Ahh choo! Blowing the Dust off of my Blog

Wow, so it’s been a year since my last post and oh what a year it was!

I just had to jinx it with my “figuring out my work/life balance” post!  Boy, was that put to the test!

All in all, my family was darn lucky through the quarantine (and still to this day, we have not lost any family members)… I already had a work-from-home job and my husband was able to switch to working remotely.  School was an unexpected headache for this kids, but we made it through (virtual school this 20-21 school year is MUCH improved)!

Although not leaving the house is my life goal (I’m such a homebody!), having that choice taken away did get to me.  And just feeling the stress and struggles of so many people in the world… it got to me.
I struggled with just maintaining my weight through August 2020 and made zero progress.

Then in late August I lost my kitty who was only a year old. 

He was totally fine one day and four days later, he was gone (uncontrollable seizures via a brain tumor).  I did NOT take this well… at all.  He was my healing buddy when I had my back surgery in 2019.  He would sleep on me on the couch for the weeks I had to sleep there to avoid going up/down stairs.  It would have been a much lonelier experience if not for him.

The same week he passed away, I also began the real estate roller coaster that I am STILL ON.
First it was finding a house for my in-laws who were moving down from New Jersey. 
The real estate market is CRAZY.  Homes are on the market for a split second, then are already under contract.
My family and I toured through a bunch of homes for them since we are local… the travel time (up to an hour), the timing in general (always around dinner time so we’d stop for drive thru) and the walk-through time (usually an hour each time) just ate into our days and schedules, never mind the constant searching online for available homes.
I hadn’t had that much takeout/drive thru food in like… forever.

Within a month or so, I’d packed on at least 10 pounds… then the holiday season was upon us.
Just when we nailed down a house for my in-laws, my mom finally decided to list her house in Maine and move close to me (something I’ve wanted her to do for YEARS so I could be more helpful when she has health issues).
So in addition to helping with moving logistics for my in-laws, the house searching and tours started for my mom’s behalf.

By year end, I was up to a weight I haven’t been in 4 years.  From my lowest weight achieved in 2020 to the highest, I was up 26 pounds!!! I didn’t like it and it scared me. 
I took new “before” pictures because I knew I was going to start losing again… I didn’t know how, but I knew I would.

You’d think by now I’d know “how”, but my body keeps changing. 
I think my try with Keto a few years ago really messed up my body and my intestinal track hasn’t been right since, no matter how low fat I got (I don’t have a gallbladder, but even with trying some over-the-counter supplements/enzymes, I wasn’t absorbing the nutrients correctly and certain foods have me spending my days in the bathroom).
I was also still doing Intermittent Fasting, which was getting me NOTHING and didn’t help at all with weight loss.

Late December 2020 I started watching some documentaries on Netflix & Prime about plant based whole food diets… trying to avoid the vegan activists ones.  It was literally the only thing I’d never truly tried… yes, I tried lowering my meat intake, but I never stopped completely.
I was mostly inspired by ‘Unsupersize Me’ by Juan-Carlos Asse (and ‘Unsupersize Us’ as well).

So on January 10, 2021 I stopped eating animal products… no meat, dairy, eggs… even butter.
I also said goodbye to Intermittent Fasting… I’d become the cliché fat girl who only eats 2 meals a day and wonders why she’s fat… no more.  Time to wake up my slumbering metabolism! Hello breakfast!

13 days later, I’d lost 6 lbs and 12.5 inches all over!
Finally, my intestinal issues stopped… no more trips to the bathroom all day long… my track actually got to fill up and things “normalized” in that department.
I could eat avocadoes again!  (formerly a trigger)

Things moved forward with my mom’s home selling and finding a home near me, so my husband and I went up to her house and stayed with her over 2 weeks to pack up and clean her home (she isn’t physically well enough to do it).  My blessed & awesome in-laws took the kids for all that time.
Even with this trip, other than just 2 food items, I managed to stay plant based… even with a total of over 38 hours of driving over 4 days with 2 hotel stays.

From my last official weigh-in before I left (no scale at my mom’s) to after my return (1/19 to 2/16), I’d lost another 8.2 lbs and 1.75 inches.

So needless to say, I’m back to losing and on a completely different track than I have been the last few years… or ever, really!

Do I miss meat? 
Sometimes, but knowing how I feel so much better not eating it really helps to not want to eat it.
Keep in mind I’m still a wife and mother and no one else in my family is choosing to eat only plant-based, so I still prepare animal products daily, multiple times a day, and yet, I’ve been able to choose an alternative.

Is it hard to eat only plant-based? 
Yes and no.  It’s hard during travel, for sure.  I do love Burger King’s Impossible Burger and Subway’s Veggie Delight… but mostly, it’s just the extra effort to be prepared… to know you’ve created and option for yourself that is strictly plant-based.  If you have that, it doesn’t actually feel “hard”… certainly less than what I initially thought.
Also, having vegan alternatives to cheese, chicken, deli meat, hotdogs, etc. has helped fill any desire for these items.

Do you feel hungry all the time only eating plant-based?
I am more satisfied than I thought I’d be only having plant-based foods.  This was mostly a mental hurdle (you have to get over all the protein marketing and “milk does a body good” crap… it’s all marketing bullshit… there is literally protein in ALL PLANTS – did you know that? I didn’t until recently!).  And actually, I’m eating things that were formally no-no’s in my world like bread and pita or tortilla chips which has been a delightful change that has me excited for my meals.  I still even have my Ben & Jerry’s every Friday… just a non-dairy kind.

Aren’t you a Vegan? 
No.  I still eat honey.  Plus, there are a couple products that say “may contain eggs” but that don’t seem to bother me, so I still eat them. I also use a leather purse that was gifted to me. I will never be a true “vegan”, so I do not use that label.

Another change… Facebook is feeling like a dinosaur and interaction with pages just isn’t what it used to be, so I finally decided to start an Instagram account for Person in Progress:   gwenacious


The real estate woes still have not ended.  We moved my mom down to us and she lived with us for a week (oh so much drama with that and my time living with her before that, but I will spare you), but now all of her earthly possessions are in my in-laws barn and she’s staying at a hotel while we wait for her Maine house to close and then for the closing on the house we found her only 7.7 miles away. 
She has a tenant that just didn’t want to leave and we’re on the FOURTH postponed closing date… it’s frustrating. 
We’ve also incurred over $6000 in debt to help my mom move (truck, trailer, gas, hotel, rented muscle), earnest money, inspections, etc. that we won’t get back until both closings are finally done.
I’ll be SUPER happy to be done with realtors and real estate issues, packing & moving for a LONG TIME.
Now that I have so many family members finally living in my state, I can’t go anywhere anyway!

So a LOT has changed over the last year… absolutely NONE of it I saw coming what-so-ever.
I’m hoping it’ll all be for the better long term.
Stay tuned.

Finding a Work/Life Balance – FINALLY!

I’ve lived all the lives of a mom it seems.  I’ve been a full-time working mom, a stay-at-home-mom and now I’m a part-time work-from-home mom.  If you’d asked me 3 months ago if I wanted to keep being a stay-at-home-mom for as long as it was financially possible, the answer FOR SURE would have been YES.  But my answer has changed now!

I didn’t want to give up my unemployed status for anything.
How I left my former full-time job after all the many years of service and the corporate BS I put up with just left a bad taste in my mouth.  I wasn’t sure I could “handle” getting back out there, not to mention I would have been limited in my choices for jobs.

I was so lucky that a move down South and a new job for my hubby meant I could stay home for once, guilt free.

It took YEARS to fall into that role and truly be happy and satisfied (something some moms never really get to when they’ve come from a full-time job).
I got over no longer providing financially to my family by instead, keeping my house clean, doing the dishes, laundry, bills, making school lunches, cooking a family dinner almost every night, etc.
I eventually learned to take pride and satisfaction in how I ran the household and kept everything going.

Sure, let’s be honest… I wasn’t “Suzy Homemaker” every single day… there were plenty of times I did the bare minimum (dishes, cooking dinner, maybe a load of laundry), but spent the rest of my day in front of the TV like a big ol’ cliché (um, yes, I even watch a soap opera, but in fairness to me, that started when I was 15 years old and I just kept watching – it wasn’t something that I started because I was staying home).

The hours would FLY BY.  There didn’t seem to be enough time for me to sleep, keep up with the kids (homework, lunches, bath time, playtime, bedtime ritual, etc.) and get some needed chill time so that I’d feel ready to handle the house chores, bills, etc.
I would put off home tasks daily until I *had* to do them out of necessity.

In the midst of the stay-at-home-mom life that I had for 11 years, I had my bouts of trying to lose weight as this blog has documented (and my former one) for 8 of those years… watching what I ate and making time for exercise, but that was usually at the cost of something else, like house chores.
I never did find a long term sustainable balance.
And if I had to leave the house (doctor’s appt, dentist, school function, etc.), it exhausted my introverted self, both physically and mentally and I couldn’t wait to have a day that I could just stay home again.

Yet on those busy weeks I had to leave the house 2 or 3 out of 5 days, at the end, although I was tired from it, I felt accomplished.  It’s always been hard for me to get past the exhausting part to reap the accomplished part to purposely make optional plans to leave the house.

And now I have this new life as a part-time work-from-home mom.
First off, I must admit I was not actively looking for a job.
I knew that we seem to be digging a financial hole every year… always living just out of our means, mostly because we pay so much towards existing debt, using tax refunds to dig ourselves out once in a while, but sometimes it was just making a small dent and the hole ultimately got deeper and deeper in the long run.
I figured I would HAVE to work again, but thought it impossible until all of our kiddos were in full-time school which won’t happen until Fall 2021.
Even then, the time between bus pick up and bus drop off does not allow for a full 8 hours, even if you work from home with no commute! Crazy, right? How the hell do other parents deal with this shit? Oh yeah, paying for after school care, that’s how… thank goodness for that!

Anyway… even at that point I had ZERO CLUE what the heck kind of job I could find (obviously part-time unless I was getting paid enough to afford the after school care) seeming at that point I would have been unemployed for almost 13 years!!! I figured I’d probably have to go to a temp agency, get some office/data entry job… start at ground zero and probably minimum wage.

Instead, the most unlikely event occurred.
I was basically handed a job out of the blue.
I was sought out by a company to work for them, FROM HOME and part-time!!  What, wha???

I realize… this NEVER happens.  It’s straight out of one of those always-a-happy-ending movies.
It was totally a “who you know” situation.
In this case, it was my hubby.
He happened to do IT work for a guy that used to be his boss’s boss that had retired and bought a new business, so he’d known my hubby for a decade already.
Now 100% of how I got my job was because my hubby is awesome at HIS job, is trustworthy and has a good work ethic… if not for that, this would have never happened… definite kudos to him!

They were complaining they were getting backlogged and needed to hire someone and the more they talked, the more my hubby realized I’d be perfect for the job.  He decided to throw my name out there, gave them a little synopsis of the work I’d done previously (um, 11 years ago!) and here’s why I really got the job:  he told them I was basically just like him as far as how I did my job and my work ethic (totally true) and they were SOLD.

When my hubby told me of this opportunity, at first I was hesitant, because I as mentioned already, I didn’t really want to give up my unemployed status, but after thinking about it for a few minutes I was thinking how perfect this was for me to “get back out there” (ironically by getting to stay home) and get something NEW on my resume.
Sure, this was a year and a half before I planned, but think of it… I could then have a year and a half experience and if I wanted to, be able to work full-time for them, still from home when that time comes.
I was sold.

This was brought to me the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. I showed up that Friday to the local office, talked to them for maybe 30 mins (where at least 3 times they asked “is this something you’d be interested in doing?”), followed by 2 hours of training and then the following Monday I started working from home!
Just like that, after 11 years of unemployment – POOF – I have a job again!

I never even had to “interview” or even dust off my resume.  I filled out an application just for paperwork sake, but I was already hired by then!
THIS NEVER HAPPENS!
I will forever be grateful how this all came about. It really feels like the universe finally threw me a bone!

Life with part-time work from home… it wasn’t pretty for the first few weeks.

As I once predicted that with me returning to work, somethings would probably slide… like house work.
Well, it did.
The very first week I worked, we picked up/had food delivered twice.  The laundry piled up more than usual.  My hubby chipped in and did the dishes that just piled up that I hadn’t gotten to, and I forgot to pay the mortgage! (luckily my mortgage company doesn’t consider it “late” until the 16^th of the month!)

I was honestly trying to figure out how to do this work-from-home thing… something I’ve literally NEVER done!  Suddenly I wasn’t at the disposal of my 3-year-old to answer every whim at that exact moment… this took some adjusting on both our parts.  I would do my best to “set her up” with a drink, snack, toys, etc. so that she could be occupied for a long as possible while I tried to work.

When I was done getting in my hours (which is sometimes split into 3 segments throughout the day), all I wanted to do was veg… watch TV.  It felt “earned”.  Cleaning, cooking, etc. just got shoved down my priority list.
It was basically what I feared me going back to work would mean for my house and my family.

But those first few weeks were just how it started, not how it ended up.

About a month in, things got better… because it was now part of my ritual to work, I’d gotten used to it and was weaning off the need to chill so much during the hours I wasn’t working.  Also, missing my mortgage payment was a wake up call and I knew I HAD to learn to handle things better and not let so much slide.

Currently, (now almost 2 months in), I’m happy to report that my work/home/mom life is just as balanced as it ever has been!

I’m making extra money, so our finances aren’t as strained (whew!).
I just got a credit card offer that is for the lowest APR and the highest credit limited I’ve ever been offered, not to mention the 0% APR on balance transfers for an impressive amount of time.  I was able to transfer the complete balance of another card and for what I was paying them anyway, I will be able send that same amount to the new card and PAY OFF that amount before the 0% APR runs out and will have saved almost $700 in interest!
I still work in segments during the day, most commonly first thing in the morning & at night after the kids go to sleep so I don’t cut into my time with them in the afternoons/evenings.
I’ve been making a weekly menu, ordering the groceries (hubby picks them up) and making dinner every night.
I keep up with the dishes, laundry, toy clean up and even vacuum more than I used to.
I’m eating within my calorie limit.
I get exercise daily.
I still have chill time to watch TV.
I’m regularly getting at least 6-7 hours of sleep with 8-9 hours on the weekends.
The bills are paid on time.
I’m making progress on the walking trail I’m creating in the woods surrounding our neighborhood.

I’m freaking doing ALL OF THIS, ALL AT THE SAME TIME!
What??????????????  Crazy, right?
I wouldn’t have thought it possible.

But you know what I learned about myself?  The more I take on, the more I can handle!
I adjust.  I get used to it.
I feel like I have MORE TIME in the day than I ever used to!  And yet, I get MORE done!

In fact there have been times were it’s 8 pm and I’ve already gotten enough work hours in, the kids are put to bed, the dishes done, school lunches made, the toys cleaned up and I already had TV time and exercise that day, and although I NEVER feel bored, I get this “wow… free time… what am I going to do?” feeling.
It’s completely unfamiliar, but it’s FABULOUS.

I end up doing more and that drives me to want to do even more.  Organize something, update the baby books, work on sewing projects, paint a picture, volunteer for my HOA, sort and declutter old office files… you name it.
It’s because I figured out how to manage my time better.  And because I’m constantly feeling accomplished, I feed off of that which energizes me, and my desire to sit and watch TV just diminished a ton!  And without all those hours of TV watching I used to feel I “needed”, I gain back all that time!

Apparently, I stumbled on the perfect scenario for my personality, my mental health, my emotional health and even my physical health.  I couldn’t say that for any other work/non-work life I’ve experienced.

Full-time working mom was too much and I couldn’t create balance.
Stay-at-home-mom wasn’t enough and laziness came too easily (excluding the first year and a half with a new baby of course! I’m done with that now, so that’s not happening again)
Part-time work-from-home mom seems just perfect for me.

I may even want to continue part-time hours even after all my kids are in full-time school.

Here’s hoping this isn’t some “honeymoon” period and I burn out… I really don’t think I will as I get adequate “me”/relaxing time, but you never know… and I certainly hope I don’t jinx it by sharing!

Thinking back & Going forward

Yesterday was my first child’s 14^th birthday.  It got me thinking about what I was doing 14 years ago and where I was in my journey.
Right before that pregnancy I’d gained back the weight from my most successful weight loss attempt (in pounds lost, obviously not in longevity… there was just so much I didn’t understand about health or myself at that time).
In 2003/2004 I’d lost 90 lbs in 10 months on the 6-Week Body Makeover.  By the time I had gotten pregnant, I’d gained it all back plus 4 lbs (via work stress, a miscarriage & a death in the family – there’s a bunch of other reasons that became clear to me later, but those are the big ones).

So 14 years ago, I was happy to have basically maintained my weight while pregnant so that when all was said and done, I’d actually lost 15 lbs during my pregnancy.  This put me at 265 lbs.  And guess what I weighed in as on his birthday 14 years later?  Yup, 265 lbs.
Knowing I’ve had 2 more kids since him and the last as late as 39 years old, being that number actually makes me proud.  It could be SO MUCH WORSE.  Shit, it HAS been so much worse!

So past me knowing what future me has gone through, I’d think she’d be proud too.

Going forward, yesterday was my first recovery day to break the sugar addiction that started right before my son’s birthday party last Saturday.  Not only was it the pizza & cake at his party, but let’s just say I was DUMB and got Halloween candy too early!  Oy! Duh.  I even tried putting it in the freezer because I’m not a fan of frozen chocolate, but no, the craving was so deep I just ate frozen chocolate! Ugh.

But I knew what was going to happen if I didn’t put a stop to this yesterday.
A) I wouldn’t have a loss for this week’s weigh-in (which I did manage – down .6 from last week),
B) the more I give in, the longer the addiction will last & the harder it’ll be to stop, and
C) that would mean I’d be snacking on candy every single day until Halloween when we could finally give it away (and trust me, there’d be plenty left).

I just needed a day… one day to not have any real sugar (and avoiding bad carbs also helps as those trigger the cravings). And I did it.
I ate great yesterday, drank lots of water & took a couple walks.
In just one day the scale went down by 3 lbs!
And you know what? It wasn’t as bad as I thought it was going to be!
Maybe catching myself earlier made it a tad easier.  Maybe the fact that as the hours went by, I felt better and better helped keep me on track.
Maybe the fact that I could fit into one of my 12-year-old niece’s hand-me-downs to my daughters because it was too small for her really boosted my spirit!!!

No make-up, crap hair and my boobs were SQUISHED, but dang it, it fit! (my youngest photo-bombing behind me)

I’m torn if this dress is “too young” looking for me… like if I keep losing weight (so maybe the chest part fits better/not so fat legs), could I pull this off in public?  I’m thinking it could be my new graduation dress (I’ll have an 8^th grade and 1^st grade graduation to attend this year) instead of borrowing a dress from my sister like I always do.  I would definitely need some nylons to hide the veins and bright whiteness of my legs! LOL  I dunno… on the fence.  I guess I’ll have to try it on and make a decision in May.

Well whatever the multitude of reasons there were to help keep me on track yesterday, I made it through.  I made it through today too.  My spirits not as high at the moment, but I did make it through.

Tomorrow should be another candy-free day.
I’m actually planning to avoid candy on Halloween… save all my favorites (100 Grand bar, Snickers, tootsie rolls/pops, 1 pack of smarties & 1 box of Nerds) and have them on Friday instead seeming that’s my higher calorie day anyway and also when I usually have real sugar (Ben & Jerry’s).
Otherwise, I run the risk of starting the addiction again (i.e. more than 1 day in a row of real sugar makes it REALLY hard to say ‘no’ on day 3, etc.), which would make Saturday a tough day.

I think this is a smart idea… it’s just going to be very hard to not have any candy on Halloween when several hours are dedicated to it and all my kids are eating it! But I’ve managed to do that previously… it’s not impossible.
Happy Halloween!

I’m off to watch This Is Us.

Vacation, Death Scare & Back Surgery… oh my!

To say I’ve had an interesting last few months would be an understatement!
Now I’m playing catch up… not only do I mean filling y’all in (I get to say that now – been a Southerner for over a decade now!) about what’s been happening since my last post in Jan 2019, but that also applies to my constant ongoing goal of losing weight & getting back down to former lower weights.
Ten months ago I was trying to recover from a gain over hurricane stress and holidays and had the incentive that my in-laws were treating us to a beach vacation in early June.
Well, I did manage to be 10 lbs down for that trip.  Not as much as I wanted, but I was happy I got where I did (263 lbs).
[for any new readers, I’ve been at this weight battle a long time… top weight was 320 lbs in 2014. Lowest weight achieved as an adult was 185 lbs in 2004 and I’ve been trying to get back there – or near there – ever since… and I’m 5’10” if you’re curious]

Apparently I pulled off looking decent enough that dressed in my cute bathing suit & cover-up, my mother-in-law didn’t recognize me when I approached her to say ‘hi’ out at the pool!  Granted, she usually only sees me in my “mom uniform” (stretchy pants, t-shirts), so this was an improvement. LOL But even *I* liked the way I looked.  I had way less stress about “do I look fat?” than I’ve ever felt during such a vacation, so that was really nice.

So then vacation was over and it was half way through June already and we had big plans to go NOWHERE for the rest of the summer so it would feel like we had a summer (they go by SO FAST now) and I would continue on trying to recover the lowest weight I achieved last year (257 lbs in late August).

God laughs when you make plans, right?

Well just a few days after returning home, I got a frightening call from my mother who is in her 70’s and not in the best of health.  She was so depressed, out of it and it sounded like she was just going to give up on life. She actually said that she’d be fine with dying that night.
Not me!!! So not cool with that!!!
Never mind the emotional turmoil this would cause me, my very pragmatic brain got thinking ‘what if she did die?’  I used to think I was prepared because my mom & I have discussed various aspects, but all of a sudden it hit me how much I didn’t know!
I don’t know where she keeps her important paperwork, who her lawyer is, where she stores extra keys (she has 2 apartments with tenants), and she’s got a house full of antiques but I can’t tell the difference between a family heirloom and something she picked up at an auction a couple years ago!
It’d be just like me to keep some auction item and sell the family piece because I had no idea.
I needed her to tell me these things. I’ve been begging her for years to put sticky notes on the back of various items letting me know their history/importance, but she just won’t do it on her own, plus she hasn’t felt well enough to have the energy.
I wanted to go over her wishes again (I knew she wanted to be cremated, but unclear if she still wanted a marker somewhere or a service, where the service would be, etc.).

In short, I PANICKED.

Luckily, 2 days later I get a call from my mother (I was too chickenshit to even try to call her) who, by that time, was in a much better state, mentally & physically.  By then I’d already made the decision… although she lives over 1100 miles away, I had to visit her to sort out all these details just in case she does pass sooner than later.
She is also pragmatic and didn’t take offense at all and liked that I was planning a visit, even if it was going to be “all business”.

So the next 2 weeks I was preparing for this trip, making lists with questions for her to answer, stuff I needed to bring (like my laptop & charging cords), packing stuff, etc.  I just couldn’t make any progress weight-wise… basically I just stayed the same, doing my best not to stress eat and gain weight.

Then another week & a half for the trip up there & back (with a stop at my in-laws where I left my hubby & the kids so I could visit my mom alone).
Here’s Mom & I… with a heavy snapchat filter to help hide the bruises on her face from the fall she’d recently had due to passing out. 😦

Many, many hours of driving later, we were back home and I was drained… physically & emotionally.
I didn’t quite get to everything I wanted to go over with my mom, but darn close and close enough that that pragmatic part of my brain calmed and felt better about the day I dread… being the executor of her estate (I do have a brother and sister, but due to current relationships, they are not to be involved… it’s all on me).

But even with questions answered, it took me a solid 2 weeks after returning home to ‘move past’ my concerns and just all the mental/emotional stimulus that trip incited.

I blinked and it was my youngest’s 3^rd birthday, then school shopping, orientations and bam, school started.
This brings me to my next big update…

On the day school started, Tuesday August 20^th, I spent the day in the ER.
Sunday evening, Aug 18^th, my youngest daughter had come in after being in the pool without taking her swim stuff off first and had created a puddle.  I didn’t see the puddle and slipped.
I did my best awkward “dance” to try NOT to fall on my back (I was already nursing a sore lower back from, you know, life) and instead, after flailing around a bit, I was able to fall forward and landed on my knees.
Even after landing that way, all I felt was a ripping pain in my lower back.
I knew immediately something was wrong… this wasn’t normal, something more serious just happened.  I couldn’t even get up on my own… my hubby had to lift me into a nearby chair.  Afterwards, with assistance, I could get to the couch where I medicated with Advil and got an ice pack on my back.

Maybe it was my mom sensibilities, but seeming it was so close to bedtime for my girls and we were also watching the neighbor’s daughter for a sleepover, some how I managed to make it through the night and stayed home, my hubby thankfully taking care of all the bedtime rituals while I stayed on the couch.
But the next day, Monday Aug 19^th, we all took a trip to Urgent Care so I could be checked out seeming I could barely walk and even sitting was causing pain.
There I got an x-ray and got told I had some arthritis and thinning of my discs.  I was prescribed hydrocodone, prednisone & a muscle relaxer and told I should feel better in a few days.
Well, that didn’t work out.

First, the hydrocodone didn’t even touch my pain. I legit thought the pharmacy had given me a placebo!
I took all the meds prescribed and went to bed that night hoping I’d feel better in the morning.
Nope.

Early in the morning I could barely get to a sitting position in my bed and that was with my hubby’s assistance.  Then I absolutely needed him to get to standing.  Then I used him as a crutch to get to the bathroom. I got to the toilet, expecting to sit and have some relief… NO.  There was no “sweet spot” of pain relief anymore… NONE.  Every position was SO PAINFUL!  Have you even tried to pee when you’re experiencing pain?  It’s damn near IMPOSSIBLE.
So I got off of there (with hubby’s help) as soon as I could and made our way back to the bed.  I was so looking forward to laying back down and getting some relief.
No, to my nightmare, the opposite occurred.
I laid down and everything just got worse!  HOLY PAIN.
I tried laying flat on my back… PAIN.
Rolling onto my stomach… PAIN.
Trying to get on my side… PAIN.
I COULD NOT GET RELIEF!!!  And forget trying to sit up or stand again! The pain was too much!  There was just no way I was going anywhere.

I was literally screaming and crying.  Never in my life have I ever experienced so much pain that I couldn’t get any relief from.

I also felt bad because this was early in the morning on the first day of school, Tuesday Aug 20^th.
My middle daughter who was starting 1^st grade could hear me crying and came into my room.  I tried to say have a good day and I was desperately trying not to scream or cry, but the pain was too much… ugh.  I think I traumatized her.
Then my hubby had to leave me to go get her on her bus (this was about 6:30am and she’s just too young to wait in the dark alone for the bus, especially on the very first day).

So I laid there, hoping the useless hydrocodone I took 30 mins prior to getting out of bed would kick the eff in.
Enter my son (13 yo, starting 8^th grade, different school/later bus to catch).  He could hear me screaming as well.  He kept asking if there was anything he could do… so I had him bring me just about every spare pillow he could find to help me prop up my legs and see if I could get *any* relief.
It didn’t help very much, but I was appreciative.
My son had also never witnessed me crying like that… I think he was also traumatized.

Unbeknownst to me, my hubby had already called 911, so by the time he returned and came back upstairs to our room, I could already hear the siren of the first responder. Thank goodness I was still dressed from the previous night because it would have been too much work/pain otherwise!
After a ride in a funny chair they have designed to get patients downstairs safely and then a lift onto a stretcher, I was off to the ER where I’d spend basically the whole day.

There I got the “good” pain meds and finally felt relief, followed by an MRI.
I got the same exact prescriptions, but instead of hydrocodone, I got upgraded to Percocet (so much better!!!).

I earned myself an appointment with a spine institute where I discovered via the MRI that I had multiple bulging discs, one severe.
Imagine your back is like a jelly donut… the jelly is your disc and it was like I’d squished the donut and some of the jelly came out, directly onto my nerves and spinal cord, causing the extreme pain.
Tons of people have bulging discs and can just live with them, facing flare-ups that go away with rest/ice/heat in a couple days… then you have my situation where unless you take on a more major treatment, this pain/incapacity isn’t going anywhere.
I had a CT scan done at the office so they could better see what was going on to determine a correct course of action.

So the next day I had a guided steroid injection into my back.
By the next day, life a bit better for me… the steroids I was taking (both orally & via the injection) were starting to help and the pain meds were actually working.  I went from a life at 0% (incapable of everything) to maybe 40%.
A few days later, I had the f/u to go over the CT scan results.
This is when we all agreed that having rods & screws placed in my back was the best course of action.

By then I’d done a lot of research (they gave us the possible surgeries at the first appointment, so I had time to research before the f/u) and was totally at peace with this plan.

Don’t get me wrong, if you could have only seen my or my hubby’s face when the doctor first mentioned possible rods & screws… I think our jaws were on the floor.  I mean it was the furthest thing from my mind as a surgery I’d ever need!
But after my research, I was a much cooler customer and just at peace with it.  I much preferred my odds with the surgery than without or with a less evasive approach with a crappy rate of success.
Even still, it will probably be a long time before I stop thinking “I can’t believe I had rods & screws in my back”.

So exactly 1 week after my spinal steroid injection, I had major back surgery (Thursday Aug 29^th).
They removed a few vertebrae, ground it up, created a paste and then “painted” it onto my back on the opposite side… better known as fusing the bones. As that “bone paste” hardens, it will fuse those parts of my back together (L4 & L5 and surrounding area above/below).  The rods & screws are there to lend support while this healing happens, but will stay in forever unless they become infected.

Don’t I look good for being in the hospital? No filter! 🙂
Of course, this was *before* I tried sitting up fully, standing or walking!

It took me 2 attempts to start walking at the hospital.  The first time I almost passed out (and holy crap the pain! thank goodness I had an on-demand morphine drip!) and I was forced to lay down again so I wouldn’t fall off the bed. The second time I felt a similar fuzzy feeling taking me over, but less so, so I stayed in a sitting position and leaned against my hospital bed (I’d put the back side all the way up which made the bed almost a 90 degree angle).  A few minutes later I felt better and stood & walked for the first time.
It was super hard and painful, but after that, each time got a little bit easier.
I was able to be discharged on Sunday, Sep 1^st, exactly 2 weeks since my injury.

Not gonna lie, my first 3 weeks of recovery at home sucked.  Not even so much the back pain, but the pain/soreness I was experiencing in my Left leg.  Apparently all normal, and it did finally subside.

Lucky for me I have very generous family members who kicked in the cash so my 3 year old could be dropped at daycare for 9 weeks so I could rest & recover with strict instructions to wear a back brace, no bending and no lifting anything over 10 lbs. Caring for her at home alone would have been impossible.
Between weeks 3-4 I finally started feeling improvement on almost a daily basis.
I am now the owner of a walker, a raised toilet seat, a cane, a new ice/heat pack, several back braces, a power lift chair and a grabber tool to get stuff off the floor. #feelingold

Almost 6 weeks out from surgery was our 20^th wedding anniversary.  I wasn’t sure I’d be still able to do it, but I healed enough that we were able to do the new “wedding photos” we’d planned… me in my original dress, veil, bouquet, jewelry & even the corset, my girls dressed up as my flower girls (didn’t have any 20 years ago – all the kids in the family were too young or old), and my son & hubby in tuxes. To save cost, just like 20 years ago, my sister was our photographer.
But instead of barely squeezing into my wedding dress (seriously, my sister could barely zip me in 20 years ago!), even after some shrinkage from washing & some minor tailoring, my dress was still too big for me and I had no trouble zipping it myself!

I’m so glad we did this!  Lucky me my corset basically acted as a back brace, so I didn’t feel my back the whole time.
I love how some of these pictures came out.

These photos may end up being the last where our son actually looks like a kid… he’s days away from turning 14 and I think a major growth spurt and face changes are on the way.
But we’ll always have these pics.

And now back to current… I’m now just over 7 weeks out from surgery.  Last week I got clearance to bend and at the end of this week I can start weaning off my back brace.

Best weight achieved through all this?  I got down to 259 lbs. Pain and the inability to get up to get food and eat really helps cut down on the calories! LOL
I was 259 the morning of my surgery and 259 a day after coming home from surgery.
I’ve been doing my best to maintain this weight loss (I had gotten up to 269 prior from mom stress/travel, so that was a 10 lb loss), but it’s been hard.

My only exercise has been walking because that’s all I was allowed to do.
That, and after a week and a half after surgery, my appetite came back FULL FORCE and then some.
It’s so hard not to immediately regain weight lost by such drastic calorie deficits (under 1000 calories a few times I’d bet… just wasn’t hungry).
I’ve gone up as high as 265 lbs and back down to 259 lbs a couple times in the last month plus.
I’m in the recovery phase currently trying to get back down again.  Last week I was 261 lbs.

I think I hit a mental block because of all the significance that comes with getting back into the 250’s (re-achieving last year’s low of 257, getting under 254 means I’ll be lower than I have been in almost 7 years and below 250 will be the lowest I’ve achieved since over 15 years!!!)

This time around I’m trying not to “be in my head” about it and stay off the scale unless it’s a weigh-in day (Tuesdays).
Continue to heal, drink all the water, walk daily, keep intermittent fasting (16/8), stick to my food plan (low carb/no bad carbs) and have my higher calorie Fridays… that’s my plan right now.

Oh, and we got another kitten… Baloo. He was only about 4-5 weeks old and we rescued him after he was lost from his litter, separated from his mom for at least 48 hrs, and we nursed him back to health (just prior to my injury).  He was my healing buddy while I spent weeks sleeping on the couch (the electric recliner kind) since the stairs to my bed were too difficult for me.  He spent hours sleeping on my chest or neck/shoulder & kept me company.

I think he was sent to me… he made couch time much more entertaining and less lonely and now he is a healthy, happy kitty.

I think I might start blogging more frequently again… might help me get through the holidays.  And then my blogs wouldn’t have to be SO LONG (sorry!) Stay tuned!

Updates and Changes

Wow… didn’t mean for so much time to come between posts here!  I forget the audience (of um, all 2 of you?) here aren’t the same audience of the 1200+ people who like my Person in Progress page on Facebook (of which it really seems like only 2-5 people ever see that).  I update on FB way more often than here… just easier to bam out a couple sentences than a whole blog.
But anyway, let me fill you in (and myself… this is basically my diary of sorts that I do go back and read occasionally).
Last you heard from me was July 2018.  Feeling refreshed with a new outlook of ‘do what works for you for as long as it works, just don’t back track too much’, I went on to have a rather successful summer.

After getting all the way back up to 276.2 lbs, I restarted the next day late in late June and was down to 257.2 lbs by 21Aug2018.  Close to a 20-pound loss in 2 months.
This doesn’t sound like much (seeming I have far more to lose), but it was a BIG DEAL for me because of the constant down 4 lbs, up 4 lbs roller coaster I’d felt stuck on for the longest time.
Those almost 20 lbs were enough for me to go down a pants size and down 2 shirt sizes!  I was wearing t-shirts from my closet that were once in the ‘way too tight’ category.
It felt AWESOME.
So what happened?  Why didn’t I continue?
Stress.  More specifically, hurricane stress.

In September we had two major warnings of hurricanes to the point of seriously prepping the house, bringing items in, tying things down, buying food that wouldn’t require power to cook, stocking up on bottled water, buying a generator so we wouldn’t lose all the food in our big freezer and making sure our family photos would be easy to grab if we had to evacuate.
And what happened?  NOTHING.
Florence was a let down in the best way for our area.  Hurricane Michael came next and I could tell no one was bothering to prep as hard as we did for Florence and as fate would have it, it hit us harder, but luckily not bad enough for any major damage.
This basically took up the entire month of September.
It was really eye opening for me to realize how horribly I handled this stress.
By October I was back up to 262.  But then came my anniversary, my son’s birthday and Halloween.
Just when I was going to take back control before I regained too much after these events, my youngest daughter broke her femur.
This was a big deal for us.  Our first major ER visit.  She’s only 2 and I can’t tell you the struggle it was having a 2-year-old that was in a cast from her ribs to her toe!  Ugh.
She had that thing on for 5 weeks.  (Just imagine not being able to give your child a bath for 5 weeks… go ahead, imagine that… I’ll wait)

So at the end of that ordeal it was just in time for Christmas.
I started this year at 273.4 pounds.

So, almost a total re-gain, but I’m happy I didn’t get all the way back.  I’m already back down to 269 even though we have no money right now, my hubby isn’t working this week because of the government shutdown so we’ve been living off the food we already had in the freezer and pantry, though unfortunately not really the best quality food choices.

I’ve upped the amount/intensity of walking I was doing (which wasn’t much lately… just going out for a short walk with my daughter who now points which roads she wants us to take and had inadvertently made our walks half as long as they used to be or some nights we’d skip it all together).  Now I wait for my littles to go to bed and then I go out with just the dog so I can choose where I go and how long I’m out there.

I’ve also added in some stretching exercises because I’m not liking how stiff/sore I’ve been getting from doing nothing.  Age is a fickle mistress and everything starts to ache and hurt just from being big and existing. I just feel less limber than I’ve ever felt and it’s because I’m just not doing anything except household chores and small walks.

So I created a short, doable routine of movements to at least do SOMETHING, EVERY day.
10 squats (but I usually do 20)
10 crossover toe touches (no idea what they are actually called – you know, when you have your arms lifted at your sides, you bend and twist and your right hand touches your left toes, then you go back up and switch sides, etc.)
10 toe touches (and then reach up in between)
Side bend with over head stretch into Triangle, both sides (got this yoga combo from TurboJam)

And speaking of TurboJam, I started adding in a couple of my favorite moves from that as well to help add in some standing ab work and lift my legs.

I’ve been doing this for 5 days now and I can already feel a difference in my flexibility.  Bending over for anything is less of a deal, including putting my socks on (it’s the little things as they say).

So right now I’m basically compensating for my not ideal food intake with more exercise in addition to 16/8 intermittent fasting (which usually is more like 18/6) and of course, drinking lots of water.

So progress will be slower, but I’ll take any progress.  Down 3 lbs my first week… not expecting as much this week.  At this point, I’d be happy if I was still 269 and not back up again because of all the high sodium foods lately.

Some other notable changes…
During the holiday break time at my in-laws I actually managed to maintain my weight instead of gaining(!!!)
The familiar curse of not being able to start over in the new year and get going seems not to have hit me this year.  I was 3 days in and realized ‘oh yeah, I usually can’t get started this time of year’ and was happy I didn’t feel the holiday mindset holding on for dear life as it has in the past.  I’m waiting until some more solid progress (and maybe not until February) to officially announce “I broke the cycle!”.

We also have a new kitten.  Our cat of 17 years passed away the day we came back from holiday traveling… I think we missed saying goodbye by just a couple hours.  Although very sad, she had a long life and I can’t say I was surprised she passed.  We got our new kitten only 2 days after she passed.  Some may think we were replacing her or moving too quickly, but really getting a new kitten was something I’ve been wanting for the past few years, but our old cat had FIV (feline HIV) and I didn’t want to risk infecting a new kitten, so we waited.  I still miss her and honored her departure, but I have to admit having a new kitten around has lessened the sadness.  He’s SO DANG CUTE!

I also have added incentive to get healthier and lose some weight (you know, more than just the usual ‘to be healthy’/live longer for my kids/blah, blah, blah… and maybe that’s been a key to breaking the cycle this year) and that is that our in-laws are treating us to a 6 night stay at a beach resort!!!

It’ll be a family thing… us, them, my brother-in-law and his wife, maybe even her adult daughter as well, but hey, other than the food and gas to get there, it’s a free vacation!  It’s their 50^th wedding anniversary this year and also our 20^th, so they wanted to do something big with all of us.  Sounds good to me!
And beach means bathing suit… dun, dun, dun…

I was so much more confident and fitting my clothes better when I got into the 250’s, so it’s my goal to get back down to where I was (257) and hopefully keep going.  My official goal is 250 by early June.  Five months seems more than adequate to get down 23 lbs… more than adequate, but I’m a realist… I know stuff happens and I’m obviously not the start and then go all the way to finish with nothing in between (if only!).  I would LOVE to manage to get to 249… just so I can have the satisfaction of knowing I was back in the 240’s! That literally hasn’t happened in 15 years!!!!!!!!! Wow.  OMG that would be awesome.  Just thinking about that puts a smile on my face.

I also have 3 pairs of capris I know I could rock, comfortably, for this trip if I even manage to get down to 255 lbs, not to mention all those t-shirts that are currently back to ‘too tight’ status.  So many mini goals wrapped into one big one!
I’m going to hang one of those pairs of capris prominently in my closest as a reminder of my goals so I see it every day.

So that’s about it… the gist of it anyway… things were going awesome, I let multiple sources of stress get the better of me and now I’m restarting with the New Year like an annoying stereotype and keeping a goal in mind for a family vacation as I get back to making better choices and upping my exercise… stay tuned.

Struggling in the weight loss battle? READ THIS

I just had an epiphany.   In my 15+ years of seriously working at this weight battle, one thing is always true: I keep learning things about weight loss and myself and this is just another example.

It shocks me every time I have those ‘a-ha’ (or mostly ‘duh’) moments when I finally realize something, as you’d think after so many years, there wouldn’t be anything left to discover!

Today it was figuring out what “works”… or doesn’t.

I just realized that I’ve spent so many of those weight struggle years trying to focus only on what would work for me “long term”. That if it wasn’t something that I could see myself doing forever, then I wanted to avoid it (tracking food, excluding a food group, rigorous exercise program, etc.)

 

So then I struggle with what is left: moderation… not wanting to push myself *too* hard just because I knew I wouldn’t maintain that forever.
But what ends up happening? I get limited results, I struggle more and achieve little momentum to my goal, which of course bums me out, emotional eating starts, moodiness and/or depression sets in and things can end up worse than before.

 

But those times you start a new food program, a new book, a new exercise, etc. and you’re flying high and finally making some progress… what do you say?

“This time it’s different”, “this program is different”, “this is it” or some other variation

You think you’ve solved the riddle, figured out the magic pill, found the elusive combination that will FINALLY get you to your goal.

What happens? You only stay on it for 3 weeks, 6 weeks, 3 months, 6 months, a year and eventually you stop doing whatever it was (because it lost that new shiny program feeling, among other reasons) and progress stops.

You go back to your default (for most it’s being lazier, eating more, eating not-so-great food choices) and bam, weight gain.
If you’re lucky, you only regain a little or as much as you lost… for most it’s gaining back more than you lost. Then you’re back to square one… or even behind square one with an additional mountain to climb before you even get to where you were.😳😔

Then you feel that program failed you (and worse, you failed it), so you bum out for a bit and end up waiting for the next new and different program to excite you and get you going again.

Do you know how many times I’ve said/blogged/posted/vlogged “it’s different this time” when I start a new journey? COUNTLESS.

It’s almost laughable when I think about it.
I just caught myself doing this very thing last week. I said it out loud, meant it (as usual), but then it came to me… shit, I’ve totally said this before… many times before!

And yet EACH TIME I can give you a laundry list of *why* “it’s different”.

But here’s the truth:   IT’S NOT DIFFERENT!!!!

 

It is not any better or special than any other program you’ve tried. It’s just that it’s new and different to YOU and because you’ve never tried and failed at it previously, you have hope and excitement again which can fuel you like a cup of coffee and drive you to try harder than you have before.

 

This is great, but what happens? It doesn’t last… just like all the other programs.

See, this is why people preach about changing your LIFESTYLE. To make little changes that add up so that you eventually do everything you need to do to be a healthier person long term.

BUT… if you are over 100 lbs, 50 lbs or maybe even just 30 lbs from that life of maintenance, going the ‘lifestyle’ way can take FOREVER (especially for those of us getting older who aren’t in our 20’s or 30’s anymore).

Those programs that “work”, albeit, for a short time, are exactly the spurts we need to get us down to that goal!
We need to embrace these methods to get us closer to our goal and NOT feel bad about when they stop working or we take a break from it.

It’s the in-between we need to watch out for. THAT is when you need to work on those ‘changing your lifestyle’ habits so that you don’t regain any or as much before you find that next program to help you further.

I realized that my in-betweens are SO MUCH BETTER than they used to be.

My history (the condensed version):

2003-2004 lost 90 lbs, 2005 gained back 94 lbs

2006 lost 40 lbs, 2006 gained back 40 lbs

2008 lost 30 lbs, 2009 gained back 50 lbs (depression – worst year of my life)

2011 lost 40 lbs, 2012 & 2013 gained back 60 lbs (had a baby/sleep deprivation gain)

2014 lost 36 lbs, 2015 gained back 15 lbs

2016 & 2017 lost 30 lbs, 2017 & 2018 gained back 20 lbs

And a lot of in-betweens in 2017 when I’d only go up 10 and back down 10, and this year, up 4 lbs, down 4 lbs… again and again

 

So slowly, but surely, I’m managing the in-betweens much better than I used to and with no more job to lose (2009 depression source) or babies to have (hubby got fixed 😉), I’m hoping there’s no other major life events that add to my challenge for awhile.

 

It took me a bit to realize this, but I ended up taking certain parts of some of the programs I’ve tried and really made them “lifestyle changes” so that I can lower the damage more effectively than I used to when I’m in an “off the wagon” period.

6 Week Body Makeover: learned to drink more water & always have protein first at every meal

 

Sparkpeople: tracking my food – it comes and goes, but now with the app it’s much faster and I have loads of favorites and grouped foods to make this easier than it ever has been, so I find it more enjoyable and less of a burden

 

Turbo Jam: that I don’t necessarily need to lift a bunch of weights to tone my muscles (hello standing ab workout!) and by far, this is the only “video” exercise I ever go back to… definitely my favorite & I prefer to work smarter, not harder

 

Naturally Thin (by Bethenny Frankel): that I can have it all, just not all at once, to generally take a better look at my portions and how to balance my day more than I ever did before

 

Intermittent Fasting: something I wish I knew about sooner… 16 hr fast/8 hr eating window really helps lower regain of weight & higher fasting times help to start losing again

 

Keto: that carbs aren’t my friends and I don’t need (or want) them as much as I thought I did and I’ve embraced a low carb life (and my blood sugars thank me for it… A1C now out of pre-diabetic range)😁

Plant-based:  that I wasn’t eating enough veggies consistently and now that I do, my intestines are much happier which is incentive to keep eating the veggies

 

They are just a few examples of how I’ve made parts of each plan actually into a lifestyle change and therefore lessen the negative impact of the in-between.

 

So it’s not necessarily all about if a program can last long-term… don’t worry about that or you might never GET to your “long term”!

I know there are those people that change their lives and never look back and get to goal on the first try, but I’m not one of them and know so many who aren’t… so this is for you.

 

So try that program, fad, book, shake, group, etc. (obviously only healthy ones… I don’t EVER recommend calories under 1200 for woman and I’m still iffy about taking pills)… work it for as long as you can and use these motivated ‘spurts’ to help get you to your goal.

It’s the in-between where most of your hard lessons and effort will come in… those are the true work.

And when you get to maintenance, those lessons and things you’ve learned to handle the in-between will help you out on those bad days, because we all have bad days and they will always be a part of our lives. 

Differences – how changing your mind can change it all

It’s amazing the amount of change that can happen in just a couple weeks.  After changing my thinking about the responsibility I have for myself and family concerning food choices from a burden to an opportunity, more than weight loss had occurred.

First, I regained the ability to stop snacking after dinner.  Yes, the first week was the tough one… fighting the pangs to eat that stemmed from the bad habit of giving in to those desires over the last 6 months.

Fasting. This was completely unintentional, but I extended my intermittent fasting time.  Instead of counting down those 16 hours and eating at that point no matter what, I just let my stomach be my guide and drank more water and kept going.  I now have at least two 20 oz glasses of water and two mugs of tea prior to eating (used to be 1 water, 1 tea).  I end up hitting 18-19.5 hours fasted almost daily, and with not that much effort.  Other than noting I made it past 16 hours, I don’t stare at the clock anymore.

Happiness.  I am just generally happier, have more energy and am in a better mood since my mindset changed.  I clean the house I’m in such a good mood – motivated to get up and get stuff done when formally I’d be sitting on the couch in between doing things for my kiddos.

TV shows.  It took me until yesterday to realize even my TV watching habits have changed.  It was so bad the last 6 months of me struggling that I used to have to watch ‘My 600-lb Life’ and/or ‘Skin Tight’ to motivate me not to eat and to drink more water (when trying to fast in the mornings or not snack at night after dinner).
Yesterday I noticed I had some episodes building up in my DVR and only then I realized I’d just made it through 2.5 weeks of staying on track without needing to watch it!  This is BIG.  It feels so nice to not need that external motivation… that I finally got that from within.

Internal.  This may sound strange, but when I’m in the process of actively losing weight, there is this tightness I can feel around my jawline.  It only ever happens when I’m losing weight… like I can feel my jawline getting thinner/more pronounced.  It’s been a long time since I had this feeling.

External.  I’m used to it taking a bunch of pounds lost before I can see any visible changes, but I forgot that’s usually because I was always starting above 300 lbs.  It takes a good 30-40 lbs lost to actually SEE any changes when you start that big.  Well I’m not starting from there and at only 6 lbs down, I swear I’m noticing things already…  my t-shirts (admittedly 2 sizes too big for me, but I don’t like the way the smaller sized shirts I have fit yet, so there you go) are starting to go off my bonier-than-usual shoulder more often.  I actually finally got a full-length mirror to see myself toes to nose and when I tried on those smaller shirts, I could see a leaner version of myself that wasn’t there 3 weeks ago.

Control.  Now that I fought the bad habits and practically evaporated those pangs I’ve been fighting for 6 months (because if you stop giving in, your brain stops connecting thought with action and stops firing the prompt), making better food choices has felt so much easier.  Less of a hassle, less overthinking.  Even logging my food in Sparkpeople has become something I look forward to instead of dreading.  It also helps that 6 months ago I got my first smartphone so logging it using the app is way faster than the former experience I had doing it on my laptop.

Resolve.  Just 3 whole weeks ago, certain foods were triggers for me to eat them.  If I had leftover homemade popcorn (I actually like it better that way!) it would always be eaten the next day.  I just realized I had leftover popcorn from a week ago!  That’s never happened.
Since my daughter was having a sleepover, I made eggs and waffles for them.  I can usually ignore a food I’m trying to avoid the first time I make it for the kids, but it gets harder the second and third time.  As it was, my son was having a sleepover as well, but slept MUCH later, so when they woke I made waffles again.  The former me at that point would have said ‘eff it’ and had a waffle as well.  Now?  It didn’t bother me nearly as much and I just went on with my day.
Then there’s my weekly pint of Ben & Jerry’s… usually we buy it the night before or the same day we’re having our once a week ice cream (Fridays).  If we ever tried buying it sooner, both my husband and I wouldn’t be able to wait for Friday and inevitably we’d have it beforehand because we just couldn’t deal with it being present in the house without eating it.  This week?  I bought it on Wednesday.  And guess what?  I didn’t think of it until Friday, the scheduled day.  It didn’t tempt me… I really didn’t think about it at all!  How refreshing!

So these are the many examples of how so much can change in less than 3 weeks!  It’s crazy, but it proves you can move beyond a slump if you change your point of view and mindset, which in turn will make other factors easier as time goes by.

P.S.  I’m baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaack baby! 🙂

Mommy: Food Monitor

It’s been plenty hard enough to battle my own weight issues for the past few decades.  For some reason it never occurred to me that I’d have to do most of the “work” for my children’s struggles as well.  Call it wishful thinking, but I kind of hoped that if my hubby & I were still fat as parents, it would be to skinny/healthy-looking kids.  I’ve seen this scenario time and time again.  But we weren’t one of those situations.  Nope.  Our poor kids got the shallow end of the gene pool on that front… 99^th percentile for weight from day one, every single one of them.

Maybe I also thought that by the time I had all my kids and the eldest was about to become a teenager that I would have gotten a better handle on my own issues, so if I had to take on the burden of theirs, it wouldn’t be as hard.

But here I am, my struggle harder than ever, and theirs seems like more than an uphill battle.
I think I just mentally and emotionally cracked yesterday.  The pressure to keep trying to better myself and be the main decision maker for my family’s choices just built up to the point I snapped.
And just to be clear, this is not imagined pressure… I’m not making it out to be more than it is.  Time and time again I’ve seen the correlation.

When I’m “on the wagon”, making good choices, losing weight and therefore feeling better, more confident and just a happier person and therefore a happier mom, my good decisions trickle down to my family.  When I’m eating better, they eat better.  The little ones will see what I’m eating and want it too, even if it’s “healthy”.  My son (the picky eater) barely noticed when hubby & I went Keto last year and ended up benefiting and he lost weight too (with no effort on his part… his food choices were just made for him and he ate what he liked).
When I’m in the “zone” I am more thoughtful as far as planning meals, prepping food and being more prepared for when the little kids want snacks (which is CONSTANTLY) and I’ll already have a healthier choice ready to go.
But the same is unfortunately true for the opposite scenario.  When I’m having an off day, I’m not feeling it, I’m tired of the food obsession necessary for me not to gain weight (yep, I said that right… forget about losing weight, I have to watch what I eat just to avoid gaining) and I’m just in a “fuck it” mood, there are no thoughtful snacks, let alone decent dinners.
The kids go back to their defaults of Sunchips, peanut butter crackers, goldfish, Smartfood, pb & j sandwiches, etc. My hubby will ask “what’s for dinner?” and I’ll make the familiar face of ‘don’t even go there’ and truly, my answer is “anything I don’t have to cook”.  So, what do we have?  My hubby’s go-tos are pizza, Chinese or a sub place… even since having his gastric sleeve procedure.  Once in a while he’ll be my hero and make eggs for everyone as a breakfast-for-dinner, but that feels rare.
The pizza, Chinese or subs… these are the choices when mommy just wants a break from doing ALL THE THINKING AND COOKING when it comes to food and meals.
I just get so sick of it sometimes.  It’s exhausting.
I wish people could make the healthier choices ON THEIR OWN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

My whole family LOVES when I make crudites (cut carrots, celery, green pepper, broccoli crowns with a ranch/Greek dressing combo dip), but does any single one of them ever ASK for this?  Nope.
This goes for just about every “healthy” snack or meal… they enjoy it, but it ALWAYS has to come from me.
This means the health of my ENTIRE FAMILY (can even be said for my hubby too) rest entirely on MY SHOULDERS.
I can’t express the amount of pressure this puts on me… the burden of it all.
I clearly have good days and bad days and I don’t see me being able to not have bad days even being an option as those are just a part of life… but I and my family suffer because of it in the long term.

This realization also feels like my children being “overweight” is mostly my fault… too many of those “off” days, weeks and months of their lives that added up.  Sure, genetics is working against them, but that’s only a reason we have to try harder, be more diligent.

Yes, my 12-year-old is responsible for his decisions (hell, I remember at his age I took it upon myself one summer to make better food choices and exercise more and I lost 10 lbs), but he makes decisions from what *I* provide him.  If left to his own devices, he’d live on cheese quesadillas, mac & cheese and pizza.

It feels like no one else in this family is trying.  Even my hubby.  Yes, he’s put in more effort in the past year, but since his surgery it feels like he’s letting his smaller stomach do all the work.  He doesn’t prioritize exercise anymore and instead of cheese sticks, protein shakes or nuts as snacks, he’s eating things like tortilla chips & salsa, pb & fluff sandwiches, Ritz crackers and saltines.
It’s not a mystery his weight loss has slowed tremendously.

So, my family’s food health is entirely on me.
Yesterday it only felt like a burden.
But a friend reminded me I can choose my attitude.  I started going back through my own posts a year ago while still on Keto the first time (before the hormone issues) and all the yummy pics of foods we were eating and my family was thriving and I was enjoying it too.
As I reviewed my own posts, I drank down lots of water and then had a healthy dinner (that could have easily been pizza if I’d continued my mood from earlier) and even took a family walk even though it’s SO HOT outside, even at 8pm.

So this burden… it’s also an opportunity.  My family’s fate is in my control.
Sure, it’s a hell of a lot of work, but if I’m going to do it anyway (which I have to… we all have to eat several times a day), I might as well try to make it count as best I can… and hopefully try to limit the “fuck it” days.  I mean I don’t plan on never letting my family have pizza, but it needs to go back to being a once in a while thing, not a twice a month thing.
Maybe I should start a list of easier things that can be made when I’m desperate not to cook… like egg salad… it feels simpler and doesn’t involve needing poultry/meat on hand (which when I don’t plan ahead, we won’t have any but the frozen kind). And before anyone suggests cooking and freezing casseroles, everyone in my family HATES them but me, so nope, not an option.
So although this burden is heavy on my shoulders, I’m really going to try to turn it into an opportunity to make us all better off.  Might as well.
Now to go have a snack of nuts and pickles.  #lowcarblife

Back Injury Lessons

Last Monday I threw my back out.  We’re talking incapable of getting up, standing, walking or even sitting down without assistance and there was no such thing as a “comfy position”.  It was the worst back pain of my life.
I was helpless and useless.
I couldn’t be a mom… couldn’t lift my toddler to hug her, change her, get her out of her crib… hell, I couldn’t even fix her a snack.
The first day the debilitating pain struck, both my husband and sister came to the rescue to help out since I was incapable of being left alone with my kids during the day when I’m normally alone with them.
Day 2 was my sister.
Day 3 my hubby.
Days 4 & 5, my son (yep, kept him home from school).

Let me just say, I HATE being helpless.  I’m totally the “do it myself” person that has a really hard time asking for help.  So yeah, this was basically my worst nightmare.

I broke down crying before calling my hubby to come home from work to help me (mostly because I felt guilty because he barely has any vacation time left and was supposed to be working OT that week).  When he got stuck in major traffic on the way home to rescue me (I was stuck sitting on our uncomfortable couch that you can’t lay down on and desperately needed to get to our other couch to lay down, but was completely unable to get there) I was in so much pain and worried my toddler would need assistance I couldn’t give her (since I’d recently gotten my 5-year-old on the bus for 4K school and she wasn’t there to assist), I broke down again crying before texting my sister to see if she could get there sooner.  I had anxiety and panicked over how to even ASK for her assistance because that’s how foreign the concept is to me!
As fate would have it, they basically arrived at the same time.
I had to be helped off the couch onto a rolling desk chair to make my way to the couch.
First, a stop off at the bathroom.  Oh holy hell.  So much pain I was wondering if it was worth going pee and thought about just holding it.
Standing hurt, *sitting* hurt (I’ve had back issues previously, but that was new)… leaning any which way I could, there was no relief from the pain to be found.  It was like someone was stabbing me in my lower back and I couldn’t get the knife out.
Finally getting to the couch to lay down (with a LOT of assistance), gave me partial relief, but I was still in constant pain.

I learned very quickly that the adults I called on to help me were really there to take the place of what I would normally be doing as I watched them deal with the kids… snacks, clean-up, diaper changes, going outside, coming back in, more clean-up, pick up at the bus stop, naptime, etc.
I almost felt invisible on the couch and had to ask for everything.

I was so hungry when my sister & hubby arrived at almost 1pm that first day as I hadn’t eaten anything yet and barely had any water (no tea, no coffee either).  Since I had to be laying down, I was limited to what I could eat.
I opted for a protein shake with a straw.
I had 2.
Hours later, a banana.
Let me tell you, there isn’t much you can eat *cleanly* while completely on your back!!!
I felt hungry most of the afternoon, but felt too guilty and like too much of an inconvenience to ask for anything more.
I also limited my water because I knew how painful it would be to have to get to the bathroom.

This is when I learned my first lesson.
I’ve spent years indulging myself simply because it was all too easy to get up and get it/make it myself, even if I didn’t need it at all.
For dinner my hubby ordered delivery food since I couldn’t cook and he was totally stressed trying to work from home, look after the kids and do things for me.
For this, I knew I needed a slightly more upright position to eat.  This was HARD.  I was SO uncomfortable, but also SO hungry by then.
He served me ½ a sub and 1 slice of pizza.
If it were up to me and I was capable, let’s be honest… that would have been the entire sub and maybe 2 slices of pizza.
In this circumstance, I yet again didn’t want to burden anyone.  He came and took my plate away and didn’t ask if I wanted more, so I didn’t say anything.
More time passed and that’s when I realized I *was* satisfied with what I’d eaten.  I didn’t actually need more.
A capable me would have rationalized that I hadn’t had that many calories all day and/or I “deserved” more food and I totally would have eaten more.
But being captive to the couch and completely unable to help myself, I went without and learned I could live without.
Imagine that.

Another instance that sticks with me (ok, maybe not a “lesson” but still, a learning moment), is when my husband was helping me on/off the toilet.  It was that particular instance that it occurred to me that this all would be so much easier for the both of us if I weighed much less than I do.

Let’s face it… in all likelihood, this could happen again.  With my uneven hips and tendency to push too hard sometimes, I could have this happen again and when it does, do I want to be this big still?  Hell no.  It’d be so much easier on everyone if I wasn’t.
I’ve never really felt guilty for being overweight until that moment.  Embarrassed, yes.  Ashamed, yes.  But guilty?  Nope, not until then.
That moment keeps sticking with me (in a good way), leading me to better choices ever since.

So normally when people are incapacitated and laying on their back or sitting on their butts all day, they gain weight… not me!  Totally the opposite and mostly because I hate asking for help!  LOL

Here’s another lesson… at 3 am that first night, I almost called 911 because for the life of me I could NOT find a position to relieve the pain at all (after a recent trip to the bathroom by myself).  I was crying and my lip quivering because of my discomfort and I had yet to get any sleep.  I thought about what I should do first… call, then wake my hubby next to me? (Because of our noise machines, my crying didn’t wake him) Wake him first, see if we should skip the expense of an ambulance ride and have him drive me instead? Then I had a thought… what actually happens when you show up to the ER with back pain?
So I looked it up on my phone which was conveniently at my bedside.  Turns out at least 95% of the people who go to the ER for back pain were dissatisfied with their result!!!  Why?  Because of the uncomfortable nature just to GET there (whether in a car or in an ambulance).  The waiting and once you are seen, more waiting as the nurses check your vitals, poke and prod you, but you have to wait for the doctor to get any of those good drugs.  And then what ultimately happens?  They tell you to follow-up with your regular doctor.
It started to seem like a collosal waste of time and money to go the ER.
So then I started researching all my symptoms and methods of relief I should try (um, why hadn’t I done that earlier?)  Turns out I was applying heat when I should have been icing… among other things.
But in the midst of this research, because I had awkwardly contorted my body in order to shield my sleeping hubby from the light from my phone, I suddenly realized that I had managed to lessen the pain!!!  YAY!  I *can* get some sleep and make it through the night!
With this new found relief and wisdom, I made it through and everything got better from there.
I’ve never been so happy I didn’t call 911.

So here I am, 5 days out from the worst of the worst and I managed a rather normally functional day.
I could get up, stand, walk, bend over (slooooooooooooooowly), sit down and even *carefully* lift/carry my 35 lb toddler again.  I kept a back brace on most of the time and I find that very helpful.
Today I cooked, did the dishes, cleaned up, vacuumed, did bills, and even some laundry and managed a walk with the family.  Damn near normal.  I still have pain, but it’s hardly anything compared to where I was. (damn the human body is amazing)
I had taken everything for granted.
As I slowly regained certain abilities (like to stand up without help, sit and not have pain, walk without sharp pain, etc.) I was so thankful with each improvement.
After about 24 hours of staying in a laying down position, I was able to transition to sitting in my La-Z-boy recliner instead.  Slowly, and with the aid of a cane, I could walk on my own again.
Something as simple as a bathroom trip felt like such an accomplishment when I could do it completely on my own! (let’s not even talk about the pain and awkwardness of wiping oneself when you have a back issue or being able to pull up your own pants when you’re done!)
When making that trip wasn’t so bad anymore (or at least tolerable), I could drink water more freely and rehydrated myself.
I iced, used lidocaine pain patches, electrotherapy pain relief and took lots and lots of Advil and I made it through.

It was a really tough and painful week (I haven’t even gone into the rejection my poor toddler felt when I couldn’t pick her up when she wanted me to and how sad that was to witness), but one I hope I don’t forgot anytime soon as two key things stay in the forefront of my mind and are driving me to really make some changes and get out of this rut.

Just the week before this happened I decided to go vegan.  Yup, vegan.  That couldn’t be anymore opposite of Keto if I tried!  But animal products weren’t having the best result for me, intestinally speaking, so I knew I needed a change.
My digestive system has thanked me ever since!
Have I been full vegan this whole time?  Clearly not since you know I had pizza.  But I discovered that my diet in general has been sorely lacking in veggies for a LONG time.  And can only eating plant-based foods keep me satisfied?  Yup!  I thought I was going to miss meat more than I did.  Turns out I missed butter & cream the most!  I didn’t have chicken for 2 weeks… that was a first in my entire adult life!

So mostly I try to have a vegan day now and then, or at least vegetarian (still like just a bit of cream in my coffee).  I have upped my veggie amount EVERY day, regardless, and severely lowered animal proteins and have limited my dairy consumption.
This change got me considering alternatives I would have never tried if I hadn’t attempted to go vegan (like discovering cashew milk as a substitution for cream in my coffee… so glad I tried it!)

I feel so much healthier right now (even with the back pain still!)
I figured out (the hard way) that I indulge myself far too often and am actually capable of going without.
I am also re-inspired to make changes and get going in the right direction on this weight train.

It’s been a hell of a week.

Functioning

The state of my life feels exactly as this post is titled.  Lately I feel like a shell of a person.  I’m there, I’m doing the daily tasks, but I’m checked out.
It would fit my mood perfectly if I had one of those t-shirts that said “I don’t want to adult today”.
And it’s not just that.  I feel like quitting… everything.
I want to quit trying to lose weight.
I want to quit my passion project.
I want to quit being a parent.
Absolutely none of those are an option to quit, but I’m just being honest that it’s just how I feel right now.
Yet I still cook the meals, do the dishes, laundry, pay bills, sweep/vacuum the floor, clean up toys, and the kids are fed/changed/bathed/entertained/homework done along with hugs, hand holds, tickling, story time and even my husband of over 18 years & I still have a sex life.
I do all this, but I’m not *feeling* it.  I’m like a wife/mommy robot.  I’ve checked out… or want to.
I’ve lost my drive.
Every day when I’m not doing the wife/mom things, I check out.  All I want to do is sit on the couch, binge watch a Netflix show (currently ‘Party of Five’) and play solitaire on my phone.  That’s it.  That’s ALL I want to do.
As if there aren’t things I could be doing for my passion project (that over 600 members are following me on now, hence why I can’t quit that).  There is a LOT to do with that… more research, finishing a business plan, trying to find a strategic partner and loads more.  But none of that is the “fun” stuff and a lot of it I’ve never done before in my life, so it is overwhelming and intimidating.  I think this is why I’m afraid to even start it.  So, I don’t… I avoid it.  I post and tweet things to keep my audience alive, but don’t really accomplish anything towards my end goal.

As if there aren’t things I could be doing to better my health… taking a walk, lifting weights, drinking more water.  I am in one of those periods where I completely lack motivation and because I’ve gone off the rails too much, I don’t even have a healthy routine to get me through the harder times.
Instead, I’ve just let myself go with whatever whims I was having.  I went 3 days in a row with eating outside my window (intermittent fasting – supposed to stop at 6-6:30 pm and I had snacks past 9 pm) and now I’m finding it SUPER HARD to get back on track.

Yesterday was supposed to be day 1.  OH BOY DID IT FEEL LIKE DAY 1.  I felt like an alcoholic that just decided to stop drinking cold turkey, except for me it’s food and I’m trying to avoid things like tortilla chips with salsa/sour cream/cheese, drinking Ovaltine, having chocolate, popcorn or anything with too much sugar.
Gone are the days I found it easy to not eat carbs.  I’m sure that’d be true if I could manage to get past those first 3 days (which are the hardest).  I’m finding it so hard to make it through without faltering.
All I did all day was think about food… my next meal… what I’m trying to avoid (I know, I know… I *should* be concentrating on what I CAN eat, not what I shouldn’t).

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It’s been 5 days since I started writing… now 20Feb2018.  I made it past that day 1 and even day 2, but Ben & Jerry’s ice cream after my Valentine’s treat of lobster just started me struggling all over again and my weight went back up to where it was basically a WHOLE YEAR AGO.  Ugh.  So much for breaking the trend of not getting going earlier in the year.  I hate this… it makes it feel like I shouldn’t even BOTHER to try to get back on track until mid-March because for several years now, that’s always when I finally get back on track… but I don’t WANT to feel that way… like I don’t have control and the pattern wins.  Damn it I don’t want the pattern to win, but I keep heading in the direction to make it true… yet again.  Argh.

I’m a bit removed from these original feelings I wrote 5 days ago already (oh the healing powers of just typing it out), but I never finished the entirety of what I wanted to document…

It felt like days would go by punctuated by my youngest daughter’s baby monitor.  Turning it off meant the start of my “shift” of being on-duty and turning it on meant getting a break.  It shouldn’t feel that way.  I’m a mom, I shouldn’t feel like an unpaid babysitter, but seriously, that’s the best way to put how I was feeling.
I shouldn’t be so unmotivated that every second I get to myself I was sitting back on the couch, binge watching TV and playing solitaire… oh, and eating too much.
It was like I was just sleepwalking through my life and couldn’t wake myself up.  Once in a while I felt awake, like during a family walk or if I got into a project (like planning the road trip my son will be taking with his grandparents early summer), I felt awake and distracted and it felt great to get out of my own head.
But when it’s over, so is that awakeness and back to the couch I went.
It was never motivation enough to get me to start my own projects.  I just couldn’t get going on my own… it was always outside influence waking me from my mental slumber and always temporary.

I hate to say it, but I felt like I was a bit depressed.  I have only had one major episode of depression in my life and it was completely situational.  Right now, I have no idea what would prompt me to become depressed… not to that degree.
Financial issues are the norm, so I can’t see that contributing.
It wasn’t time yet for PMS (though it is now and yet I’m feeling so much better).
It’s not nutritional insufficiency leading to hormonal imbalances like I experienced last summer.

I just don’t get what caused me to feel so down and disconnected.  But it feels completely brought on by my own choices… like one lazy indulgent day made me feel bad the next day (scale going up, feeling out of control) and because I just got disgusted with myself, it’s like all I could handle to play games and watch TV.  But then doing that constantly was getting me down because I felt so unproductive and that lead me to eat and the next thing I know I’m putting on my jeans that just a few months ago were starting to feel loose only to discover they were back to feeling tight.  Cue more eating and feeling worse and therefore lacking in the motivation to start ANYTHING.

It was a terrible cycle… all brought on my repetitive negative behavior.  But to lose the connection to my family?  That was new.  Usually I’m all in my own head, dealing with my issues, but still feeling life, enjoying my kids and husband and still getting things done…  I’ve never felt so disconnected from all that to the point no part of it gave me joy.
That part scares me.

Luckily, and I can’t tell you what the difference was, I seem to have come out of that funk.  One day I just woke up feeling actually awake… *in* my life instead of a spectator.  All on my own I took control again and started feeling awake.
Stuff still happens, but I’m handling it better now… kids trash my newly cleaned floor with dirt and sand from the outside and I can deal without getting all annoyed, I got summoned for Jury Duty (for ON my birthday, thankyouverymuch) and I deal with it, my hubby wakes me up at 1:50am to have me take him to the ER and I stay awake until 8am and just go with the flow (he’s better now… still figuring out what the cause of his stomach pain was).  I was so tired that day, yet still felt more awake than those weeks I’d checked out.  Instead of dreading dinner, I become more proactive about planning and writing out menus and choosing to make healthier choices, even for my kid’s snacks.

Then my mother-in-law volunteers me for a project – to paint a realistic sea turtle for my niece as a present for her college graduation this spring.  I said yes, but felt reluctant inside… doubting my talents and ability to get started/finish projects, especially given the last few weeks.  But I think I knew it would be good for me, so I agreed.
I spend hours going through existing turtle paintings to draw inspiration and technique until we decided on a combination of 3 different works to create my own.

So now I’m feeling better.  Yesterday was another “day 1” and I just decided to go 100% Keto and that I did.  It was necessary to break my cycle of wanting something sweet and to keep me satisfied so I didn’t snack after dinner.  I made it through.  Yes, I wanted a snack at about 9:30pm (finished eating before 6pm) but I didn’t give in.  I drank my water and watched Khloe Kardashian’s Revenge Body and then finished a book it’s taken me over a year to finish (Lauren Graham’s Someday, Someday, Maybe) as I was limited to just waiting room reading except the last 45 mins I read at home just to get it done.

Today is “day 2” and I’ve already thought about having popcorn.  I made a yummy frittata for breakfast and was sipping my coffee, thinking about waiting to put my youngest down for her nap and then making it.  I’m still considering it.  I actually haven’t had any popcorn in over a week.  But in attempt to distract myself and give time for my breakfast to settle and feel full from it, I came back to my laptop to complete writing this post.
I also made the decision that if I start feeling snacky while watching ‘Party of Five’, then I should STOP watching it.  I feel like I got into the bad habit of that show making me hungry and me giving into the whim practically immediately… like I’ve linked watching that show to eating.  So, I only watch when I can handle it and step away when I can’t.  It’s not the show’s fault, it’s totally me.  And I can’t stop watching now… I’m almost to the last season!
It’s the same way I associate sitting down to watch a movie with having popcorn.  I’m rather horrified that my 12-year-old already has this association… and it runs DEEP.  The last movie we watched, I refused to let him have popcorn (the rest of us weren’t either and we’d JUST had dinner!) and he must have whined about it at least 4 times throughout the whole movie.  You’d expect that after 20 mins into the movie, all would be forgotten, but instead he’d randomly turn to me and whine “I still want popcorn”.  Ugh.  See what I mean?  DEEP.

It becomes harder to live in the denial of your bad habits when you see them reflected in & imitated by your children.

So I’m doing better… much better in comparison to my “shell” existence.  I went back up to a high of 277.2 and today I’m 274.2 lbs.  That’s still 16 lbs from my recent (mid-November) lowest achieved weight… ouch.  I have some serious damage control to do!

Oh, and my birthday is lurking around the corner… honestly, I think that is one of the biggest factors that messes with my head as far as not breaking the pattern each beginning of the year.  It’s just a day… I wish I could relax about it and stop getting myself down with thoughts of “here I am again, not where I’d thought I’d be by my birthday/this age… still this weight… still fighting this battle, feeling and looking older…” etc., etc., etc.
Getting down about it only exacerbates the issue.   Duh, self.