Things are GREAT!

I haven't posted in a long time, but I just wanted to give an update on my progress. Things are fantastic! I weighed in at 172.8 this morning, I'm almost in the 160s and that was almost another 3 pounds this week! With my hypothyroidism and my PCOS I've been making sure my expectations weren't too high because it's going to be harder for me to lose weight than other people. But the important thing is that things are going in the right direction, and I think I weigh less than I did when I married Jake.

The only frustrating this is that my size is still the same, I'm not losing inches too much, even though I'm losing weight. I think that's a little odd, I don't know where the weight is coming from if the inches aren't coming off, but eventually I'll get there too. I feel like my torso looks smaller, but those darn hips of mine just aren't budging. I think I'm going to start thinking about exercising, which might make the difference inch-wise.

Look how great my weight stones are looking! I'm getting so excited to see how close  I'm getting to my goal weight!

The Starting Line! (again!)

Well today is the first day of my program. I'm pretty excited about it (see previous post for information). I splurged  quite a bit this last week, so I gained three pounds, but I was just trying to get a few specific meals in before I couldn't eat them anymore. So I start off at 188.1 and hopefully in about a month I'll be 178; that's the plan anyways. This morning I don't feel super great, but mostly because I stayed up pretty late reading my book and the cat is really bothering my allergies lately. So I guess it's a low point, but that means it'll only go up from there.

I think the hardest thing is going to be drinking the amount of water I'm supposed to. The guideline is half of your body weight in ounces of water. So since I'm 188 I should drink at least 94 oz. of water. The program suggests 100 to start out, which should also help with the hunger since I'll be all full of water. For those of you that know me well, usually 16 oz of water is about the top of my usual consumption. I'm going to miss drinking milk, I love that stuff! I'm usually not to crazy about the taste, or lack thereof, of water, but I'm just going to have to get used to it. It's probably one of those things that I've never done and it's partially how I've gotten to my weight. My poor digestive track has probably never gotten the water it needs to run properly. So hopefully just drinking that amount of water will make a big difference with everything, even before you factor in all the good nutrients I'll get from the food.

So I'll keep posting about stuff along the way, 150 here we come!
Here are my before pictures. could I look anymore depressing? haha

Reboot and a Fresh Start

Okay so I haven't updated this in forever, I know. But I went back in and put all the info on the chart, and did a new chart format so that's fun. Notice the nice little increase from May until now. That, my friends, is what they call stress weight. My job was making my body hold onto weight because I was stressing it out, and it also made me eat WAY too many carbs. So we're back to the dreaded low 180s where I cannot seem to get past. Enter super-cousin to save the day! My cousin Meghan is a coach for Take Shape for Life and has used the program to lose her pregnancy fat, so I figure if it worked for her, it can work for me! I always curse my genetics on my mom's side for giving me massive thighs that like to store fat for winter, except they seem to think I live in the arctic and winter lasts for 12 months. But Meghan has those same genes, so I'm confident about how this can work. Here's her website. Check it out! My doctor says if I'm a good girl and really stick to the program, I could lose 20 lbs by my next appointment in two months. So if that's true, I'll be about the same weight I was when I was 16. (BTW, I was about 165 when I got my driver's license, and I lied and put 160. No 16 year old girl should have to lie about her weight on her driver's license, that's just sad.)

At my doctor's appointment he said everything looked good. My blood pressure has come down a bit, so that's good. We were watching that since it's been a little higher than he'd like. He said my thyroid levels by the one measurement are where other doctors might start tapering my meds down, but then looking at my other count, the one that measure how much thyroid I actually have in my body or something, I'm about right where I need to be. So moving ahead, since I did gain weight, we talked about what we should do differently and I mentioned that my cousin did this program, and he said he thinks it's a great idea. I'm most excited about how everything is made by doctors to be exactly what I need because Jake and I are terrible about eat well balanced meals. We forget to get enough protein and calorie-wise we're probably okay, but they're calories that are not really helping us do anything. My face has been continuing to clear up, just a few break outs at my time of the month, but pretty good. The proactiv has really made my skin feel so great. I've been using the dark spot corrector they have to try and lighten my acne scaring, but I'm not satisfied with the improvement yet. I'll give it a little more time, but it's really the only thing left that bugs me about my skin.

So hopefully my program materials and food will get here soon and I can get going on shedding these last 30 lbs or so. In two months it will be right before the holidays, new clothes for Christmas, here I come!

Whoops, fell of the earth there for a while...

Sorry about the length between posts, I did promise I would be better about that, but c'est la vie.
I re-sprained my ankle a week or so ago, so that was a bummer. We were at the glow-in-the-dark mini golf course at Trafalga and I stepped off a ledge onto the green and it was not flat like I thought, so I rolled it and went down hard. Thankfully it wasn't bad enough to need the brace again, but it did further delay my return to full workouts. I'm just too scared to make it worse.

On the plus side, my face seems to be a little bit more clear, but still not where I want it to be. I couldn't find the "DIM" supplement my doctor recommended, and the pharmacist didn't know what it was, so I'll need to do some more research/call my doctor back. It probably doesn't help that I've been pretty stressed out lately and that makes me break out, and even worse, my stress coping mechanism is to pick at my face, so nothing gets to heal and the oil from my hands gets transferred to my skin. Ouch and yuck!

This morning I weighed in at 184.7, and I'm still in the "overweight" category instead of "obese" so I'm going in the right direction! I set my typical "5 lbs in One month" goal on my wii fit, which will put me in the 170s if I make it. The last time I got close to that, I rebounded and gain some weight back. The 180s are always the hardest for me, but that's to be expected since I haven't weighed less than 180.0 in a very long time. I'm not exactly sure how long, but probably high school.

Back on the Wagon

Ahh my blog, we meet again. I haven't posted in so long, partially due to my shame. The stress and rich food of Christmas set me back a bit. But I'm trying to get back on track now, so I feel like I can post again. I was in the high 180s before Christmas and trending down but afterward I weighed in at 192. bleugh! I guess that setbacks are just part of the process right?  Isn't that the way they say it goes..... (now I'm singing Jim Croce in my head, thanks Mom for the songs of the 70's.) I feel like it's important to take a step back and see how I'm trending over-all so I don't get discouraged. Here's what my Wii-Fit tells me:

So not too bad right? you can see the little blips were things go wrong, but overall it's trending in a downward trajectory.

Besides the weight gain, the worst part of trying to get back into the swing of things is how quickly my body loses the things I worked so hard on. I've lost a lot of muscle from my spin class, just the few squats and lunges I did last week made me sore for days, when they shouldn't have been quite so hard. So it's been frustrating to not be able to do the things that I could do just a few months ago. I've got to pull my Schwinn out of the cats room and get back on it.

I have noticed that I generally feel better on the days when I at least did a few yoga poses in the morning, but it's just so hard to get up in the morning. I've been trying to take my metformin at night before I go to bed so that I remember to take it, and I usually eat something pretty close to bedtime (not good for dieting I know, but I just can't help it) so my stomach doesn't get so upset.

On that note of late night snacks, I'm pretty frustrated with the Phentermine; it suppresses my appetite all day, so at lunch time I usually can hardly even look at the food.  Then dinner is a little bit better, but since I hardly ate any lunch I'm completely ravenous when I get home at 6:00 and I just can't take the time to cook something that is more well balanced. So I eat something very small (usually moderately healthy) just to tide me over until my food is cooked, but then that little something has filled the place of my dinner and I'm not hungry any more. Then at 10:30 I'm rampaging through the kitchen trying to ease the insatiable appetite that consumes me. Eventually I tell myself that I've eaten plenty, even though I still feel like I could polish off an entire package of saltine crackers, and then I go to bed. Then since my stomach was unhappy before I went to bed, I wake up starving but as my habits have made it impossible for me to wake up when I want to, I don't have time for breakfast other than what I can grab as we're heading out the door and eat in the car. It's an infuriating process!

I meet with my doctor again next week, hopefully we can figure something out or he'll explain that it's all normal and I shouldn't worry.

Pre Thanksgiving

Alright, so I figured I should make a pre-Thanksgiving post so that when I've completely gorged myself on pumpkin pie and yams this week, I'll know what a bad girl I've been.

I weighed in yesterday at 191.8. Yay!!!!!!!! So from my highest point at 214, that's a total loss of 22.2 pounds. 

I forgot to move my pebbles around, so sorry no picture, but when I dip into the 180s I'll take one I promise. I also need to get one of me in my size 16 jeans. They're too big! Annoyingly so! Unfortunately, they're not too big everywhere, so I don't know if that means I can go down a size. I can put my 14s on, but it's not pretty, or comfortable in some places. With my 16s I have to cinch my belt so tight to hold them on, it makes it pucker all weird in the back and stuff, and I could get them off without unbuttoning them or anything. But my hips are still too wide to go smaller, really. So I guess this is the weird/frustrating part of weight loss. I'm too small for the jeans I have been wearing, but not small enough to go down a size, so I don't look good in any of them.  But hopefully that will work itself out soon. And I'm too cheap to go buy a pair that fits me right now because I don't plan on staying at the size I'm at for long.

The 180s are the hardest part for me since that's as far as I got, and where I've been for the last couple of years. I think I was at 187 on my wedding day, so it's really my "mostly healthy stage"  in my mind. Obviously if I'm really supposed to be at like 136 (that's a 22 BMI), 187 is way above mostly healthy, but that was the reality I had to accept before I knew what to do about  it. Also, when I did Weight Watchers before, I bottomed out at 180, but never went even a tenth of a pound lower than that. Even getting to 180 took me ages and ages longer than any of the other weight.

Since the 180s are so hard for me, I figured I would set myself some temporary incentives to get myself excited. So when I get to 185 I get to have my hair cut. If this happens by Christmas, I might even color it too. It's getting really long, which is great since I've been growing it out, but I've been almost a year since I've cut it and the ends are starting to split. I think my hair has been healthier since I've been starting all this, largely thanks to the multivitamin I've been taking and getting my thyroid under control. Hypo-thyroidism makes your hair really dry and brittle, which curly hair is naturally anyway, so mine was really bad.

Then when I get to 179.9 and finally see a 7 in the tens slot, I get to buy myself a pair of shoes I completely don't need. I figured that was a good girl goal, and hopefully it will get me through this pretty tough stretch.

So there you have it. Success, goals, and hopefully I won't stuff myself like a turkey for Thanksgiving.

Progress, finally!

Okay so I've finally made some progress! Since the last time I posted, I'm down to 194.9 lbs. Hurrah! Below 200 and over 5 lbs lost in the last month! (that was the goal I set in my Wii fit, so I got little stars when I weighed in tonight and completed my goal)

Here's how my pebbles are looking:

Pretty exciting right? I mean, yeah, there is still a lot of pebbles in the right bowl, but the little pile in the "lost" bowl is getting bigger!

There are downsides, however. Metformin is still the death of me. I hate that crap. I still haven't heard from my doctor about the results of my blood test, so I need to call again. I'm wondering if my fasting blood sugar levels will reveal some more clues to the answers. Also the cold weather is making it more obvious that my thyroid is too low. I've started to take partial pills to up my dosage like he told me to at my appointment, but I wish I knew how low I was so that I could maybe increase it more quickly than a fourth of a pill at a time. Jake has a hard time getting my feet and hands to even warm up, let alone stay warm.

The other problem, is that my medication has all but removed my appetite. I joked the other day that my drugs are giving me a eating disorder. I totally feel like I'm anorexic sometimes and don't want to eat. It comes and goes, but I don't want to be messing up my internal organs, so I'm careful to make sure that I'm taking enough calories in, even when I don't feel like eating. Some foods, like Chinese, I haven't been able to eat since I've gone on my meds, they just sound disgusting, which is sad because I miss going to Panda, and I love making my own fried rice.

I also have noticed that I've been very emotional and a little erratic. This might be partially due to the fact that I either am exhausted and spend the whole day dozing off in my classes, or I'm an insomniac and am jittery all day like a drugie going through withdrawals. I think I know what it is like to have Bipolar disorder because I have stages of mania and times where I just need to cry. Jake has been a real trouper to deal with all this. Now I don't want you to think I'm a complete mental nut case all the time, I'm mostly my usual self, but I have episodes where I feel a little out of control.

Hopefully the weight loss will continue and then eventually I'll be able to stop taking all of these medications that do weird things to me and everything will be hunky-dory.