Reality Bites

About a year and a half ago I cut back on the dairy and gluten in my diet at the recommendation of a naturopath.  She looked at my medical history and my list of symptoms and said that inflammation was at the root of all my problems and that both dairy and gluten could contribute to that.  

As a general rule in the south you have a biscuit with most meals.  Even if you already have potatoes, rice, pizza, etc on your plate you should also have a couple pieces of bread.  Since both my husband and I are from the south we have proudly continued this tradition.  My inner voice screamed no when I thought about given up all my favorites.  But I was desperate for relief and tired of traditional doctors telling me that I had a number of "syndromes" which may or may not be responsive to medication (in my case no medications have been useful to date).  So I jumped into the gluten and dairy free pool with both feet.  

I rarely do anything in moderation.  The moment I hear about a new fitness craze, shoe, diet book, fashion trend, artist I immediately sign up for or buy everything that I can.  My diet no different.  So I bring a box of food to the break room at work so that I don't have the temptation in my house.  I spend $250 at the whole foods store and create a binder of limited ingredient recipes that will keep my foodie heart happy.  

I didn't want it to work but it did.  I felt better.  I slept better.  My bathroom trips were better and less frequent.  All of my syndromes improved.  I was ecstatic.  I told everyone I knew that I was on a limited ingredient diet.  I started frequenting the restaurants that could accommodate my new lifestyle.  

After about 2 months I plateaued.  My syndromes were taking over again.  I was frustrated.  So I did what any irrational, overreacting person would do.  I started bringing all the crap back in my diet. 

I had never gone 100% gluten/dairy free.  I had settled on a place where about 60-75% of what I ate was on my diet.  But once I stopped feeling good I stopped monitoring what I ate.  I stopped trying.  Of course then I had to tell everyone that I had only had moderate success with my limited ingredient diet so I was going back to my old ways.  

A rational person would have visited their medical doctor and tried some of those prescriptions again to see if they worked better when combined with a limited ingredient diet.  Or maybe follow up with the naturopath to see if there were supplements or additional changes that she recommended.  Hell, maybe even checked out an online community and checked for tips from other folks suffering from the same problems.    

Fast forward to a few months later.  My husband and I went on a trip to a bed and breakfast in Vermont.  The trip was amazing.  It was a foodie's dream vacation.  Amazing dishes that felt indulgent and healthy at the same time.  The chef at the bed and breakfast made all of her food from locally sourced ingredients.  Most of the restaurants that we visited did the same.  I was eating gluten free without effort because it was everywhere.  There were no dairy free options in Vermont but there was an amazing selection of organic/raw options.  So of course you know what happened:  I felt better.  I slept better. My bathroom trips were better and less frequent.

So here I am again.  With a pantry full of selections from the whole foods store and my trusty recipe binder dusted off.  Just in time for Christmas and the New Year I am getting back on the wagon.  Not everyone quits smoking the first time but eventually it usually takes.  So here goes nothing.  

    

New Life Resolutions

There used to be this annoying TV commercial about advertising that had the tag line " Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results is the definition of insanity" or something like that.  I think it was to encourage people to stop advertising in the yellow pages and start advertising on the Internet.  When I am struggling at different points in my life I often think of this quote. 

Why is my 5K time not getting faster?  Because I'm not training any differently. 

Why am I not losing weight?  Because I'm not eating any differently.

Why aren't my pets behavioral problems getting better?  Because I'm not doing anything differently.

I could go on and on.  My professional life.  My personal life.  There are a number of things that I wish were better but if I'm just sitting here wishing and whining I'm not going to make any progress.  It seems like every January people are filled with promise that they are going to turn their lives around.  They gyms are packed.  Everyone is going to run a marathon, lose 10 lbs, spend more time with their families, etc.  And then 6 weeks later their lives return back to normal and they join the majority of the world who fail on their New Year's Resolutions.  

What would it take to be in the minority?  To be one of those people who sets a goal, has discipline and then actually achieves those goals.  You've seen those people- the one's who lose 100 lbs, run a marathon, quit their soul crushing jobs and start their own business.  These people exist.  

So I'm not going to say these are my New Year's Resolutions because these are life changes that I need to make.  To be a happier, healthier, more productive human being and someone that I am proud to be.  I have made improvements in a lot of areas of my life over the past few years and I am proud of those improvements.  I am a much better person than I used to be but there are a still lot of things that I need to change. 

I could go on for pages about every area of my life that I want to change.  I'm just going to focus on one at a time.  I'm going to try to ask myself, when making decisions: "Is this a decision that will help me meet my goal?  I am going to feel better or worse about myself at the end of the day?"

My first resolution is to write more.  I have been keeping a journal since I was three years old.  I feel better when I write.  I find that I am less combative (and less of a conversation hog) when I write.  I have become pretty good about writing in my journal at the end of the day to clear my head before I try to sleep.  I would like to start blogging in the morning.  I wake up at least an hour before my husband.  That needs to be my zen time.  And so it begins.   

The Fit Fat Girl

I have prided myself on defying people's assumptions about what a fit person looked like. But, as my waist line has expanded, I recognize that at this point I'm not being honest with myself. It's one thing to be a thick size 12 (like I once was) but I'm not that girl any more. A lot of people treat me like I'm still that girl but all that does is feed my ego and allow me to keep lying to myself.

I get offended when people assume that I'm a walker instead of a runner because of my size but realistically I'm not the picture of fitness and health right now. As I get more involved in Zumba, I love seeing instructors of all shapes and sizes. I recognize that these people are athletes and that they are fit because they're spending several hours a week teaching. But I also recognize that these people aren't as healthy as they could be.

I'm not ever going to be a skinny girl and I wouldn't want to be. But I would love to be that thick size 12 again. I want to get rid of my belly and tone up my body. I haven't been able to run as much during the past few months because I've been having so many joint problems. I know these joint problems are a direct result of my weight gain.

I am currently sitting in a hotel room 5 hours away from home. I have another day of meetings and catered meals ahead of me. I chose to hang out with my co-workers last night and enjoy dinner and drinks on the boss instead of working out. Today is looking like more of the same. I'm feeling pretty gluttonous right now.

My goal is to learn to not over-do the unlimited food and drink that comes with this job and to make time to get my fitness in even when I'm traveling. Tomorrow is a new day. I'm going to push myself harder because I know what I'm capable of when I commit to something.

Me and My Health

Last January at my annual physical the nurse mentioned that my blood pressure was elevated. She said it could be the stress of coming to the doctor but that I should look at it.

In September I had a really bad sinus infection. When the doctor took my vital signs she told me that my blood pressure was a little high and that I should keep an eye on it. She said it could be the medicine the allergy medicine that I was taking but, with my family history of diabetes and hypertension, I should be careful about what I take. This freaked me out. I figured that two warnings was all I needed. I bought a blood pressure cuff so I could measure my readings at home and track my progress as I lost weight.

The findings weren't great. My blood pressure was as high as 145/103 which definitely put me in the hypertensive category. My husband has a similar family history as mine and started tracking his readings as well. His blood pressure wasn't as high as mine but it was definitely wasn't ideal.

My husband and I do not work out consistently. There have been times, when training for a big race, when we run 25-20 miles in a week. We have also gone several weeks without running or going to the gym. Consistency is our biggest problem. I often worry that we won't get serious about our health until one of develops diabetes or heart disease.

In the past 11 weeks I have lost 8 pounds. I didn't get really serious about working out until 3-4 weeks ago when I was preparing to teach zumba. I haven't run at all during this time because of some nagging knee and ankle problems but today I got my new running shoes in the mail and I plan to hit the treadmill either tonight or tomorrow. I also will start lifting weights again so I'm not so prone to injury. Getting back into doing yoga regularly will also help with my injuries.

My husband has lost 6 pounds during this same time period. He hasn't worked out much during this time but he has gotten better about not letting himself indulge in all the junk food that is available to him at work. He plans to cut back on his work hours (from 40 hours to 32 hours) for the next month so he can figure out ways to fit working out and studying into his schedule. I am confident that once he establishes a routine he will be able to maintain it. Before we got together, my husband worked 50-60 hours a week and still found time to run after work three times a week. No, he didn't have a wife, two dogs and a cat at that time but he was married to drinking at the bars with his friends...

Since I've been tracking my blood pressure I was prepared to leave the doctor's office today with a prescription to help reduce my blood pressure. Imagine my surprise when the nurse told me my blood pressure was 110/68 (perfect) and that the wrist blood pressure cuff that we were using was completely inaccurate. Part of me is aggravated that we spent money on such a piece of crap. At the same time I don't know if I would have jumped back into fitness with such enthusiasm if I didn't think I was on the fast track to hypertension like the rest of my family.

The doctor gave me a referral to see a dietitian to help me plan my meals better and with a sleep specialist to try to get me into a better sleep pattern which could be contributing to my inactive metabolism. I am looking to teach Zumba 5 days a week and get back to being the serious athlete that I once was. I want my husband and I to be that fit couple that we always envy.

Where is that Wagon?

So in the past month, I've put down my dog, lost my grandmother and lost another acquaintance to suicide. Before this happened, I had already fallen off the health and fitness wagon when I was a bridesmaid in yet another wedding. But throughout all of this tragedy, I have really let myself go.

I am torn between being one of those crazy chicks that works out all the time and can eat whatever she wants (I used to be her) and making serious changes to my diet so that moderate exercise will be enough to keep me at a healthy weight (did that with nutrisystem for a couple months). Yet another death by diabetes in my family reminded me that while I'm relatively healthy now, I'm obese and at risk for getting really sick if I don't stop this before I get completely out of control.

I would like to find a happy balance between psycho workout chick and rabbit food but I'm not sure if it exists to me. I've always been an all or nothing girl and pushed myself to unbelievable limits when I was feeling healthy or wallowed in self pity for weeks when I wasn't. When I have sought out professional help in the past, I have faced horrible doctors who made me feel even worse about myself.

Of course I know there are great doctors out there and that I could have found another specialist who might have helped me. But in true me fashion I wrote off getting any professional help because of how crappy the help was when I tried in the past.

My husband is very supportive of me and wants me to get fit. He also has a family history of diabetes and admits that he could probably stand to lose a few pounds as well. But he is 6'4" tall and is in pretty good shape. 30 extra pounds on him doesn't really show that much. On me, it's my size 16 pants which were too tight for me this morning but fit great last year.

I have been lucky that I have maintained a lot of my muscle tone because of how much I worked out in the past. I don't even want to think about how fat I would be if this were not the case.

I think I'm at the point where I need to give myself an ultimatum: get your shit together by this date and if you don't see a change, you need help. I've told this to my husband and he agrees. So now I'm just trying to figure out exactly what my plan is so I can pull it all together. I need something of a regimented schedule but not too strict. I need a reward system in place but it has to be for little accomplishments and not just the big ones. I think I'm just going to have to try to figure this out as I go along.

I don't want to put something on paper without really thinking about what I want to achieve in the end. Another post is coming once I figure all this out...

Week Two on the Wagon

Had another pretty good week. It's not quite over yet but I'm confident that I'm going to get one more run and 15 more minutes of strength training in today to meet my workout goals for the week. This week I struggled with eating the right things. For the most part, I have been better about eating a variety foods and not loading up on the carbs every time I'm hungry. I always feel better when I eat better but that doesn't mean there weren't a couple of slip ups.

I have been craving Chinese food for weeks so I picked up take out on my way home from work Wednesday night. The best thing about Chinese take out is that there is always enough food for at least 3 meals because the portions are so large. Thursday afternoon I piled my plate high with leftover fried rice and sesame chicken for a late lunch before heading to the movies with my husband. I had a splitting headache shortly after I finished eating (that's always a bad sign). When we went to the movies we split a medium soda and pretzel bites. That's right, I added more carbs to my body when I was already feeling crappy. Needless to say, I was nodding off a few minutes into the movie; I probably slept through about 45 minutes of a 90 minute movie. My headache was still there after the movie and my neck was killing me from nodding off. On top of that there is the embarrassment from falling asleep during the movie and the wasted money on a movie ticket for a movie that I'll have to rent when it comes out on DVD.

You would think this incident would remind me of why I shouldn't eat like that but this has happened to me at least hundred times and I obviously still haven't learned my lesson. All I had to do was have half the portion of Chinese food and eat some veggies or fruit with my meal and I would have felt okay. But the food craving always leads to overeating rather than just satisfying my hunger. It doesn't make any sense because the less I eat each day, the longer the leftovers last. But my brain doesn't work that way. Sure enough this morning I put myself in a food coma and ended up taking a 2 hour nap. Granted, I rarely get enough sleep at night and a two hour nap is probably something that I needed but the food coma nap is not refreshing. You wake up feeling hung over and achy and rarely do you feel rested.

So my goal for this week is to think before I eat. It sounds simple but for me its a big deal. I need to remember how horrible I will feel if I eat an entire plate of pasta vs. saving half of it for my lunch the next day. I also have to accept that my husband doesn't have Insulin Resistance Syndrome and he can eat carbs until the cows come home without having any negative side effects. Just because we eat our meals together doesn't mean that I have to eat exactly as much as he does. He is 10 inches taller than me and 20 lbs heavier. Unless I want to look like him, I shouldn't eat like him.

Insulin Resistance Syndrome

According to Web MD, insulin resistance is a condition in which the body produces insulin but does not use it properly. The body’s digestive system breaks food down into glucose, which then travels in the bloodstream to cells throughout the body. When people are insulin resistant, their muscle, fat, and liver cells do not respond properly to insulin. As a result, their bodies need more insulin to help glucose enter cells. Insulin resistance increases the chance of developing type 2 diabetes and heart disease.

So what does all this medical crap mean? It means that I fall asleep after eating a lot of carbs. Whether I'm standing up, at a movie or fully engaged in a conversation, my blood sugar spikes and then crashes dramatically. It means that I will develop type 2 diabetes and all the problems that come with it (like 80% of my extended family) if I don't make some serious lifestyle changes. It seems unfair that eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich is enough to literally put me in a food coma. But it also seems stupid that I'm not willing to eat half of a sandwich and have a salad with it and I won't feel like crap.

The bottom line is that my weight has fluctuated between 198-210 lbs for the past couple years. I am 5'6" tall so that puts me in the obese category. I have gotten down to 193 lbs twice in this time but I have not been able to keep it off. I been a runner since grade school and I'm proud to say that I have kept that up despite gaining weight. But my joints are suffering from the excess weight, not to mention my finishing times.

What I need to do is get down to 185 lbs to be healthier. Ideally, I could get down to 165-175 lbs but I'm just setting small goals for now. I also need to get my waist down to 35 inches or less (I hover around 40-41" right now) and my waist to hip ratio to 0.7 or less (it's 0.87 right now). I'm sick of being embarrassed about my weight and having to buy new clothes every year. They say that after 6 weeks on an exercise/diet regiment, your body will embrace the new program and it will become a habit. It also takes this long for your metabolism to start working again if you've destroyed yours, like I have, through bad lifestyle choices.

So I start again tomorrow. For the umpteenth time, I am trying to get a handle on my life. My goal for this week is to run 4 times, do 45 minutes of strength training, 90 minutes of yoga or pilates and one wild card workout. This may seem like a lot but in my prime I was working out 2+ hours a day during the week and 3-4 hours a day on the weekend. I also have a flex time schedule which means that I might spend 10 hours a week in a office and the rest of the time on my own so this should be difficult.

Maybe I can get my husband on board this time too. But the bottom line is that I have to do this for me, regardless of what he's doing.

Running From My Family History

Most of my girl friends over the years have been thick. I met most of them through sports so while most of us needed to lose a few pounds we were all very athletic and pretty healthy. Over the years we have all let ourselves go gaining any where from 20-120 lbs. There are various excuses (some legitimate but most not) for our weight gain but the bottom line is that we aren't working as hard as we used to even though we don't want to admit it. At this point we are set in our ways and don't want to stop eating wings every Thursday night even though we're no longer running 20 miles a week. But we still expect to drop the weight that it took us years to gain in a matter of weeks with minimal effort.

Recently, three of my girlfriends figured it out and have been able to drop the weight due to major life events. Two to get ready for their weddings and one because the doctor wouldn't perform fertility treatments until she lost weight. I wish that I was as noble as them but my main motivation is completely shallow: I don't want to be the fat friend. I don't want to stick out in pictures. I want to wear the sexy clothes that I used to wear when we went out dancing and not the flaw-hiding conservative clothes I'm wearing now. I want people to tell me how good I look and ask if I've lost weight. I want to open my closet and fit everything in it. I want to look like a runner and not have people look at me like I don't belong when I line up for road races. I guess I don't want to stick out because I'm fat but I do want to be noticed for being fit.

I come from a long line of fat people. Almost everyone in my family becomes morbidly obese once they reach a certain age. They all have diabetes and high blood sugar and eventually die from weight-related illnesses. They are not active. Every event whether happy or sad is commemorated with a large table of deep fried food. You are insulted if you are too fat and equally insulted if you are too skinny. My mother was skinny her whole life and gained weight when my father became ill. All the comments from my family were still negative they just shifted from skinny comments to fat comments. She has started to lose the weight so of course the attempts at sabotage through mean comments have started again. Literally, the first thing out of a lot of my relatives mouth is "Wow you've gained weight" or "Damn your so skinny why don't you eat" and not the normal hello that most people would find appropriate. It's no wonder we all have weight and self esteem issues.

Me, my mom and two of my cousins are working to try and be the exception to the rule. We are trying to live long productive lives at healthy weights. When we go to family functions we have to learn to be strong enough to ignore their comments. We cannot let their negativity derail us because, realistically, that's what they want. They want us to be just like them. If we're all fat then it must be okay. I can't tell you how many times I've been told that "we" (black people or people from the south) are just naturally thicker. There is nothing natural about the 4000 calories that most of us take in at a family dinner or my 32 year old cousin being put on a 1200 calorie a day diet to keep her from developing type 2 diabetes.

While I have lost 15 pounds so far on my weight loss journey, I have been struggling for the past month. I have found myself slipping back into my old habits and giving myself permission to slack. I let myself get cocky because the 15 pounds came off in 10 weeks. But the fact that no additional weight has come off in the past 5 weeks and the fluctuation in the scale by 2-3 pounds on an off week is the wake up call that I need. I will have issues with food for the rest of my life. I will always need to be careful with what I eat because of my family history. I can never go back to eating whatever I want every day. I have to care enough about myself to try harder and stick with it.

Realistically, I don't think I can lose the 40-50 lbs that would put me in the ideal weight range for my height. I think those charts are not specific enough. Every women that is 5'6" does not need to weigh 145 lbs. We are all built differently. I haven't weighed that much since I graduated from high school and I had very little muscle tone then and injured myself frequently. I do think I can lose another 20-30 lbs and get my body fat down into a healthier range. Am I going to run 20 miles a week and do karate 4 days a week like I did at my peak? Of course not. But I can do a lot more than I'm doing now.

For now, I will be walking very briskly from my family history and working to run from it. I refuse to spend another year of my life being fat and feeling bad about myself. I will not continue to hold on to clothes that I haven't been able to wear for years or that I have never taken the tags off. When I open my closet all of the clothes will be in my size, whatever it is at that point. I will be whoever I am by the end of this year. I just hope that person looks a lot more like she did 5 years ago and not like the person that I see today.

Getting Old Is Depressing

I am still happily in my early thirties and know I have a lot of life to live. But as I watch the older folks around me go through difficult times it makes me sad. I know that some of the problems people experience with old age could be avoided if they lead a healthier lifestyle when they were younger. But you can also lead a very healthy life and still end up with Alzheimer's, Osteoporosis, etc. It's just not fair!

My neighbor Steve is a very nice man. He is in his late 80's if not into his 90's. Him and his wife have lived in their house for the better part of their adult life. They live alone and have a home health care nurse stop by for a few hours every day and their adult children visit in the evenings. Steve's wife had a stroke and has trouble getting around and speaking. I'm not sure what is wrong with Steve but we have seen an ambulance take him away several times. He walks very slowly and has slurred speech but seems to get by okay.

Steve is the kind of guy that worked his entire life and is not dealing well with retirement. There have been a a few times where my husband or I witnessed Steve picking up something too heavy for him or saw him trying to shovel his walkway and ran over to stop him and offer our assistance. He drives his boat-sized Buick around the corner to the drug store or from the driveway in front of his house to the back of his house at least once a day. I worry every time he gets in the car because he drives very slowly and I'm guessing he's not supposed to drive very far, if at all. He walks to his mailbox several times a day. I'm not sure what else he's looking for between the newspaper and the mail delivery but obviously he is bored. I think that Steve and his wife should be in an assisted living facility. He needs to be somewhere where they can provide constant supervision but where he can still live relatively independently. A day full of structured activities would add some excitement to his life.

I'm sure his children have discussed putting Steve and his wife in a facility. I'm sure the doctors have recommended it but Steve has refused. We have been through the same thing with my grandmother for several years. My grandmother has diabetes and cataracts and a number of other conditions related to these two diseases. We have had to cut vacations short to rush her to the hospital. She has blacked out while walking to a public restroom. She has fallen when walking around the house. But no matter what happens my uncle always rationalizes why she doesn't need to be in a home despite the protests from my mother, her older brother and all of us grand kids.

Truth be told, my grandmother is a very nasty woman. She has years of pent up anger and frustration from the hard childhood that she went through and then the struggles of raising three children on her own. She is quite racist and while she doesn't usually say mean things to peoples faces, her behavior makes it clear how she feels. My grandmother is what we call an equal opportunity racist. She hates white people, Asian people, African people, black people who are too dark and of course, black people who are too light. She is one of 14 children with the skin tones ranging from "could pass for white" to "Black African in the sun all day black". She has no problem spewing her venom at members of her own family in addition to complete strangers no matter how much they are trying to help her. I think this is why my relatives have given up. It's easier to let her do what she wants rather than argue with her. At this point, my mother thinks that its too late to get my grandmother into a home because she's in her late 80's and probably won't live for too much longer so why add the stress of moving.

My grandmother has lost more than half of her siblings. I can't imagine watching all of my friends and family die and then waiting for my turn. You would think that going through all this would make her value the time that she has left but of course that's not the case. Her youngest sister died this past weekend. Immediately after telling me the news my grandmother started complaining about how her next youngest sister was going to try to steal the spotlight at the funeral by singing at the church. She did this at one of her brother's funerals last year and my grandmother still complains about how she thinks she's better than everyone else because she's light-skinned and how everyone gives her so much attention that she doesn't deserve. Sigh. All I can do is listen to these rants because as much as I don't enjoy talking to my grandmother on the phone, I know there will come a time when she is not here and I should try to keep in touch with her so I don't have any regrets when she passes away.

Here in upstate New York we have a large elderly community. A month doesn't go by without a car accident caused by an elderly person going the wrong way on the highway or blowing a traffic signal and killing themselves and other innocent people. I know that there are a lot of older people who are in great shape who can still get around and work without assistance but they are the exception for sure. I cringe at the thought of a Big Brother type of government that takes away driver's licenses when you reach a certain age or forces assisted living but I don't think there would be anything wrong with making people retest every 5 years once they get to be a certain age. I think that emphasizing that people set up an account for "elderly living" in addition to life insurance to cover assisted living, home nursing care and all the other things that we might need in the last 10-30 years of our lives.

I hope to be one of the healthy old people that I see running at the park, working at Walmart and tending to their meticulously well kept lawns. But I know that even if I'm not, that I will make sure that my husband and I have planned for the worst so that our families and neighbors don't have to worry about taking care of us.