Chronicles of a Late Bloomer

Celebrating: Living in an era of modern medicine where simple lab work, blood draws, and tests can begin to yield answers when you’re not well.

Grateful for: Let’s not anyone be shocked that my weight is up this week. In addition to everything else going on, I got my period this morning. So, today I’m grateful for perspective. After all, aren’t I the one always preaching about the power of perception? Three weeks ago, I would have been squealing with delight at these numbers. And that’s what I’m grateful for. Knowing that I have the power to put a positive spin on this. Knowing not to let a negative perspective smash my forward momentum. And, so, I am grateful to have a body, to be making peace with it, and to have a good doctor and amazing health insurance.

Starting weight: 354.6 pounds
Last week: 296.8
This week: 301.2
Change this week: +4.4
Total change: -53.4
Next milestone: 60 pounds gone (since I already reached 55 pounds gone)

This week’s mantra: Trust the doctors to figure things out, trust the universe to give you strength, trust your body to respond as you GET BACK TO BASICS.

Celebrating: Crossing into the 200’s! Defeating the troll under the 300-pound bridge! Achieving my end-of-the-year goal! Call it what you will, I’m under 300 pounds!

Grateful for: I had really wanted to take a picture of my purple toesies framing the 299.8 point. However, I must have hit that point somewhere around Wednesday night after spending all afternoon and evening in the emergency room. Wednesday, I had another pain crisis which resulted in a 7-pound drop only 30 hours later. My doctors seem to think I have stomach acid problems, which leads to such debilitating abdominal pain that I am rendered immobile, speechless, breathless, and lying in a pool of my own sweat on the carpeted floor of my office. I just don’t understand how severe indigestion could be making me lose this weight. I’m sticking with my ovarian cyst theory until proven otherwise. (Note: I don’t “bounce back” from these dramatic weight losses, as though they were pure water weight or some other scale game. No, I lose the outrageous amount of weight in the 2 days following the pain crisis and it never comes back. All I can figure is that a combination of eating right, exercising, and battling the huge, fluid-filled aliens living deep in my torso has spurred me to these current numbers.)

Starting weight: 354.6 pounds
Last week: 300.4
This week: 296.8
Change this week: -3.6
Total change: -57.8
Next milestone: 60 pounds gone

This week’s mantra: Be grateful. Be grateful. Be grateful.

Celebrating: Crossing over from BMI’s “Severly Obese” into just “Obese.” Yay!

Grateful for: I wrote earlier about an increase in [otherwise healthy] carbs and my trepidation over weight fluctuations this week. Well, the mystery seems to have been solved when I experienced another ovarian cyst rupture yesterday at work. Thankfully, this one was only about half as severe and debilitating as the one linked above, and that is what I’m grateful for this week — that I was able to ride it out with my office door locked, get home safely, and rest. (And, heck. Maybe once my body re-absorbs the rest of the cyst fluid, I will have crossed into the two-hundreds!)

Starting weight: 354.6 pounds
Last week: 301.6
This week: 300.4
Change this week: -0.8
Total change: -54.2
Next milestone: 55 pounds gone

This week’s mantra: I’m too close to ease up! TIME TO CROSS 300!

Celebrating: 50 POUNDS GONE!!!

Grateful for: I’m sorry — maybe you didn’t hear me. I’VE LOST OVER 50 POUNDS! (Okay, also I’m grateful to have broken past 40 BMI points.)

Starting weight: 354.6 pounds
Last week: 306.8
This week: 301.6
Change this week: -5.2
Total change: -53.0
Next milestone: 55 pounds gone

This week’s mantra: Hold on tight and enjoy the ride.

I was having a foul-mood day on Thursday, out of nowhere. Well, it was probably less “out of nowhere” than it was “out of staying up until 2 a.m. every night watching the Olympics.” Seriously, NBC. I appreciate that you are trying to show these events live, but COME ON ALREADY.

So, in the midst of my crankiness, I decided to purposefully go and do something nice for someone else. On my lunch break, I wandered into the blood donation center at the hospital and gave a pint.

Well, the pint gave back to me with a few pleasant surprises:

1. My blood pressure was 119/74. Yay!
   
2. I had plenty of hemoglobin and was not anemic — something I wonder about from time to time when I am not eating as much (or as much red meat!) as I used to. Maybe the daily multi-vitamin is saving me in this department.
   
3. After donating, as I sipped on orange juice (and turned down the brownies — stating that “I’m allergic to chocolate” now that I know it causes my migraines), a teenaged volunteer came around with a stack of t-shirts.

   “Would you like one?” he gawked.

   “No thanks, I don’t think they’d fit me,” I answered, matter-of-factly, between jokes with the phlebotomist who was bagging and tagging my blood. Generally, I require a 3X and sometimes a 4X. Since I was pretty sure they wouldn’t have anything larger than an XL (the gold standard for free t-shirt giveaways), I just waved him off.

   Later on, another employee came around, unaware that I had already rejected the offer. “Would you like a 1X or 2X?” he asked.

   As I sipped the juice, something inside me did a little flip. I held up two fingers and smiled my gratitude.

   Then I ran back down to my office, locked the door, stripped from the waist up, and pulled the 2X over my head.

   It fit.

Celebrating: Being able to wear a 2X t-shirt! (more on that later)

Grateful for: payday yesterday. Phew! That was a close one!

Starting weight: 354.6 pounds
Last week: 309.0
This week: 306.8
Change this week: -2.2
Total change: -47.8
Next milestone: 50 pounds gone

This week’s mantra: Oh my gosh! I can do it. I can do it. I can do it. I can do it. I can do it. I can do it. I can do it.

I’ve heard and read a lot lately about people in maintenance or on plateaus who are lamenting the gain/loss of the same 1-3 pounds. I’ve heard those pounds blamed, demonized, and credited for more malice and malintent than I ever thought possible. Before we beat ourselves up for “gaining and losing,” let’s consider exactly how arbitrary our system of measurement really is.

I mean, who was it that originally decided how much a pound weighed? Cubits and feet were once based on bodily measurements — and what if you were freakishly tall or long or wide? Early civilizations standardized a quantity of grain or rocks to get by in the measuring game. Like everything else in life, a pound is what you make it.

For instance, if you live in Europe, you can gain as much as 2.2 pounds and theoretically not notice any difference on the scale! That’s because a kilogram is 2.2 pounds. In Britain, you might weigh in stones, which equate to 14 pounds each! I’ll admit — I’m a little tired of letting something as arbitrary as a small unit of measurement freak me out.

For me, personally, I can’t let myself be grieved little gains/losses, plateaus, or other numerical nonsense. It’s all in the momentum you have and the direction you are moving. I think a 5-pound alarm will do. That is, I think that if I were to notice a 5-pound gain, I would attempt to step up my efforts. Why 5 pounds? Yes, it’s a nice round number. But, it’s more than that, to me.

5 pounds, which is the size of my second dog, is a substantial amount of weight in the perspective of my life. 5 pounds is how much a life weighs — a life that is very precious to me (though not necessarily so for everyone). My dog made a big splash when she arrived, and she would leave a big void if she were gone.

I’ve chosen 5 pounds as my measurement of choice. I celebrate 5-pound losses and I will pay attention to 5-pound gains. Everything else is just numbers.

Celebrating: 45 pounds gone!

Grateful for: all that I am learning about myself in this process.

Starting weight: 354.6 pounds
Last week: 311.4
This week: 309.0
Change this week: -2.4
Total change: -45.6
Next milestone: 50 pounds gone

This week’s mantra: Achieving goals is good; there is no need to sabotage them.

Celebrating: 40 pounds gone

Grateful for: living in a body that knows how to heal itself.

Starting weight: 354.6 pounds
Last week: 312.0
This week: 311.4
Change this week: -0.6
Total change: -43.2
Next milestone: 45 pounds gone

This week’s mantra: put the so-called energy bar down and back away from the table.

Because I have so much weight to lose, it generally takes a while before people visibly register the changes in my size and shape. Historically, it takes about 40 pounds (or, over 10% of my body weight) before people start to ask if I’ve changed my hair or bought a new blouse. What they really mean is, “You look thinner,” but at my massive size, their brains still have a problem using any variation of the word “thin” to describe me. One good friend asked me if I were sick or had been screened for cancer after I lost that magical, noticeable amount of weight. It took some doing, but I was able to eventually take that as a compliment.

It’s confusing for my viewers because really, I’m not thin. I’m just thinnER. Still, when I realized a few weeks ago that I had achieved my 40-pound and 10% goal, I knew it was time for people to start noticing. And, notice they have — to the tune of 8 people just last week.

Last night, my ex and I were sorting through some old photos and came across one that was taken when he came home with me last Christmas. We both gasped in shock. Somehow, me weighing 360-some-odd pounds had been lost on us, back then. There we sat in the photo, smiling at the camera, and I at well over twice his size. I was a cascade of chins and dimples and folds.

No, I’m not implying that I look dramatically better today, but the difference was so noticeable that we talked about it, off and on, for the bulk of the evening. He was particularly baffled. He just couldn’t figure out how all of that extra weight had gone unnoticed by him. (I knew why — and it’s the reason that I stayed with him so long.)

All of this is to say that people are starting to notice.