Rebecca1492

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Winter is usually a time where I burrow in, eat because it is cold and going outside is miserable, and I get a little fatter.  But this winter has been different.  This is the winter I am finally feeling well.  I feel like I am taking my life back.  I had no idea how exhausted I  had become.  I mean, I knew I was sleep deprived and I knew it was impacting my ability to do things and to concentrate and to even be a competent functioning adult.  But until you start feeling better again I don’t know that one truly appreciates how imperative SLEEP is!  How incredibly vital one feels when you’ve slept through the night and you wake up without PAIN.  It’s incredible. 

I get 40 minutes every morning on the elliptical machine.  Before that I start my day with yoga stretches.  I have only been to 3 classes so far, but my instructor sent me home with a sheet of paper showing some of the most basic poses and I use that to stretch and pose every morning.  I like the class.  It is taught at the senior center.  When I signed up I asked if it was only for seniors and was assured that it was for all ages, so I signed my 14 year old daughter and I.  Then, when we got there we were the only ones under 60.  Still, I feel like it is a good pace for me.  The instructor is about ensuring we don’t have pain but that we still push ourselves a little.  I am also WAY more inflexible than I thought I would be.  And I had VERY low expectations for myself.  I can usually do the poses, but HOLDING them sometimes induces trembling like a little purse dog. 

I have only lost about 33 lbs so far, but I have lost over 4 inches in my waist alone.  I am not yet walking around with a rope to hold up my pants. But I am getting close.  I have in my closet some “skinny clothes” that have been 1-2 sizes too small for several years.  I kept them because I always had hope.  Now I am pulling them out and trying them on and they FIT!  I need to spend a weekend day just cleaning out my closet of the stuff that is too huge and getting rid of it.

My wedding ring is getting pretty loose.  Soon I will have to put it on my middle finger instead of my ring finger.  Trying to decide if I will get it resized or just ask my husband for a new jeweled band for our anniversary.

I still don’t get all the calories and protein in each day that I am targeted to get.  I go to support meetings once a month (they have them twice a month but my yoga class conflicts with one of the meetings and I choose yoga.)  At the support group the nurse navigator says that it is normal not to be able to reach those target goals this early on.  I have to take a whole slew of vitamins every day in order to supplement what I can get in through eating.  Both because I cannot get in enough through eating and because for the first year I will have malabsorption of my nutrients.  I don’t mind taking the vitamins.  I am telling you, I feel SO MUCH BETTER!

I still have struggles.  My husband got a blood clot in his leg when he was stuck for 9 hours in his truck on the roads during one of the big December snow storms in Portland.    This is the 2nd time he's gotten a blood clot in the last 3-4 years.  Apparently he is prone to them.  Thank God we are past the phase where he felt he needed to do nothing but sit on his ass with his leg propped up while he binge watched Game of Thrones.  He still has doctor appointments regularly in an effort to try to get his INR #’s in a good range.  AND, while they were doing all the bloodwork on him they discovered he is on the borderline of having diabetes, so they put him on metformin.  That motivated him to start working out and eating better.  For a couple of weeks.  Then he stopped.  I keep hoping that my example of working out every single day and eating better will rub off on him.  I serve a healthy meal for dinner on the nights I am home.  But if I have a board meeting or night court and am not the one making dinner, he cooks pasta with heavy sauce, macaroni and cheese, bread and no vegetables.  It has gotten to the point where the kids are delighted to learn I will not be home for dinner.  They also love the high fat carb fests.  I knew it would be a difficult change for my family, I just didn't expect this much RESISTANCE.  The other night when he knew I would be at Yoga he stopped and got the kids fast food.  He tries to only do it when he knows I won't be around, but it's not like I don't KNOW about it. 

And just because I have had the suregery, it is not a magic cure that makes me stop wanting the things that are bad for me.  I made cupcakes for my daughter's 14th birthday yesterday and wanted one SO freaking bad!  I make this cream cheese frosting that I used to just BINGE on.  Finally, I decided I would eat a cupcake.  I knew it was not on my diet and it could give me terrible diarrhea but I decided I wanted to do it anyway.  How sick is that?  On the plus side, although it did make my tummy upset, as I was eating it I realized it was not nearly as good as I had made it out to be in my mind.  Maybe the memory of that will help me say "no" next time around.  Maybe not.  I'm not going to beat myself up for my mistakes.  I'm just going to move forward and try to make good decisions in the future. 

Saturday was my two month "surgiversary."  I have lost about 28 lbs so far.  It is not happening magically, asI had hoped.  I have to work for this.  But somehow this time is different than all the previous times.  PErhaps because my tastes have changed.  Sweets don't taste all that good anymore, and if I eat too  much, I get terrible diahreah and it is just not worth it.  I am keeping track of every bite that goes in my mouth.  Sometimes the idea that I have to pack a lunch every single day or be faced with the fact that it is noon and I have to figure out how to feed myself gets overwhelming.  I am still a little afraid of eating out.  I prefer the comfort of the scale and measuring cups in my own kitchen.  I went to a get together at a friend's house on Friday and she had lots of stuff I could eat.  I had told her I was focusing on protein so she had salame, cheese slices, almonds, and brie (along with the standards of chips, cookies, and wine - I wasn't the only guest!)  It was such a relief to get there and see that there was good food I could eat.  At the same time, I was trying to estimate how much I can eat, which kind of scares me.  If I eat too much I get VERY nauseous, and for some reason I am still struggling with recognizing my body's signal that I have had enough.  Thus the desire to weigh and measure everything.  I know my limits if I can weigh and measure.  But just eyeballing things - I have had some failures at that.

I have discovered that I will not always dump from eating sugar.  I will dump if I eat too MUCH sugar, but I CAN have some sweet things without getting violently ill.  I am not sure  how I feel about this.  Part of me is thrilled.  Trying to avoid every bit of sugar was taxing and not always tht easy.  Another part of me is afraid.  If I can eat sugar, perhaps I will go back to my old ways.  Perhaps it will become a slippery slope that I slide down while my weight balloons back up.  This is somethign I will have to keep an eye on.  Sweets are my trigger.  I cannot let it get out of control again.

I have so much more energy than I had before the surgery.  Some of that is because I am finally getting to SLEEP again!  Yay!  Two years of gradually decreasing sleep until one is getting less than a couple of hours a night is a good way to feel like crap all the time.  So the sleep alone is a huge boost.  But I am starting to notice cues from my body that I would not recognize before.  If I eat poorly, for example,  I realize that I am a little more tired and my morning workouts don't go as well the next day.  I think I previously just always felt bad, so now that I feel good I notice more than I previously did.  I am FAR more active than I used to be.  I get up every morning and work out on the elleptical machine we have for 35 minutes.  On Thursdays I go to Yoga.  It's just an intro class but I like the stretching and posing I am learning and try to incorporate some of the moves before my AM workout.  I am also trying to do more with the kids.  A couple of weeks ago we all went ice skating and I catually DID IT!  For a couple of hours.  I was terrible, but I still stayed on the ice.  Pre surgery I would have made an excuse and sat on the sidelines.  Today I took all the kids on a bike ride in a local park.  It was cold and I got an earache, but I DID IT.  THese are things I would not have previously done.

I took measurements the night  before my surgery, and although I know I am losing weight, I feel like I have not lost a huge amount, so I am totally surprised at the inches coming off.  I keep telling my husband that I think we are doing the measurements wrong every month, because I just cannot fathom that I have lost FOUR INCHES off of my waist alone.  Maybe at some point I will actually HAVE a waist!  (when he is helping me measure my husband always asks, "Where do you want me to measure?"  and I reply, "On my waist!"  and he looks c onfused.  I guess I don't exactly have much of a waist!)  I am also losing in my bust, which surprises me as my bust is totally fake (bi lateral mastectomy in 2012) but I guess it is my back fat that is dminishing.  Hips, arms, and thigh are also melting away.  I love this new me, but I am also afraid.  Afraid it won't last.  But determined that it WILL last!