.

QR codes in the book lead to proaktiv.io/wnl, where the references are organized chapter by chapter with links to PubMed and DOI records. New studies are screened for relevance to the book's chapters and summarized using AI. The printed book is complete; the evidence behind it keeps moving.

The final three chapters explore how artificial intelligence helped produce the book, how its limitations were managed, and how automated systems can continue monitoring research after publication.

About the author
Michel Tagliati, MD, trained at Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm. He worked clinically for twenty years in Swedish public healthcare and has worked as a researcher in clinical studies of diabetes. He is the founder of PROAKTIV, an organization focused on metabolic health.

His clinical experience includes approximately 100,000 patient encounters. Over those years, he repeatedly encountered a central problem: metabolic dysfunction can develop long before conventional laboratory results clearly indicate disease. That experience helped shape this book.

Originally published in Swedish as Vikten av att hålla vikten. This English-language edition was translated from the Swedish original using artificial intelligence. The translation was then independently reviewed, corrected, and validated under the author's direction.