I admit I have been struggling a bit lately with my diet…..for the last month, at least, maybe more. The scale hasn’t budged, although I continue to notice my body changing. My shoulders are starting to emerge. There is a definite…..”space” in my arms and thighs between the muscle and the fat and extra skin that continues to hang there. I try to not be obsessed about it, to not study my body in the mirror and analyze what I see. It is what it is and I have very little control over it. I’m already doing what I can do…obsessing over the result of my work is not helpful. Easy to say, not so easy to do.
I stopped going to the lifestyle manager I started to see in February. I felt that perhaps he didn’t entirely understand the dietary needs of a bariatric patient….that he’s used to dealing with bodybuilders. There is some crossover…nutrition is nutrition. Clean eating is clean eating. But weight loss surgery patients do have some unique needs. More importantly, I could not afford him, my trainer and my gym membership so something had to go. And I’m not giving up my trainer or gym membership.
Sadly I have also cut nuts out of my diet. I had been eating nuts as a snack every day. I love them. Even though they are good for you and the perfect food, I just cannot handle them right now. They are so high in calories, and go down so easily that I found I was just consuming way too many calories by eating them on a daily basis. I’m much better off with cottage cheese as a snack. No one binges on cottage cheese.
Many bariatric patients struggle with hair loss a few months after surgery and I am now at that point. I am seriously worried about how much hair I’m losing. There’s hair everywhere I go…in the shower drain, in the sink, on the floor, all over my bed, on my desk at work, the whole garbage can in the bathroom is filled with my hair…. every time I brush my hair, my brush is full of hair; every time I touch my head, a handful of hair comes out; it’s everywhere, and I am trying to not freak out about it but I wonder how much I can lose before it will start to show.
I should not be freaking out. I have already experienced this when I had my
lap band. And I knew it would happen again. And, if I didn’t talk about it, no one would
even know because, lucky for me, my hair is so insanely thick that I can afford
to lose some hair. But still, it is
pretty scary. Logically, I know it will
stop sometime. But I worry it won’t.
I’m also struggling with comparing myself to
other weight loss surgery patients. I
know I should not, but there are people who had surgery at the same time as me
who have already lost 100 pounds. I’m
nowhere near that yet. I tell myself
that I’m feeling great and making choices that have impacted how fast I would
lose weight, and I did that intentionally…so how can I now compare myself to
other people who made different choices?
Everything everyone else does just looks so easy. You don’t get a sense of other people’s
personal struggles, especially if they don’t talk about it. So I wish people would talk about it. One thing I do know for sure is my sleeve honeymoon period – that time after surgery when you feel the most restriction, when you struggle to consume enough calories and protein to sustain life, when your new stomach probably won’t tolerate many different foods – was very short. Almost as soon as I came off my liquid diet, I could eat anything. My stomach tolerates everything. I definitely get full much quicker than I did before surgery and I don’t get hungry as often, and it’s wonderful to actually experience feelings of “fullness” and “hunger”…….but I absolutely need to track my food every single meal otherwise I could easily eat 3000 calories/day even with the sleeve. I have learned that if I eat over 1000 calories/day, even though I am working out several times a week, I am probably not going to lose (or gain) any weight that week. Right now that seems to be my maintenance number. I really like SparkPeople.com for tracking my food.
So I make sure I eat less than 1000 calories a day and I don’t stare at my body too much and I just accept the hair falling out as a fact that I can do nothing about and I don’t interact with other weight loss surgery patients when I’m feeling insecure. I just go with the flow. The old Laura never would have been so compliant, but something I said in one of my previous posts stuck with me: I need to get out of my own way.
This means not fighting everything and everyone, including myself. I’ve always been an impulsive person. But I have also always let fear paralyze me. And I tend to make a decision, act on it and then do something completely stupid to mess it all up. At this point of my life, my challenge is to make thoughtful decisions that will get me where I want to be, and also not let fear block me from doing things that are scary but might be good for me. I need to trust my instincts and not do something stupid that will cause me to self-destruct once I have made a decision. I need to focus my energy where it will do me the most good and when I recognize fear or self-destruction, or impulsivity, I need to just step around it and keep moving on.
This idea of not fighting myself, of getting out of my own way, has to lead to some interesting results. For example, as a testament to my overblown, recently re-found confidence, I offer this photographic evidence:
This, my friends, is my “racing” number for the JP Morgan Corporate Challenge. Yes, I, Laura Lea Dennis, former goth girl, “I’m too cool to exercise” couch potato and the girl who would not walk around the block to save her life, have signed up to stroll (not race) through the Corporate Challenge. 3.5 miles. 5K. Happening today. At 7pm.
I don’t know who I think I am signing up for a 5K. People don’t usually do this kind of stuff until after they’ve reached their goal weight. It’s a common goal to strive for among WLS patients…..1 year post op, lost 100% of my excess weight so I think I’ll do a 5K to show myself and everyone else how far I’ve come.
But not me.
No….I’m not even 5 months post op, have lost 34% of my excess weight, and
am still not even close to being fit. You
probably can’t even see how far I’ve come yet.
If I squint, I can barely see how far I’ve come. But a couple weeks ago the idea popped into
my head that I should do it now…..to hell with waiting. My company participates every year. At the
very last minute, when the deadline for registering was upon me, I registered
and that was it. There was no time to
back out.
For the past three weeks, there has been a voice
in my head throwing a temper tantrum and screaming at me, “WHAT ARE YOU
DOING!??”…but I pretty much just ignore that voice. Every once in a while, I’ll go…”what AM I
doing?” But I’m doing it anyway. I’m doing it.I have no idea if I can actually do it. The longest distance I’ve walked on the treadmill at the gym so far has been 2 miles and it took me 45 minutes. So I’ll probably be the last of 10,000 people who crosses the finish line but all I care about is that I do in fact cross the finish line.
Two weekends ago I went to my cousin’s wedding in New York City. I’ve lost enough weight that I feel pretty good. But I grossly overestimate what I am actually physically capable of most of the time. So I headed to New York thinking I could conquer the city and do a million things while I was there. I couldn’t do a million things. But I could get a new dress and shoes that I liked, go to the wedding, have a great time, walk to the subway, the train, the hotel, stand around schmoozing at the wedding, and also do 10 other things, but not a million. And I had a fantastic weekend and I’m glad I went.
Late Saturday night while I was there, I was
flipping through channels on TV and happened across the movie “My Cousin Vinny”…just
starting. Some of you may recall that I
mentioned in a previous post that this movie was on TV while I was being raped
in 1994. I had never seen it before that
but I recognized Marisa Tomei’s and Joe Pesci’s voices and focused on them
until it was over. Afterwards, I found
out what movie it was so I could avoid it like the plague. I refused to watch it. I left
a party once because everyone at the party wanted to watch it.
In my hotel, I was presented with the
opportunity to watch it and I didn’t think about it….I just started
watching. And I kept watching. I even laughed a few times. The voice in my
head kept screaming, “QUICK, TURN IT OFF NOW!”, but again, I just ignored the
voice. It was a pretty good movie. I did not burst into flames and I did not
melt into a puddle of flashbacks. I was
fine. It’s just a movie. I went to bed afterwards and woke up the next
day just like every other day. My life
went on.My neighbor Pat has been going through her own journey of sorts since her husband Harold died last July. A couple weeks ago she talked to me about how she always wanted to try horseback riding…she has never done it before. I think I have mentioned before that getting back on a horse is one of my goals. So I mentioned this to Pat and the idea of our doing it together was born. She is going to wait for me to be ready and then we’ll go riding at a farm owned by friends of hers. I think September has a nice ring to it. (I just realized we didn’t talk about English/Western riding and I have no idea which one she meant. I have no idea how to ride Western style…only English. No matter…I’ll do it anyway.)
Granted, the riding thing hasn’t actually happened yet, but just the very idea of riding again makes me positively giddy. I just know this is going to be another one of those things where the voice in my head is screaming and I just ignore it and I’m ready to do it much sooner than I thought I would be.
I have started to nullify the idea that unless I get down to a certain weight, I can’t do the things I want to do. I’m much much more willing to try. I’m starting to realize that I know how to make myself happy. I can do it right now….I don’t have to be miserable until I lose weight. Being overweight is not a punishment I need to bestow on myself. Or rather, denying myself the things that give me pleasure because I am overweight is not a punishment I need to bestow on myself. I can live a whole life and be happy right now. I owe it to myself to be happy right now.
So those are some of the things that have been happening by me simply just getting out of my own way.
In other news, the only response I’ve had to
the posters about Felix so far – the ones I posted on the street by my gym - has been one phone call from a woman who said she
found a dead cat that looked just like Felix in her garage in March. Obviously she doesn’t have the cat anymore so
I can’t confirm one way or another. She
swears this cat looked just like Felix but many people have said that about
many cats in the last year…and they are not wrong.
However, the cat I saw a couple weeks ago was
clearly not the one who died in this woman’s garage. My trainer mentioned a couple nights ago that
she saw a cat that could be mine just a few nights ago behind the gym. So my hopes are still high. Another pretty exciting thing for me has been starting to take care of other areas of my health. Sorry for the overshare, but hey, that's what a blog is for! I have a new doctor and one of the first things she did was take me off Metformin (which I was taking for PCOS) and put me back on the Pill instead. This makes me happy for multiple reasons, not the least of which is the Pill is a LOT smaller than Metformin. You probably think the size of a pill makes no difference but let me tell you, for me it does. Taking my meds every day is like a meal in and of itself. Because of my sleeve and the number of pills I take, I am completely full by the time I have finished taking them all.
If you saw my morning pill-taking routine, you’d swear I am an 80 year old woman on the verge of death with only medicine keeping her alive. I’ve got one of those ridiculous plastic daily pill dispensers and if I don’t use it, I sometimes forget to take my vitamins. I have 8 different medications I take every single day….almost all of them are vitamin supplements. Annoyingly, the FDA is so messed up that the 5mg Folic Acid tiny tiny tiny pill I used to take in Canada is not available in the US. Since I moved to the States, I have to take 5 giant 1mg Folic Acid pills every day (which are ¾ sugar)…so it’s actually 15 pills I need to take every day.
So replacing one very large pill with one very
small pill is reason to be slightly excited.
On that note, I’m off to the Corporate
Challenge! Wish me luck…
Random Stuff:
·
I hate the word “Scranton”. I don’t want to say it or hear someone else
say it. Like nails on a chalkboard.
·
I love original art. I bought my first piece of
original art on a trip to NYC when I was in high school from a guy on the
street who painted street scenes. The
piece I want to acquire next is called “Dare to be Me” and as soon as I saw it,
I knew it would provide a source of strength and inspiration for me to keep
going with this "journey" I’m on.
·
I’m not a huge fan of
chocolate. I like it, but I’d rather eat
something caramel-y, nutty, salty or fruit-y than chocolate. And I’d pick vanilla over chocolate any day
of the week.
·
If I do eat chocolate, my
fave chocolate bar is the Barcelona bar from Vosges. Sea salt, almonds and dark chocolate…..so simple
but amazing, and it reminds me of my first trip to Las Vegas ‘cos that’s where
I discovered it. So even though I can
get it at Wegmans, there’s always something slightly exciting about getting
one.
·
I am also excessively fond
of Hedonist chocolates here in Rochester.
Their chocolates are so beautiful and delicious. There’s something very special about choosing
a box of 30 yourself. Then when you get
them home, you don’t want to eat them because they are just so beautiful to
look at…like a collective work of many tiny pieces of art.
·
Cookies are my
kryptonite. I can’t keep cookies in the
house or I’ll eat all the cookies until they’re gone. And then I will immediately want some
more. So these days I try to pretend
cookies don’t exist. I do not go down
the cookie aisle in the grocery store and I curse co-workers who bring cookies
to work.
·
We never had traditional
birthday cake while I was growing up. My
brother isn’t a fan of cake so my mom always made him chocolate pie for his
birthday. I love trifle so I always had
a birthday trifle.
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