Desperate and stumbled upon exercise?

My wake up call made me know that I needed to do something desperately and stop this messing around. I didn't have another 20 years to try and emotionally figure out what I was doing wrong. So I went to a doctor to get gastric bypass surgery. My insurance required a bunch of tests that basically took a year to complete. I guess they want you to want it bad enough to stick with the goal through a year's worth of hoops to jump through. Well I was glad for this eventually but not yet.

I did the swallow test, some barium swallowing thing, a psych eval, a sleep study, visited my doctor X number of times in X months with chart notes all talking about my weight problem. Then the last step was to lose 5% of my weight and then my insurance would approve my surgery. I accidentally lost 12% of my weight. This caused my insurance to deny my request because by their standards apparently I can lose the weight. Well I knew I could lose 50 lbs pretty easily...I had done it many times in 20 years....my problem was losing more than that and then keeping it off. I was looking for the final motivation to make it to my goal and pain is a great motivator for me. I figured after gastric bypass you get sick if you eat the wrong foods and that sickness would cause me to not even try to get away with it cause I hate pain and sickness. Now I had a choice to make. Gain 20 lbs back or try to lose the weight this one last time on my own. Since I had already lost 30 lbs I was feeling pretty motivated and so I went for it. Hallelujah, thank God I decided that.

This little tiny voice inside me would argue the logic of my desire for gastric bypass. It would say, "If you are willing to make this lifelong commitment with this surgery that will forever change the way your body works and will forever change what you should be putting into it, why not just commit to yourself to eat differently without altering your body"? Yes, I would argue with the little voice - "I can't do it obviously or else I would have already. I can alter my eating for a while then something happens and I can't anymore....THAT is what I need to figure out".

I found this great little "bootcamp" run by a couple women in my town where they would work your butt off and it was a fun little group. It helped me to show up for a "social hour" of sorts and I could compete with the other girls (yes, competition is a big motivator for me too). Their bootcamps would run in 6 week cycles and over the course of 3 cycles I actually saw through the fitness tests and through the daily moves that I was getting stronger. I remember the night I was taking a shower and I slipped a little bit and caught myself easily without using my hands. It dawned on me that I wasn't afraid of falling in the shower anymore! I had a strong enough core to just stabilize myself! Wow, I was strong! Well this planted a little seed inside me because I loved being strong and able. I couldn't believe that I was but I loved it!

The part of this bootcamp that was frustrating for me was that there wasn't any real guidance with eating. I had a natural compass that said "You are working your butt off each week, you're not putting crap in your body"! But aside from that, I was choosing what to eat based on my personal desire....standing in front of the fridge and asking myself, "Hmmm, what do I want". I was tracking my food on a website that tallied up your calorie intake and broke it down into fat, protein, carbs and would track your sugar and vitamins if you wanted it to. That was helpful but still not really providing guidance. It had a calculation where you told it your goals and how active you are and it would spit out a number of calories you should be striving for each day. That was great but still....that's not really guidance. What frustrated me was that some days I'd have enough energy to work out but some days I wouldn't. I was drinking a little "energy booster" drink before working out to get me all pumped up but even then I'd feel a crash during the class and have to use my "willpower" to get through. There was that feeling again - I hate working out - I hate having to rely on my thinking to make me do this thing that I didn't feel good doing. I liked the result of doing it...the getting stronger part...so I guess I'd just have to focus on that (more mental weight loss which always fails). The other problem I was having was that I wasn't seeing consistent results either on a scale or with a tape measure. I saw some results but not consistently. Nothing that told me that I WILL reach my goal, this is the formula to do it, and this is about how long it will take you. If I had that, I would know that what I was doing was the right thing! You know? It's like I needed validation that what I was doing worked for my body and hypothyroidism didn't matter. I mean heck, I take my meds everyday and my blood levels were stable so that means I SHOULD be able to do this, right?

Oh well...what could I do? I guess I'd have to read and read and ask and keeping seeking the right answers to my questions: How do I know if I'm eating the right things? How do I know if this is the right calorie intake? I hear that when you workout this intensely you should eat more calories? Am I undereating? What am I doing wrong that I'm not getting consistent results?

Oh well, I guess I'd just have to sustain this mental pushing and dragging my butt to the bootcamps because at least I was headed in the right direction and my heart was healthier, right? There was that :/

Life Changing Events and a Wake Up Call

My husband was deployed to Afghanistan in 2009. I was to hold down the fort and raise our little toddler alone while he went to combat. I didn't know what he was doing there, everything was very hush-hush. When he came home our life turned completely upside down and the smart, capable, bread-winner, protector, best friend, husband that left for Afghanistan wasn't who came home. His limbs were all there but his brain, his personality, and his physical abilities were all different. I became the caregiver and advocate for my disabled husband would now function more like an elderly dementia patient. We had no money, no help, no information, no guidance, and no support. I was given a broken husband and expected to move on with life.

I write a blog about my husband, his experience, and our experience together but this one won't focus on all that. I'll skip ahead to say that what it took to get the care my husband needed and the benefits my husband had earned by sacrificing his future took every ounce of my being. I work great under pressure, I am a tenacious fighter for justice, and I can ignore my own needs better than anyone I know! And so I took a back seat and my husband and family became first!

During this journey, I came to the realization that if anything were to happen to me, my husband would have to be placed in a home or die. My didn't know what would happen to our little boy. The outlook was a horrible one and all that had to happen was for me to get cancer, diabetes, a heart attack, or God forbid some unforeseen accident. While I have no control over accidents, I have some control over how healthy I am and what quality my body is in. For years of fighting for my husband's needs and putting myself on the back burner, I had gained all my weight back to the heaviest I'd been, 256 lbs. Worse than that number, my advocating work was all done by computer and phone while sitting on my big, growing butt. I was 40 years old and my body was hurting from lack of care, complete neglect of every aspect of it, and basically I was just slowly killing myself.

When I realized that I couldn't do this to myself anymore, it was not fair to my husband or my children. Here I was selflessly giving all of me to everyone I loved but to myself I was being completely selfish. I really wasn't thinking of them at all because I was just helping my body become a diseased, broken, dying body even sooner than it needed to be. This was my wake up call!