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.
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