So far so good...

My New's Years Resolutions have survived so far and I've started losing weight again! I stalled since Thanksgiving around 210 pounds. Today I weighed in at 206.5, so close to 199!! I've been tracking my weight on MyFitnessPal and tracking my calories on a CalorieCounter app on my android phone. The calorie counter app is SO cool, you can use a bar code scan to register food then group certain foods together as a meal (ex. 1 scoop Isopure protein powder, 1 scoop Spirutein choc/protein powder, 1/2 cup milk, 3 packets stevia = 1 protein shake).

I see this as going well and as something I could definitely stick with. I'm still technically eating too many carbs- shoot me... I love carbs. It's not bad stuff really- a slice of whole wheat bread, corn thins, milk (yes milk has carbs :/). I do cheat and allow myself 1 cup of chex mix per day. I'm strange- if I'm not allowed to have something I love I go crazy. I also occasionally have a few squares of dark  chocolate. So far I'm still losing half a pound or a pound a day, so I guess it's working!

I'm around 900-1300 calories per day but I've been active and for my weight I can eat much more to maintain, so I think that's good too. I've been making myself drink a protein shake every morning since I was convinced that I wasn't getting in enough protein before, which probably caused my stall. Since I've been eating better I've been getting in around 100 grams of protein a day. :)

I joined the gym with my boyfriend who loves to weight lift, so I'm going to do that with him as well as take some cycling classes. I've also done Tae Kwon Do on and off since I was 6 years old so I recently rejoined and went to my first class last night. Actually- I thought I was going to class but I accidentally went to a pure cardio class and almost died. Not a great way to transition back into intense exercise!

So that's where I stand now. Just waiting to dip below 200 and head back into ONE-derland. :) Half of my closet is still clothes that are too small- so I can't wait to wear some of them!!

By the way- yesterday was my 5 month surgiversary. 256 to 207.5 as of then. Hopefully I make a lot of progress before my 6 month!

New Year's Resolution

So I'm a cliche... I'm making New Year's Resolutions. :)

• Exercise often. 2 days a weeks of martial arts. 2 or more days a week at the gym with Jon, lifting and cycling. and other various exercising, like walking, biking, playing on my trampoline
• count calories. I'm determined to use myfitnesspal.com to count my calories and make sure that I'm hitting the amount of protein I need as well. 
• Take vitamins. I'm supposed to be taking actigall (to avoid gallstones), a multivitamin, and calcium supplements. i need to make sure to take them all, everyday.
• Have a protein shake for breakfast. I need to take in 70 grams of protein a day and it's hard to do that with just food with limited space, so a protein shake will jump start my day. 
• Don't buy snacks. Limit snacks to healthy things and limit them. Only indulge in dark chocolate. 
• Set a weight goal. I think I want to be 130-140. I would like to reach my goal by my 21st birthday which is in June 2012. 

Wish me luck! I am determined not to give up on my goals and to get rid of my final 60+ pounds!

Changes

So I've had a very discouraging month long stall. This is probably stemming from too little protein and too many carbs as well as massive stress from college and a job search. I figured this would be a good time to look back and reflect on what has changed and what is going to change as soon as I get myself together and get back on track.

A lot of clothes that I've had in my closet have begun to fit. I've enjoyed the catharsis of throwing away or giving away clothes that don't fit anymore. I'm enjoying wearing some expensive coats that were given to me but I was never able to fit. I also find it ironic that I'll be losing more weight during a season when most people cover up, so when I "reveal" myself in the spring/summer, it will be all the more shocking. I've been enjoying shoe and make up shopping more.  I went through a period where all of that seemed silly because heels made my feet hurt and make up seemed like a waste of time. It's also more fun to be able to sit and cross my legs easily and fit into chairs.

I still see myself as quite large and I'm sure others to do, but I've shrunk from a certain level of large- like massive to extra chubby. I still have a number of insecurities but I can see how they might lessen as I shrink. I hope you all have a great holiday season and that I am successful with my efforts as January 1 rolls around.

Stall

Stalls are commonplace and torturous. Weight can't be lost like a lovely line chart with a constant, gentle downward slope. Instead it works like a flight of stairs, going down, leveling out, going down. It makes sense logically but mental it's awful. Stalls feel like personal failure and mine has come just before I read a milestone- getting below 200 pounds. Stalls in weight loss feel like a stall in life sometimes, like you're not moving forward. I can't wait for mine to end, even though it feels endless I have a sneaking suspicion that it will in fact end some day soon. 130 pounds seems so far away though and I am a far cry from an impressive "after" picture! I'm making some resolutions to help though- tracking food carefully, exercising more, and maybe imposing a certain time that I don't eat after. I need to keep chugging along! Wish me luck!

Weight Loss With the Sleeve

Weight loss with the sleeve is slow but steady, but it doesn't feel like that. I feel like I haven't lost anything but them I look back at my spreadsheet and see that it did. It just feels so slow sometimes! I'm still a bit over 200 pounds so I'm still "fat" and no one really notices that I got any smaller. I feel subtle differences but nothing absolutely major. I feel like once I get below 180 I'll be closer to being a "normal" person but that might not be until early next year.

You would think that eating the way they told me to and exercising more would speed up my weight loss but it doesn't always. I don't always eat exactly the way they tell me to but even when I do it doesn't make my weight loss speed up. Exercise usually does they opposite of what it should, I don't know if it's water retention or muscle growth but I never see a dirrect correlation between exercise and weight loss- although I know there must be.

Losing weight is like being in an iffy relationship. You never know what motivates them and you're just going with trial and error to make them happy. I feel so disconnected from my body- it's been 20 years and I still don't know what to do to make it do what I want it to... So I'm just trudging along, hoping to keep losing weight simply from a calorie deficit and some exercise. I'll feel better when I get under 200 and into "one-derland" (which better be soon!!)

My History with Obesity: Part 3

My first experiences with diets came in middle school, probably before I was mature enough to handle this type of thinking. Eating often and in large quantities was so natural to me, mostly because that’s just how I was from the beginning and because those were the habits I subsequently built, trying to make me utilize portion control and carb control was a struggle. My mother never had a major weight problem but she was always a little heavier than she’d like to have been. Therefore we had several dozen diet books in our house with overtook several shelves in a kitchen bookshelf. Whichever one she was interested in that month could usually be found on the kitchen counter with several post it notes poking out of it.

She approached me like one would approach an addict, gently and letting them know you’re there for them but they need to make the decision to get help. I explored the South Beach Diet, Weight Watchers, Atkins, and more. All not exactly designed for people in their early teens and while I didn’t consciously rebel against these diets I did eventually fall off the wagon, generally because they tried to make me eat weird food and because I was rarely satisfied with the measly portions they allowed (with the exception of Atkins which allowed a lot of food, but the lack of carbs gave me headaches). I never lost any significant amount of weight when dieting ever, my hunger would force me to slowly add foods back in and over the course of about two weeks I would be back to enough calories to satisfy me but too many calories to lose weight.

Walking into high school of over 1,500 students and seeing a sea of students that all seeming thin and put together was overwhelming for me. I had always been one to immediately compare myself to others and being in a room with thirty people (after being in a class where my entire grade was half that size) was crazy. The girls were generally clones of each other, they all had perfectly relaxed straight hair while mine was unruly, frizzy, and naturally curly and all wore clothes for a combination of American Eagle, Aeropostale, and Hollister. Most of these stores didn’t carry sizes above a large in their store so I was shit out of luck. As high school went on I had to change from shopping in the Juniors section, where some of the clothes seemed so unreasonably small I don’t think I would have fit them even as a young child, to shopping in Misses and finally Womans and specialty shops like Dress Barn, Torrid, and Lane Bryant. Clothes for “full figured” women all had a generally theme, in some stores they would be all old lady clothes with lovely floral pattern that looked like they belonged on a tasteless bedspread covering a lumpy mattress in an old age home. For the most part they avoided clingy material and went for the loose style. Sometimes I’d go into these stores and get excited thinking “Wow, that looks great on the mannequin. Maybe I won’t live and die in baggy, shapeless clothes anymore!” But then I would go in the dressing room and it would be a disaster. Maybe I was too fast for these fat clothes, but then I realized that that mannequin did not have chubby arms, bad fat, or love handles, it was just a slightly bigger model of a skinny mannequin. It was just like plus sized models have just a little bit of chub spread out equally throughout their body so you could say hey, they’re a little bigger, but not throwing up in your mouth bigger. You never see a 300 pound woman with stretch marks and cellulite showing off that bra and panty collection made just for you and your special plus sized needs.

I did obviously find clothes to wear because the only thing worse than going to high school with ill-fitting clothes was going with none at all. Around this time jeans started to not find well. To those of you who are jeans enthusiasts, you know that jeans are supposed to gently rest right below your belly button. My stomach protruded to the point where the waist of my jeans rested under my stomach, similar to a man with a large beer belly. This caused them to be baggy in the butt, loose in the crotch, and do weird things around the knees. Overall, it was not a good look so I did my best to make myself look presentable but slowly shifted to wearing stretchy pants (usually black) and t-shirts.

This generally didn’t work and whenever I caught a glimpse of myself in a mirror I would cringe. My self-image has always confused me. Looking at my weight and how I’ve only been over 200 pounds since the beginning of college but I was over 150 for the entirely of my time in high school – which is large. I remember thinking how big I was the whole time. I recently found some old pictures and seeing how small I was compared to now. Then I felt big, but I do remember not fitting in clothes in the juniors section and feeling auditorium seats feeling tight. The little sensations of being heavy added up over the years. First it was clothes and feeling bigger in general. Then one day I thought about the size of the skinny girl’s XS shirt and my XL, I considered the volume I had that she didn’t. I physically took up a much larger area than she did and that was just odd to me. 

Restaurant Experience- Pre and Post Op

I was always a very hungry person, so I always ate a lot at every sitting. How much I ate when I went out would always depend on who I was with. If it was friends I would eat either before or after the meal and make sure I never got anything too "embarrassing", like fettuccine alfredo. If I was out with family we would always get an appetizer and then I would order something big, like pasta, and usually eat most of it.

The way I look at menus has changed drastically since I've gotten my sleeve. I used to look to find a way that I could eat as much as possible basically. I also never used to actively seek out healthy options per se when eating  out. I would usually get pasta with shrimp or a cheeseburger or something in that family. Before surgery I never felt full so that led me to seek out larger portions and to live my life focusing on satisfying my ever-constant hunger.

On a side note-- I was never one to skip breakfast. It would usually be 2 eggs and 2 pieces of wheat toast (I never understood people who skip breakfast..), but I would be hungry usually around 10 or 11am. If I didn't eat for more than a few hours I would get stomach pains, fatigue, lightheadness, and some irritability. It was almost as though I was going through withdrawal and it actually make me nervous sometimes. The general point is that I believe that my weight problem was due largely to my larger appetite which is very similar to my fathers. A lot of people (mostly skinny people or fat people who lost weight sitting in their high horse) like to say that genetics have little to with weight gain and that obesity is essentially a moral failing. I was never one to jump to genetics as an instant out but I have to say there definitely is SOME connection to obesity and genetics. I was always overweight growing up even though I was always active. Who knows...nature vs. nurture. I think it's some combination of the two, personally.

Back to the topic at hand- Post surgery I knew there was a high emphasis on eat protein first and getting in 70 + grams per day, so now I only order protein. Eggs, chicken, maybe beef, or seafood. Shrimp cocktails are a good meal or some simple chicken dish, some salad are nice so you can eat the chicken on top with some dressing and lettuce. Basically, I ONLY look for healthier dishes. Luckily, since I can eat so little I'm not always looking for low fat or low calorie options. I'll never to be able to eat the whole thing in one sitting so that's not my focus, protein in.

PS. If you are out at a less formal place, try to order a side of something. For example: I went to a place that sold mexican food and just ordered a side of grilled shrimp. My lunch was $3. :)

Has anyone else noticed a change in themselves when eating out or any pre-op who anticipate any changes or challenges when eating out? Please comment below!! :)