In The Grand Scheme Of Things

Yesterday I was disappointed about my weight. Today I am in so much pain, I really do not care how much I weigh. I want the pain to go away. It will take some time.

I had too much fun being a normal person yesterday. I went shopping - consignment store, yarn store, fish market, and grocery store. Then I came home and lay down for an hour and then I made dinner which meant I stood for another hour. After dinner, my brother had to help me upstairs because I was in so much pain. Now after almost 12 hours in bed, my back is better but not much. I will spend a lot of time lying down today. DAMN! I think I would feel better if I could get to the beach....

In the grand scheme of things, being fat is not an overwhelming problem in my life. I was just reading on FB that a friend is now celebrating two years of being cancer free because she had a recurrence. That is more of a problem than being fat. If you think about it: would you rather be fat and healthish or skinny and have cancer? Not a hard decision.

Losing weight would help me be healthier in some ways. Less body weight equals lower blood pressure, healthier organs, yada, yada, yada. But I can't get up and move more to do that. I will try to be healthier. But I have to stop being in pain first.

And before you ask, I have been taking my pain meds - a combination of prescription and OTC and I am on a weekly pain patch. This is not an unusual occurrence in my life so I have what I need to help stop the pain. If I went to my doctor they would tell me I was doing all I can.

Disappointment

When I stopped working where they brought cookies, bagels, and pastries in several times a week, when for runs to the bakery next door for snacks, and shared pizza, Chinese, or Thai lunches, I thought I would lose weight. I did lose some weight, maybe 10 lbs. Then I gained some of it back.

Some how over the past ten years, besides getting older and developing a million health ailments, I have managed to put on more pounds than I can believe. I am thirty pounds over what I consider my fattest ever weight. I am not sure how that happened. And now, even though I go to the gym three times a week, I can't seem to lose any more.

I know you are what you eat but that doesn't seem to help me. Today was a big breakfast (we are on vacation) of a banana, two eggs, three pieces of bacon and a piece of toast (homemade bread) with butter. That was more than I normally have and I wasn't hungry for lunch until 2 pm when I had a peach and a plum. That will tide me over for dinner.

Tonight for dinner I am making an awesome looking seafood stew.  The original recipe calls for 4.5 cups whipping cream and 2 cups of half and half. I'll be using 1% milk instead. I can't imagine all that fat. Chowder isn't the most healthy thing to eat but a rainy day in New England on the ocean calls for chowder. But we will also have a salad and home made bread with it. What we don't eat tonight will be eaten for lunch and other meals for the next few days. Portion control is a big part of weight control.

Back to my topic of disappointment. I was very disappointed today when I went to try on clothes and they didn't fit. Very depressing. Even an XL was too small. And its really only the flabbiness around my middle that I can't seem to get rid of. My inner size six is lost behind a wall of flab.

I am disappointed in myself in that I can't seem to lose the weight. I am disappointed in my body which restricts what I am able to do. I physically am unable to do more exercise. I do not just sit around at home. I make sure I do things every day - I go out to the garden. I get together with friends. I try to eat healthy. I don't eat junk food. I don't eat candy or drink soda.

Its not my thyroid so I can't really rev up my metabolism as I don't have a thyroid. My medication level was just tweaked up but that's not a diet solution.

I know as you age it gets harder to lose weight. I realize this. I also know that I made a big lifestyle change by leaving work.  But I also need to make another change that makes me a skinnier person. I wouldn't mind being healthier but that's not going to happen short of a miracle cure.

I love this time of year

There is so much optimism in the health news this time of year (not so much the rest of the news especially with the ongoing European terrorism).  What I am referring to is the deluge of advice on flatten belly fat, eat healthier, and, my favorite,  how to really lose weight.

As with everything on the internet, we must take these with a grain of salt (and possibly a large margarita as well). Eating healthier does include eating more vegetables but I do that. I mean how many vegetables do I need in a day? And will it make all my ailments go away? They are what contribute to my unhealthy body. Because of my ailments, I spend too much time sitting on my butt and too little time hiking, skiing, snow shoeing, walking, etc.

I need real advice on how to be healthier and this is what I have come up with for me this January.

1. Attempt to go for a walk at least once a week. If I can do that, I can increase my weekly exercise quota. But its not really a reality. Some weeks I just cannot add in a walk because I feel crappy so much of the time.
2. Stop eating the crap at work. 

I work in a small office 15-18 hours/3 days a week. It is family run and wonderful. But I have never worked in an office with so much junk food, even when I worked for a candy company (Fanny Farmer Candy Shops) and was responsible for all the samples for photo shoots. Even the owners joke about the office 10 lb weight increase.

This week for example, the office manager had a sugar craving and went to the bakery next door and came back with an entire blueberry coffee cake (and a giant cookie for herself). Plus the (giant warehouse store containers of) brownies and cream puffs someone else brought in .

I think if I can attain those two goals, I will be a thinner happier person. I did breakdown yesterday and had a piece of coffee cake, left over Chex mix, and some goldfish. But in avoiding the crap for a couple weeks, the scale had started to move in the right direction.

So I am going to skip the healthy news this year, unless a cure for cancer, fibromyalgia, and rheumatoid arthritis are announced, and stop eating the junk food at work.

It is possible that things can go in the right direction

In 2007, when I was in chemo, nausea was my constant friend. It didn't stop me from eating, in fact I did gain weight during chemo. It disappeared after chemo.

A few weeks ago, my rheumatologist put me on sulfasalazine to help with my rheumatoid arthritis. Its just like chemo again in that it makes me feel nauseous all over again. I have felt nauseous again and again since I started taking a few weeks ago. This nausea made me actually do some research on it even though I did listen to my doctor who said nausea could happen.

So I looked it up on drugs.com and there it is under side effects that may go

"Some sulfasalazine side effects may not need any medical attention. As your body gets used to the medicine these side effects may disappear. Your health care professional may be able to help you prevent or reduce these side effects, but do check with them if any of the following side effects continue, or if you are concerned about them:

More common

• Abdominal or stomach pain or upset
• decreased weight

Less common

• Welts

Less common or rare

• Discoloration of the skin or urine
• hair loss or thinning of the hair
• swelling or inflammation of the mouth"

Did you see it? The second bullet in the first series of bullets. Decreased weight. How sneaky? How cool? Every other medication has caused weight gain. This one causes weight loss. Now I am happy.

Being an elephant....

Or more on perceptions vs. reality. I talk about losing weight and my deflabbification project but it never seems to work. I have decided my job is very fattening. I sit next to the kitchen and then people bring in nasty things like donuts and cookies... or even make special trips to the bakery next door to get more when the homemade stuff is run out or they just want a sweet thing. And of course they get enough to share. Then there is the snack rack where for 90 paltry pennies you can get a bag of premade, chemical and fat filled, empty calories of your choice. All within 8' of my desk and in my sightlines. As well as the parade of coworkers going by for their share. So I decided I look and feel like this:

Or this:

Last week at the reunion, I was talking to a social worker friend about this (who is less than 5' tall and weighs less than 90 lbs) about how I feel fat and I hate the way I look in pictures. Her calm reply was that we all feel that way. It did help but I still feel fat. I know my downfalls - emotional eating, late night snacking after dinner, on the job snacking and I have promised myself I need to do something about this before I have to buy larger clothes yet again. But I do feel very sorry for this elephant that is on a strict diet to lose 500 lbs during pregnancy no less.

Weight gain is a side effect of cancer.

Weight gain is the side effect of everything these days - even breathing. I am on too many medications which have a side effect of weight gain.... So here I sit in my slightly tight clothes two sizes larger than I used to wear in dire need of a drastic deflabbification project.

"People with certain cancers – such as breast, prostate and colon cancer – are more likely to gain weight during treatment due to the therapies used to combat their disease. Hormone therapy, some chemotherapy regimens and medications such as steroids  all can cause weight gain, as well as water retention."

THEY  DIDN'T TELL ME THIS WHEN I WAS DIAGNOSED! Well there was a lot they didn't tell me - or that I didn't want to hear. But it is much harder to lose weight after breast cancer while still on hormone therapy.

And I am also on all sorts of other medications for my other ailments that might cause weight gain. I do go to the gym three times a week so its not as if I just sit around all the time.

And of course we need to remember:

"Some studies of cancer patients have linked obesity to an increased risk of recurrence and death in several common cancers, including breast, colorectal and prostate cancer. The California Teachers Study, led by City of Hope’s Leslie Berstein, showed that being obese was associated with a significant increase of dying from breast cancer for many women." More on this here.


So your treatment makes you fat and your fatness makes you more likely to die from it. So obviously something is wrong with the treatment. Does anyone see any irony with this?

The real question is if I went off the medications that might cause weight gain, would the weight magically disappear? I think that answer is a big fat no. Damn.

Fat or fit

What's the worst thing about any doctor appointment? They weigh you. What's the nastiest machine at the gym? The scale - especially when it goes in the wrong direction. Has any doctor never said 'stop exercising and eating right'? No, never. They always say eat right, get plenty of exercise, and maintain a healthy weight - which to most of us means 'lose weight'. There is a problem between the 'get plenty of exercise' vs the 'maintain a healthy weight'. Muscle is denser than flab.

My husband used to be in the Army Reserves where he had a regular battle with the weight requirements which are based on a version of BMI. Being a heavy boned guy, he was always on the upper end and stressed. But the military requires physically fit soldiers so he would continually fight his own battle of the bulge. Someone at one point had pointed out that entire NFL teams, while being very fit, would not make the military requirements either.

Now at the Olympics some are calling the women athletes fat. Look at Misty May Treanor of beach volleyball fame. I looked up  her BMI. She's at 23.4 which is topping out the normal range. Does she look fat? No! She looks amazingly fit and on the edge of skinny. Some of the teams are calling the one's who beat them fat. Hello! You need many muscles to be that athletic and they are doing what they need to do to break Olympic and World records.

And why is it the media's business about what people weigh anyway? And why is it such a societal issue that women are supposed to be a size 4? Name calling never got anyone anywhere.

I do know I have a spare 20+ lbs to give to anyone who wants it.

News that is useless to me

I didn't use to be (so) fat. I used to be a size 8ish and am now a size 12ish if you really need to know. My size 8ness lasted until that first chemo when they pumped me full of steroids....

Now research says lose a little weight and greatly reduce that breast cancer risk. That's not very helpful. I am in the much higher than normal risk pool because I already had it.

More research (because we needed more research) tells us that obese people are more likely to be diagnosed with advanced and aggressive thyroid cancer. This is also a little too late for me because I don't have a thyroid (thank you cancer) but it could always come back - but we just won't think about THOSE things.

So this is useless news to me but maybe it will help others. Not that you haven't heard it before - we all need to lose weight.