Tag Archives: weight loss

Congrats! You’re Fat!

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So yesterday I went to a sports medicine clinic at the University of Minnesota and had quite possibly one of the single most unpleasant experiences of my life. I was perfectly pleased as punch to find out they had Saturday hours, for someone that works the kind of hours in a high stress job this is amazing! I can’t leave work to go to an appointment in the middle of the day without it causing havoc. I arrived early as instructed. my 0915 appointment, I arrived at 0855, they said 15-20 minutes early. I sat around filling out my medical history, for which there are never enough lines, I filled out my medicine list, including dosage and time of day taken, because I can recite that from memory. I know these things, they are ingrained in me, living with illness this is why I am. Invisible illness, visibly medicated.
I waited till about 0940 before I was roomed, no biggie, it was Saturday. The guy who roomed me at the clinic was nice enough, promised me a sticker when I was done… because I spotted them on the counter and said I wanted one (which I didn’t get!) We went over the list of my meds which was already in the system since this is a place affiliated with all of my other stuff… no biggie. Yes It’s all right I was just at my PCP a few days before. I changed into my shorts between him leaving and Dr. Joseph P. Garry MD coming in. I have been through enough of these ortho visits to know that jeans are not what you wear to get an exam done unless you want to wear a gown.
Dr Garry came in, said hello sat down on his stool and started to read my chart. He was unfriendly, asked very few questions of me. I felt ignored. As he read through my chart, and the paperwork I had to fill out he seemed to almost be skeptical of my ehlers-danlos diagnosis, asking who did it and seened puzzled as to why it was so late in my life that I was diagnosed, and why I was diagnosed at the childrens hospital in MN. I tried to provide info and he seemed to be in his own world. I thought perhaps he was onto something… I thought wrong.
I hopped up on the table, he looked at my foot, pressed on the heel where the pain is, ignored the swelling in my leg, said yep that is. PF, of course it hurts, (i swear he rolled his eyes!) I’ve apparently never been cured of it and now need formal PT instead of the at home work we did when it got better. Thats all good, but what about the swelling in my leg, yes thats from that… uhh ok.
He then pressed on all the spots on my back, tender spots for fibro, tender spots for other reasons, I mentioned the widows hump that I have, he ignored that saying it was because I was overweight. He sat back at his computer, pulled up an abdominal ct I had dome in 2010(!!!) said my spine looked fine despite some mild scoliosis (which even I didn’t know about! add this to the list of stuff I found out in the last week about that ct, apparently I had tiny kidney stones too). He never asked me more details about my job. Yes I work as a dispatcher, but my duties include pulling parts in a warehouse, and carrying fucking heavy ass boxes, totes and on occasion bodies! He said all of my back problems are soft tissue and the only option I have is to lose weight. Seriously that is my treatment plan? His suggestion, gastric bypass ASAP. Also, get off of the Topamax, and my other fibro meds and start lyrica, which has HUGE weight gain side effects. He told me Topa has huge weight gain side effects as well. He said that it is my weight that is causing these problems.
I guess I want to know why I didn’t hurt like this at 400+ pounds. I want to know why I didn’t get any new films ordered it has been 3 years since those were taken, I’ve been in a car accident since then, and I was a full on delivery driver during that time. Shit changes. This guy, in my opinion failed to look at the big picture that there is a potential problem.
How about a suggestion of a breast reduction to take some of the pain off of my neck/upper back? The 40H/HH that I am carrying around simply can’t be lost with weight loss… since I lost weight they got bigger I went from a DDD to a bigger size…
I left feeling very defeated, I didn’t cry till I got to the car. I regrouped sent my closest friends a text and let them know that it was a waste of my time. It truly was, I hate that nothing really truly came from this except more determination that there are too many fat-phobic doctors out there.
Treat the whole fucking person… there has to be something out there that can be dome to relieve the pain, My PCP and I are going to look into acupuncture while the idea of WLS is now weighing heavily in the back of my mind.
Is that what it is going to take to get them to start treating me like a whole person? I may just go to such lengths at this point because I am just tired of fighting.
What more is there that a person can do?

Running on Decaf…

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Hop in the time machine with me! Let’s navigate back again all the way to second grade and lets watch for a moment.  There I sit at the kitchen table, grumpy and groggy, sad, not wanting to go to school.  This is the year I cut my hair at school, lied about it, got into trouble for it.  I refuse to eat breakfast and it is the morning of the CTBS test, this is the standardized testing for the state.  This is the morning I get a small Peter Rabbit mug full of the blood of life, coffee.

Wayne’s World wavy lines, fast forward…. by the end of high school I would drink a cup before school, take one with me, and continue to fill my coffee mug throughout the day from the faculty pot.  I was downing something like 17 cups a day.  Water… what does that mean I existed on coffee and caffeine free diet coke.  I was forced off coffee, or moreover caffeine when I had my nervous breakdown and went into treatment for my depression in the hospital.  Caffeine is a drug and I was abusing it.

I had a coffee pot next to my bed when I lived with my now ex husband, there was pretty much constantly coffee available I drank it he didn’t.  He was into Mountain Dew and Southern Comfort.  When I saw the bad habits and behavioral patterns emerging that reminded me of how I was back in high school I went off coffee again, cold turkey.

So now I am a real adult, not that I wasn’t when I was married, but seriously I was still a child, I was still too young.  I live in the big city, I know I LOVE coffee.  I have used coffee as a crutch since I moved here.  When I would stay up for 2 or 3 days at a time working nights and trying to have some kind of life, swapping shifts to make social events, I would drink coffee like no one should.  I enjoy the flavor, the subtle differences in different blends, I enjoy savoring a cup of coffee.

Coffee cupI was bringing a mug (5cup home-brewed pot) with me every day to work in the morning, when you get up at 3am to work a 10 hour shift, plus prep time for your shift, and then have someone who isn’t quite on time EVER that is your relief it turns into a 10.5 hour day 5 times a week, coffee seems like it should be a part of the day.  I recently decided, about the time I gave up gluten and my stomach was being so horrible, that perhaps that much coffee was not a good idea.  I have been cutting back my coffee consumption significantly.  No more caffeine, and also no coffee until I have had a liter of water in the morning.  It is supposed to be really good for your skin to have water first thing in the morning, Can’t hurt to start the day with water right?

Have I noticed a change in the no caffeine role in my life yet?  Well, truth is I still have had a bit of caffeine here and there.  There is a small pack of 7.5 ounce cans of coke zero in my work fridge for the simple reason that on occasion my headaches are bad enough that I need the caffeine to make the pills work better.  I want to not be dependent on the caffeine, and while I know a decaf Americano still has a small amount of caffeine in it, I am certain that it is significantly less than what the quad shot tall had.  I still plan on drinking coffee, but only in moderation, not every day.  Like I said I enjoy the flavor, and that is what I am going to focus on, enjoying the flavor of the coffee, sipping not gulping, swirling not chugging.

Is it realistic to think I will never have caffeine, absolutely not, I do not live in a world of absolutes.  I want to go long enough without a significant amount of it in my system that I can feel what kind of effect it has on my body.  So here I sit with my decaf Americano with heavy cream. YUM!

Quitting Weight Watchers

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So since July I have been doing Weight Watchers.  I have done as I promised myself, I gave into the plan.  I followed the weird math, I did the plan as it was intended.  I didn’t use my weekly points, I used my weekly points.  I used all, I used some, I worked out a lot, I worked out a little.  I ate my target daily points, I ate less than my target points and here I sit, fluxing the same 15 lbs up and down.

Now there is something to be said about staying close to the same weight for a long period of time after having regained a bunch of weight, however I am not happy with this.  I wrote, I believe last time, maybe the time before, about how I am switching to VERY low carb, and gluten-free eating.  I would love to continue my Weight Watchers membership to get the meetings and the weigh in’s (I prefer to weigh in on someone else’s scale that doesn’t move around as opposed to mine that gets tossed in the closet after I weigh) however almost $50.00 a month is not worth getting on the scale 4 times.  I will miss seeing the excitement and progress others are making on their journeys, and I haven’t told anyone goodbye or why I am leaving.  I know my leader will be sad to see me go, but it isn’t working for me.

That after all is what this whole process is about. Finding what works for you, not what works for everyone else.  I can’t sit here and say, oh such and such worked for Emma and blah blah worked for Joe, because when it comes to these things, I am not them I am myself.  I have never been one to follow the crowd, actually that is something I pride myself on.  I may have my f2fpack, but I never run with the pack.  I follow my own drum and listen to what my body tells me is right.  I did far too much damage to my body when I was young by not eating enough thinking that was the only way.  Now with the wealth of knowledge available to me I know there are hundreds of ways to do things and I need to find what works for me.

I do know that tracking is the answer, however I think that tracking calories isn’t my answer. That led to a very dangerous world for me.  I know that when I track calories I become so hyper-focused on tracking every crumb and every morsel that it becomes a sickness.  I start to lose my grip on reality after a while.  It didn’t happen luckily when I was tracking points as much, but it was still there.  I think somewhere in my mind I just want so badly to succeed that I cannot let anything go.

I know that it takes time to get where I am going, and like everything worth doing it is worth doing well, and the right way.  So I bump along, wondering how anyone ever loses weight working full-time (50 hours a week minimum), squeezing in working out, and trying to maintain a relationship with loved ones, and friends.  It truly is no wonder I feel like I can’t ever catch up sometimes.

I find my center as I close my eyes, my bedtime is my time.  It is the commitment I make to myself.  It is the way I show myself respect, to let myself have rest.  When someone asks me how much sleep I got the night before I like to be able to answer 7 or 8 hours. I could take time from that to keep up with everyone else… but it is not worth the expense. I am doing what I need to do for me… and in the end, no one else can do this for me, or do it like me.

Cleaning House

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So in getting myself set up for success I am slowly cleaning all the crap out of my pantry.  I am coming to terms with the fact that I am better for listening to my body.  Fighting the transition is silly, embracing the change is the only logical and rational thing to do.  As I dump boxes of Fiber One bars into a Target bag, and throw 100 calorie packs, and 2-point weight watchers bars into bags to give away I am faced with a dilemma.

Is it better to throw this stuff out, or give it away? I sent some of my Weight Watchers products to new homes already.  Friends that I know like the products, but won’t likely over indulge in them.  I have some bars left in my car back in the trunk where I can’t just grab one peel it and shove it into my mouth without thinking about the consequences.

I bring bags of my stuff to the office, spread them out on the snack table and watch and people snatch things from it like it were a magical wonderland! Skittles, Special K Crackers, granola things, reduced fat peanut butter, cookies, all dumped there sitting there like a treasure trove.  All the things that I adore, all the things that I like because they came from my home.

The torture only lasts about a day or so per bag, In general free food won’t last long in my office.  I purged the pantry of the jar of biscoff cookie spread today… it is still sitting on the table… no one knows what to do with it… if noone eats it or takes it by tomorrow I will throw it away.  Am I doing the wrong thing by bringing these things to my office?  I can’t donate open packages to a food shelf so my other option really is to just throw them out.

I feel like I am feeding/enabling people to binge on food by bringing all of this stuff to the office.  I know there is one gentleman who works for us who can use the food, and always asks if it is okay for him to take an extra one for later.  He knows where all the free meals in the city are, he has had a hard life.  I feel for him, he is why I bring the food here… but I wonder if on some level I am not trying to make everyone else fat?  I know that isn’t my intention… but could it be??

I guess in the end I know I am doing what is best for me, and that is something I keep doing.  I am not going to force anyone to eat the snacks on the table, and I am content to toss them in the dumpster at the end of the day.  I am slowly setting up my home environment for success as things change.  Next step is to finish setting my work environment up.  I dug out my extra Brita pitcher, that will be coming here to work this week.  I don’t like the taste of city tap water, and my Bobble Bottle is great, but once it’s empty I have no cold water left.

I guess the phrase adapt or die comes to mind when I think about where I am on my path right now.  I certainly don’t want to go back to feeling like I did when I was 430 pounds, and I certainly know I don’t want to feel like crap.  So we put our heads down and push through and find the upside.  Bacon and dippy eggs for breakfast with a side of asparagus? Sounds like a silver lining to me!

Now I just have to finish the cabinet purge, get the community snack table cleared and I will be in the clear :D

Here we go Again…

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So… here we are again, the blog sits quiet, Kris is not so healthy. It has been about six months since I started the Weight Watchers program and I have lost and gained the same 10 pounds. I followed their program the way it is intended to be followed, and I also followed the suggestion of the leaders/receptionists and lifetime members who have successfully kept the weight off and we have manipulated the numbers.
Truth it, it isn’t working for me. There is something else going on.
Aside from the fact that currently I feel lousy, pain in my leg and foot, falling, back pain, my guts were a mess around Easter. Pretty much anything that I ate was giving me horrible stomach and intestinal pain. It could be anything from bread to a salad to a piece of chicken and I would just feel horrible pain. Looking at my food log, which really helped this process along, we can see my diet had a lot of two things…. dairy and wheat. Well guess what… time for something to go. :/
a few days with no dairy and no wheat and I started feeling better. I started on 2 different probiotics and that helped I am sure. It was suggested probably 2 years ago that I try giving up wheat for my fibro, at that time I wasn’t ready to hear it. … Now having IBS issues in wake of what I am guessing was too much sugar, I am sure that it is something that needs to happen. *sad panda* So I am now learning to navigate the world of low carb once again.
Low carb is not something I thought I would ever go back to, I did Atkins for a while when I was with my Ex-husband. Lost some weight, but never got to the point where I felt healhy, but I was also not exercising, and it was a toxic relationship.
I know a lot more now about nutrition, and about how to properly fuel your body with the right chains of fatty acids and such. I am uncertain if the gluten is actually an issue with me, or if my guts were just on a sugar holiday, But I am starting to feel better. I can eat and not feel like I want to rip my intestines out from gas pains so that is awesome and I will take it!
So I guess my latest lesson is to trust my body, if it is yelling at me, I don’t need to yell back I need to shut up and listen then do something about it.

Pepperidge farm still remembers that you can numb your feelings with food

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So last night I was headed to bed, and I was watching a bit of TV and a commercial came on and something clicked inside of my head, proof that I am much more aware and awake about the subtext and subtle cues around me of food and it’s influence in our world.  You can view the commercial <a href=”http://ispot.tv/a/7IcC”>here</a&gt;, and I suggest that you do so you know what I am talking about.

For those of you that can’t view this commercial it is a husband and wife having a conversation getting ready to go out for the night.  The husband is prodding his wife along about not being quite ready to go yet.  She is half in frame with a glass talking about how she has to spend the night with the bosses wife.  Haha it is a big joke we are supposed to laugh at booze being used to lubricate her senses for the night.  skip forward just a bit and we come to find out she is medicateing herself not with a cocktail, (because alcohol is not the answer) but the more socially acceptable form of medication, FOOD!  Now I get it, it is just a commercial, but I actually literally cocked my head to the side and grabbed my bedside table and wrote down Pepperidge farm still remembers… that you can numb your feelings with food.

There is a stigma that ataches itself to an addiction to alcohol and drugs, but somehow the idea that food being used as therapy, and comfort, and hidden eating and being an addiction is somehow ignored and disordered eating being trivialized, joked about and ridiculed is really making me mad.  There is a Sonic commercial where the husband is hiding his eating from his wife, (I believe he is out to eat with his best friend and says Don’t tell my wife).  Is the obesity epidemic and poor nutrition habits of this country a joke to everyone?  Are the skyrocketing numbers of body image issues among not just girls but boys as well resulting in eating disorders not a big enough clue to anyone that this should not be a joke?

I think the fact that the moment i saw what was really going on in this commercial and my mind clicked over and felt it in my mind, and my gut I could tell that there was and is something deeper going on in my life.  I talked briefly in my last post about my cupcake issue.  And how I found a solution to that with making my own.  I don’t want to be swayed by fancy packaging or advertising.  Fruits and veggies are bright and vibrant, and will be coming into season, center isles are full of crap.  The tables have turned marketing professionals you need to change your game!

The answer is to turn off the tv right?  Turn off the tv and go to bed, or for a walk, or 100 other things.  I can only fight for what I know is right for me or my own family, but seriously I understand they are looking for some humor, but this hit a sour and bitter note with me.

What do you think?

Breaking free of the three’s

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So last week I weighed in at weight watchers and I about crapped myself. I was up four pounds! I was ready to kill myself. I took a step back and I realized okay Kris take a deep breath you are spiraling into that negative bad space again. Yes progress isn’t happening the way you wanted it to, but you have been fighting a lot of circumstances you cannot control.
What can you control? What do YOU think is not working for you. What is it that you like about Weight Watchers, what are you paying for, what is it that you need. Well I know that one of the things I need is the weekly accountability. I need someone else to weigh me in, having a scale at home that I can weigh in all the time on leads to bad things. I like the meetings, I am good at tracking. These are keys to Weight Watchers.
I sat down and looked at my food log, and saw something glaringly obvious. Not about last week, I was fairly confident that last week was mostly related to water weight, I am still eating too much food. These zero point foods are going to be the death of me. The fact that fruits and veggies are zero points, still fails me. They are good choices, I am capable of making those good choices. I in fact make those good choices, over and over again. I am making those choices too much.
This last week I have started a full scale nutrient tracking with Lose It! the way I lost the large chunk of my weight before. I plugged in my 1500 calorie target which is what I was using before when I got to 250. I discussed with Robb and he agrees with my current weight my target with WW is probably some where near 2000 calories a day, which for me is set too high. I have a slow metabolism and my body isn’t built to process calories as efficiently as others. So all week long I ate well, meaning I ate good foods, mostly. There was a pizza night after I had to take o. The responsibility at work of an inventory recount which entails a lot of squatting,kneeling and bending that puts my body into a flare if I don’t take the proper precautions. I overate one or two nights. Y a little bit. The nice part about nutrient tracking as opposed to just calorie tracking is I have the fat carbs and protein and I can just plug that info into my weight watchers app and see how many points I am eating. Mostly I was a bit under my target for the day, the days I was over I was not surprised. What makes this different? Well, this negated the idea of the zero point foods. I am under no assumption in eating the fruits and veggies that they are free, and I do not consume them as such, however I think with my body being as sensitive as it is to so many things they need to be accounted for and I perhaps just need that sense of control.
This week I weighed in and had lost the previous weeks FOUR pound gain plus some putting me back under 300 pounds. This is progress. Progress not perfection. I needed to see the two’s again. I saw them during the early stages of weight watchers, then all the stuff went wrong with my back and well, drugs, and no movement just leads to a fat unhappy person. I don’t want to be fat and unhappy, I want to be the old me.
I am coming back to the old me slowly. When I hurt too much to work out I still go to the gym, even if it is just to soak in the pool for a while. I figure if I am still there, it is better an not going at all. I will still move my arms and legs around a bit in the water right? I wish that there were some magic answer, a magic bullet, some pill or plan someone to tell me, do this the weight will come off and then just keep doing this, but it is slow. There is something to be said for working hard at what you want.
I am excited for spring to arrive, or warmer weather at least. I am inking it will be nice to be able to perhaps walk to Minnehaha Falls after work, or around the lake, without the fear of falling on ice. I am hopeful that perhaps I will start walking to the local co-op after work to grab an item or two then back to work before heading home for the day. So who knows!

Success Redefined

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How do you measure something that there is no clear definition of? Something that is not actually quantified by everyone the same way? How can one person simply define a word and it be the pinnacle and definitive answer for everyone. Simple, you can’t, I can’t.
Each and every single one of us must sit back and look at the big picture and look to see what we are trying to find success at. Are you successful can be such a loaded question, and lead down so many roads. It can lead you to a very positive or very negative place based upon where you are mentally and how you interpret the question.
In the health and wellness world how do you view success? When I started losing weight I was over 400 pounds. I know you have read it over and over again but it bears repeating because I will never forget it, I felt as though I was going to die. I was trapped inside a tomb that was my body. I had high blood pressure, dangerously high, I had high cholesterol, horrendous triglycerides and the thought of doing anything except driving around delivering packages in my car, and drinking red bull and Starbucks at all hours of the day and night was my reality.
I am still not at my goal weight, I got to about 250 and my life went through a shift. My personal life underwent an overhaul, my professional life went through a complete shift where I went from working nights and weekends to a 55+ hour a week shift that starts at about 3:45 every weekday morning. I regained in the neighborhood of 50 pounds and if I didn’t know better by most of the definitions that I can think of that would make me a failure.
WRONG! I make my own definitions of success, and I do not view this as a failure, because I am still trying. I am still actively choosing to pick the better choices for food. I choose to go to the gym instead of going to the coffee shop on Saturday mornings. I choose to push myself to be better I choose to get up and go.
I measure success not in the number on the scale, because a number while a unit of measure is not a measure of self worth, and is not a measure of what I have accomplished but in how I feel. I do not measure success in the size of my jeans, or in the number of friends I have or the number of miles I can run, which by the way is ZERO. I measure my success on the number of times I get up when I fall down.
I measure my success on how strong I can be, for myself and for my friends. I measure success in what I can give to others, and the strength I can share. This past weekend I participated in the #happy5k project. (Check them out on Facebook and Twitter!) I love this idea, it is a virtual 5k, and their motto is Have a Purpose, Push Yourself. I love this motto. As most of you know I am currently stuck in the pool for exercise (and if you followed twitter last nights dreadmill went horribly and I am back in the water until further notice) So I water walked my 5k.
I love that there are things like virtual 5k’s that I can participate in that allow me to have the sense of community with other athletes, that can give me the same rush and feeling of success that I had when I did the Prior Fat Pack 5k, or the Fathers Day 5k. I am hopeful that I will be back in action by the time the Color Run comes around in July, but since the treadmill killed me after 1.25 miles yesterday and I can barely walk due to heel issues from it today we shall play by ear.
I had a successful virtual 5k, I am part of something bigger. I love it!
So I will continue on babysteppin-waterwalkin my way thru one setback at a time as long as it takes.
I am a success story, I will forever be my own success story, I just have to decide how I want to end my success story… luckily there is still too much of the story to be written to worry about an ending.
Are you successful? Do you keep pushing yourself despite the odds to get where you want to be? How do you define your personal success?

Working Out.

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As we are all aware working out is a key piece of any healthy lifestyle, and for those that have followed my writing here for a while, or that know me, you know that this is something I have struggled with. In part it has been the desire and drive to work out that I have issues with and it is also in part the actual activity. The chronic pain, the injuries, the setbacks, but I keep coming back.
Last night I was curled up in bed, rubbing ketoprofin into my knees in hopes of finding some small bit of relief and to find a cause. My fingers reached behind my knee and rubbed the worked went to stars and started to go black I screamed in pain. Yep, I’m there again. Living on the edge. I was trying to pinpoint the problem. Robb pointed out I took a fall, and my knee is STILL covered in bruises from it. I don’t want to blame the fall, but perhaps that is it. Perhaps I did something, or maybe it’s simply that I just don’t heal as fast, and my tissue is more susceptible to damage. I thought back over the last year or so and I have taken FOUR significant falls. Falls that have resulted in significant bruises to my shins and knees. Still I press on.
I tell one of the most significant ladies in my life that self care if so important, that you have to remember to give your body what it needs, or it will take what it wants when you aren’t planning on it. So I keep pushing along, trying to listen to my body. So how does this relate to working out? Well, Way back when I started this lifestyle shift, getting healthy, eating better, making the right choices more than the wrong ones, I started at the YWCA, it was a good place for me, close to home, and it worked, my body responded. I switched when I changed jobs, and that change didn’t agree with my body. The change in machines and the lack of the pool killed my body. What did I do, well I reverted to old behaviors, that hadn’t been working that led to the change. Now I am in a better place.
I cannot sing the praises of the YMCA I am at now enough. While I don’t love that it takes so long for me to get there, especially with gas prices the way they are, I am making that investment in myself. While I don’t love that there are kids in the vortex when I am trying to get my workout on during the week… it is made all the better by Sunday Mornings when it is ADULTS ONLY, if I had a different job where I worked normal hours I would totally be taking advantage of the adults only evening hours to get my workout on as well. What a simple but smart idea that I wish the YWCA would have had. I can’t even begin to explain the endless frustration I experienced “fighting” with the aquatics staff to get the bullying that was going on to stop. Teenage boys would actually try and bully me when I would workout in the pool. I was intentionally kicked and splashed in the deep end of the pool. I was jumped in on top of, it was a very negative experience at times.
So right now I am trying my best to listen to my body when it comes to working out. I want so very desperately to be like everyone else and just be able to pick up and go for a run, or answer the pleas of friends to be their gym company, but sadly it isn’t in the stars for this girl right now. It likely wont be in the stars for me anytime. Running seems to disagree with my body. It doesn’t make me a failure, it just means I have to find a different activity.
I will keep pushing forward with what I can do.
Babysteps are still steps. I just have to keep moving, even when it hurts.

Struggle

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When there is no struggle there can be no progress. 

*Sigh*

Since last Friday my body has been in a mode I like to call, the hunger train.  I want to eat everything in sight!  I am fighting with all my might to not inhale everything I see.  When I went to brunch with my friends, as I posted here on the blog, I custom ordered to find something that would hit on exactly what I thought I needed and wanted, some fat, some greens, and here I sit almost a week later and the metaphorical train barrels on.

I believe that it is hormone related, I am due for that wonderful flux in the next few days, however the fact that this is now on a week of struggle I am just so very tired of this.  The week prior to this I didn’t eat all my Weight Watchers points, in fact most days I had to force myself to get close to my goals.  This week I am eating into my “weeklies”  I find myself not wanting to track my extra points to that I have enough extras left in-case I get hungry… which is silly because all I would be doing is telling myself lies. Track honestly, or you aren’t doing yourself any favors.  Eat the right foods if you are hungry.

So I am trying to cut out the unnatural carbohydrates from my diet over the next few days.  I am thinking perhaps what I am experiencing is almost a sugar detox.  Last week I ate a LOT of carbs.  Not really good carbs either, and in my world I don’t view carbohydrates as the enemy, however I do have two different divisions of them in my mind.  Natural, and unnatural where the natural ones come from veggies, fruits, dairy etc, natural sugars and starches, and the unnatural ones are the ones that come from pasta and things like that.  I ate vegetarian Pad Thai (homemade) 5 times last week.  All were within my daily points totals, reasonable serving sizes however that much pasta, even though it was rice noodles, sweetened with honey, and veggies.  The amount of carbohydrates consumed may be exactly what has triggered me into this mega food rage.

This week I have been eating chicken salad for lunch, 4 ounces of chicken, with celery puree, and some good fat mixed in to keep it  together.  Breakfast has stayed the same, my breakfast sandwich (Special K Veggie Flatbread or Jimmy Dean Delight spinach sandwich) and yogurt and I think I need more protein.  I am guessing that I am in need of more protein.  Last night I had breakfast for dinner, egg beaters, ham and mushrooms (natural carb).  Today for breakfast I am swapping out my flat-bread for egg beaters with ham and mushrooms and laughing cow, and a Greek yogurt.  Coffee with half & half, and maybe some fruit.

I am dropping the triscuits from my lunch in favor of string cheese, and an extra few snow peas and I am currently unsure as to what dinner will hold as it is my takeout night as I will be hitting the pool right after work.  Maybe an unwich from Jimmy John’s.    I don’t like that I am struggling so much, I don’t like that I am waking up during the night wanting to empty the fridge.  I don’t like that no matter how much water I drink, or how many good choices I am making the hunger keeps coming back.

I am frustrated but I am putting my faith in the program, one choice at a time is all I can make.  I will stumble, I will fall, I will get up, brush myself off, and continue along.