Monthly Archives: January 2021
As documented in my previous entries about my weight history, I’ve always struggled with my weight. I don’t think I actively started dieting until I was in my teens, but I always had big dreams of losing the weight no matter what age I was.
I find the older I get, the more my reasons for wanting to lose weight have changed.
When I was younger, it was for the obvious reason. I wanted to look better. Plain and simple, no doubt about it.
It started to shift as I slowly approached my late 20’s. I remember being put on high blood pressure medicine when I was 27 years old and being horrified. Blood pressure medicine was for OLD people! I was still young and vibrant damn it! Never mind that I couldn’t walk my dog to the end of my block without my lower back seizing up and me having to sit down and rest.
Young and vibrant in my mind, but my body was rapidly becoming that of a senior citizen.
In doing some research I recall reading somewhere that reducing your weight by a mere 10% could help lower your blood pressure. I think that was when I started to slowly make better decisions.
After dropping about 100 lbs I no longer had to take the BP meds. That was a great bonus, as was being able to walk great distances with no pain. But let’s face it, I looked amazing compared to my highest weight. It mostly all came down to looks.
As the years have gone by and I have yo-yoed back and forth in my weight, my looks have usually been a trigger to start the process all over again. I’ll see a picture someone took without my knowledge and be horrified at how I look.
This time it wasn’t about looks. Don’t get me wrong, that will be a wonderful side benefit! However, as I approach my late 40’s at an alarmingly fast rate, my health is more of a concern than anything else.
I’m tired of having no energy. I’m tired of being winded walking a short distance. I’m tired of my joints constantly aching. I’m tired of worrying about my health. And I’m tired of being tired.
I know that my everyday aches and pains would be greatly reduced if I lighten the load on my body. Carrying around this much weight was still painful in my younger years, but it is nothing compared to what I’m feeling 20+ years later.
My blood pressure is high again and I don’t want to be put on meds. My cholesterol was quite high on my last blood test and I don’t want to be put on a statin. My ankles now swell in the evening from sitting all day at work…that never happened when I was active and slimmer.
I know it sounds completely stupid to say this, but I don’t like taking up more space than I used to. Granted it isn’t as much as I did when I was at my heaviest, but it is I feel it for sure. The pandemic has really prevented me from seeing how bad it is as I can’t go to a restaurant and sit in a booth to see how bad the table cuts into my gut. And I haven’t been on a plane in over a year so I don’t know if I need an extender for the seat belt, but chances are probably pretty good that I do.
I remember one of my proudest NSV (non scale victories) was when I could buckle the seat belt on a plane with no assistance. It was always so embarrassing to have to ring the flight attendant and ask for one. At one point I was so large that I didn’t even have to ask, once I was seated a well meaning FA approached me and silently handed one to me with a smile. While I was grateful not to have to ask, I was mortified that she just eyeballed me and was like: “Yeah, that fatty needs an extender, I’m going to save her the trouble of asking and just bring her one.” I’m sure she was really nice but she really could not have won in the scenario I concocted in my head that day.
A couple of days ago at work, I had to crawl under my desk to plug in my new Bluetooth speaker and it was a pretty tight fit. Like, I wasn’t even sure I was going to be able to get back out. Not cool.
So yeah, while I will take any cosmetic benefits from the weight loss, I am much more looking forward to the health related ones.
For Part One of this story please click here.
At age 26 years old, I married the love of my life in a fun ceremony in Las Vegas. I was also the highest weight I had ever been at that point in my life.
I was over 300 pounds at that point but I don’t think by too much. My mother in law had to make my dress for me because at that time getting a wedding dress for my size was just way too expensive and they all looked like crap anyway.
You would think that seeing the way that I looked in those wedding photos would be enough for me to try and turn it around, but you would be wrong. For the first time in my life I was happy and in love in a healthy relationship and I didn’t care what I looked like. My husband didn’t seem to care so why should I? I continued to eat whatever I wanted and put on weight.
I can’t tell you what my weight actually topped out at because our scale broke and I was in no hurry to fix it. Why they heck would I want to see that growing number? I was happy right?
If I had to guess, I would say I was probably 350 at my highest. The pictures may look bigger but I’m also only 5’4″. To be honest it could have been a higher weight but for some reason 350 feels right. We will never know on the weight, but I can tell you that I wore as size 4-5X.
I’m honestly not sure when I got the first motivation to start losing weight again. However, I can say that according to old journal in 2004 I started making better decisions and over the course of three years, I lost about 50 lbs. That sounds about right as I got married in 2000.
From that journal, I then lost 60 to 80 pounds doing Atkins/low carb. It was pretty quick but I can’t say how quick because I suck at journaling (you will learn this if you stay tuned).
Same purple dress as above only 80 lbs lighter.
After that it was a pretty big yo yo fest of losing and gaining weight, but I am happy to say that I was always trying rather than not.
I feel like I got into the best shape of my life (other than when I had an eating disorder) when I was training to run my first half marathon in 2010. I had gotten into doing a bunch of 5k races and even a couple of 10ks but when I heard that they were going to have a 1/2 marathon in Vegas, I knew I wanted to do it.
The main reason was of course: Vegas! But the second best reason was that it was all flat. They basically ran us down the strip, around downtown and then back up the strip.
I was very nervous about how I would fare during such a long “run”. You see, I wasn’t a runner, I did all my races at a very fast walk. So I trained. I still would never call myself a runner, but I was averaging a half run/half fast walk in all my training times.
I finished the marathon within my goal time and was quite pleased with myself.
We also renewed our vows that year for our ten year anniversary and I was quite pleased to have photos that didn’t make me cringe as much.
I would complete three more Vegas half marathons but I’m sad to say that I never trained nearly as hard for any of the others as I did for that first one. Once the initial fear of the unknown was over, I realized that I could have basically walked the whole thing and been fine. At that point, the laziness kicked in and I put in the bare minimum. I’m still glad I did them, because even the bare minimum of training is better than nothing at all.
Over the next few years there was more yo yo dieting and flirting with fitness but the end result was gaining weight back.
In 2017, I decided to start a youtube channel to hold myself accountable. I had seen similar channels and watched them for motivation, and thought…Why the heck not?
It really worked for me for awhile as shed almost 40 lbs and was feeling good again. Working out and eating right is a winning combination for me (go figure).
I’m not sure when it went awry that time. Part of it was that I got so into making over the top videos (green screens with fun backgrounds) that were a pain in the ass to edit and so it just lost all of the fun aspect it had before. So I slacked off, on both the videos and the diet and exercise.
That brings us up to current.
I’m back on my channel and I’ve started this new blog to get myself back in check. Here’s to much needed success in 2021!
It’s funny how actively doing something to improve myself makes me feel so much happier.
It’s no secret I’ve been in a slump. A funk. A serious risk of falling into another pit of depression, and it seems like I just crawled out of one not that long ago.
Last week we attempted to start Keto again on my husbands insistence, he loves keto. Me, not so much. I’m not sure why, but for some reason, my body just hates low carb now. It’s so weird because I used to do so well on it. I lost 80 pounds on it many many years ago and felt and looked great!
Over the years however, I have seemed to develop an electrolyte imbalance and doing low carb or keto makes it so much worse. Within days I start getting heart palpitations and those are no fun.
Also, I have diverticulitis and because of the foods we eat on low carb I inevitably wind up with some serious bouts of gastritis…also no fun.
So I finally sat down with The Hubs last week and had a frank discussion about how I just cannot do low carb any longer. He was not pleased but he understood that I wouldn’t ask him to do a diet that hurt him, so he shouldn’t do that to me either. He begrudgingly agreed to go on the diet that I chose…so what exactly is that diet?
Well, it’s kinda like I was doing before in 2017-18 when I lost 40 lbs. Basically it is making better decisions. We will be incorporating more carbs but less processed foods. So more fruits and veggies, more chicken than beef and using portion control. I know! What a concept!!!
He’s skeptical but pleased as the last two nights I have cooked dinner.
He still doesn’t quite understand it, as tonight when he cooked dinner he made the omelet I asked for but also made some fried brown rice cooked with pork belly to pair it with. I waited until he wasn’t looking and swapped the fried rice with some canned green beans. A girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do! Also, I saved the fried rice for this weekend when I will have more calories to spare. It’s not off limits, but I had eaten most of my calories already and wasn’t prepared for the rice when he offered it.
Anyhoo, to get back to the original topic, I had basically been a lump for the last year…probably longer if I were to really think about it. I had given up on myself. It didn’t start that way, I’m sure.
I do remember when the pandemic hit and we started our first shelter in place here in California, that I treated it a lot like a snow day. When I was growing up in Maine and there was a big snowstorm brewing, my mom and I would take a trip to the store and get all kinds of comfort and junk food to get us through the next few days that we would be snowed in.
This was the mentality that I went into the shut down with in March. Only instead of it only being a few days it went on for months and months. And somewhere along the way, I lost the ability to care about what I was eating and how much weight I was gaining.
In addition to that, the whole pandemic thing really messed with my head. I was never actually allowed to shelter in place as my work deemed themselves essential and so I had to go into work every day and I was very paranoid as I felt everyone else should have been too.
Since my husband has per-existing conditions, I put him on lock down and so I was the one to do any of the essential going outside things. He started working from home and I did all the essential errands in addition to going into work five days a week.
All of this took it’s toll on us in different ways. My husband was craving socialization when I got home and I was up to my ears in it and only wanted to be left alone.
So all of this in addition to constant fighting back and forth on social media on whether COVID was a hoax or not, really put me in a bad spot mentally. I’m an empath and this and then the political state of the world was almost quite literally making me crazy.
To add more fuel to the fire (literally) we had to evacuate our house in August due to wildfires (thankfully, only for five or six days and our house was not harmed) and my mother passed away that same week (her illness had started in May and I wasn’t able to get to her during any of this due to the pandemic as she lived in Maine and was under strict lock down in her facility).
I pretty much stopped any activity and ate my feelings for the better part of the year.
I’ve been trying to reach a balance and claw my way out of the depths of depression that I was in and I feel like in the last couple of months I’ve done a pretty decent job. As well as can be expected I suppose.
This week when I started actively planning my new diet and following through with it, I felt a weight lift. That constant nagging in the back of my head that I was slowly killing myself, started to lighten up. I feel like at least I am now trying to help myself and that is a pretty good feeling. Especially after not having that for so long. I told myself that I was just doing what I had to to get by, but I was being lazy and had basically just given up.
That was a very long winded way to say that I’m feeling really good this week and I attribute it mostly to the fact that I am starting to take care of myself again. It feels really nice and I’m excited to once again be on a weight loss journey.
