Wagon? What wagon?

I have fallen off the wagon. From where I am, I cannot even see the wagon.
My old bad habits are proving harder to break than I had hoped and since coming off the detox, I have not been very successful in maintaining healthy habits.
As I have mentioned before, a really bad habit that I have is not eating. I can go all day without eating and not even feel hungry and then eat a whole bunch, late at night, and let it sit in my stomach as I shuffle off to bed. I'm sure that if metabolisms get a score between 1 and 100, I am batting about a 25. Maybe lower, but I don't want to be too pessimistic.
What's frustrating me is this: I know what to do. I know you are supposed to eat every couple of hours, I know about fiber and calories and simple carbs and blah, blah, blah. For some reason, though, I can't follow through on it. I have the knowledge, but not the ability to put it into action.
I don't really want to divulge all the big "no no"s I have committed, but let's just say I even let myself get super hungry and eat from a drive-through.
So tomorrow is a new day and here's hoping I can try to get back on track ASAP. My Weigh In will still come up on Sunday and I am really hoping my bad behaviour won't catch up with me to undo the weight I've lost so far.
I need to do another shopping trip so I can load up on healthy food. I think maybe I need to plan a shopping trip at the same time every week so I always have good food in the house.
Mister Obvious says: These 50 pounds are gonna be really friggin' hard to lose.

Workin' 9-5: What a way to earn a livin'

Tomorrow marks my return to work after being off for the better part of the last 2 weeks because of this infection I've had that's made me so sick.
I am always apprehensive about going back to work after having a period of time off due to illness, but I feel especially anxious about it this time because of the length of time I was away. I am also especially disappointed because, as I noted here on this blog, one of my goals for this New Year was to miss less work due to illness. The thing that poses me the biggest problem is the way it affects my relationships with the people I work with. Unfortunately, there are some bad apples in my fruit basket of colleagues and some rumours of whether or not I am a big ol' faker have been passed around. Knowing that this is the impression the people I spend more time with than my own family have of me is enough to make me never want to show up to work again because, as much as I tell myself that they can jump up their own asses, I can't help but care what other people think of me.
When you've had problems with your health the way I have you start to recognise that there are certain consequences that are going to come along with that. It definitely limits my life in far more ways than just work and I have lost friends and created strained relationships with people in my family because of it. My integrity, however, has never been called into question the way it has at my current position. It doesn't seem to matter how many times my various doctors can provide the information they ask for, they want more and more proof that I'm not staying home to watch day time TV or taking mini holidays. I wish I knew how to seperate myself from it but the truth is that it does hurt my feelings and make me feel a very definite way about some of the people I work with.
I have long suspected that I am not the type of person who is cut out to work Monday-Friday, 9-5 but that it what I have been doing for the last several years. I'd really love to be able to find a job where I could work fewer days and go to school so I could actually (finally!) finish my degree and move on to a career that I actually enjoy. I am always searching for work I can do for fewer days, do partly or entirely from home or have a more flexible schedule but there just isn't very much out there at the moment.
Until I find my dream job, though, I am back to the office. Cubicle, here I come!

Well, isn't that special...

When I was seven years old, I got a stomach ache. In the 20 years since then, my health has fluctuated more than the US dollar and has inspired many Ben Stiller movie-esque scenes of embarrassment. Although I am still not entirely sure WHY my stomach behaves the way it does, I have had 20 years of dealing with its various temper tantrums and... Let’s just call them ‘flash floods’. You would think that one of the benefits of this many years of experience would be a greater knowledge and understanding of my body’s many complaints and that I, like a trained ninja, would know how to deflect and counter each one. To a degree, this is true. My stomach comes at me with feeling super acidy, I expertly counter with extra over the counter antacid with prescription acid reducer, HI-YA! My stomach attacks with sharp pains, I deflect with buscopan and really strong peppermint tea, BLAM! I feel a sneak-attack of grumbling and churning below my belly button, I switch to extreme bland diet and don’t make plans to leave the house that day. I would say about 70% of the time, I know what’s what in terms of my stomach but every so often my body still manages to flummox me. This brings me to what has been happening since my last blog entry. As my loyal readers are aware, I have been dealing with an unhappy stomach since a few days into my detox. My theory was that the super increase of fibre and reduction of soluble (AKA Easy to digest!) carbohydrates had sent my digestive tract into a tizzy that would soon correct itself. The trouble was, my “go to” eating plan for when my stomach is bad and the rules of the detox did not mesh so I had to call it quits on the detox and give my belly a little TLC. Unfortunately, my tried and true tricks did not seem to work and I actually found myself feeling worse. Not only was my stomach playing it’s normal pranks on me, but whole new symptoms were being thrown into the mix. I had a headache, I was dizzy and incredibly nauseous. Being the medical professional that the World Wide Web allows me to be, I decided that I was simply dehydrated and could remedy that myself as well. Unfortunately, this also failed to resolve my issues and I spent all of Sunday night in a cold sweat and shaking like a leaf until I finally got up and took my temperature: 101.8 degrees. Well, now I am confounded. My stomach, for all its quirks and inconsistency, could not cause a fever like that. I took some Tylenol and, since I already had a Dr’s appointment booked for the next day, just tried to get some sleep. Cut to: Me in the shower the next day. Alright, don’t linger too long on that image... As I think I have mentioned before, I got a breast reduction in June of last year. Since then, I have no feeling around where my incision scars are still healing. I noticed that on one side, I looked like I had a major sunburn. It felt hot to touch, but it didn’t hurt... mostly because I couldn’t feel anything. I went to the Dr and told him how I had been feeling and, as an afterthought, mentioned the redness on my chest. He took a look and turns out, I have mastitis cellulitis... or, an infection of breast tissue that can apparently make you quite sick.
That brings me to today: I am on heavy duty antibiotics, my fever and headache are finally subsiding and I am very achy in the chest region. The last few days have been so crappy that I didn’t even feel up to looking at the computer screen long enough to update my blog, which is why I have been radio silent for a bit. Now I am all kinds of curious about what affected my stomach at what point and if there was anything I could have done to avoid this mess. It has also presented me with some challenges regarding my weight loss: I have been so sick that I don’t think I have gotten a lot of nutrition out of the food I have been eating, which hasn’t been much because I’ve been so nauseated. I haven’t been exercising because of this either. I feel Sunday approaching and my Weigh In and I just hope that my big 1st week success won’t be completely gone by the time all this clears out of my system.

Day 6: Getting totally fed up with Detoxing!

When I started the 9-Day Detox (which I believe I may have called a 10-Day Detox in earlier posts, so I will try to find and correct) I thought it would go like this: Days 1-3 would be hell with cravings and such and then, once in the swing of things, would lose the cravings and start to feel like superwoman. Instead, I found it has gone like this: Days 1-3 were not that hard, cravings weren't too bad and I felt like I could carry on the diet for 9 days no problemo. Aside from my stomach issues, which might be a problem on any given day regardless of what I am doing, my body felt fine. Days 4 and 5, however, have been a lot harder. I am getting totally fed up with this detox business and wanted some regular food so badly yesterday I felt like an addict on Intervention before the intervention... I think I literally went through all the stages of grief in about 5 minutes thinking about chocolate. I think I did that about ten times.
I am starting to wonder if, once I am allowed things like cereal and some meat protein, the cravings for the really 'bad' things won't be as bad because I am eating a larger variety of foods.
Food was much the same as it has been the last few days, which the exception of adding some "Yam fries" to the menu at dinner. I made some tzatziki (Low fat plain yogurt (strained), cucumber, garlic, lemon juice) and used that to dip the yams in (Thank you, Arley!). Having the yams was a really nice change and because they feel more "carb-like" I did feel more satisfied after eating them as opposed to the brown rice that I am getting oh-so sick of.
I was doing some research yesterday about this whole "Fat Smash Diet" business because come Day 10, I haven't decided if I will follow that plan or venture out more on my own. There is a lot out there that says the Detox phase is unhealthy, unnecessary and the only reason you lose weight is because of the severe caloric deficiency. When I was feeling fed up, that seemed like someone had thrown me a life preserver but I think I'd feel really shite about not being able to do what I set out to. For right now, I will stick to this 9-Day Detox and just hope that all the food I am missing out on right now will taste that much better once it's over.

When Day 2 turned to Night 2...

Well, Day 1 went pretty well but Night 1 was a whole other story. When I went to bed I wasn't feeling great and it got worse throughout the night. My stomach is definitely not coping well with all this fibre and without the "cushion" of more gentle carbs. I felt really uncomfortable all night and couldn't get to sleep AND I had to get up every few hours to pee... Guess that means I am drinking enough water!
I am hoping that if I keep up the diet, my body will adjust and my stomach will get on board. Otherwise, I will be a very tired lady!

The Skinny on being... Well, Not So Skinny!

From my vast knowledge of overweight people (from watching "The Biggest Loser") it seems like there are two types of people that are overweight/obese in their adulthood:
1) They have always been overweight. Even pictures of them at 10 years old showed a chubby little kid who never "grew out of it". It seems like with a lot of those people, after highschool or college the weight just keeps piling on until they are in a state of "Oh my god!".
2) They were never overweight growing up and then at some point, teenage years, college, after having kids they end up packing on the pounds. Sometimes it happens after a traumatic event and it gets credited to emotional eating, sometimes it just seems like their lifestyles make it easy to overeat, not be active enough and then voila...

I personally fit into category 2. I was pretty skinny when I was growing up and because of all the problems I've had with my stomach since I was 8 or 9, I would lose weight when I'd get sick. Then in high school and college, I'd say I was prety average. I wasn't overweight at all, but definitely thought I'd like to be skinnier. Having said that, I don't remember any girls in high school who didn't want to be skinnier...
In 2002 I moved to England (where I met my now-husband) and without trying, or even really realizing it, I lost abotu 20 lbs. I was down to about 120lbs. I was working long days in a pub, running around all day and I didn't have a car so I had to walk everywhere. I can't say my eating was perfect (or close to it) but I do remember being broke enough that we weren't exactly eating out at fine restaurants on a regular basis.
Then I got sick again, and when I say sick... Wowza. My stomach got so bad that even a glass of water that was too cold would send me running for the restroom. Not a pretty picture. So, I lost more weight. I got down to about 115lbs before I stopped weighing myself. I was so sick and started to get so anxious about getting sick that it was about this time that I started getting panic attacks. I remember joking to a friend at the time back in Canada that I was the skinniest I'd ever been, but I felt too sick and was too nervous to go out and show it off.

After months of this, I finally got in to see a good Gastroenterologist who discovered part of the reason I was sick was I was on the entirely wrong medication and gave me some other things that were to help. Suddenly, I could eat. And eat I did! I would say I was still eating really healthy at the time (anything with fat in it freaked me out because it was so hard to digest) but I still managed to put on 30 lbs in about 2 months. I was still pretty happy because I was eating and not as sick and just assumed that because I had only been averaging about 400 calories a day prior to this, my body was just storing everything I ate until it realised we weren't in starvation mode anymore.
Unfortunately, it didn't stop there. I steadily put on more and more weight and started running out of excuses for why my body was storing all this fat... I was just getting fat.
I got sick again but this time, the weight didn't come off. It didn't seem to matter if I didn't eat, ate super healthy or ate all the crap in the world...I was still sick, and still fat.
That brings us to now. My eating habbits are definitely not good. I don't eat a lot of the really "big bad" foods, but I definitely don't eat frequently enough and I'm sure I'm not getting proper nutrition. I partly blame the lethargy of feeling sick and anxious on not better planning my meals and stocking my house with good food, but I plan to address all that over the next 50 weeks as well.
So here's the thing... I weigh more now that I ever have and I hope this is the most I ever weigh and I never am this big again. And it sucks. Having grown up thinner and putting on the weight fairly quickly has really brought to my attention how different my body feels:
My feet hurt. All the time. I've always had sore feet after standing all day and I could ever only last about 10 minutes in heels, but now it's a lot more extreme. If I go to the mall and walk around for an hour, my feet are in agony.
And the lack of cardio is a real pain in the ass... Like walking up three flights of stairs at work will leave me winded for a good 2 minutes. That's not good. Worse than that, if getting up off the couch seems like it's getting hard enough to do that you decided NOT to do whatever it is that getting up required... Not good. Not good at all.
Just being bigger all around is hard too... It makes doing really simple things like shaving your legs and painting your toenails more awkward. Not impossible, I'm not that far along, but enough that I notice more "in the way" than there should be.
Then of course there is clothes. When I was 140lbs and typically a size Medium, clothes shopping was still a pain in the ass. Finding a good pair of pants at any size is tricky. When you are a size 18, finding ANYTHING that doesn't look like you're either wearing a tent or busting at the seams is nearly impossible. Add to that the horrible pastels and patterns that designers put out there for "Plus Size" clothing... Yes, I might be bigger than some of the other women out there but I still want to look like I'm in my 20's... And it's still 2010. Why is that Plus Size clothes are still in the 90s?
Of course, those are just SOME of the physical challenges are being bigger. The other, and I'm sure the harder for some people, are the emotional/mental challenges. For a long time, because I had been thinner and had been out of the country for so long, I didn't even want to go out and let people see that I had ballooned out the way I had. I was embarassed to let even my friends see me at first, which can make you feel pretty crappy about yourself. Add to that a mother who has actually given you something called "Fat Blaster pills" as a gift and not so subtle hints about your weight and your self esteem takes a pretty good hit. On top of all of that, I'd be lying if I said my weight gain hasn't affected my relationship with my husband. He loves me, sure.. but he doesn't really want to jump my bones like he did when I was 130lbs. All of that just doesn't make a girl feel real special... And then when that makes me sad, it's even harder to get off my ass and do something about it.

To conclude... being fat sucks. It hurts, makes you feel bad and isn't healthy. It's hard, losing weight is hard and keeping weight you lose off is hard. Damnit, I'm in for a hell of a 50 weeks.