Plans, Perserverance, Acceptance

 Over the holidays I slacked off quite a bit on my overall eating and health plan. It definitely affected both my weight (as evidenced with the five pound gain over the past three months) and with how I felt.

• My blood sugar went back up, to unacceptable levels. I'm still playing around with the insulin I take, trying to take as little as possible while still keeping my sugars at a healthy level. It's really hard. My sugars right now vary between the low 100s (110's at the low end) to the high 200s (270s at the high end) throughout the day. I'm playing with diet, exercise, AND insulin... it's crazy. I was dealing with highs upon waking up until this week; now I am dealing with normal fasting sugars but random peaks throughout the day. I also don't feel great when this is going on... I vary between fatigue / sluggishness and dizziness. 
• A lot of my gastrointestinal issues were cropping back up. I am pretty sure this is gluten-related. It was overwhelming to be gluten free during the holidays and I gave up on it a lot of the time, leading me to cycle between constipation and diarrhea. I would also have periodic bouts with stomach pain. My acid reflux came back last month. I have been gluten free again for a few weeks and I'm feeling much better.
• My hair started falling out again. This was something that has been happening for a few years now, and while it was alarming at times - the sheer amount of hair I would pull out every time I showered - I have been blessed with a LOT of hair to spare and I wasn't BALD, my hair was just a lot thinner. I wrote it off as a post-having kids thing and/or a diabetes thing. When it stopped happening last summer I didn't really notice... but when it started happening AGAIN it became pretty clear to me that it, too, was probably gluten related! My hair loss over the past week, now that I'm gluten free again, has been pretty minimal.
• I had more frequent headaches and bouts of fatigue over the holidays. The fatigue was nowhere near as bad as it had been at the start of 2012 but I could feel it creeping back in at times.
• And of course, my weight started creeping back up.

I'm not really doing The Blood Sugar Solution plan, per se, anymore. There are definite positive things I have taken away from it - the elimination diet and discovering how much better I feel without gluten, for one. There are others I'm not so sure about - the vast amount of supplements, for one. I've cut a lot of them out - I didn't really notice a huge difference in how I felt, and as I do more research over time, there's just so much conflicting data on what each one actually DOES and whether or not they are really effective that it's a tough call to make. I've stuck with a multivitamin, omega-3's, probiotics, and fiber supplements... and until I run out I'm going to continue taking the "Healthy Blood Sugar" supplement I picked up from Vitacost. I don't plan on buying more of it though, unless my blood sugar changes drastically when I stop taking them!

Diet wise I am, obviously, eating gluten free right now. I'm still working to find a good balance between healthy, easy, not time-consuming, appealing to me, and cost effective. It's really hard, much harder than I think food SHOULD be. I'm sure I'll expand more on this topic as time goes on. I'm trying to streamline meals as much as possible, while trying the occasional new thing to hopefully expand our repertoire a little bit.

Exercise - I'm picking that back up. Slacked a good amount over the holidays. Contemplating working my way up to my own "Biggest Loser" type exercise plan to kickstart my weight loss. I will see how that pans out for me and, of course, report in on it too.

That's pretty much it. In the grand scheme of things, we know there's no magic pills... with RARE exceptions, it's calories in, calories out. I've also come to terms a LOT more over the past year that the TYPE of calories you put in matter. I've been staunchly denying that for years, but the more I learn, and the more I experiment with my own health, the more I realize I simply have to accept it as true. I've not just accepted it, I've even made a lot of peace with that over the past year - it was really hard for me, for a long time, to say "No one should eat this food" or "I shouldn't eat this type of food". Even after it was becoming readily apparent, I still wanted to rage against the injustice of it. I'm pretty much through with, for lack of a better term, the stages of grief over food. I don't always love the restrictions but I'm not angry or in denial anymore. I focus on what I CAN eat, not what I can't.

I slip up, I pick myself up, I start over again.

2013 State Of The Weight

That weight, it just wants to keep on creeping!


My weight officially climbed back up to 223 over the holidays. My lowest point prior to was 218, so a five pound gain over the past three months. Weight loss isn't linear; even people on The Biggest Loser have weeks where they gain!

The holidays are tough, and for me the struggle begins in October - Halloween is my favorite holiday, and there are so many delicious treats that go along with it. Apple and pumpkin EVERYTHING, and all the candy. Fall is a great time to start baking too.
Thanksgiving isn't terribly hard for me - it's just one day, and we don't go to a lot of parties or anything.
December is a little tougher, with a few parties and Christmas cookies and the holiday itself.
My husband's birthday is January 1st so New Year's always brings a few indulgences too.
After struggling through October, I decided I was going to give myself a little break and just try to maintain. A five pound gain isn't the worst thing in the world. If I was at a healthy weight it wouldn't really matter at all, as long as I got back into my healthy habits after the season ended!

Overall, I lost 13.6 pounds last year. I feel better than I did at the beginning of last year too. I'm recommitted to my goals and I am going to keep moving forward! I'd like to see a lot more weight come off this year, now that I have a better handle on what works for my body.

Still, it sucks when those numbers creep up.

(Don't forget you can check out progress pictures at my weight loss Tumblr!)

Major Off-Roading

I've kind of got a little bit of this going on right now. Or at least that's how I feel.

I've been pretty off my game the past week. I haven't journaled about my diet since last Thursday, and I've definitely been half-assing the diet in that week as well. Here's what's been going on:

For starters, I have a generalized anxiety disorder. I'm not sure if I've mentioned that in this blog or not. One of the positive things I HAVE noticed is that my anxiety seems much more controlled and lessened since I started this diet. That's pretty awesome. Unfortunately, it's not completely GONE. One of the areas I've always struggled is with achieving balance in life... balance in all my goals, mostly. If I spend too much time focusing on ONE goal I start to get anxious that the others aren't being achieved. In the past I would just get overanxious, shut down, and do NOTHING. I've learned through therapy to roll with the punches (or the mood swings, if you will) a little better though, and when I feel that anxiety start to come up I have gotten much better at shifting gears. That's kind of what happened last Friday. I was starting to get really anxious because I was focusing all my time on my diet and taking care of the family, and my house was falling into massive disarray. So I took Friday to chill out a bit and focus mostly on whipping the house back into shape. I stuck to the diet pretty faithfully, I just didn't blog or journal or make complicated meals (leftovers, yay). Unfortunately this carried over into some of the other days... with not being a HUGE fan of some of the foods I have to eat on this plan, it is hard for me to scrounge up foods on the fly right now. I'm still working on building up that repertoire of easy and satisfying freezer meals, snacks, quick foods, and foods on the go. Without having those resources in place, and with 33 years of bad-food eating habits in place, it's very easy to go backwards and grab things that aren't great for me.

Another challenge: yesterday was my birthday. YAY! We went out all day on Saturday to celebrate... we hit the Bristol Renaissance Faire (one of my favorite places) and then Joe's Crab Shack for dinner. I did OK on the diet but allowed a few small cheats to sneak through the cracks. Tuesday night I had a Partylites show / birthday party at my house, and mostly stuck to the diet but cheated with corn tortilla chips and a little cheese. (I also, in a moment of weakness, bought and ate a cupcake at Jewel when I was shopping for the party.) Yesterday, my actual birthday, a friend took me out to lunch and my family took me out to dinner. I cheated with corn chips again, a little cheese, and some barbecue sauce (mmm ribs). A few cheats here and there are definitely going to add up. Though I think overall I handled the birthday landmine fairly well.

A third challenge: we ran out of food money. Eating fresh, healthy foods IS expensive, and I don't have a good handle yet on some of my money-saving food ideas. I am working on learning:

• how to buy in smaller amounts so less produce goes to waste
• how to plan my recipes (which I'm still building up!) seasonally
• how to plan my meals so that I'm using ALL the ingredients I buy (for example, if I have a recipe that uses two stalks of celery, trying to plan a few more recipes in the next couple days that use the REST of that bunch of celery I bought)

I'm not quite there yet though. It's going to take time, and I recognize that, but in the meantime I am exceeding my food budget by quite a bit. I've been subsisting on $400 a month for our family of four. That's not cutting it anymore.  For processed foods, I could coupon quite a bit and get good deals and sometimes even free food. While fresh food coupons DO exist, they are rare. We already discussed changing the budget next month to allow more food money, but for this month (until the 15th, at least) I'm down to the 'scrounge in your pantry' stage. Which isn't working incredibly well overall. I got rid of most of the bad foods but there's still a few things lurking that I may have to delve into because I just won't have any other options until next payday. I'll do the best I can.

This leads me to another challenge: I do keep some foods in the house for my kids and husband. I am learning that some foods do not tempt me and other foods, unfortunately, DO. Things I have snuck bits of in the past week include ice cream, generic Cheetos, candy, and a Twinkie I filched from my mom's house. It's like logically I know these things are bad for me but before the logic center of my mind can process a strong rebuttal, my body is already going

and then it's too late. So this is another learning process... what treats I can and can't have for them in the house while I'm struggling through this. What I'm going to do about going to my mom's house I just don't know. It's pretty much a known fact that dieting 'willpower' is a myth. 

To attribute dieting success or failure to willpower, researchers say, is to ignore the complex interaction of brain chemicals, behavioral conditioning, hormones, heredity and the powerful influence of habits. Telling an overweight person to use willpower is, in many ways, like telling a clinically depressed person to ''snap out of it.''

 I'll just keep looking for ways to fight this war inside myself until I've managed to change my brain chemicals, conditioning, hormones, etc. as best I can.

So. Anyway. There's been some backsliding. I've noticed some health backsliding as well, some of the old symptoms coming back up, and I DO NOT WANT that. This is real life, and this is a HUGE process; I'm not going to beat myself up over it. I'm just going to pick myself up and get back on track. The Blood Sugar Solution book says:

Getting and staying healthy in our modern world is a heroic feat. It is a subversive and revolutionary act. We have to navigate dangerous food landscapes, resist carefully designed temptations at every turn, fight marketing that goes right after our primitive hard-wired survival impulses, and fend off food pushers, saboteurs, and a thousand distractions online, on television, and in other media.

A HEROIC FEAT. A A revolutionary act! I like that. I enjoy a good challenge. I started journaling again today, and I'm going to count today as the official start of Week Two... which I will blog about next time!