NewAge Mommy, writer and medium
We have discussed quitting smoking and made attempts. Now, they’re banning smoking on our complex’s property- outside. We do not smoke indoors so quitting is our only option. May 1 is our quit date. I bought patches a few weeks ago because I knew this was coming and I have gum but can’t tolerate it.
I have been working on cutting back and trying to practice some of the tips I have read.
Wish me luck that we both can cut back enough to be able to quit for good this time.
I know your metabolism takes a slight hit at 30, larger hit at 35 and every 5 years or so keeps shrinking. I’m still heavier than I was pre-kids and reality is hitting me. I knew I no longer had my pre-baby body, but will I be able to go back?
I accepted the fact that pregnancy made my hips more of a problem area than they already were. I only wore a larger size (11-13 in high school) for that reason, but had an hourglass figure. When I dropped to a 14, I tried on some 17s and couldn’t get them past my hips. That was when I read that juniors and adult sizes are made different (1,3,5, etc are juniors. 2,4,6, etc are adult). Juniors are made narrow in the hips where adult jeans are made wider in the hips.
I do know that with Ehlers Danlos, collagen is affected and where it makes your skin stretchy, it seems it may be harder to just bounce back. My scars fade but they still look strange when they heal. I don’t know much else about EDS but I do have an appointment, not only with a genetic specialist, but a specialist who lives with EDS herself. But that’s in a little bit. Right now, I’ve been researching trying to find foods that can help, workouts good enough to help lose weight and tone up but also safe for Osteo and loose joints and anything else that could help me with shrinking back down.
In the past 2 years, I’m down from 220 to about 170. I’m down from a size 20 to a size 14-16. I still have 40lbs left and hoping to get down to a 6ish or 8, maybe and I have 5 years in my mind to do it. If I can get down to my goal, fix what I need to fix diet wise and perfect my ingredient reading I should be able to maintain despite my Hashimotos. I’m seeing that even thyroid isn’t as much of an excuse as people use it. I dropped 20lbs in 4 months on a good dose of thyroid medication and cutting 1 ingredient out. I’m almost 1 month back to the normal (gluten free) lifestyle and finally feeling back to how I was feeling. I just had my thyroid levels tested again and they were perfect.
Right now, I’m trying to buy less processed foods. I have quit drinking Mello Yello (but I did switch to Diet coke for the time being), I’m eating 1 grain meal a day (if that) and the rest are cooked or salad. I do need to cut condiments and I still am drinking my Starbucks double shots (1 a day), I also started to notice my sugar drops when I eat potatoes so I’m switching to sweet potatoes.
The problem is when you have multiple diagnosis’s with several recomendations for diets. Where I have obvious issues with gluten, gluten free is needed (unless I want to spend all day cramping and in the bathroom), I had the diabetic low glycemic diet recommended to me for the reactive hypoglycemia. Cutting everything that was recommended to me feels restrictive. It also makes my OCD mind feel like I’ll be depriving myself and feels like it’s a black/white situation instead of- eat this way and you’ll feel great, eat that way and feel like crap.
I’m working on disassociating food with pleasure or anything related to emotions and trying to associate it with fueling my body and nothing more. Mindfulness helps that. Taking time to savor what I eat and pay attention to it is what I’m working on. Salad tastes great, so does fruit. Sugar and snacks that are heavily processed taste like chemicals but are an addiction- I’ve read all about sugar addiction and cold turkey is the way to go with kicking it. I’ve been thinking about trying a 1 month sugar free diet to try to break it. Just not sure if I have the will power currently. I will start it at the beginning of a month this year, though. Just have to build up and do further research into it to go in armed instead of half assing it.
In my picture, I was 18. I was constantly working out but didn’t know half of what I know now. I was also healthy.
I wasn’t skinny, but I was a good 30lbs smaller than I am now.
As far back as I can remember, I struggled with everything needing to be perfect. My first memory related, was when I was in early elementary school. I had to have my work perfect. By perfect, I mean it had to look absolutely perfect- if I looped a “B,” I had to erase but if I left an eraser mark, it didn’t count and I would have to copy everything onto a new paper until there were no marks and no messy letters. To this day, people complement my handwriting. The ones I’m friends with, I’ll joke about why my handwriting is so neat, other times I’ll just thank them and move on.
Another strong memory I have from when I was in elementary school is being afraid of thinking anything profane on Sunday, after church while I still smelled like the church building. I was afraid if I let any impure thought slip, I would get struck by lightning. Needless to say, I slipped once and nothing happened. When nothing happened, I started to realize it was unfounded so that obsession slowly faded.
I also had a strong fear that if I slept with my feet uncovered, I would get drug into a Hell like dimension by a demon.I read a while back, that is actually a common fear.
When I was in later elementary school, the people I associated with outside of school were middle aged, most of whom had weight problems and were trying to lose weight. What started as me getting hooked on Diet Coke and diet specialty foods, walking and reading weight loss tips in women’s magazines turned into an obsession. Pretty soon, I had a set workout routine I HAD to follow or else, in my mind, I would gain 20lbs over night. It went from a short 5 minute workout to taking over an hour to do. It also grew from having to walk a few times a day to having to walk 12 miles, BUT the 12 miles had to be by myself, if I walked with anyone else, the calories were not burned and my count had to freeze. It also didn’t count without music, so if my walkman died in the middle of a lap, I had to redo the lap. It went from me getting anxious to punishing myself if I failed a day. I would restrict my calories as much as possible until I started having near fainting spells in 9th grade. I found out I had low blood sugar and have been dealing with that ever since. In college, I realized I had a problem by the time my obsession morphed into binging then puking. The disordered relationship I had with food (diagnosed as ED-NOS and later told sounded like OCD instead of an actual eating disorder) only ended when I had my first daughter. I made myself quit and deal with the anxiety because I didn’t want my daughter to grow up seeing her mom starve herself.
When I was little, I was told to not touch the stove- it would be hot. Needless to say, I burnt my hand but another time, I touched it and it was cold. I started testing to see whether it would be hot or cold each time I passed and before long, it was a compulsion. That compulsion/impulse happened every time I walked past an oven from the time I was around 7 or 8 until recently. Even when I was walking through an oven display at a place like Lowes (that’s always fun- tapping every stove I walk past in Lowes)
All those, along with having to bite my nails down until they are perfect, having to delete the whole sentence if I notice a typo and getting a headache when I read the misuse of “they’re, there and their,” were things I always considered quirks. That is, until it got really bad. I started getting obsessive thoughts- intrusive thoughts I could not get out of my mind. My oldest was born 3 months early, 1lb 11.5ozs and 13 inches long. She was very sick, long NICU stay and came home on oxygen. When she was 15 months, I got pregnant with her little sister. This baby didn’t live (she had a condition called Anencephaly) and that was when the OCD symptoms got bad. I got to the point I was afraid of carrying my daughter around because I’d get the image of her oxygen mask (cannula) falling off or dropping her down the stairs.
I started grief counseling through a program we had for my older daughter, mentioned the stories from when I was growing up and she told me I had OCD.
I started studying OCD and it fit perfect- it was like the puzzle pieces fell into place and it gave me such relief. She gave me a piece of advice I still use- to sit back when I have thoughts and ask myself “is this how a normal person would react?”
It has helped me through a lot, but I have had to go to normal people from time to time because, let’s be real, when you have a disorder like OCD- you do not know what normal is.
I have been reading a lot about the condition and I have been doing my best to ignore compulsions, ride out the anxiety and see that nothing horrible is happening. It gets annoying when OCD becomes my focus of obsession and when ignoring compulsions becomes a compulsion itself, but I am getting better with it.
I’ll post more on other types of OCD I have personally dealt with later, but since my diagnosis and starting to learn how to handle it, I have been trying to spread awareness of the real condition- not what everyone likes to joke about.
