Category Archives: Health Stuff

random thoughts on diets and exercise

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A few weeks ago, I’d realized that I’d gained weight. Not a significant amount. Basically, my weight varies a little from day to day, but I have a 5-pound range where I tend to hover. I noticed that the 5-pound range had shifted upward by about 3 or 4 pounds.

This seems insignificant, I know, but I’ve found that it’s a hell of a lot easier to lose 3-5 pounds than it is to lose, say, 20. So, for a couple of weeks, I cut out all processed foods – restricted myself to veggies, fruit, and meat, nothing else. (Not even any dairy, except for a splash of milk in my coffee in the morning. Because even I have limits.) And I lost the weight pretty easily by doing that. I got back to my usual weight range, and I’m pretty pleased with that.

It got me thinking about diets and exercise programs, and which ones have worked for me over the years, and which ones haven’t. And I have come up with a theory about weight loss that might be complete b.s., but it makes sense to me.

I think that in order to successfully lose weight, you have to find the delicate balance between two factors:
1. A diet that works for your body.
2. A diet that works for your brain.

See, I don’t think every diet works for every person. A couple of years ago, I tried Jenny Craig. It did nothing for me except make me hungry and grumpy and feel like crap. I know some people are very successful on those types of programs, and hey, good for them! I think something about the pre-made processed food just turns my metabolism to sludge. That’s just me and my body.

The brain part is trickier, but I think it’s why I’ve had a lot of “false starts” with diets where I planned to start some new strategy, and then completely failed. Like, I had a doctor who told me to try a liquid diet for 2 weeks. I basically white-knuckled it and barely made it to day 5 before I caved. It was a mental hang-up that I had, I couldn’t cope with it.

I know some people can’t do the diet approach works for me. I know that vigilantly checking your weight every day, and dieting the minute that you start to gain does border on being a little obsessive. I get that it wouldn’t work for everybody’s personality type. And not everyone can do the whole “eliminate all processed foods” super-restricted diet that works for me.

I don’t really know what my point is here, just that you shouldn’t be discouraged if you hit a plateau or need to quit your latest weight-loss endeavor before you hit your goal. It just means you need to keep trying different approaches until you find the one that works for your body and your brain.

That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

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While I’m on this whole diet/exercise rant, running has been my “exercise of choice” for a pretty long time now. Over a year, I guess. I started off really slow – I used the Doctor Mama approach of “run so slowly that you would be embarrassed if anyone saw you.” (I tried various interval training programs over the years, couch-to-5K type things, but this “go sloooow” approach is the only thing I’ve found that works for me and doesn’t kill my knees.)

And for a really long time, I only ran on my treadmill in my house, because I was embarrassed about how slow and awful I was at running. All the panting! The needing to stop to blow my nose or get a gulp of water! Mortifying.

And I’ve gotten a lot better. I started running outside when the weather got nice a couple of months ago, and I’m sure I’ll be back on the treadmill when it gets too hot later this summer, but right now I just run in the morning before it gets too unbearable.

I’ve gradually increased both my speed (I’m still slow compared to most runners, I average about a 5 mph pace), and the length of my runs. I’m now running close to 3 miles, 5 days a week. No lie, I’m pretty proud of that.

I like running because I can let my mind wander. It calms my anxiety, and it helps me gather my thoughts and figure myself out. Kind of a zen thing, I guess.

Today, for some reason, I started thinking about pain. On “House of Cards,” at the very beginning of the first episode (the scene with the dog, for those of you who know what I’m talking about), Frank Underwood talks about the two types of pain – how there’s the pain that makes you stronger, and there’s pain that’s useless.

And I thought about how that applies to running. See, I don’t mind it when my legs hurt while I run, because I figure they’re getting stronger. And I’m ok when my heart is pounding and my lungs feel like they’re going to explode out of my chest, because I know I’m building up my endurance.

The one thing I can’t handle? When sweat drips into my eyes. There’s no benefit there. My eyes aren’t going to get stronger because of it. It’s just stupid and it hurts. Useless pain.

So, yeah. Maybe using the treadmill in the air-conditioning isn’t such a bad idea after all.

outgrowing asthma

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Catie was diagnosed with asthma when she was 14 months old. That first trip to the hospital remains to this day as one of the scariest parenting moments of my life. It’s also the only time I’ve cried in a room full of medical professionals. (I usually hold it together until after the crisis over, THEN fall apart.)

We had several other asthma incidents over the next couple of years, but with medication and a nebulizer, we were mostly able to keep things under control. She was in the hospital only one other time, right before she turned 2.

When she was 2 1/2 or 3 (I forget when), our pediatrician put her on a daily regiment of a Flovent inhaler (2 puffs every morning) and a Zyrtec. She hasn’t had an asthma attack since then. Even when she was sick, she never wheezed.

I know some kids outgrow asthma, but given that Dave has asthma and still has to manage it daily, I wasn’t terribly optimistic that Catie would be one of those kids. When I had mentioned it to doctors that she hadn’t had an asthma attack in such a long time, and did they think it was possible that she had outgrown it, they’d kind of shrug and say maybe, but that it wasn’t worth the risk of taking away her meds to find out.

Earlier this week, we went to the pediatrician for something completely unrelated – Catie had a rash on her face, which turned out to be Fifths Disease (common viral rash, passes after a few days). While we were there, as part of the standard patient work-up, he asked for her current medications. I told him, then he asked when her last asthma attack happened. I said that it had been when she was 2 1/2 or so, I wasn’t sure of the exact date.

He said, “And she’s 7 now? She’s obviously outgrown the asthma, stop giving her the Flovent. Keep up the Zyrtec and maybe think about getting her tested for allergies.”

Catie was ecstatic. Not that her inhaler bothered her so much, but I think she didn’t like having that “asthmatic” label on her. Also, the best part (in her mind), is that come flu shot time, she can do the nasal spray mist rather than the shot. (Asthmatic kids can’t do the flu mist. And like most kids, she’s terrified of needles, so the idea of a nasal spray is about a thousand times preferable.)

I have an ear nose and throat doctor who does allergy testing, so we’ll look into that at some point. She’s obviously allergic to some things, because she’s been coughing non-stop since pollen season started. But allergies don’t feel as terrifyingly life-threatening as asthma.

In the car after the doctor, she threw her arms in the air and yelled, “I’M FREEEEEE!!!!”

She was just being silly, but man, I totally understand that feeling, sweet girl.

detoxing

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I have a lot of issues when it comes to food. That sentence probably applies to a significant percentage of women, I realize, and I don’t think my issues are particularly special or unique. Food is comfort, food is a reward, food is stress relief.

From basically Thanksgiving until New Year’s, I ate pretty much everything in sight. I didn’t track my calories, I eased up on my workouts, and I was completely self-indulgent about eating whatever the hell I wanted, whenever I wanted. Cookies at midnight? SURE! Why not? Miraculously, I didn’t gain any weight during the holidays, although don’t ask me how because I honestly don’t know.

I worked really hard in 2013 and lost a lot of weight, and I have a pretty big fear of regaining it and undoing all that work. So my plan had been to allow myself that time of indulgence, with the knowledge that after New Year’s, I was going to start a detox diet and get back on track. It’s not even that I’m trying to lose more weight, because I’m actually pretty happy with where my weight is right now – sure, I wouldn’t complain if a few more pounds magically disappeared, but my size 10 jeans fit comfortably and I’m pretty ok with that. The detox plan was more about hitting a mental reset button, so I don’t continue these bad habits of eating junk food all the time.

I started the detox on Monday. This basically means all I’m eating is meat, vegetables, and fruit. No sweets, no carbs, no processed foods, no dairy. It’s really hard.

And because a few people have asked, this is sort of what a typical day looks like:
* Breakfast – a few slices of turkey bacon and a piece of fruit (today was grapefruit with a little Sweet & Low).
* Lunch – a big salad with some kind of meat (usually grilled chicken on it). I don’t use dressing. Oil & vinegar would be allowed, but I hate that, so I just put a little salt on it and I’m fine.
* Dinner – some kind of meat/veggie. Piece of salmon and roasted asparagus. Steak and steamed broccoli. That kind of thing.

If I want to snack between meals, it’s basically some kind of vegetable (like a handful of raw baby carrots) or an extra piece of fruit.

So, yeah, that’s a little intense, right? And it isn’t sustainable in the long-term, believe me, I know that. The idea is to do this for 3 weeks (although if I last 2 weeks, I’ll be happy), and it sort of changes how I think about my daily meals and makes me more mindful about the foods that I’m shoving in my mouth. Like, no more polishing off the kids’ leftovers. And no more grabbing some quick sugary treat because I just happened to walk past the kitchen.

So yeah, I started it on Monday, and by Tuesday afternoon, it dawned on me that all of that eating I did over the holidays was not, in fact, just a fun little self-indulgence, but was actually how I was coping with some pretty major stress issues in my life. Most of which falls under the category of “stuff I can’t blog about,” but mostly involves my kids and all of the changes we’ve been dealing with lately. I’m not the most adaptable person in the world, I lack the “go with the flow” gene, and those kinds of major life events tend to really stress me out.

The thing is, though, take away my comfort food? And there is no comfort. Which is how I ended up sobbing my eyes out all over Chris’s chest on Tuesday night. (To be clear, he didn’t do anything to make me cry. He just happened to walk in the door and ask me how my day was. Poor guy had no idea what a loaded question that was.)

(Oh, it probably goes without saying, but there’s no alcohol allowed on the detox diet either, which is fine because I hardly ever drink anyway, but man, if there haven’t been a few times this week that drinking my feelings sounded like an excellent plan, since I couldn’t eat them. Damn.)

And I’m sure this is healthy, forcing me to talk about my worries and fears and confront them, rather than bury them down with another handful of potato chips. It’s just weird that dealing with the emotional side of it parallels the food that I’m eating: it’s good for me, and I know it, I just don’t like it very much.

trying to work with cartoons as my background soundtrack

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Catie is still sick. This is fourth day in a row of school that she’s missed. Her fever was only 100.1 this morning, so I’m hoping that means that she’s moving in the general direction of recovery.

I’m extremely fortunate that my job is so flexible about allowing me to work from home. I don’t know what other single moms do in this position. How do you miss four days of work? I mean, really, what do you do?

And honestly, Catie is a pretty easy kid to take care of, even when she’s sick. I keep pushing fluids on her, and giving her Tylenol or Motrin to keep her comfortable, but she’s mostly content, as long as she has either a movie on TV or her iPad to keep her busy. She whines a little when she’s really miserable, but mostly she’s been ok. (If it had been Lucy that got this virus? WHOLE OTHER STORY.)

As much as my parents help out, they can’t really do much when the kids are sick. My mom is so susceptible to illnesses ever since she had chemo (btw, I realized I didn’t mention it, but she recently passed the “5 years cancer-free” point, so YAY MOM!!). The last time my parents took care of one of the kids when they were sick, my mom ended up in the ER after she caught it because it hit her so much harder. So I’m just not willing to risk it. My parents are getting up there in years, and I’d like to keep them around as long as possible. Keeping my kids quarantined when they’re contagious seems like an easy trade-off.

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Chris’s birthday is next week, and then Christmas is the week after that. I have no idea what to get him for either occasion. I’m normally pretty good at gift-giving, but with him, I’m just stumped.

And although The Bloggess’ latest post about best and worst gifts has had me cackling, it still hasn’t helped me figure out what I’m going to get. Dang.

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Also next week: Dave is flying in to visit with the kids for the holidays. The kids are really excited to see him. I, as usual, am looking forward to sleeping a lot while the kids are with him.

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Aside from Chris, I think I have almost all of my Christmas shopping done, and I mailed out my cards today. This is surprisingly punctual for me.

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Nothing else new, really. I’m just over having a miserably sick kiddo, and I’m ready for some downtime.

the “after” pic

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I wasn’t going to write anything else about my boobs, because you know: this is starting to get a little weird. But, a LOT of people have asked about what my boobs look like now after the surgery.

Since I’m not going to post naked pictures of myself on the Internet (never ever, no no no), this will have to suffice for all of y’all who were curious.

Before:
Before Boobs

After:
After Boobs
Oh hello, awkwardly placed drawstring on my sweatpants, and glass of iced tea (which was on the bathroom counter & looks like it’s on top of my ass). Clearly I have crafted the fine art of the Boob Selfie over here.

They’re still pretty swollen and there’s a lot more “upper boob” (not sure what else to call it) than I’d like, but that’s supposed to settle down eventually so they’ll look more natural. But I’m really, really happy with them overall.

One brief moment of panic? The corner of one of my incisions had been hurting for a few days, and when I finally took the steri-strips off, I saw that it was red and looked possibly infected. I talked with the doctor and she said it’s something they see often. They stitch you up with a clear thread that’s supposed to just disintegrate and be absorbed by your body, but sometimes where the incision ends (where the thread is knotted, so there’s more of it), your body will think it’s a foreign object and try to, um, push it out. And it’ll get stuck. And possibly infected. And it hurts like a sonofabitch.

Let me just tell you that handing Chris a pair of sterilized tweezers and closing my eyes while he took care of it? Pretty much embodies my definition of “taking the intimacy in your relationship to the next level.” He’ll never see me poop on a delivery table (thank God for that), and I sincerely hope that this is as gross as it ever gets.

(He was totally calm about it. I was trying to fix it myself with a magnifying mirror, and he passed by the bathroom and was like, “Want some help with that?” And this was not exactly a “whee, boobies!” kind of moment, since it involved forcibly removing a foreign object from my body. But it takes a lot to rattle the man, I have to give him credit for that.)

Ok, I think that’s it for the boob chapter. Now back to boring blog posts about my kids and my boyfriend and all of that normal stuff.

a week later

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I don’t know exactly how much I want to get into the whole boob job recovery thing. Basically: I’m fine. I got my first shower on Saturday, and it was blissful.

As for my first impression of the new boobs? I knew they’d be swollen and higher than where they’re going to end up, but the first image that popped into my head upon seeing them: my boobs were shaped like Snoopy posing as a vulture.

vulture

It was a little freaky. But they’re starting to settle down now, and I had my one-week follow-up appointment with my plastic surgeon today. I’m following my doctor’s orders on not lifting anything heavy for the next few weeks and doing this whole boob massage thing to make sure no scar tissue forms around the implants (which causes hard boobs, and nobody wants hard boobs).

I also got to switch from the post-op surgical compression bra to a regular sports bra today, and my skin almost wept with relief. The elastic on that compression bra has been the worst part of my recovery. It rubbed my skin raw. Awful.

Not much else to report, other than the fact that I got a sinus infection immediately after surgery, because really? If you’ve just had your pectoral muscles sliced open? You totally want to do a lot of coughing and sneezing.

Dave is still in town, and he has Catie and Lucy with him – I’ve only seen them once in the past week, and I miss them like crazy. Being a single mom is exhausting, no doubt, but my life feels all weirdly thrown off when they aren’t here causing havoc. I’m grateful that Dave has been here so I could have this time to recover, but man, I can’t wait to squeeze their faces.

Sooooo…. yeah. I’m fine, the boobs are good, I miss my kids, I wish I could stop coughing. That’s about it, really. How are you?

boobage

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I’ve been debating on whether or not this is a topic for my blog, and… well, here goes.

I’m getting a boob job next week.

A lot of people I know, upon hearing this, have reacted along the lines of, “What? Why? Your boobs are fine!”

You know what those people have in common? They’ve never seen me naked.

Have you seen those super-padded “add a cup size” bras? Those are all I own. So, if you think my boobs look normal, that’s why.

I’m not going to post a topless photo of myself on the Internet to prove just how much I need this, so instead, I took a picture of myself in my pajamas and just pulled my t-shirt tight so you can see exactly how much I’m not rocking up top.

Before Boobs

See? There’s not a lot going on there. Like, at all.

And I’ve wanted bigger boobs for the past 20 years, at least. For a while I thought, oh well, someday I’ll have kids and they’ll get bigger. Only they didn’t get bigger. Even after my girls were born and I thought that maybe I’d get giant nursing boobs? Nope. I went up maybe half a cup size (and that’s being generous), but that was all.

I remember trying on nursing bras in a store, and realizing they didn’t make padded, push-up nursing bras. And I cried. (Although to be fair, I’d had a baby the week before, so I cried about lots of things then.)

Perk of having had a blog for ages: I realized that oh yeah, I’ve written about this before. Key passage there:

I started thinking about how most women have at least one part of their body that they hate and obsess about constantly? Mine has always been my breasts. They’re too small, they aren’t a pretty shape, my nipples are proportionally too large, whatever. Hating my boobs has pretty much been a constant in my life since puberty. I guess I feel like this is just another way in which they’ve failed me.

They failed me twice, actually, because breastfeeding didn’t work with Lucy either. And then earlier this year, I lost over 30 pounds, which is wonderful, but I went from having pretty-much-nothing boobs to now-wrinkly-REALLY-nothing boobs.

And it’s not like I want anything freakishly large either. I want my upper body to feel proportionate to my lower body. No giant circus clown boobs. Just, I don’t know, a solid C cup would be lovely.

Chris is a typical guy, so he doesn’t really care one way or the other – boobs are boobs. But since I decided to do this, there have been so many boob-related puns lately, y’all – like he “fully supports” my decision, jokes about cups that runneth over, etc. He’s awesome, but there’s also been a lot of eye rolling happening over here.

I worried a little about how I’d explain it to Catie, because I’m so cautious about her learning negative body image ideas from me. (For example, I never tell her that I’m on a diet to lose weight, I tell her that I’m on a diet to make myself stronger so that I can keep up with her and Lucy.) So I kind of casually mentioned that you know, my boobs don’t look the same since I had kids, so a doctor is going to fix them up for me, but it’s no big deal. She kind of shrugged and said, “oh ok.” And that was that.

(Obviously, since Lucy is only two, I don’t worry about what she thinks too much. I doubt she’ll internalize any body image issues at her age.)

So, yeah. Boobs. Next Thursday, July 18th. And I am really, really excited, you guys.