Skip to main content

Another Restart - with added health issues


Another Restart - with added health issues


Photo by i yunmai on Unsplash


It looks like I'm starting again, this time even heavier than before. Nth time, the charm?

107.5kg

It's not quite the heaviest I have ever been, but it's not far off. My heaviest was 110kg*

I am worried about my health. 
Since quitting breastfeeding at nearly two years, no hormonal birth control, and no major changes to my diet, I have gained a significant amount of weight that I can't account for with calories in/out. In addition, it has ALL gone to my belly. I am not joking. I wear the same bra size; I wear the same trousers (the waist won't fasten if there's no elastic) but I have turned into a barrel.

Even at my heaviest, I maintained a consistent 1-2 dress-size disparity between hips & waist and 2-3 between bust & waist, i.e. my waist was always around two dress-sizes smaller than my bust and hips.

I have a sneaking suspicion (more than a suspicion, but not diagnosed) that I have either an underactive thyroid, PCOS, or both. However, as I AM overweight and in the obese category, if I go to a doctor for testing then they will just tell me to lose weight and there's nothing wrong with me that self-control won't fix. 

I need to have a full food diary available and ready to refute every condescending word from their mouth.

I'm not stupid, and I have a long history of the doctor refusing to listen to me. I need evidence in my arsenal.

In the next few weeks (hopefully on the run-up to moving house) I'm attempting to eat "normally". Eating reasonable meals at sensible times, without snacking, two or three times per day. The number of meals depends mainly on whether I'm trying to 16:8 fast. I can't eat three meals in eight hours.

When we move house and change doctors and all the other stuff, I want to have the evidence in my hands. As well as that, I want to check my blood sugars too. Refute the idea that I might be diabetic because of my weight. I'm not, I sporadically check my fasting and after-meal blood sugars just to make sure I'm not sliding that way. I'm not. Sometimes my fasting is high, but 105 is only potentially pre-diabetic if anything. And post-meal sugars are usually within the 140 limits.


See, I have all the answers that doctors will demand before they will even LOOK at anything else. 

Ready, Set, Go!


* If you don't use metric units, you can check the conversion here.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Using the Right Activity Levels - (or don't lie to yourself)

How active are you? Can you answer this honestly, without padding it with extras you assume will constitute a higher activity level than you  actually  achieve?  You might think that being a parent of an energetic pre-schooler would keep you active, but the sad truth is that it doesn't. What about all the washing, cleaning, cooking, laundry, and playtime? It doesn't account for much besides the average daily movement. You need to  ACTIVELY  increase your activity levels for it to make any difference to your estimated calorie intake. Doing active things that are part of your daily routine is normal. Otherwise, we could quantify every trip to the kitchen to make a drink or walk to the bathroom as part of our regular exercise. This is not the case. TDEE vs BMR The  calorie calculator  that I use on my weight loss journey is from the 5:2 Fast diet website. It's one of the better ones for accuracy and tweaking for activity, and weight down to 0.1kg. When I input my

First Fast Day

I finished my first fast day on Wednesday 7 th January and it was pretty easy. I know a few people on this same diet struggle with the first fast but I find I can survive quite happily on a day of tea and a few nibbles of raw veg. I did a lot of reading on the forums and while the idea of the diet is that you fast for two days and eat “normally” on your off days I felt I needed to make a concerted effort to remain within my Total Daily Energy Expenditure (TDEE). It’s all very well blaming weight gain on any number of reasons but most of us (whether you admit to anyone but yourself) know that the reason we are overweight is because we ate too much, our idea of portion control is somewhat skewed or we snack indiscriminately. I have created a spread sheet in excel (I’m feeling so proud, I used formulas and everything) I’ll post it if anyone would like it, It’s reasonably simple but it allows me to keep an eye on what I’m putting in my body on a daily basis and exactly how much I

Monday 26th January – Fast Day

Today is going well so far, I’m not hungry and I have plenty of tea to keep me going and I don’t envisage any problems arising. Considering my lapse from the TDEE for two days over the weekend I am going to attempt a “semi-fast” tomorrow, between my two fast days.  A fast day is a reduction of calorie intake to one quarter of your TDEE so I will attempt to make Tuesday a reduction to one half of my TDEE. I think if I try to do this it might stop me wanting to gorge when I come off of a fast.   My stomach will have shrunk more because of the calorie reduction over three days instead of one and I should have achieved a reasonable state of ketosis over that period. Anyway who knows I might be right I might be wrong but I can give it a shot. If I can’t stick it I haven’t lost anything and I’ll probably come in at under my TDEE anyway.