Decision Time

Well, I survived Tuesday's appointment. I didn't lose a lot of weight since last month -- 2 pounds -- but I consider that a miracle after all the picnics, reunions, birthday dinner and cake, and don't forget the carnival!

It's also amazing when I consider that summer for me has been a disaster stress/food wise for the past several years. The screwed-up family schedule, some part of the house in construction/remodeling chaos, and a variety of other elements I won't mention here always seems to lead me in three possible outcomes: tears, anxiety or mindless eating. I had one such crying bout the other morning when I got overwhelmed by all of it and everyone involved. And while I did kind of let myself go on a free-for-all around my birthday (as most "normal" people do, I think), the majority of my month was really good as far as IE goes.

I am not a fan going to the doctor, which was proven scientifically over this past six months. When I first come in they take my blood pressure and it's always high because I'm so anxious and nervous, but by the end my doctor takes it again and it's always 10 points lower. But I believe having that monthly appointment really helped to keep me on track and accountable. And while I had that monthly supervision, it helped me stay on track and start to establish some new habits that I believe are starting to stick.

I will admit, after the appointment I went home and "splurged": I had two cookies for a snack, allowed myself some fried food for supper, and then in the evening had a small ice cream sundae. That's it. No bags of chips, boxes of cookies, or quarts of ice cream. Compared to even the beginning of the year, this was small in comparison to previous "splurges". And you know what? It didn't agree with me at all! All that rich food upset my stomach, and the next morning I was GLAD to get right back to my "regular" food. A major milestone!

I'm going to admit something here, which I've only told a few people. There was an ulterior motive/reason for these monthly visits. In January when I first went to the doctor he wanted me to consider getting the LAP Band surgery. A requirement to be approved for it is a documented six-month, doctor-supervised weight loss plan. This last visit was the six-month mark, so technically I'm done and I should now make a decision about the surgery.

The problem is I'm completely undecided. I have always and will continue to swear I will never have the gastric bypass. I think it's the mutilation of a well-functioning digestive system. It's way too dangerous and full of risks, not only with the surgery itself, but with the recovery and the long-term problems of malnutrition and loss of bone density. Yes, I know some people who have had success; I also know some people who had a horrible time in recovery, some who have managed to regain a lot of weight despite the surgery, and I have read of the deaths caused by it, too. I just don't see enough positives here for me to ever consider it.

The LAP Band, however, has never received full condemnation from me. It's less invasive, doesn't involve cutting, and rerouting parts of your body, and it seems to cause far fewer problems. But I'm still leery. It still involves inserting foreign objects into your body, and there are always some risks with that.

I admit that I'm wary of the whole process of it. Going to doctors, being evaluated, all the requirements they expect of you before and after the procedure. It feels to me like I'd be selling my soul to the Weight Loss Devil. I could be totally wrong with these impressions, but after a lifetime of doctors, weight loss experts, magazine articles and news reports telling me I HAVE to do this or MUST do that, I'm very gun-shy about being forced to someone else's "rules." I've worked so hard at this intuitive eating process; what if their rules don't coincide or are the complete opposite of what I've tried to accomplish?

But then I look at recent pictures of myself and bemoan the fact that I regained all this weight from my all-time adult low a few years ago. Even though it was still extremely far from our culture's current ideal, I wish I could have that body back and think I'd do just about anything do get it. But then I realize I can't go back on another diet full of "shoulds," deprivation and perfectionism, that it nearly made me snap before, and I'm afraid that's exactly what I'd find in the LAP Band experience.

Of course, I won't know for sure unless I go to the informational meeting and find out what it's really all about. But I keep procrastinating, worried that once I get there they'll give me the hard sell and I'll be pressured into it. However, I know I'm not that weak-willed that I'll allow myself to be talked into something I know I don't want to do. I need to quit procrastinating and letting indecision rule my life.

For now, I'm concentrating on IE, because it seems to be working. Maybe not as fast as weight loss surgery, but progress is progress no matter how small. And on Friday I finally have my first appointment with my new therapist. We had a very brief phone conversation last week, and I told her I'm interested in cognitive behavioral therapy. At the appointment I'll go into more detail, and I'm really hopeful that she'll be able to help me reinforce new beliefs and more productive behaviors that will turn this weight battle around for good.

Motivation

Today I have been cleaning the house and really hitting it hard. It's the cleanest the house has been in ages. Why? I have company staying over tonight.

As I mentioned in the previous post, I am a control freak and hate chaos. That definitely includes my house -- clutter and chaos there makes me nuts nuts nuts! Yet why is it that I need outside motivation -- someone else coming to visit -- to propel me into high-octane cleaning?

I realized the same thing goes with my eating and my weight. I'd like to be a "normal" eater and achieve a healthier weight, yet why is it that I can't get motivated unless I have the threat of an impending doctor's appointment and stepping on his scale?

Again, what is going on inside of me that won't make the effort unless there's an outside force? Is it some basic lack of self esteem and negative thinking that doesn't think I deserve it? Do I think other people's opinions -- guests, doctors -- are more important than mine? Or do I fear their criticism more than I do my own?

Let's face it, most people follow the rules because there are consequences. Some of them are negative: We wouldn't worry too much about speed limits if there were no speeding tickets. We don't break laws because there are possible fines and even jail time. And then there's the positive reinforcement: would we care about doing well in school if we didn't get the A? Would we try to make the sales quota if there wasn't a commission or bonus tied to it? Most humans need rules and consequences, sometimes rewards and punishments, to motivate us to do the right thing.

I guess for me, dealing with my eating creates mixed signals in my head. While I know logically that it is better for my body and mind to eat healthier, i.e., a reward, it's hard to not feel deprived -- a form of punishment -- if I restrict or try to eliminate certain kinds of foods. And my reaction to that threat of punishment is to run away or rebel.

For example: yesterday I was reading a magazine that included a big section on one of those "get healthy now!" programs, and as I leafed through their suggested meals and treats I actually started to get anxious! Just the thought of "you can't have that" and "you have to eat this" sends me into that spiral of diet mentality that always has the reverse psychology effect on me. "I can't have it? Well, then, by God , I'm gonna' eat it twice as much as I did before!"

I am SO much happier when I eat intuitively. I have choices and don't have a huge list of don'ts and shoulds and no-nos hanging over my head. I'm not obsessing every minute of the day over how many calories I've consumed and how many more I'm "allowed" to have that day. The thing is, it is work focusing in on what my body actually wants and needs, and paying close attention to
those signals of hunger and satiety instead of following the rules of eating at this time and never eating after a certain hour. I'm sure when I was very young this was all automatic to me, but I "shoulded" myself until I lost that ability. Now I have to relearn it, which can be difficult when I'm trying to counteract the years of irrational thinking and emotional ties I've used instead.

My doctor's appointment is in an hour. I sure hope there isn't too much punishment in store for me.

Out of the Ashes

“The phoenix hope, can wing her way through the desert skies, and still defying fortune's spite; revive from ashes and rise.”

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

Six months. It seems both like a long time and hardly any time at all. Where was I all that time? Good question. Under the wet, heavy blanket of my depression, a blanket soaked with a good deal of stress, burn-out and mental exhaustion from a variety of issues going on in my life.

When I saw my general practitioner in January and he looked at the sorry state I was in, I tried to explain that I spent the majority of the past year fighting depression. His frank reply: "You've been battling depression most of your life, haven't you?" And I couldn't argue with that. I've had anxiety problems since I was 10, and suffered my first serious bout of depression around 14 or 15. It's been a lifetime of struggling.

I apologize to those friendly bloggers who left messages over the past six months. I left off here so positive, and I was nowhere near that mental state and couldn't collect myself enough to even explain. I wasn't only cut off from blogging, I was cut off from myself.

And in that process of cutting off, I ate. I must say, thank goodness, that it wasn't the compulsive, crazed binge eating I was doing at the end of my dieting days -- that was a scary time of hoarding binge foods, sneaking off to eat this "contraband" and mindlessly consuming it until I was often physically ill. I think the combination of the information I've learned from studying Intuitive Eating and the Wellbutrin I was taking kept me from that extreme.
Instead, it was just a "f#!*-it" attitude. I ate whatever I wanted and didn't think once about health or nutrition; it was all about comfort. I made lousy choices all day long. And exercise flew right out the window; other than housework and a little snow shoveling I was living a completely sedentary existence, escaping into TV, movies and reading books from the library.

I guess you could say my doctor's appointment was my wake-up call, my "hitting bottom." I finally realized the dark place I'd fallen into and knew I had to do something to pull myself out of it. I was in a sorry state and not just emotionally. My weight went up, and so did my blood pressure (it didn't help that I was fighting off a panic attack about the appointment before I even walked in the door, plus almost hitting a telephone pole on the icy roads getting to the office!). Fortunately it wasn't dangerously high -- yet -- and my other test results came back okay. My doctor wasn't mean, but he woke me up to the fact that I'm not getting any younger, and the time is quickly coming where my body won't be able to tolerate the excess weight, lousy diet and sedentary lifestyle without serious consequences.

So then I got home, cried, and tried to figure out what in the hell I was going to do with myself. The doctor brought up the idea of Lap-Band surgery, and I actually considered it for, oh, a day. But I realized once again that my problems have little to do with the size of my stomach -- it's about the beliefs in my head combined with my health issues, which include hypothyroidism and PCOS. I don't know if I'd put the depression in the mental or physical column -- it definitely runs in my family, but is that nature or nurture? The same thing goes with my body -- both sides of my family are made of up stocky, German and Eastern European ancestors. But is that genetics or the way our families ate and dealt with food? In any case, it adds up to the fact that I'm never going to have a body like a runway model. I don't think that's a negative belief, just a realistic one.

Putting all that aside, I looked at what were realistic goals and what I could tackle without making myself crazy(ier).

Dieting in the typical sense is out for me. I caught myself in the first couple weeks after the doctor's appointment falling into some dieting mentality (restricting too much, wanting to weigh myself obsessively, etc.) and quickly falling into an anxiety attack. I was lucky in a sense that I had an appointment with my therapist that day, and I was able to talk about the extremes in my thinking. This past year it's either not caring about anything (i.e. depression), or obsessing to the point of anxiety. And my question that day was, how do I find the balance in between these two points?

The biggest things were getting my blood pressure back to a healthier level, which tied directly into getting more physically active again. My doctor gave me a very basic walking program, and even though it seemed ridiculous to start off at 5 minutes a day for the first week, I realized that was my extreme, black or white thinking rearing its head. I looked at it in different, more positive ways: instead of being intimidated by a program that looked really hard and difficult, this was something that sounded very easy to do, and I'd be more apt to doing it because it would be over quickly! But more importantly, those 5 minutes a day would enable me to establish a habit. And it worked. I slowly crept up to 10 minutes a day, and now it's 15.

As fate would have it, a week after my appointment I once again became captain of my church's team for our local newspaper's fitness challenge, which wraps up with a 5K/10K walk and run in June. You keep track of your exercise and weight loss which are converted to points that are added in with your race result. In our case those points go towards a competition with other churches for a "Pastor's Cup" trophy. All of this benefits various charitable organizations in our area. This is my third year as captain of our team, and there is something to be said for having a chart to keep track of your exercise to keep you motivated to keep it up.

As for the food and eating? I'm doing my best with IE and its basic rules: eat when you're hungry, eat what you want, eat until you're satisfied. I am making an effort to make healthier choices, but only those foods that I really like. There have been some instances that I don't make the healthiest choice, or else there's nothing else available, but I took them in stride and didn't attach any bad feelings or guilt to them. I have had a couple instances of stress-eating, but they were limited and did not snowball into a feeding frenzy. I think it's because I was conscious of my actions, which cut down the intensity of my need for it.

Tomorrow I go back to the doctor to find out a) if I've lost any weight and b) if my blood pressure has gone down. While I've tried to stay away from the scale these past six weeks, I did take a peek this morning, just so I'd be prepared for tomorrow's appointment, and it appears I've lost somewhere between 10-15 pounds. I just hope the blood pressure has gone down, too.

I'm not getting too excited about the weight loss. My main focus right now is not about that. My main goal right now is taking care of myself, and that means physically and mentally. I can't go back to sacrificing my sanity for a smaller dress size, yet I can't sacrifice my health, either. So I'm doing my best to achieve balance -- balance in what I eat, balance in putting movement in my life, and balance in finding satisfying "me" time in the midst of working, housekeeping and being a wife, mother, daughter, sister and friend.

My biggest concern right now is the fear of the return of that blanket of depression. Even though I'm feeling better now, how long until it once again takes over and takes all the joy out of life? I'll end with another quote from Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra:

"Our greatest foes, and whom we must chiefly combat, are within."

Adventures in Boredom

Remember yesterday when I said how quick and easy it was to get Mabel x-rayed and splinted at the ER? Well, I wish it had been that fast at the orthopedic doctor's office. It took TWO AND HALF HOURS for her to be seen and get a cast on her arm. I think 40 minutes was spent in the waiting room, another 15 minutes waiting in the exam room for the doctor. We saw her for 5 to 10 minutes, then had to wait another 45 minutes in the exam room for the physician's assistant to get to us to cast her. This took the rest of the 2 1/2 hours.

My wonderful daughter did manage to entertain us with her antics. In the waiting room she was writhing in agony over her boredom. I asked her why she didn't bring her Nintendo DS along, and her reply was fast and mumbled (as usual), and I was sure she replied, "I wanted Lucky Charms but they died." This made us all laugh, and Hubby and I went on to ask her if it was the green pots of gold or the blue moons that actually died. In truth, she forgot to charge her DS, and that's what was dead.

During the interminably long wait in the exam room, Mabel was continuing her roller coaster ride of giggles, whining, mock crying, then back to the giggles again in this bizarre cycle of mood swings. During one of the whiny periods she asked us, "Do I have to go to Camp Aldo Nova?", referring to our unusually-named church camp (and it doesn't even remotely sound like Aldo Nova, by the way!). Hubby and I looked at each other and burst out laughing, both bursting into scary renditions of "Fantasy." This definitely helped relieve the drudgery of sitting there in the empty vacuum of a doctor's office.

But we finally got the heck out of there and manged to get back to our hometown just as the rain began, dampening our opportunity to go to our local volunteer fire department's carnival/block party. This has been a tradition in our town for generations, and every kid in the area looks forward to the week of rides, games, cotton candy, funnel cakes and candy apples. The adults play Bingo, eat hamburgers and hot dogs in our hometown bakery's rolls that everyone adores, and moan over how much money their kids beg them for to play "just one more game." We managed to get our supper and dessert, but it was too wet to ride, and we didn't really want Mabel out in the rain with her new cast. She was bummed, but I promised to take her later in the week. Hopefully the weather forecast will improve for us. But rain on Block Party week is pretty much tradition in these parts, too.

I must say the last two days my neck/shoulder/arm issue has been much better. There's still a little pain and ache there, but vastly improved from a week ago. Maybe I'm on the mend. Let's hope so.