The official diagnosis is Hashimoto's Disease.

So I wrote about hypothyroidism a few weeks ago. At that stage I was waiting on test results to clarify the reason for my underactive thyroid, and the test results are in. I have Hashimoto's Disease.
I have to admit, with the massive amount of reading I've done over the past 24 hours, I'm both more understanding about people whose thyroid is contributing to their weight gain, and absolutely furious with anyone who uses it as an excuse to not put in any effort. I'm also more impressed with myself. The fact that I've been able to lose a large amount of weight in a decently short period of time (22kg in a year) is something my doctor says I must have worked extremely hard for. Looking back over that year, I definitely have put my body through its paces and tested the limits of what I can endure in terms of restrictive eating and exercise.

I'm seeing an endocrinologist with expertise in thyroid disease on March 28th and I'm hoping that treatment can start at that point. I have so many hashi's symptoms that may or may not be able to be treated with thyroid hormone replacement. Some of them may be completely unrelated to the Hashimoto's.

Things I'm hopeful and optimistic about changing:

• I'll keep my hair and it won't be dry and brittle any more.
• I'll start to feel more "well". Thinking back over the years, there are so many things I attributed to just being overweight. One of the main ones is that I can't remember the last time I felt really well.
• My skin dryness and issues with Ketosis Pilaris will clear up.
• My anxiety and panic issues will settle down.
• My body will stop fighting me on this weight loss thing. I know a lot of people hope that thyroid meds will just magically fix their weight problems and they'll return to a healthy weight automatically. I realize the struggle my body needs to go through in order to rid itself of the extra weight, and expect that in order to lose more weight, I'll need to just continue with what I'm currently doing and hope that the loss becomes a little easier as a result of a better-functioning metabolism.

Something I've learned in the last 24 hours is that Duromine masks thyroid function problems. I've been on it for 2 and a half months after a massive stall in my loss, and was due to finish up with it this month anyway, but now I need to stop using it altogether so that my doctors are looking at genuine blood test results when they're deciding on the treatment course for me. I was surprised to see a normal TFT result on my bloods yesterday when my thyroid antibodies were over 1000 and my TFT results have been steadily declining over a number of years. That's when I looked into what can cause a sudden normal and found that Duromine can be a factor. I guess we'll see once I have the next test in 2 weeks time with no Duromine in my system.

I'll post an update in a couple of weeks when I know more about what we're gonna do about this.

"But I don't have tiiiiime to lose weight!"

Bullshit.
Complete and utter bullshit.
First of all, if you have time to stuff your face, you'll save time by eating less.
Second of all, you make time to move your butt if it's really that important to you. How much idle time do you spend daily/weekly/monthly watching TV or just doing not much at all?
Find 10 minutes to just move. Walk around your back yard, find a fitness video on youtube and jiggle along with it (that's what I used to do!), find a way to fit exercise in with your daily routine. Walk to the shops, or to work, park a little further away . It all helps!

Here's how much time I have...it's the same amount of time I had before I started to lose weight (actually, I have less time now because any time you see "time for relationship" in the pic here, I didn't need to set that aside before.)
Please note: the things not listed in my schedule are:
Every 2nd weekend, the entire weekend becomes "time for relationship" and I spend the weekend with the boyfriend, and the schedule is very flexible. I sometimes do exercise things, but my primary focus during that time is relationship things and spending quality time together.
Time for buying groceries.
Time for appointments with doctors or teachers at school, or whatever.
Time for cleaning my house.
Time for washing clothes, etc.
Time for leisure activities, taking the kids places on weekends, etc.
Time for idle things like reading or watching TV (these things are important too)
Time to spend with extended family and friends.

You'll note that the only "spare" time blocks I have are Thursday early evening, Saturday early evening and Sunday during the day. That's when all of the abovementioned things happen.

So when do my workouts happen? Well, I joined the gym where my kids do karate. While they train, I train. Sometimes in the evening we'll get dinner in early and go out running/biking on the Peninsula Link trail. On weekends, we do things together that involve more movement. I'm a single mum (that is, I do not live with my boyfriend and I'm running the house by myself). I'm about as time-poor as it gets, once you factor in work and the kids' sports stuff. Please don't ever tell me that you don't have time to take care of yourself. Unless you're ok with me laughing in your face.

Anyway... here it is:

Skinny issues

 No, I'm not quite there yet. I'm definitely not referring to myself as "skinny"....but I was thinking this morning about skin in general, because I've very recently started to take a lot more care of mine.

I read that dry brushing helps with loose skin, and as you can see in the pic here, I already have plenty of that, even though I'm only about half way through this weight loss thing.

I also stepped up my routine for exfoliation and moisturising. I scrub with a mixture of coffee grounds and brown sugar. It used to be once a month, but now it's once a week. I moisturise my skin after every time I wash (so my hands get it a few times a day, full body in the morning after I shower, and again if I go to the gym and shower again.
I've been holding off on telling you guys the moisturiser that I use because I haven't been using it for long enough to tell if it's really doing what it says on the bottle, but it's Nivea firming body lotion. I love the way it feels. It does take a little while to sink into the skin, which can be a pain in the morning if you're rushing out the door, but it's not greasy, and it leaves me feeling smooth and hydrated.

This second picture is a skin issue I've had for as long as I can remember, and it's been linked to the dry skin associated with hypothyroidism, though if I recall correctly, my mother has the same thing and her thyroid is fine. It's called ketosis pilaris, and it's fairly common. The treatment for it is the same as what I've just started doing for my loose skin, so I'll check back in with you guys on this in a couple of months and let you know if there's any improvement.

I'll be honest. I'm terrified of what my body is going to look like when this thing is all done. My thighs look like they're melting right now, and my belly is deflating like a balloon. I know that it's all gotta be better than still being so, so obese, but I can't help but feel like there will be a punishment for all the damage I've done to my body as well as the rewards from losing the weight. At the end of the day, I have nobody to blame but myself. I allowed this to happen to my skin, and now I'll have to deal with the consequences. It's a good reminder though, that when we do horrible stuff to ourselves, there are long term effects that will stay with us forever.

Last of all, my advice to anyone I care about....would be:

As soon as you feel your clothes getting too tight when you're still a healthy weight, do something about it. Don't buy bigger clothes, work harder to keep what you have. It took a decade and a half, and an awful journey back to health that I still have at least another year of before I can start to maintain weight for me to realize that it's just not worth it. Food isn't worth it. Addiction isn't worth it. I'll be fighting the addiction for the rest of my life and I wish I had fought it in the beginning.

Weight loss wars: Surgery vs "The natural way".

I get asked a lot how I'm losing weight.When I reply with my standard "Eat less, move more", people seem to think that's a reason to tell me I'm doing really well and deserve extra credit for doing it "the hard way". I also tend to hear everyone's gripes about people who "take the easy way out" by having a surgery to lose weight.

Here's the thing....I'm pretty sure it's an ok comparison....I've had 2 babies. The first one was a C section, and the second one was a VBAC ("natural" birth). Wanna take a guess at which one I'd call easier? Jesus Christ, the vag birth was so much easier, by a million times. The surgery was horrendous, it interfered with my body's normal stuff and I couldn't even walk properly for weeks. After the little demon was born, I felt like I'd been kicked in the bum really hard for about a week, but went about my business. I'm thinking that it's much, much easier to just dedicate yourself to eating better and exercising than it is to incapacitate yourself with surgical intervention, have to heal and recover before you can even start, and adjust immediately to a brand new way of life. The weight loss is faster with a surgery. That's both a good thing and a bad thing. The skin issues are worse, the strain on your heart is worse, you require more psych support because the changes are faster and there's no time to adjust. If I had the choice right now, half way through (and at 99.5kg, there are still doctors who would recommend surgical intervention for me) I would choose to just keep going the way that I am, even if money was no object. Because I feel like this is the easy way. There's no downtime, I don't need to arrange work stuff around my weight loss. I'm free to choose what I put into my body and I'm not limited by things that now don't agree with me or cause me pain. This one is the right choice for me.

Now...It's up to you what the best choice is for your body. I wholeheartedly support any person who makes a change to get healthy, and I applaud everyone who's doing this the hard way with surgical intervention. Many of my friends have done it all different ways with so much success between them. My friend Paul had a gastric band and lost (kept off!) over 100kg. He's now an amazing karate dude. My friend Rhonda changed the way she ate and dropped (and kept off!) like 4 dress sizes. Did I mention she's a grandmother ( a young, vibrant and awesome-looking one, but a nan nonetheless)? My friend Alice had a gastric bypass, completely changed the way she thinks about food and is the fiercest gym queen I know (muscle-babe!) 70+kg down from her start weight. I am in AWE of all of these people and I see nasty comments thrown around like the surgery people "cheated". Are you fucking kidding me? How the fuck is spending hours a day in the gym and meal prepping like a boss cheating? The jealousy on this intarwebz is very, very real.

So I have no idea why it's controversial to have a weight loss surgery. I don't know why it divides groups of people and there's arguments everywhere about it. It is simply a person making a choice about their own body....and guess what? It has nothing to do with you, or me, or anyone else who thinks they know someone because they liked a few instagram pictures.

Chill out, people.

Journal #2

I realized this morning that I totally forgot to tell you guys that I hit the goal and smashed that third digit right off my scales! A week after I first journal'd about it, I'm sitting at 99.6kg and just a little bit pleased with myself.

There isn't really much to report this week. I've worked out once, which was just yoga because I have my period and have felt all gross and bloated all week. I know that exercise can help with that, but it's also ok to sometimes just chill out and let yourself have a bloaty day or 3.

People are starting to notice the difference. It's a really awesome feeling. My Grandad is here from the UK at the moment, and he asked where the rest of me had gone, which made me laugh.

Anxiety has been a bit higher this week, but I'm coming up to a National Championship with my brass band, so it'll only get worse for the next month, and I'm completely prepared for that to happen. I have good support, and this year I'm taking the boyfriend with me, so that will help heaps. So will the spa that we have in our room while we're away!

Ok, that's all I've got for you today. Stay tuned over the weekend for a new post about something people love to argue about.

For the love of running.

This is a picture of me and my brother. We work together, we go to the same gym, our kids are very close in age (my youngest is right in the middle of his 2) and we are only 10 months apart in age. Weirdly, we're very, very different people on some pretty fundamental levels.

Today at work, we were talking about my weight loss and increase in fitness, and he said "You'll be able to run all the way from work to home soon!"

Which really got me to thinking about why my response was "Meh, that's not really something I'm interested in doing."

One of the big differences between my brother and I is that he is very much an athlete. He's always played sports, always been a runner. Recently, he ran a fucking marathon! I am....not so much. Thinking on it today, I realized that the only reason I run is because it helps to accelerate and support my weight loss and will help me with being more toned when the weight is gone. It's a tool that assists me with achieving a goal. For him, it's running for the love of running. He genuinely enjoys it. I don't understand it, personally. I guess it's just a personal preference thing. It's not even that I don't enjoy working out at all, because I lovelovelove yoga, and I'll continue to practice yoga until I'm dead because it makes me feel really great. It helps to keep my anxiety under control and I love the feeling of stretching out my muscles and stuff. Maybe that's how running is for my brother.

Perhaps my reluctance to do things like running has contributed to my obesity over the years. If I'd been a runner like my brother, would my body have been different, and would I have had better control over my weight issues? I have no idea. Probably not. You can't outrun a terrible diet.

So....I've got a bunch of running ahead of me on this weight loss journey, but man....I can't wait until I don't have to do it any more.

Replacing (or introducing) meals: Optifast tips

When I started with the weight loss thing, the first thing my doctor wanted me to change was the fact that I never ate breakfast. In fact, I usually never ate until 1pm when lunch is at work. Not eating in the morning just sets your metabolism up for badness.

I tried eating cereal, weet bix, and it was ok, but I found myself feeling gross while I was trying to eat it so soon after I'd woken up.

I figured I could "replace" the meal (or in my case, introduce a set of nutrients at a reasonable hour) with a shake far more easily, since it would just feel like I was having a drink of milk or whatever.

After doing a bit of research, and being thoroughly horrified by the sheer sugar content (among other things) of some brands (**a note on sugar in a minute. I'll finish this thought first**), I asked my doctor, who recommended Optifast as a meal replacement. In fact, Optifast is the shake most often recommended by doctors. I think it even used to be a product you could only get with a prescription back in the day. It's what your surgeon will make you have for a few weeks before a weight loss surgery. People love it and people hate it. I guess it just depends on your outlook. There are ways to improve it if you're struggling or just don't like it, though (but it's not gonna fill you up any more or taste any better, so don't expect me to get out a magic wand. Do you want to lose weight or not?).

First, a quick thing about these shakes having sugar in them. Of course they bloody do. They are a nutritionally complete meal replacement. That means it has everything your body -needs- to -survive-. That includes sugar. Not your lovely white granules, but sugars in their more raw, less refined states. The kinds of sugars that we need to function properly. Just do your research about how -much- sugar your body needs to survive and don't get sucked into "meal replacements" that do little more for you than a Mars bar would.

Ok... how do we make optifast better?

• Basically, the way to make it more tolerable over a period of time is to switch it up. Take advantage of the fact that there are different flavours and find a couple that you like (my picks are Chai and Chocolate), get the desserts, soups and bars so that you're getting different textures and not just drinking every meal cold (if you're doing 3x a day). That's the easiest way to not get sick of it after 5 minutes.
• If you're doing shakes, make them COLD. Like super cold. Make them with water out of the fridge, then put them back in the fridge for a bit before you drink them. Don't make a shake too far in advance, though. They turn gross. I learned that the hard way, thinking I could shake-prep for a whole week's worth of breakfasts. Expensive mistake. I have one of those little blenders that have the bullet thing, so what I like to do is put some crushed ice in the bullet, add water, add the shake packet and whizz it up to make a frappe. Yum. Chocolate works best for those.
• Make sure you mix the desserts well. A powdery lump in the middle isn't nice. Same deal with the soups. Both dessert flavours are nice. My favourite is the lemon one, but the chocolate one tastes like chocolate mousse...if you got the packet from the home brand section of coles. Like... the kind of chocolate mousse we ate in the 80's because nobody had any money and isn't it awesome that we even got dessert? Yeah...that kind. But it's still edible and not horrible. The soups are hit and miss. I actually liked the Chicken one last winter, but the veggie one made me wanna stay fat. It was gross.
• You can add things to them, but if you're on Opti for a weight loss surgery, it's a no go for you. Whatever you add to a shake needs to be taken into account when you're counting your daily intake. Make smart, good decisions. If the shakes don't fill you up enough, add a weet bix and slightly more water. If you need to get more nutrients in for the day so that you'll have energy to exercise, do half a banana. Just don't do stupid stuff like making an Opti frappe and putting cream on top so you feel like you're having a guilt-free version of a maccas frappe. Those empty calories just are not worth the stunted weight loss that happens because of them. I feel like if you're going to do this.....really do it and live through every completely sucky day that comes with losing weight, you have to make everything count. The more dedicated you can be, the less sucky days you'll have to deal with because you'll get there so much faster. One of the most uttered phrases out of my mouth when it comes to food these days is "not worth it".

Other Optifast tips:

• OMG....for the love of everything holy in this universe....drink enough water. And when I say drink enough, I mean drink water all day long. At least 2 litres a day (lets not go overboard and make ourselves sick, though) because if you don't drink enough lovely clean precious water YOU WILL GET HEMORRHOIDS ( I had to google how to spell that) AND BREAK YOUR BUMHOLE. For reals. Nobody likes a broken bumhole.
• Don't go on a 3x Opti intake and expect to be able to work out a lot...or at all. You're not going to have heaps of energy. Again, this stuff is giving you what you need to survive. Not to be an olympic athlete. However, that doesn't mean you shouldn't try. If you're feeling good, go for a walk, see how far you get, then try to go a little bit further tomorrow. Building strength, fitness and endurance is what you want when you're starting out.

• Don't forget your fats and your extras. On the box, it tells you to have like a spoonful of vegetable oil and however much veggies it says each day. These things are important because they aren't for filling you up so you're less hungry as much as they are for filling the nutritional gaps. Fats from plant sources (unsaturated fats) are important for brain function, and veggies are veggies. I don't need to explain them, do I?
• Don't look at Optifast as a long term diet plan. You should be looking to do Optifast for a maximum of 3 months, and using it as a tool to train your body into better eating habits. You can't just lose weight with shakes and then go back to how you ate before. You know what happens when you eat like you used to. You gain, and all the hard work is for nothing.

 
I think that's about all I've got about Optifast. If you have any more tips, leave them as a comment. I'd love to hear your ideas!

The "bigger" girl.

"The bigger girl." 

 

That's my descriptor...apparently. I'm not sure why my mum felt the need to tell me, to be honest. She was angry about what had been said, but...I didn't need to hear it. Someone had referred to me, not knowing she's my mum. "We usually see the bigger girl."
That person has seen me for 2 years, probably 5 times in total. She's seen me at my heaviest, and she saw me 2 weeks ago. I do realize that this journey is far from over. My body is not at a point where I would say I'm satisfied and ready to move into maintenance mode instead of weight loss mode. There's at least 20, maybe closer to 30 kg to go (I don't have a goal weight, just gonna wing it as I get to a healthy size and see what feels good on me). I know this. BUT, I have to add here that the top I'm wearing in this photo is a size 18. It's way too big, clearly. I'm in a size 16 right now, which is the size of the average woman in Australia. I've never been so fucking happy to be average. People are fucking dicks sometimes.
The main reason it makes me upset and angry is because she could have used ANY other descriptor.
"The other girl."
"The dark haired girl."
"The younger girl." (since she was talking to mum and obviously I'm the younger one)
"The girl with the opal necklace." (I never take it off)
"The girl who brought our price list/floorstock/spoke to us about different things that are available."

She chose what she chose. Because she's an asshole.

Which got me thinking about how we choose our words, and how they can impact someone, even if we don't think they're offensive or whatever. When I heard this, I felt it, physically. I felt like I'd been punched in the stomach. My heart sank, and all of my newfound, fledgling self confidence went away. It'll definitely make me more careful about how I choose to describe a person or refer to them from this point on.

I know that I need to be strong, to rise above it, to use it for motivation...but sometimes I'm not strong. Sometimes it's all a bit too much and I feel like it's all too hard. I don't know what advice to give you guys, if you're following along with a journey of your own, except....let those days come and go. Tomorrow will be a better day and you'll feel good again. Be kind to yourself so that when others are unkind, you're ok.

I'm gonna go give myself a facial and paint my nails. Tomorrow is a better day.