It’s day 1 of my full juice fast. I weighed in this morning at 270.4 which is 9.6 pounds less than I was on Friday when my weight hit 280. I feel so much better already it’s kind of crazy. The craziest thing is that I feel sooooo on top of my game. My sleep is sound. I wake up feeling refreshed. This morning I got up the same time as I usually do but ended up ready to go way earlier than I needed to be and early to work when I usually come in just on time or a minute or two after. There must be something to that old saying “If you fail to prepare you prepare to fail”…I suppose the opposite is also true! Anyway I’m excited for today! I’m even excited to feel a little hungry at times and remember what that actually feels like instead of feigning it as an excuse to binge. Life is good.
Pre-reboot: The last day of easing in
Well, this is it. My last day before I begin consuming only fruit and vegetable juice for a while. I am now off solid food completely and today I will be following the juice fast guidelines set out on the “Reboot With Joe” website but adding in a couple cups of broth from the vegetable soup I made last week. Then tomorrow it’ll be all juice made fresh in my kitchen for at least ten days (but I’m hoping longer).
Unfortunately, my poor teammate Lola has been diagnosed with pneumonia in both lungs so she needs to eat in order to take her antibiotics. So it’s down to me to see if I can make this juice fast thing a real go or not. She’s hoping to continue adding juice into her diet and following a clean eating plan and hopefully drop some weight as well over the next couple weeks and then go on the juice fast as soon as her round of anti-biotics is done. What a trooper.
However, that means I need to be even more resolved than ever about this. I need to be ultimately prepared for each day and that means a lot of time in front of my juicer and a lot of clean mason jars (because they don’t stain or take on taste and they seal without leaking…plus I just feel like mason jars were intended for fresh fruit and vegetables, right?).
Do you know what it’s like when you’re resolved to make a positive change and THAT is exactly when something extraordinarily tempting comes into your life? That was today. Normally people don’t bring food into work for the office…except today, the first day I’ve resolved not to eat anything, is the day someone brings in chocolate covered strawberries…I mean really!?!? Who does that!? lol. Oh well… pretty tough to beat my resolve for today.
I’ve decided to adopt a new mentality when it comes to temptation. My whole life when I’ve dieted I’d say “I want that but I can’t have it!” and ultimately I go off that diet and have three times as much of it as I would have before. I’ve decided to adopt the attitude of “I can have it, but I don’t want it” and hope that it really catches on and becomes a meaningful mentality for me.
Anyway, 9 pounds down so far and can’t wait to see what happens next!!
Slow to Fast
I’ve never been bigger. It sucks. My la-di-dah attitude towards my weight has not been helping me. I feel honestly that my body is on the brink of crisis. Little things keep happening and I know that if I don’t make a big change, it’s only going to get worse.
I miss feeling healthy. I can’t remember the last time I felt healthy. Probably 5 years ago at my healthiest…a time when I was still a solid 70-80 pounds overweight…I felt amazing. Now I need to lose that much twice. It’s horrifying if I think about it too hard.
That’s why, after watching the documentary “Fat, Sick & Nearly Dead” I’ve decided to go for broke and do a juice fast. My friend Lola has also decided to join me as she is at her highest weight range as well. We both have a long way to go but we feel committed to this idea.
So for the past few days I’ve been juicing and adding it in to my day, markedly starting my days with juice and ending with food. My weight hasn’t really done much but I’m not too worried. It can’t hold on forever. On Thursday we will begin only consuming juice made from fresh fruits and vegetables for at least 10 days. My first goal is to drop 30 pounds and I’m determined to stay on my juice fast at least that long. If at that point I feel amazing, my plan is to continue as long as I feel healthy and capable. But for now I want to just prepare myself for Thursday when there will no longer be food consumed. It’s nutrient dense juice for this chica! So far I’ve dropped a couple pounds and that’s great. I’m hoping for a heck of a lot more than a couple and hopefully to see some of my health concerns start to go away. Here’s to health…and juice!
PCOhNo…MY HORMONES!!!
The short of it – I want to have babies but my hormones disagree.
I have been informally diagnosed a few times with a disorder known as PCOS (Poly Cystic Ovarian Syndrome) which basically means my sex hormones are all out of whack, I’m resistant to insulin, I’m not ovulating and I gain weight easily (while losing weight very difficultly).
Now that I’m married I have a very important reason to finally do what it’s going to take to figure this out…I want to have my husband’s babies! And since I’ll be 31 in a couple months I need to get on it ASAP so that if it doesn’t work we can start looking into the adoption process.
My naturopath and I are working on my PCOS, but I’ve never had the blood-work and ultrasounds to see exactly where things are at, so I decided to start working with a GP on this as well. So yesterday I went to the doctor and now I have all the sheets of paper to take to the lab to get my everything checked out. So next week I’ll start that testing and at the end of March I’ll see my doctor again and get an idea for where things are at. I’m hoping that I don’t actually have cysts on my ovaries at this point, but I’m not ruling anything out. I have this feeling that I’m heading down a very steep path and that it’s going to be a long road ahead to figure this all out. I’ll provide periodic updates here on my blog because, well…I like pretending anybody actually cares.
Lates!
What not to Eat: My custom food list
I thought today I’d share the list my naturopath gave me as a guideline for what I should eat if I want to beat the insulin resistance and help my PCOS. You’ll see this is really a list of what NOT to eat, as much of it is red and crossed out…in case you couldn’t tell, that’s a bad thing. You may have to squint, but at least you’ll get an idea of how I’m trying to go from living on carbs with a side of veggies, to living pretty much without carbs. DISCLAIMER: This list was created by my naturopath based on MY specific needs and may not be a guide for all people…but you also can’t go wrong if you’re trying to beat insulin resistance by getting an idea of a diet that will help.
Going Down in a Blaze of Glory…and cheese
Well folks, when I stepped on the scale today I saw what 9 days on a Ketogenic Diet has done for my body…to the tune of 9.5 pounds lower than I was on February 1st. This is CRAY! I can’t believe I’m averaging a pound per day so far of loss. Of course a body can hardly sustain that, right? I mean you hear about people losing crazy amounts of weight in short amounts of time, but I always just assumed those people made a blood pact with a witch doctor or something. This is legitimate, scientific weight loss while never feeling hungry and not having cravings.
I mean…I ate crème brule yesterday. Yes I used stevia instead of sugar, but seriously. It should be wrong for crème brule to be a weight loss food. It’s awesome.
I’m not exactly ready to toot my horn tooooo loudly because water is stupid and your body can decide to hold on to it at the most inopportune times…for example. Say you were hoping to go from 9.5 pounds to 10 and you’re doing everything you can think of to achieve that and you step on the scale wishing and hoping and suddenly you’re 9.5 pounds down has become only 5 and you contemplate (and sometimes end up) eating the family size bag of zesty cheese tortilla chips, a box of macaroni and cheese, a can or two of oysters and a large chocolate bar. That’s what my pattern has been up to now. I am determined not to let that be my pattern anymore. And so I’m just going to focus on how proud of myself I am for not compromising this diet for over 9 days already…a mammoth feat in my history books.
Coming into February, the shortest month of the year, I was determined to do as much as possible to see what could be done by the end of the month if I was nearly perfect. I am aching to find out because I really owe it to myself, my husband, and hopefully my future little ones to be disciplined for them.
Now, on a positive note, I’m so close to my first 10 pounds I could scream, but I’ll reserve that for actually reaching it. Maybe tomorrow?!?
Eating Pizza Without Hating Myself
There’s a growing fad among low carb dieters to replace everything with cauliflower. Bread? Cauliflower. Alfredo Sauce? Cauliflower. Potatoes? Cauliflower. Rice? Cauliflower…I applaud the ingenuity of dieters who can take an offensively boring and funky tasting vegetable and turn it into so many things…but I draw the line on cauliflower pizza crust. I can’t do it. And so for me the thought of not eating pizza is a sad one…until Pinterest intervened and showed me the path to awesomeness…as usual.
And so I found myself yesterday making this pizza crust recipe from Cooky’s Creations and it is, in fact, the holy grail of low carb pizza crust. It is real, honest, hold it in your hands even if it’s super thin pizza crust with a great taste, texture and it just…I just…I could have wept for the joy of that pizza. Even though I had several pieces yesterday (and today), I have still maintained myself to be under 20g carbs. My ketostix are still testing optimal ketosis and I’m still losing weight. Life is good.
This morning, the 9th morning into my Keto diet, I weighed in at 7.9 pounds less than my first day. That means I have lost almost 8 pounds in 8 days. Fat, water, I don’t care what it was. All I know is that this diet is clearly what my body wants. I can tell you now that I have not felt really hungry, nor am I having the same uncontrollable cravings for things like chocolate and pasta as before. I plan to attack this week in the same way. Sunday is the 15th of the month and I will be excited to see the change.
I pretty much took last week off of fitness though. That will change this week. I plan to start training again and trying to get in lots of steps as well…and having said that, I think I’ll use a portion of my lunch break to get a bit of fresh air and stretch my legs this week.
So here we go…week one can always be a big week…week two is usually when things get tough. I’m just going to keep pounding water and supplements and low carb foods and see where the wind takes me.
Loved before Conception
Those who know me well, and I mean really well, know that I resigned myself to the idea that I may not have children when I was a teenager. See, until last year I didn’t know why my feminine cycle was irregular to the point of skipping entire years, but I did know, even at 15, that you can’t have children if you don’t ovulate. Of course at the time, the doctor’s only solution for me was a birth control pill, and even then I knew that was not an option for me. So I ignored my situation.
15 years later I am a 30 (almost 31!) year old married lady. My fat percentage is the highest it’s ever been and I haven’t cycled since 2013. I have PCOS, a hormonal disorder that causes me not to ovulate regularly, and currently not at all in a year and a half. It also makes it very easy for me to gain weight and unsurprisingly, very hard to lose any due to my body’s resistance to insulin. And so I am on the up-ramp for type II diabetes, cysts on my ovaries and probably many more obesity-related diseases unless I can get this under control. That is why I’ve taken to the most extreme carb-cutting (Ketogenic) diet to try in desperation to lose the weight.
Today is day 5 of my diet. So far it’s going really well. My weight has dropped a few pounds already (though I won’t take much notice until I reach more than 10 pounds because I can go up or down 5 pounds in water weight in a day).
Back in 2010 when I lost nearly 50 pounds and found myself balancing right around the 200 lb mark, I had this image of a healthy, svelt Mela with a black swim-suit bathed in the sun, running on a beach. She kept me going through monotonous, long workouts at the gym (because I didn’t know that long periods of medium intensity working out was actually working against my hormones and stopping me from losing more weight). She was the go-to image in my head when I just felt like I couldn’t get out of bed and go out in the winter to sweat at the gym. I don’t have that image anymore. Yeah, sure it’d be great to look awesome in a swimsuit, running on the beach. But that’s not my real motivation anymore. My real motivation has much more meaning than a few minutes on a beach somewhere.
Last week I was looking for the mental image I was going to hold on to when I saw her for the first time…it may sound really odd when I tell you, I saw my baby girl. I saw this precious little head of dark curly hair with a pink bow in it and a little pink jumper with a white sweater under it. And something just snapped inside me. I want her. I love her. I could honestly cry just thinking about her. Knowing I’m so far from having her because of the hormones in my body is so frustrating. But I also know that I have the ability to help myself. I need to lose this weight if I ever want to hold her in my arms.
And now it’s about more than just fitting my calves into high boots or having a piggy back ride on my husband’s back or being able to run without hurting myself or finally knowing what it’s like to buy a piece of clothing in a single digit size. If I don’t get it together and put in the work, and lose the weight and get my cycle going again and take my supplements, I will never get to meet that little girl…or boy if that’s God’s will. I mean hey, it’s possible I’m just crazy and it will never happen anyway and I’ll adopt that little girl or boy and love them so much. But I know that I can’t keep living as if my health doesn’t matter.
So with a lot of effort and thought and prayer and intention, I’m working hard and I will work even harder so that I have a shot at the life I long for. My family is worth not eating junk for. The thought of pasta doesn’t even appeal to me if it means I can’t be healthy enough to bring a child into the world.
This is only day 5 so I have hundreds more days to go through…but I’m doing it. And I’m not quitting because I’ve got way more reasons not to quit than I have to quit.
Tom Cruise Run
I’m kind of hooked on this new fitness app on my smartphone. It’s called Seven and it sets up a 7 minute HIIT workout where you work at an exercise for 30 seconds and rest for 10 seconds. You can customize it a bit, and they offer extra paid workouts, but if you do it consistently, you can also unlock those workouts for free by using the app a lot.
When I get a fresh breeze of motivation, I usually use it to workout like an animal one time, get sore for four days and then not exercise again for a week. It’s kind of part of the cycle in my life that I’m trying to break, so I love that this app is set up for cycles of seven minutes. You can do as many cycles as you want, but I’m just starting with one for now and trying to do it at least five times this week. I’ve already got three down, so I’m feeling pretty good about that.
Anyway, fitness should be entertaining. This app is already getting pretty predictable and I’m not a fan of at least three of the twelve exercises it makes me do. I have one knee that doesn’t want to cooperate when I’m lunging or doing step-ups. I also absolutely refuse to do jumping jacks, partly because of the probably-insane fear that I’ll end up going through the floor to my basement if I put that much pressure on the floor of my bedroom, and partly because I have another probably-insane fear that too much jumping without enough support will do ugly things to my boobs. To be fair, the real reason is more about me just hating that kind of movement than anything. It doesn’t feel good to me, so I end up doing some sort of wild cardio variation that may or may not include some interpretive dance moves.
But my favourite part is one of the last exercises. High knee running in place. This is where the playfulness in me comes to fruition. I basically do the Tom Cruise Run. If you’ve ever seen a Tom Cruise action movie, then you have a decent idea of what that is, but Courtney Cox and Christa Miller perfected the move on Cougar Town and I’ve been in love with it ever since. The Tom Cruise Run is what makes my trips from my desk to the printer and back seem like less of a monotonous task, though to be fair I only Tom Cruise walk at work. Just…if you haven’t yet, you should Google the Tom Cruise Run and enjoy your own new obsession. At this point in the workout I’m really starting to look forward to the end of the circuit, so I like to make the most of it by shouting out Tom Cruise related things like the titles of his movies or things like “Oprah’s couch”, “Scientology”, “Run Katey Run” and so on and so forth.
After all, if I can’t enjoy my workout I’m just never going to make it. Thank you Tom Cruise.
My Fat
I emerged into this world a nice big baby girl and I remained so throughout my childhood. Even as a toddler I was always chunky. I had plenty of baby fat.
I’ll never forget the first time someone told me I was fat to my face. It was a boy at school and he was rating us to determine whether we deserved to be a member of his snow fort at recess time. I grew up in the prairies so when the snow flew it was all about whose fort you belonged to. The mere fact that I remember sitting on a wall of snow while he went up and down a row of us calling each of us fat even though many were just thin girls is pretty telling about the impact it had on me. We all laughed but I wonder if anyone else remembers the feeling they had in that moment.
I was an inactive child. I had short little stubby legs and no passion for being pelted with plastic balls and so I was among the last chosen for team sports in phys. ed. I hated gym class especially because I already hated my body as a child. I accepted my fat to be part of my identity and I saw myself as huge, though looking back now, I was no more than a bit overweight. I sometimes wonder if I hadn’t learned so early in life to identify myself as fat if I’d have developed such an unhealthy emotional eating problem.
In my teen years I learned to distinguish myself as “the funny one” in order to find my value in the social order. I wasn’t going to be “the pretty one” and I wasn’t disciplined enough academically to be “the smart one” and, well I just hated exercising so there was no way I would have tried to be “the sporty one” and so I resigned myself to being the funny one and I enjoyed making people laugh. In fact I needed to make people laugh. But being “the funny one” is a self-fulfilling prophecy and I longed for the people around me to see me for more than that so I threw myself into the arts and became “the funny artsy one”.
I resigned myself to not date. I can tell you now that I was twenty five years old before I started dating. I explored my soul as a young person and devoted time to my passions of music and volunteer activities within my church community. If young men showed interest I had several devices created to push them away because I was so self-conscious about my body that I didn’t understand how they could be attracted to me, and I felt as though actually dating me would somehow open their eyes to what I was and they’d dump me because I was so fat.
One day at church a group of new immigrants had moved in from a tiny tropical island in the Indian Ocean far off the coast of the African nation of Madagascar. Having always been obsessed with the world and its inhabitants, I was glad to make fast friends with a group of young men who couldn’t wait to share all the things about their island that they missed, namely their wives and children, who they had left behind until immigration processed their applications. As I was living so far from my own family at the time, these men became as close as brothers to me. They loved to go dancing and we went out lots with a group of friends. We’d enjoy their amazing culinary offerings and a few drinks and then dance the night away at whatever club we had chosen. When I walked in all dressed and ready to go out they would hoot and holler and compliment my looks and I started to feel good about myself. I started to dance and wear skirts and do my hair and have fun. Though I never would have had any romantic involvement with these married men, we had all the fun we could singing and dancing and enjoying life as much as we could, but I was very aware of all the people who didn’t enjoy seeing a big fat girl being that free and expressing herself on the dancefloor and being given so much attention.
About five years ago I caught a wind of fierce motivation, was gifted with a gym membership from a dear friend and worked out like a beast for months. I lost about fourty pounds. I’m incredibly sad to tell you now, that in my whole life I had never been treated as well as I was when I lost that weight. Sales people would go out of their way to help me when I was fairly used to many of them trying to pretend I wasn’t there so I’d go away. Men started paying a lot of attention to me and I was intoxicated by it all. Things were even better for me at my job. It was during this period of time, one day at church, that I met the man who would become my husband. Understand at this point I was still about 70 pounds overweight, but I looked and felt so good compared to what I had been, that I exuded this massive amount of confidence.
My husband met me at my smallest. Now he knows me at my biggest. Unfortunately we have gone through a few of the hardest years of our lives together and my emotional eating habits returned. Circumstances had us getting engaged and then cancelling our wedding, my father passing away, and a slew of immigration backlog problems that we are still battling to this day. Though I am currently extremely happily married and enjoying life’s offerings, I have gained back all that I had lost the years previous and I added another twenty pounds to the mix. Hormonally, I have an imbalance that makes it super easy to gain weight, and super hard to lose any. How wonderful for me.
Every week I struggle with choices that will help or hinder my attempts to win the battle of obesity. The battle is in my own mind as well as my hormones. Every bite I take is either a celebration of my will-power or a concession to my enemy, fat. Every time I take a cheat meal to the grocery store checkout I imagine what the person behind me is thinking, “maybe you should be buying some celery instead”. A constant stream of degrading comments rolls through my head because I know what society thinks when they look at me. I know when I wear leggings my legs jiggle and people probably think I have no business wearing fun leggings…those are for skinny girls.
But I love myself too. Even though I’m my own worst enemy most days, I love who I am and I don’t mind expressing myself through fashion or movement. I don’t feel like I should be put in a special room so that the rest of society can breed the fat out of this world without having to look at us big people.
Yesterday I saw a video about obese people dancing in their underwear in an attempt to normalize big bodies. Some of the comments on the video were…heinous. I get the feeling that many in this world would like to see us all thrown over a cliff for our lack of will-power. As if seeing big bodies moving freely is somehow so offensive. What I saw was people not celebrating obesity, but celebrating life. And any movement when you’re a morbidly obese person is great.
The video made me wonder, at what percent body fat did I cease to be a human being and begin to be merely “fat”. I have hair but I am not hair. I have eyes but I am not eyes. I have feelings but I am not feelings…but because my body is carrying a certain percentage of fat…I AM FAT. Say that to yourself. I AM fat. That is what I’ve been told by this world since I was a very young girl. Not that I have some extra fat, but that I am the fat that I carry. This is the sick and twisted notion that we are hanging on people from very young. If you eat nothing but junk and have the metabolism to stay thin then you are perceived as somehow more healthy than a person who is naturally prone to retaining their fat cells even though they may be trying very hard to get healthy. The thin, unhealthy person is simply known for other attributes, while I AM my fat because I carry it on my body.
We don’t love our fat. I don’t want to be in this big body. Don’t you think I want to jump on my husband’s back on the beach in a little bathing suit or wear shorts that don’t leave my thighs to rub together or dance without seeing a disgusted face out of the corner of my eye? I have an addiction to food and an unhealthy mental relationship with food. There is a voice in my mind that reasons that I might as well stay fat because I suppose a part of me believes that’s all the world will ever see me as. A part of me hates the idea that when Adele makes the cover of a magazine, they only show her beautiful face and not her body…and that part also hates that a thin singer/actress almost always needs to be posed in a sexual manner because after all, we are our bodies aren’t we? Adele has the soul and the voice, Britney has the abs, and don’t think for a second that I consider that problem any less horrifying.
I think it’s so sad that we’re living in a society that would rate the value someone simply because of the size of their body. Young girls longing to look like the airbrushed women on the magazine covers often believe that all they are is their looks and the label on their clothing and some hate themselves so much that they use the derision of others to give themselves some sort of pat on the back. We’d rather not see what makes us uncomfortable…and the sight of an obese person enjoying themselves has become a complete offense to those who have health and fitness all figured out.
We all play a part in either building up or tearing down the people we encounter. You can choose to be part of the problem or part of the solution.
I’m going to continue to work toward health, but I know one thing for certain. I will never try to intentionally tear down an obese person. That serves no purpose but to further encourage the emotional issues that lead us down this path. Some people smoke, some people drink, some people buy expensive toys, some yell at their family members or ignore their loved ones entirely. I eat. We are all flawed and it just so happens that you see my flaws wherever I go because they are on my body. Imagine for a second that you had to wear your flaws on your shirt; maybe a sweater that says “I lose my temper over nothing and scream at my family” or “I can’t make it through a day without a whiskey” or “We are drowning in credit card debt but these shoes temporarily made me feel better about myself because at least I look rich” or “I’m make racist remarks because I hate immigrants”…I wonder how readily people would judge the obese. How easy would it be to tear down someone because of their size, if they could take one look at you and lay all your flaws bear?
Like I said before, we all play a part in either tearing down or building up the people we encounter. While I continue every day to battle my issues with food and fitness, I know that I am not the fat I carry on my body any more than I am the skin or the toenails or the hair on my body. I am me, and that’s pretty great. 🙂
Happily Mela After 
