February 12, 2005

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  This is how the dance goes –

  
  

  Three steps up and two steps back…

  
  

  When you fall, get back up and shake it off,

  
  

  One foot in front of the other,

  
  

  Three steps up and two steps back…

  
  

  Eventually I just may get there.

  
  

  

  
  

  Sigh.

  
  

  

  
  

   

  
  

  Well, this was week four of the National Body Challenge and my return to the healthy diet I did so well on last year, before the series of health challenges knocked me back down.

  
  

  In case you have been living under a rock, not paying attention, or are just plain new to reading my webjournal, last January I joined the Discovery.com National Body Challenge and followed their online diet plan with excellent results, both in my overall health and in losing weight. The best thing about it was that it was a plan that I really liked! Good food, lots of variety, five small, carefully balanced meals a day. I started out at 312 lbs, and got down to 262 in three months time.

  
  

  But then I went to the doctor to get my overall health checked out, and he sent me for a bunch of blood tests. The results were really good on the things I expected, my cholesterol levels were down to an amazing low, and I seemd to be in really good shape all around, except for one thing — they discovered I have Hashimoto’s disease, an autoimmune disease of the thyroid, which has no cure, and eventually destroys the thyroid gland. That explained so much about my long-term battle with my weight, and a lot of other symptoms I have been fighting for years. It runs in families, and was probably the cause for my mother’s thyroid problems that she battled for her entire lifetime, and I suspect also my brother’s inability to lose weight and keep it off, but he won’t go for the test.

  
  

  Although there is no cure, it can can be treated, and the solution is to go on carefully regulated levels of artificial thyroid hormones for the rest of your life. So I started taking the medication, having my blood tested every three months, and it seems that I am now on the proper dosage. But meanwhile, as my body was adapting to the switch, my appetite went through the roof, my willpower went through the floor, my emotions were all over the place, and I gained back a lot of the weight I lost.

  
  

  Then in December I went for endoscopic sinus surgery, and while I was in for that I also elected to have a uvulectomy to hopefully reduce my severe snoring (I also have sleep apnea, and the uvulectomy can sometimes be helpful for that as well) This surgery gave me one of the most severe and longest lasting sore throats I have ever experienced, and weeks of not being able to swallow without a lot of pain. I was slurping honey by the spoonful, as it was the only thing that really gave me any relief, and seemed to be helping the healing. My eating habits in general had fallen into a really bad rut, and the recovery peiod from the surgery combined with all the excesses of the holiday season put a few more pounds on.

  
  

  

  
  

  So when the National Body Challenge began again this year, I was back up to 298. Here we go again. At least I didn’t gain all the weight back, and I already knew the routine of this in2nutrition diet plan. Which wasn’t the online diet plan that Discovery.com was using this year for the National Body Challenge (momentary panic when I found that out!), but I was still able to go back to the in2nutrition website and re-activate my membership. And since my thyroid levels are now regulated artificially, that should help with the weight loss a bit as well.

  
  

  So here I am at the end of week four. My saturday morning weigh-in registered another two pounds off, for a total of 11 so far. That leaves twenty-five pounds more to get to the point I was before all hell broke loose last year. And then I can hopefully keep going from there. I would really love to begin the summer swimsuit/kayak season below 250, so I can fit in both more comfortably…

  
  

  Three steps forward, two steps back…

  
  

  …and another step forward….

  
  

  (sigh)

  
  

  

  
  

  edit: I decided to have a small celebration…a bit of “conscious cheating” one might say, since I made a conscious decision to replace my latter three meals today with some meatloaf (made with ground beef and ground turkey) about 1/2 cup of mashed potatoes for meal 3, then a little bit more meatloaf for meal 4 (a couple of hours later as I was wrapping meatloaf for freezing — I made a huge batch of 13 small “individual meatloaves” — about 9 pounds of meat — so Bernie will have them in the freezer to heat up for future meals) and finally I just had a piece of chocolate lava cake (a chocolate snack-type cake made with a gooey wet chocolate bottom and drizzled with a thin glaze instead of the regular creamy frosting top)  and a cup of tea for meal 5. I know the fat/carb/protein ratio is probably way off, and the calories may be a bit high, but I don’t think that it was that much of a splurge calorie wise. I just didn’t feel like being different tonight, I wanted to eat what Bernie was having…I made him that cake on sunday, and it had been sitting here all week tempting me, this was the last piece, I wanted to wah the dish and get it off the table, and it’s that time of the month so….

  
  

  Oh well. At least I didn’t have my regular meals plus the cake and meatloaf. I had the meatloaf and cake instead of my regular meals.

  
  

  Tomorrow it’s back to business again.

  
  

  

  
  

   

  • 8:26 pm
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