Setting: Christmas 1998. Ali was 2. I was 21, about to turn 22. Allen and I were living in Lubbock, TX, at the time and were visiting at my mom's house for Christmas.
I was in the kitchen helping get Christmas dinner ready when my older sister Carla commented on how skinny I was looking. After thinking about it, I realized I was 10 pounds lighter than I had been before I got pregnant with Ali.
I had been watching what I was eating but hadn't really put a whole lot of effort into losing my pregnancy weight after Ali was born. But when Carla brought to my attention how much weight I had lost, I figured I didn't really need to watch what I was eating anymore. Yay!
That was my first mistake.
About six months later, I had to buy my first pair of what I've come to affectionately refer to as fat pants. I could no longer breathe comfortably while wearing any of the pants already in my closet, and the scale insisted that I had gained 18 pounds. I was
not happy! You have to understand, I never did the Freshman 15 thing. This was the first time I had ever gained weight or had to buy a bigger size pants (except when I was pregnant with Ali, of course).
So, I broke down and bought the fat pants. I started exercising and watching what I ate again. A couple months later, I had lost only one pound. I found out I was pregnant with Michael, and all that got put on hold for a while. That was October of 1999.
Michael was born July 2001. In January-ish of 2002, Allen was deployed elsewhere, and I remember emailing him and telling him that I could fit back into my original pair of fat pants for the first time since my pregnancy with Michael. I was still carrying the last three pounds of my pregnancy weight, but I could wear them if I didn't mind not breathing ... again.
That began my weight issues in earnest. Wow. That was eight years ago. Didn't realize it had been that long. This has been a long road.
Anyways ... while I was only three pounds heavier than my pre-pregnancy weight, remember, I was already carrying an extra eight pounds when I got pregnant, so really I had 11 pounds that I wanted to lose. However, since I, again, hadn't really put a whole lot of effort into losing my pregnancy weight, I kind of figured it would just kinda fall off on its own.
That was my second mistake.
Fast forward to about March-ish of 2004. I had gained quite a bit of weight. Had been watching what I ate on and off. Had been exercising on and off. The numbers on the scale kept getting bigger and bigger. I started thinking maybe it was the type of birth control I was using, maybe I was just getting older, etc., etc. I had had two kids, it's OK, this happens to everybody when they get older, no big deal.
At one point, I was 36 pounds over my goal weight. I know that's not a lot for some people, but that's a lot for me. I realized I weighed more than I had ever weighed the entire time I was pregnant with Ali.
I was not pregnant! I shouldn't weigh more than I did when I was pregnant!
I decided I didn't care if this is what happens to everybody when they get older. Not for me. Not only was I fat, but I had no energy ... ever ... and I just didn't feel right.
I was not even 30 yet!
I couldn't imagine how much worse it would get once I reached my 40s or 50s if I let things continue to progress in the same direction.
I changed my birth control (I was using Depo Provera and had heard that a lot of people gain a lot of weight on that). I really started trying to eat healthy. I started exercising ... a lot. An hour of walking, an hour of yoga, and an hour of cardio every day.
Several months later, I had lost a grand total of ... wait for it ... 3 pounds!
3 measly, stinkin' pounds!
Not only had I never gained weight before, but I had also never tried to lose weight before. As far as I could tell, I was doing everything right. That stupid scale must be broken, and I couldn't figure out why.
Nothing seemed to work until I went back to work in July 2006. (I had been a full-time stay-at-home mom for the six or so years before that while Allen was in the Navy.) When I went back to work, I noticed my pants started getting baggier. The pants I was wearing when I started back to work fall off of me now.
I kept up my relatively healthy diet, but I wasn't exercising anymore. I lost about 26 pounds the first six or seven month or so. I had about 10 more to lose when the scale got stuck again. I switched to a different department, different kind of work, much more physically active work, and lost another nine pounds in the next six months. It seemed like my weight problem was conquered except that every time I stopped being really careful about what I ate, I'd start gaining weight again even though I was essentially working out for eight hours a day.
Two years ago I decided to experiment with a vegan diet. I wanted to finally stabilize my weight and stop yoyo-ing up and down. I also hoped it would help with my constant congestion and continued lack of energy. After about a month of very strict veganism, my congestion had eased up quite a bit, and my energy was up, but no big breakthroughs in the weight department.
At the end of February 2008, almost two years ago, I switched to the job I do now. Same company, different job. Much less physically active than my previous position, but not sedentary. I still stand and move around all day.
A couple months after starting in my current position, my back and hip started hurting off and on. Actually, I had been having this same pain in my hip every few months or so ever since I had been pregnant with Ali, but I started having it much more frequently.
I talked to a medical assistant friend of mine, and she said it sounded like I was having problems with my sciatic nerve. I looked that up online and read about sciatica, and it sure did sound exactly like the problems I was having.
I also talked to a couple people at work who had experience with back problems. Found three people at work who had had surgery for it. Two of them were only in their late 30s/early 40s. One had just come back from her second surgery. One lady had had back surgery a couple months prior, but it didn't really work very well, and over the next several months I witnessed her deterioration into constant pain every day. Apparently, back surgery doesn't always take the first time.
I decided no way was I going to let that be me. Again I thought, if I felt this bad now, I couldn't imagine the pain I would be in 10, 20, 30 years down the road. I started exercising at home again, focusing specifically on core strengthening exercises. The pain peaked and was really acute one weekend about a year or so ago and then went away altogether.
In the mean time, I continued with the vegan diet for the most part, but got a bit bored with it. I searched for a wider variety of recipes, but the majority of them consisted mainly of tofu. I don't do tofu. I still tried to avoid dairy, though, because I discovered that that was a large contributor to my constant congestion.
For years my mom had insisted I had a sensitivity to dairy and wheat, and that that's what caused my congestion. When I told her I had stopped eating dairy, she said, "Good! Now, you just have to stop eating wheat." And I said, "Well, if I don't eat dairy, and I don't eat wheat, what's left?!" Turns out, a lot.
In my search for an alternative to the vegan diet, I discovered the raw food diet. Did you know there are people who don't eat any cooked food?! I didn't, but since it involves no dairy and no wheat, I decided to give it a try. That was about a year ago.
What I like most about the raw food diet is that the people in the "raw food community" seem to be concerned with what's actually healthy. When I was involved with veganism, everything seemed very politically based and not necessarily health based. I don't care so much about the politics. Give me the health benefits, baby. I've really enjoyed learning all I've learned about health and nutrition in the last year.
Right now, most days I eat all raw food until dinner, for which I eat whatever the rest of the family is eating most days. My congestion is pretty much nonexistent usually, except the last couple weeks. I got a mild flu or something on new year's eve. The fever went away in less than 24 hours, but the congestion still lingers. Sometimes I give in to temptation and eat pizza or lasagna (an overload of dairy and wheat in one shot!), and then I'm really congested and feel lousy. I definitely notice a significant dip in energy on those days.
As far as the weight is concerned, I think I finally figured out the key to keeping it under control: intensive weight training. I will write more on this in another post, but for now I'll just say that so far, I've seen better, faster results with weight training than anything else I've ever tried.
Occasionally, I lose motivation. I start justifying my laziness by thinking, "I'm skinnier and healthier than most people. No need to push myself so hard." I slack off on my diet, which leads to a lack of energy, which causes me to skip my exercise, but after a month or two I'm quickly reminded of a more immediate reason why I exercise:
Because sciatica hurts!
Labels: exercise, health, nutrition, raw food diet
