03/09/2006 23:44
Where Does the Time Go???
Hi All,
I simply haven't had a spare second the last few days! I tried to respond individually to all the lovely comments I have received this last week from you all, but I wasn't able to get to everyone yet. I will - please be patient, and please know how very much your kind, thoughtful, and encouraging comments meant to me!!!
Tomorrow morning, I'm on my way up to Vermont to visit my boyfriend and his darling daughters. When I’m there I don’t have email access (unless I find a random computer when I’m out and about!), but I will definitely write more when I get back next week!
My brief report is that I have had a fantastic week and I am thrilled to have been successful in fitting Jenny Craig into my life, rather than building a rigid diet structure that I have to fit my life around! This is my true-blue goal: to find balance in my eating and in my life, so that I can actually enjoy the food I’m eating and achieve my health goals at the same time! Thank you Lord, I’m discovering it IS possible!!!
I had one moment (well, 4 hours…) of struggle with some chocolate on Sunday night, but threw the left-overs away and ate my JC in the morning. All is well! I lost a pound and half this week – yay!!! I am so fine with losing slowly, especially if it means that I don’t feel like I’m on a diet and I enjoy my food.
My best friend has breast cancer and I spent the day with her. I picked her up from chemotherapy and took her home, and then just hung out for a while. Her cancer has really made me realize how fragile our lives are, and yet there is such comfort in the certain knowledge that God holds it all together for His purposes and our good. (Romans 8:28). This has also made me realize that I want to be sure that I’m doing everything I know to do to be sure that I keep my body healthy. I need to keep the perspective of my body being God’s temple and to treat it accordingly.
I hope you are all doing well, and I look forward to reading about your journeys when I return from Vermont !
03/03/2006 00:27
Solidly Back on Track!
Thank you Lord - two good days in a row! Even managed to lose .7 pound (though I didn't deserve it after those two lousy days!). However, I'm encouraged and I'm takin' it! (Met a woman at Jenny Craig today who has lost 82 pounds in about six months - great inspiration!)
A real miracle that I was able to get back on track after only two days - this is real progress and reflective of my growing acceptance that this will be a slow process - and that is a GOOD thing!
An important lesson came out of today: I had on my exercise clothes all day long, but kept telling myself that I was going to do it this evening. Well, the evening went on, I went out to a lovely choral concert, and by the time I got back I was too pooped and still needed to have my dinner. Didn't actually eat until 10:30pm - getting to be a not-so-good habit...
Ah well, progress, not perfection, no?! All in all, a good day!
03/01/2006 22:51
Victory!
Thank God for a better day today! After 2 days of eating chocolate-covered peanuts, fudge, and a couple of biscuits, I am thrilled that I was able to get back on my Jenny Craig program today. My normal pattern is that once I start slipping up, I'm usually not able to recover until much, much farther down the road - so today is a victory!!!
Struggling a bit with feeling a bit tired and depressed this morning - not sure why. It took me a while to get going this morning, but I did accomplish good things once I did.
After 4 days of not exercising, I got back on the treadmill tonight (while watching American Idol!) and did a good workout for 43 minutes (6% incline, 3.4 mph). I felt like I could have kept on going, but I didn't want to eat dinner too late.
I am preparing myself for either no weight-loss or even a gain when I go to JC tomorrow. It won't be the end of the world...
So, God willing, I will go to sleep with a successful day under my belt! I plan to have my JC chocolate cake before bed, which will be a nice little reward. Thank you Lord, and good night!
02/28/2006 16:49
A Not-So-Brief History
All to Jesus I surrender
All to Him I freely give;
I will ever love and trust Him,
In his presence daily live.
I surrender all, I surrender all;
All to thee, my blessed Savior,
I surrender all.
I have never done anything like "public journaling" before, but I saw someone elses blog (referred from the Jenny Craig website) and liked the way it looked. I've been wanting to be more regular in my journaling and perhaps it will be easier using the computer! I am doing this totally and completely for myself, but if in some small way it helps someone else to read of my struggles, prayers, and victories - then Praise God!
A Not-So-Brief History
Struggled with using food for unhealthy reasons from around the age of 5 or so. Earliest manifestation I can remember is sneaking down to the kitchen after everyone was asleep and packing raw brown sugar into a measuring cup, taking it up to my bed, and eating it all up. Crazy! Have no idea why that was my response to life at the time, but that kind of sneaking, hiding, deceitful behavior continued throughout my life.
Oh, and I am currently 49 years old (going on 35!!!).
I was a regular weight child, the eldest of 4 girls. However, I was always the tallest one in my classes, and in comparison to my sisters, I was simply a curvier body type. Sadly, I was made to feel that I was gargantuan and I always felt fat (my mom was a Southern beauty queen and I didn't quite measure up to her standards...). I feel so grieved when I look back at pictures and see just a very normal young girl, but the seeds of a life-long, debilitating eating disorder were already firmly rooted...
At the age of 11, I started a pattern of dieting which defined my life and who I was. As long as I was "good" with my food, I was a good person; but when I was "bad" with food, I was a terrible person. I remember being so proud of myself when I ordered "diet pills" from the back of a comic book; how ecstatic I was when I was able to eat nothing but carrots for 3 days in high school; the feeling of control I had when I fasted completely for 2 days (iced tea and diet coke) and binged my brains out on the third. What joy to see that I had lost 20 lbs after 2 weeks of doing this! Yeah, right! Ask me how quickly it came back on...
Oh, and then the best "trick" of all - discovering at the age of 16 that if I simply stuck my finger down my throat after a binge, I could control things. Perhaps the biggest, and most damaging, lie of all. It took 13 years for me to give up this awful behavior and, of course, it was never even effective for me. I would be so disgusted by the whole process that I couldn't keep it up long enough to actually have it work to keep my weight down. Bad Bulimic!
So, the long and the short, is that I "dieted" my way up to my all-time high of 350lbs - reaching that weight sometime in 1997. That had to have been my physical low. I was the "walking dead". Never have I been so miserable, and yet still unable to stop my out-of-control binging (is there such a thing as in-control binging???).
Before going further, here is a list of the various diets and programs I have tried over the years:
Self-Created Diets too Numerous to Mention
Weight Watchers (several times)
Mayo Clinic Diet
Duke Diet and Fitness Center in North Carolina
Atkins Diet
Water and Juice Fasting
Pritikin Longevity Center in California
3 1/2 months at Johns Hopkins Eating Disorder Clinic
The Willough Eating Disorder Program in Florida
National Institute of Fitness in Utah (5 week stay)
3 1/2 month Doctor supervised fasting program
2 month Doctor supervised fasting program
Rotation Diet
Scarsdale Diet
Fat Flush
Carbohydrate Addicts Diet
The Weigh Down Workshop
Fasting Program at Roosevelt Hospital in New York
At the 350 pound mark I signed up for a Weigh Down Workshop class at a local church. Being a Christian, this approach appealed to me. While many of the principals that the leader put forth were very helpful and scripturally sound, there were also many that were too bound up in your status with God being closely entwined with how you did with your food. I was grateful for the program and I lost 30 pounds, but eventually felt that this was not the right program for me. However, I did continue to lose another 10 pounds, and then reached a standstill
No matter what I did, I just didn’t seem to have the ability to work this problem out on my own. One of my sisters had seen an article on Carnie Wilson’s weight loss surgery and really encouraged me to look into it. I did, but at the time just felt that surely God would help me achieve victory over this, ultimately giving me a testimony of His grace and healing power. I couldn’t believe that God would want me to undergo surgery to re-work my digestive system in order to lose weight. I believed with all my heart that my obesity was my fault – simply a result of my not being able to get a grip on the binging which continued to control my life.
For the next two years, I continued to bounce around between 310 and 330, still despairing of ever being able to experience victory over the binging and of ever being able to loose even 100 pounds. Fortunately, I had no attending health issues (well, except for the fact that I was morbidly obese!), but my joints and feet were starting to hurt, and even the simple action of trying to get out of a chair was an ordeal. I knew there were certain places I couldn’t go and I got used to asking ushers at the theater to find me a seat that would accommodate my bulk. My ex-husband told me that he would observe me sleeping for fear that I might stop breathing. Without going into detail, I actually had a hard time keeping myself clean because reaching around to bath myself, etc. was an ordeal. But, in my mind, I had no health problems! Oh, the power of De Nile!!
When my sister approached me once again with the idea of gastric bypass surgery, I was finally ready to seriously consider it. I did extensive research and found who I considered to be the “best of the best” surgeon in New York City – Dr. Michel Gagner. I underwent the surgery on March 1, 2001 at 310 pounds. WHAT A GODSEND THIS SURGERY HAS BEEN IN MY LIFE!!!!
Having said that, let me give the important and necessary caveat that this surgery is in NO WAY a panacea for the deep-seated problem of the behaviors of using food to deal with life, the binging, and yes, even weight gain after weight loss surgery.
I lost 125 pounds in 8 months. My life changed dramatically because for the first time EVER, I experienced freedom from the obsession with food. The nature of the surgery is such that for the first year or so, the food obsession is gone, the ability to overeat is physically impossible, and it gives the grace of respite from those debilitating behaviors. All of a sudden, I no longer had the desire to just sit at home and watch tv. I bought a $25 bike (of the WW1 variety!) and started riding about 10 miles each way to work each day. Oh boy, did I ever have fanny fatigue that first couple of weeks!!! The only thing that kept me going was that once I had started out on the bike, I really had no choice but to keep going to work or home. As the weight fell off, my endurance increased and the pleasure I got from riding my bike was immeasurable. After a couple of months, I invested in a better bike ($179!) and I literally rode everywhere I had to go. I never got on a bus or subway. I bought baskets for the front and back of my bike, and I did all my grocery shopping that way, not to mention everything else. I biked to church, to the opera, to the theater, to the movies, to dinner with friends. I biked in work clothes, church clothes, dressy clothes. I biked on the hottest days of summer and on the coldest and snowiest days of winter! In September of 2001 I did a “240 miles in 4 days” charity ride from Vermont to New York . This was a true-blue personal best. Have I mentioned, I LOVE MY BIKE!!!
This “pink cloud” lasted about a year, and then I started to be able to eat a bit more and I started bringing chocolate back into my diet, thinking I could be “normal” with it. And I could, except for the fact that I started “needing” to have it in bed with me, being the last thing I would eat at night, sending me off to sleep. (How embarrassing to admit that I would frequently wake up with melted chocolate on my sheets and night clothes…) Despite all the positive changes in my life and in my body, the old behaviors were sneaking back in. My ability to rationalize is boundless, and though I had gotten down to 18 pounds, the weight started creeping back up. Even though I was still biking everywhere, I couldn’t control my need to soothe myself with food. Not offered as an excuse, but I was also in the process of going through a very painful separation and divorce from 1998 to 2003 (which I did not want). It is important for me to say that in many ways this is irrelevant – I would have still found a “reason” to revert to my food comforting behaviors – divorce or no divorce. This is the nature of addiction.
To continue this saga, I managed to go back up to 240 pounds before going back to my surgeon to find out why this might be happening. After doing some tests, he told me that my stomach and intestines had, in large part, re-grown, and that it could be corrected by “re-doing” the surgery. Essentially, having another by-pass surgery. I knew that my choices had to have something to do with all of this, but I elected to go ahead with the second surgery because, at 238 pounds, I was getting dangerously close to being close to where I was before. I had the second surgery on December 9, 2003.
I didn’t experience quite the same feelings of fullness that I had experienced after the first surgery, but I did start losing weight, and got down to 181 pounds. I considered this a success. At this point, I had so much hanging skin in my abdomen, thighs, arms and breasts, that I started looking into plastic surgery. Unbelievably, my mother offered to help me! WOW!!!
I had the first of two reconstructive surgeries on June 21, 2004 (waking up at 156 pounds!) (lower body lift, liposuction, and arms) and the second one on October 22, 2004 (inner thighs, breasts, arm re-do). These surgeries were life changing in allowing me to feel more “normal” about my body than I had ever felt. However, I had some complications and the pain associated with the recovery period was worse than anything I could have ever imagined and it took me a full year before I even started to feel up to physical activity again. Even now, a year and a half later, I still struggle with some pain in the incision areas.
I still have not really gotten back to my bike riding and have just this past week started to do the treadmill. Though it probably comes as no surprise, I have been putting weight back on slowly over this past year. I think the lack of exercise combined with my old friend, chocolate, has been my downfall. Three weeks ago, I weighed in at 196.3 pounds. I knew that I had to deal with it while it was still in a range I could handle.
A good friend of mine who also went through gastric bypass and who also put about 40 pounds back on, signed up for Jenny Craig about 8 months ago. She has gotten back down to her “ideal weight” and has raved about how she never felt that she was on a diet, but that Jenny Craig has helped her with balance and portion control. These kinds of things have never worked for me, but I finally reached a point of desperation and signed up 3 weeks ago. My friend was right – it really doesn’t feel like a diet. I really like the food, and I feel that I’m eating more than I’m used to eating. In fact, some days I don’t get all my dairy or veggies in… I have lost 5.3 pounds and I am resigned to having this be a slow process – something I’ve never been able to handle. I am the Queen of Instant Gratification!!!
I have found Jenny Craig to be pretty easy to follow and I feel that I’ll be able to stick with it over the long-haul. Yesterday I had a very stressful day and ended up succumbing (ok, I made a CHOICE) to fudge and chocolate-covered peanuts… I don’t know why I felt so stressed, but while the chocolate did alleviate it in the moment, the way it made me feel is not worth repeating. However, I now know that I will be dealing with this to some degree the rest of my life. My prayer is that, by the grace of God, I will have more victories than failures, and that I will be able to keep my body at a weight that is comfortable and healthy, allowing me to be all and do all that God wants for me in this life!!!
To all who may ready this, I pray the same for you.
