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.

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.

Doctor's Appt

So I went to the doctor yesterday.
First off this was really frustrating for me because he thought I could have lost 30 pounds by my appointment, and I only lost like 2. I think he could tell I was pretty depressed about that, and he reached for the tissue box about the same time as I started tearing up.

What he tried to remind me is that it's still going in the right direction. I think he said something along the lines of "I'm not doing to lie, you are fighting a hard battle here." PCOS is suckish at best and it's not going to be easy.

We discussed switching me to spironolactone instead of metformin which would help with my acne and the unwanted hair, but it doesn't help with weight loss. I decided I care more about my weight than I do about my acne, and if I remember correctly from a year ago, at about 180 lbs. my acne essentially disappears anyway. It also has seemed recently that the acne wash he gave me makes me break out more, so I've stopped using it daily; that seems to irritate my skin less.

He prescribed an addition to my Phentermine called topamax. It's a medication used to prevent migraines but they have found it also helps patients to lose weight. The two medications are combined in a new drug called Qsymia, but it can be really expensive, and it's cheaper to buy the drugs separately.


After talking to him about everything (i.e. that I'm taking a spin class, and I eat less than 1500 calories everyday, and sometimes I even struggle to reach that) he requested some blood tests. The facts seem to indicate that my metabolism is still not working properly which is a symptom of my hypothyroidism. I probably need to increase my dosage. I also didn't eat before I went so that he could take a fasting blood sugar level reading.

I should hear about the results of my blood test on Monday, so I'll post when I know about that. And I didn't even cry when she drew the blood! You should all be so proud of me for that! (When I was younger I used to virtually throw a tantrum when I would have to get my shots, needles are not my thing.)

Getting down to 170 by Christmas is becoming a more distant goal, but I still want to be a size 10 by graduation so I can make myself this killer dress I found a pattern for at Joann's.  Actually it's a size 12 pattern, but I still have some curves. I've told myself I can't make it until I get there!(They were having a $1 pattern sale, I couldn't resist!) On the upside, Jake told me I was looking skinnier today, maybe it's just that my jeans are all stretched out from their last washing again, haha. But we'll hope he's right.

Carb cravings.

Noticed a class on overeating in my Ed Week program. The Monday class was subtitled ending carbohydrate cravings: balancing blood sugar. I'm always craving carbs, maybe I should be better about taking my metformin! Then I might not feel the need to consume an entire sleeve of crackers.