Hitting Reset Hard…

First off, apologies for being MIA the last few weeks. Life has been nothing short of chaotic in good ways and bad. Things happened after my last post that weren’t so great but then, on February 2, I got a letter in the mail that basically changed my life.

A while back, I applied for disability. I was denied, initially. My lawyers (good old Binder & Binder!) filed an appeal. Almost two years later, I found out I was granted an appeal hearing. That hearing was postponed in order to gather more evidence from past doctors (applying for disability is an ordeal, good people. It is most definitely worth having a lawyer handle things for you. I don’t know how people attempt to do this on their own!). Two months later, I went to the rescheduled hearing. I came out of it with a good feeling. The judge was a lovely person and she was very good about settling my nerves. My lawyer was great, too. He was very upbeat after the hearing, said he was confident I would win my case. Well, five months and much stress later, I got the letter with a favorable decision.

You have no idea what this decision means to me. I can now carry some of the burden of the household expenses – my son has been supporting me since we moved out of my late mother’s house in April of 2016. He’s been paying for everything, including what few monthly expenses I have. This has been a source of extreme stress (and humiliation) for me. I’m used to being the breadwinner, the provider. I’m supposed to still be looking after him, not the other way around. But he’s been, quite literally, the head of the household since we moved here two years ago. And he constantly reassured me that he had no problem taking care of me since I had done so for him all his life, through good times and bad (things got hairy for me a few times as a single mom). That’s a heavy load for a young man of 23 years of age to carry but he’s done so beautifully. I’m not kidding when I say he’s the best kid ever. I surely did something right with that one! Anyway, having this disability check will now allow me to not only pay for my own things but take some of the load off him, as well. It is a blessing and a godsend, and it’s been a long, stressful road to get here but I am grateful beyond measure. (Deep down, it is still kind of scary that the physical ailments that led to my getting disability are probably only going to get worse, despite my best efforts, but that’s a post for another day.)

So, now I can finally do some of the stuff I’ve only been dreaming about since I stopped working five years ago. I can spend a little more money at the supermarket and buy the weight loss-friendly foods I’ve been wanting to try in order to vary my daily diet a bit more (I had a set monthly food budget and half of that budget naturally had to go to my son’s meals). I’ve been wanting to join a gym since it’s been too cold to do any serious walking with my dog and – ta-da! – I have! I joined Planet Fitness last week and will be starting my workouts this week. I need to corral a trainer on my first day – given my arthritis, my pulmonary hypertension, and the recently discovered bulging discs in my spinal column, I have to create a workout that won’t wind up sending me to the nearest emergency room. But I’m excited to start. I’ve even ordered workout clothes – something I haven’t done in ten years! I’ve discovered Fabletics, the athletic wear company co-founded by Kate Hudson. Much of their gear comes in plus sizes, and their stuff is really nice. The prices aren’t bad, either. I received my first order a couple of days ago and I was really impressed with the material of the leggings and the overall quality. I also ordered from TEMA Athletics, another (albeit smaller) company that sells workout gear in all sizes. They don’t have as big a selection as Fabletics but the quality of their gear is good, too. They are kind of pricey but they have a lot of really good sales so it won’t be so hard on the old checkbook to order from them. I’m really looking forward to putting all this gear, and my Fitbit, to good use at the gym. God knows I have to do a complete reboot of my system since I’ve been “celebrating” a little too hard for the past ten days.

My lifestyle change kind of went out the window since I received a payment from Social Security. While I still weigh myself every day, I’ve been lax about tracking and I’ve been indulging in foods I don’t normally eat anymore. I’ve been a bad, bad girl! And it’s starting to show up on the scale, though not as dramatically as I expected. But I’m not really feeling guilty about it, either. I’ve been completely aware of what I’ve been doing, and I only ate when I was hungry. I wasn’t grazing constantly. I was kind of behaving, to a point. So, no, I don’t feel any guilt. I know this is going to stop in the next day or so and I’m planning on hitting the Target grocery section on Tuesday to stock up on my beloved veggies and yogurt and chicken (hey, now I can even buy that pre-cooked salmon I’ve been lusting after for months…I’m way too chicken to buy a (very expensive) fresh piece and cook it myself. I’m so afraid I’m going to burn it – my cooking skills are best suited to chicken and beef. Fish is so…delicate). I know it’s time to stop celebrating and jump back into the saddle because I’ve got another 100 pounds to lose and I want to get back to feeling good again. My body knows I haven’t been feeding it well – I’m bloated, especially in my legs, and I just don’t feel right.

Who knows? This might have been exactly what I needed to jump start my weight loss again. As I’d mentioned in my previous post, I’ve been see-sawing between the same six pounds since the end of December, and I was following the WW program pretty religiously (I mentioned how I still wasn’t too keen on the new Freestyle program). Now that I’ve freaked my body out by feeding it stuff for the last ten days that I’d only been having as an occasional treat, going back on plan should provide the jolt I need to start losing again. When I started WW back in August, I jumped right in. It wasn’t easy for the first couple of weeks but by the end of that month, I’d lost almost ten pounds and I’d completely adjusted to being on the program. I shouldn’t have any trouble getting back into the swing of things this time because I now know how to keep from getting “hangry,” and I’ll be going to the gym a few times a week so I’ll be more active than I have been. I know from past experience that exercise tends to control my appetite. So, I’m all set to work the program and get my ass in gear (albeit gently so I don’t hurt – or asphyxiate – myself).

I was granted a new beginning on February 2nd when that letter arrived in my mailbox. I’m certainly not going to waste it. I have physical problems that are never going away but with healthy eating and exercise, I can try to keep them at bay for as long as possible. Plus, I’ve got to build on my past progress. I took a selfie for the first time in weeks last Wednesday. I was wearing all new clothes (including new sneakers!) and when I compared those pictures to the one taken of me last April, when I was approaching my all-time heaviest weight, I was really happy. There’s a big difference, particularly in my legs. My belly is still pretty round, but not as round as last year, and anyone who is fighting the battle of the bulge knows that belly fat is a bitch to get rid of. But I’ll be working on that, trust me. Have a look!

(I really gotta work on my selfie face…) See the difference? No more cottage-cheese-stuffed-into-sausage-casing legs! Can’t wait to see what else I can whittle down! Stay tuned for progress reports…

Until next time, remember:  every day is a chance to hit that reset button…

Weight Watchers Freestyle…A Few Thoughts

I’m not a huge fan of change (the type of change that I, myself, don’t initiate, that is). Of course, I can accept change but it usually takes me a while to come around to it. When I was working, I hated when changes were made to my department; I hated when changes were made to the line-up of people I supported. I hate it when changes are made to programs or websites I use. But, I get over it eventually and just deal. So, having said that, you can imagine my annoyance when Weight Watchers rolled out their new “Freestyle” program – especially when I’d been doing so well on the previous version (I believe they’d termed it “Beyond the Scale”? I don’t really pay attention to that sort of thing. I like to get right into the meat of the situation or plan or…whatever).

While I was willing (albeit reluctantly) to go with the flow, I read many comments on WW’s version of social media (called “Connect”) from people who were really disgruntled. In truth, the new program did throw a few things out of wack. One of the big mistakes I believe they made, which I’ve noticed lately is not used as such a big selling point anymore, is saying that you didn’t even have to count/track all these 0 point foods. That was, in a word, dumb. Tracking what you eat is a huge part of losing weight – studies have shown that tracking your food intake is very beneficial. At the very least, keeping a food diary/journal helps you see what you’re putting in your mouth and gets you to realize that you’ve been eating a lot more crap than you should be. While I’m not a fan of tracking calories or macro and micro nutrients – God, no!!! That’s why I joined WW; they’ve done all that for me – I do swear by keeping a food journal, both on the WW site and in a paper food diary. Well, folks were really taken aback by WW’s notion that you didn’t have to track the 0 point foods. I, for one, want to see what I’ve been eating and I often refer to my diary when I’m looking for some lower point meals I’ve had in the past. For anyone who lives and dies by keeping track of their food intake, that was a stupid thing to use as a selling point to the “Freestyle” program.

The second issue most people had (in many cases, it was the most important issue) was the recalculation of everyone’s daily points. While I understand why they did it – now that there were so many 0 point foods, you didn’t need as many points – it was still a bitter pill to swallow. A lot of people swore that WW only took away a max of 7 points. Wrong. I lost 11 points and I read where some people lost as many as 13. This was huge for me. While I never gave up tracking just about everything I eat, losing that many points really put a damper on things. (I admit that there are a few things I don’t track – a random slice of cheese, an extra slice of bread, and the occasional tumbler of chocolate milk. I’ve been drinking chocolate milk since forever, and it’s not something I’m willing to give up. I have it a couple times a week, instead of every day like before, with 2% milk, which isn’t all that great in terms of points, much to my horror, but skim milk is basically water with coloring so 2% it is. Besides, my son prefers 2% to 1%, as do I, but I don’t have a big enough fridge to fit two kinds of milk. FYI, for one cup (8 oz.) of milk, whole is 7 points, 2% is 5 points, 1% is 4 points, and skim milk (fat free) is 3 points.  Three points for skim milk! You would think that would be much lower, if not 0 points! Anyway, since there isn’t that much difference point-wise between whole, 2% and skim milk, I’ll stick with 2%. After all, I don’t believe you can maintain a weight loss program without letting yourself have a treat now and then. Denying yourself the stuff you love is a sure path to destroying your program. Having it every so often isn’t going to kill you or undo your progress. And yes, it should be tracked. Great, I just shamed myself into tracking my chocolate milk.)

Anyway, back to losing my points to the new “Freestyle” program. At first, I was pissed. I was finally in a rhythm with how I worked my points. I had it figured out in terms of what I could eat and how much and how often I could have it. While I do tend to eat mostly chicken, having the 44 daily points meant I could vary my meals more, have some red meat from time to time or maybe a slightly more decadent dessert than Greek vanilla yogurt or pineapple or berries. Coming down to 33 points a day threw me – while I’d gotten to the point where I almost never used all of my 44 daily points and rarely got into my weeklies, now I had to scramble to figure out how I was going to make 33 daily points work with the rhythm I’d established. Don’t get me wrong, I love chicken, turkey, eggs and lots of different types of seafood and yay for them being 0 points now, but most of the new 0 points foods were all types of veggies, which is great as peas and corn used to cost you, and all sorts of legumes, most of which I don’t care for. But the foods I had been used to eating and was successfully losing weight with were worth the same points as before (and I believe some may have gone up in points).  How the hell was I going to make this work now? Since “Freestyle” came along, I find myself using up my weeklies like never before. WW says they encourage you to use your weeklies but I was never a fan of doing that. Since “Freestyle” rolled out in December, I’ve gained and lost the same damn six pounds. It’s not really moving the scale for me like it has for some of the people I follow on Instagram. That’s frustrating, very frustrating.

Of course, to be fair, I haven’t been well since I was hospitalized briefly at the end of November. And I’m still not sure if my meds, particularly the Trazodone I take for my insomnia, is screwing with my system. I’ve read that Trazodone often causes loss of appetite and weight loss in its users but, of course, I’m not that lucky. I find myself hungry a lot more than before I started taking it, and, obviously, I’m not losing weight as much as before. Not sleeping well also has a lot to do with it although I think I’m finally getting a handle on that. I’ve slept six hours or more each night for the past three nights (yay me!). So, there are a few reasons why I’m not doing as well on “Freestyle” as I was before the rollout, but I am still not comfortable with the program and the fact that I often find myself using my weeklies more that ever before.

In conclusion, what do I really think of the “Freestyle” program? I like that chicken, eggs, turkey, fish and other types of seafood are 0 points. Chicken, eggs and turkey are the easiest and cheapest options to have – I really can’t afford to buy seafood (other than tuna fish) so that’s off the plate for me (no pun intended). I don’t like that I don’t have as many daily points to work with and that I often have to dip into my weeklies. All in all, I don’t think I have a handle on it yet. Because of my health, I haven’t really been exercising and I know that usually helps curb my appetite so once I start working out and walking again, that will be a big help. I’m also trying to get used to the meds and get my sleep cycle back to normal, so there’s that. So, jury’s still out. I’m a firm believer in “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” and that’s how I felt when WW rolled out this new program. But, WW has worked for me thus far and, overall, it’s a program and lifestyle I’m comfortable with so I’m sticking with it. Hopefully, I’ll be able to get it together soon and get back on the road to onederland.

Until next time, remember: every day is a chance to hit that reset button…

I Feel the Need, the Need for…Sleep

One of my favorite pastimes is sleeping (and that also explains an awful lot). Unfortunately, for the past couple of years, I have suffered bouts of fairly severe insomnia. Part of it is menopause (and to think I couldn’t wait for menopause because I was so done with having my period – well, you know what they say: be careful what you wish for…) and part of it is depression. I’ve suffered from depression off and on for close to twenty years, but nothing bad enough to put me on meds for extended periods of time (until now, that is). However, I lost my mother and brother, on the same day, in August of 2016 and it’s kind of been all downhill from there. I am now suffering from clinical depression and PTSD (I was there when the police found them dead) and my sleep patterns are complete crap. I’ll have a couple or three weeks of normalcy where I’ll go to bed after my son leaves for work – he’s on the graveyard shift – and I’ll sleep through the night, waking around 7:00 or 8:00 a.m., just before Chris walks in. But then, for some mysterious reason, I’ll start feeling sleepy later and later until I’m usually awake to greet Chris when he comes home.

According to my handy dandy Fitbit, my son’s Christmas gift to me, for the week ending January 20, I slept a grand total of 36 hours; that was a combination of daytime naps and a few hours here and there that I managed to snatch at night. If you take into consideration that a person who sleeps 8 hours a night, seven nights a week, clocks in at 56 hours, I’m sorely lacking in my zzzzzzz’s. And, as if that wasn’t bad enough, not getting proper sleep screws with your weight loss. Yay.

I never realized until this go around with Weight Watchers how important sleep is to your weight loss progress. Of course, sleep is important for your health, both physical and mental, but getting a decent amount of sleep every night helps move the needle on the scale downward. The numbers on my scale have not been going anywhere very often these days, particularly since the end of November, when I was briefly hospitalized for my pulmonary hypertension. I had been on a pretty decent (drug induced) sleep schedule but the hospital stay blew all that right out of the water. I haven’t been sleeping much since then, even with the anti-depressants I was put on in early November to try to help me sleep. Talk about crazy-making!

I know that sleep helps your body heal from the beating you give it in your day to day life and that it helps you brain recharge, but I don’t know exactly what magic it does to help you lose weight (and, right now, I’m too wiped to do the research. It’s 7:16 a.m. and I spent most of the night washing dishes and cleaning up my kitchen. My mind, she is tired – I’m surprised I’m coherent enough to write this blog post. The spelling errors are plentiful, however; I guess that speaks to how fried my brain is. Good thing I proofread and ruthlessly edit everything I write). So, to whatever the mechanics are that allows sleep to help you lose weight, I say bravo! When you’re fighting the battle of the bulge, anything that lowers those numbers on the scale is an ally.

So, I’m going to keep taking my anti-depressants but I’m going to look into natural remedies that I can take to see if I can start sleeping like a (semi) normal person again. It’s not just the weight loss that concerns me, although that’s number one on the list, but I generally feel like shit and I sometimes have trouble remembering things, like what day it is or what I had to eat in the morning or the day before. Lack of sleep is a bitch, my people. It can screw with you in so many ways, both big and little. It’s also a bit scary when you haven’t slept for many hours and you can almost feel your body shutting down on you. Not fun. It also makes you lethargic and you don’t feel like going downstairs to get the mail, let alone take a hike with your trusty little Walking Dude. That certainly impedes any weight loss. So, you’re basically screwed coming and going when you can’t sleep.

If anyone has any non-pharmaceutical ways of helping them get to sleep, please share with me. I’m reaching the end of my rope. I was kind of crazy to begin with (in a good way) but now I’m approaching crazy of the not good kind because I can’t sleep. Lord knows we don’t need that!

Until next time, remember:  every day is a chance to hit that reset button…

 

I’m Not Feeling Well…Can I Have Fries with That?

Despite my rather robust appearance, I am not an entirely healthy person. I have arthritis, I get frequent headaches, my stomach likes to severely rebel on me from time to time, I have problems with my blood pressure (hypertension runs in my family), I grew up with asthma, and, because that wasn’t enough, I now have pulmonary hypertension, which is incurable. But, despite this, I’m still in a better place than, say, my best friend, who has a laundry list of medical problems, poor kid. I often wonder why this good, sweet, opinionated-but-still-wonderful person, a woman who is truly like a sister to me, has to suffer with all these illnesses. It’s not fair. So, yeah, in light of that, I’m doing okay. And I should, by all accounts, be doing even more okay about 100 pounds from now. It’s going to take a little while to get there, though.

What’s the one thing most people want to do when they’re sick – besides curl up in bed or on the couch and binge watch something on Netflix or Hulu? A lot of the time, they crave some kind of comfort food, a food that maybe their mom gave them when they were little which made them feel good (if not necessarily better). Having that food now throws you back to that simpler time in your life. While it may not make whatever you’ve got going on go away, it will take you back to that simpler time and the memory alone soothes you. Unfortunately, most comfort food is not exactly weight-loss friendly.

When I was little, the comfort food I got was a plateful of bacon or a couple of hot dogs slathered in mustard (Gulden’s Spicy Brown Mustard, as my father refused to buy anything else!). And since I would get sick three or four times every winter, I ate a lot of bacon and hot dogs (that explains so much, doesn’t it?). Now that I’m older, I can totally appreciate a nice, warm cup of soup with a simple small sandwich or salad on the side when I don’t feel well but still have an appetite. These days I rarely cook bacon at home (and even then, I use a microwave. I can’t stand all that bacon grease all over the damn place), and I have finally hunted down the ever-elusive Hebrew National 97% Fat Free Hot Dogs (thank you, Target!). It’s a taste I’ll have to acquire – they’re not bad but they’re not what I’m used to. However, they are ridiculously low in points – 1 frank equals 1 SmartPoint – so I will develop a taste for them to appease the occasional longing for a dog. Combine it with Sara Lee Delightful Multi-grain bread (another low point gem!) and French’s Yellow Mustard, and you’ve got yourself a really satisfying, low point meal.

Now, more often than not, when you’re under the weather from a cold, the flu, a flare up of your pulmonary hypertension, like I’ve been suffering from this week, or anything equally nasty, the last thing you want to do is get out of bed, schlep into the kitchen and start banging around the pots and pans to make yourself something to eat. You don’t even want to be bothered programming the microwave. So, you let your fingers do the walking and you find your Seamless, GrubHub or Uber Eats app on your phone and – voila! – a bacon cheeseburger deluxe with sweet potato fries and a diet Coke are on their way to you. (Don’t act like you don’t know many people think they can balance out a calorie-dense meal by having a freakin’ diet drink!) If you’re watching your weight or committing to a lifestyle change, that’s so totally bad, right? I say no. Don’t lose your shit; let me explain.

If you’re sick, the chances are your appetite is at zero for a couple of days. So when you do feel like eating something more than chicken soup and crackers – and you think you can keep it down (or in) – having some comfort food isn’t going to undo all of your progress so far. Sure, when you next get on the scale, your weight may have fluctuated (and I say “may have” because I’ve had a few days where I wasn’t so good the night before and the number on the scale managed to go down, not up, the next day. It’s weird but it happens, and I’m not going to look a gift horse in the mouth). That fluctuation could be from a variety of reasons, such as the food was very salty so you retained water or you didn’t go to the bathroom yet, but you’re not going to be 10 pounds heavier, and if you go back to watching what you eat and drinking more water and going to the bathroom, you’ll see the number go down again. If you’re tracking what you eat, make sure to write down your comfort food meal – you should hold yourself accountable for everything you put in your mouth. And, most importantly, forgive yourself and let it go. Tomorrow is a new day and a new chance to get back on track. Having that meal of your favorite comfort food (your “Mommy, I’m sick” meal) will give you a nice boost, something you need when you’ve been feeling like death, but it should be done with the understanding that this isn’t something you can keep doing, otherwise you’re going to go back to looking how you did before the weight loss. And if you have two comfort food meals in the space of a week, like I did this week because I wasn’t physically up to going food shopping, that’s okay. Think about it:  two meals out of the 14 to 21 normally weight-loss friendly meals a person has in a week is not going to permanently derail your progress (unless you go nuts and abandon your healthy ways – please don’t do that). Again, it is very important that you don’t make yourself nuts with guilt over one (possibly two) comfort food meals. Guilt leads to stress, stress leads to eating, eating leads to…well, you get the idea.

Making peace with yourself about veering off course every once in a while is a necessary part of getting your head on straight about this lifestyle change you’ve embarked on. I think that to be successful on any weight loss program, you have to believe that no food is off-limits – but massive portions of food are. If all you want is the taste of a nice cheeseburger, then have the damn cheeseburger – singular – not one of those monstrous triple cheeseburger mountains I’ve been seeing advertised lately. Honestly, who needs one of those things? Even at my heaviest, I never had more than a double cheeseburger and that was a rare occurence. A triple just seems like overkill. Anyway, a cheeseburger and fries or a slice of pizza, or a hot dog with everything every once in a while isn’t a bad thing, especially if you’re at a friend’s house for a party or a BBQ. The keys are moderation and telling yourself you’ll be back on track tomorrow (and tracking what you ate) and making peace with it. Besides, changing your lifestyle and creating a better, healthier you is a process, a journey, and journeys typically take a while. You’ve got time to correct the aftereffects of any little food indiscretions you may have had along the way.

Being sick sucks – trust me, I know – but if a comfort food meal can take your mind off your misery for a little while, is that really so bad? I don’t think so. When you’re sick, you want to take your comfort where you can find it. At least, that’s how I see it.

Until next time, remember:  every day is a chance to hit that reset button…