Tag Archive for 'Depo Provera'

Summer Time Saves The Toad

Published
by
thetoad
on 30 March 2008
in Dieting and Food
. 0 Comments

Hurah for Daylight Saving and welcome British Summer Time! I woke up at what I thought was 5:30am and was totally unable to get back to sleep. I decided to post a blog entry as I have been a bit quiet over the last couple of days and I am always at my most creative first thing in the morning. I turn on the computer at 5:45 and the PC tells me it is actually 6:45 which is what time I get up during the week anyway. So now I don’t feel like a total insomniac freak tapping away on the computer at an unearthly hour on a Sunday as the clocks have changed.

Well, as you can tell from the beautiful post TuT wrote about me sleeping, things haven’t been so brilliant over the last couple of days. I have just felt so depressed and fed up. Things like the depo provera injection and my weight gain and inability to shift the pounds after a valiant first week’s effort just gutted me more than words can say. It really fed into my Borderline thinking and I was pretty mentally unwell. I didn’t shower, the housework got put to one side – including the cooking and laundry and TuT had to put up with a lot.

Saturday dawned yesterday and I still felt the same and didn’t want to get out of bed. My energy levels are at all time low – I have some sort of coldy bug thing, only a slight snuffley nose, but enough of a bug to sap my energy levels. Eventually I was out of bed, showered for the first time in two days (disgusting of me I know) and going to do the weekly grocery shopping with TuT. TuT was wanting to do the shopping online, as you can see from his earlier post, but we haven’t got around to setting it up and I am not confident that I would manage to write a fully comprehensive shopping list that would include all we needed. So often in the supermarket I’ll see something that we need, but I would have neglected to put it on the shopping list. I am sure at some point we will trial an online shop, and thanks so much to Kate for her email giving advice and her experiences about Tesco and Sainsbury’s deliveries, it helped a lot.

We went around Asda, I am still avidly watching ‘Delia’ on Monday nights and wanted to get the Asda mushroom risotto. I’ve got her book so when she does the recipes on Monday night I can find out from the cookery book where to source the ingredients from. After much searching of the freezers we did find the said mushroom risotto – priced at practically £3! TuT with our trusty cardboard “points wheel” worked out each portion was four points. That seemed a lot for a relatively small portion, and Delia jazzed hers up with dried porcini mushrooms and some sort of wine, and I can’t imagine myself at lunch time going to such an effort of reducing dried and fresh mushrooms down with wine and adding them to the frozen risotto. TuT doesn’t like risotto really so if we’d bought it I would have to eat on week day lunches when TuT’s at work. I decided against it!

Delia’s use of frozen mashed potato is something we decided to use and I think it is brilliant. Mashed potato was the bane of my childhood eating as my mum adores the stuff and would eat it with every single meal. We didn’t have it with every single meal, but it wasn’t far off, there weren’t many meals she could fit mashed potato as the obligatory carbohydrate into. Her mash was lumpy and sometimes almost “grey”. I would try anything to disguise the taste and texture, once when we had gammon and pineapple I even poured juice off the tinned pineapple over it – anything to try and make it bearable to eat. Incidentally – don’t try the pineapple trick – it was disgusting! Into adulthood and cooking for myself and TuT, as you can imagine, mashed potato has not made many tea time appearances. When I have made it however I have found it a pain as I want it totally smooth – no lumps, and creamy – but keeping an eye on points from butter and milk. TuT was not overly impressed with the results when I used the stick hand blender on the boiled potatoes and made an almost potato puree – whoops! But frozen mash is ace – 5 minutes or so in the microwave, no peeling or boiling or mashing, and the resulting stuff is very nice. Creamy, no lumps, and if mash had tasted like that in my childhood I would have eaten it no problem!

Today we are going to a science show called ‘Brainiac’ in Brighton, so we decided to have Sunday dinner on Saturday night. I spoke to my younger brother on Friday afternoon and he was cooking a shoulder of lamb in red wine and shallots with his housemates and girlfriend on Friday night, as opposed to them all getting a bit too drunk and lairy at the beginning of the weekend, so doing a roast on Saturday night was inspired by my brother, and not being able to do one today as we are out for the afternoon. TuT wanted mash and roasted potatoes with his beef – no problem there with my trusty frozen mashed potato! And I am afraid, despite trying the Nigella tip of the use of semolina my homemade roasted potatoes are nothing to write home about, so I use the Asda healthy range frozen roast potatoes which are perfectly acceptable and take no time to cook whilst the meat is resting and I am doing everything else.

At 7.15pm we sat down to roast beef and all the trimmings, one thing I don’t cheat on is my Yorkshire Puddings – Toads! – I make them to the Nigella recipe, using four eggs per recipe, getting the tin as hot as possible and putting them into the hottest oven, they rise unbelievably into lots of sand castles. I am quite proud of them when I put them on the table!

The rest of the evening passed nicely. In my desperation to find out about when I could expect to start losing weight at a reasonable rate when I come off the injection I decided to post on the Weight Watchers forums if anyone else had experienced a big gain whilst being on the injection and how long it had taken to start to lose weight once its effects wore off. Thank you to all that posted a reply. It was so nice to find out that my gain of four stone is not unusual, others were reporting large gains, and that once you come off it, following Weight Watchers, a loss of 2 pounds or so a week is possible. Thank you so much to the lovely Gemma that posted a reply and wrote me a lovely email, it has made such a difference to hear from you! I’d like all of you reading this to feel free to mail me with any thoughts, questions, or advice; just follow the link on the top of the page.

Losing My Routine and Weight Related Thoughts

Published
by
thetoad
on 26 March 2008
in Dieting and Losing Weight
. 0 Comments

It feels like Tuesday but I have to remind myself that it is Wednesday. This is a good thing in that it is only two more mornings to get up before the weekend, but bad in that I won’t feel like putting any sort of routine into place as come the weekend, everything changes again. I really hate the way that bank holidays stuff up my routine; it would be ok if I worked as I would just go back to work and everything would feel the same – except for some disorientation about what day of the week it is. However, being unable to partake in employment means my days whilst TuT is at work are up to me to fill productively.

As you can tell from lack of blog entry yesterday, after the Easter Break, I wasn’t so productive yesterday or managed to re-establish my weekday routine. The day started out with Weight Watchers. My first meeting after joining last week. At this meeting for some unknown reason, you are not allowed to be weighed without your shoes on. So you have to either weigh in your shoes (!!!!) or weigh in a pair of slippers or flip flops. Luckily last week, my first weigh in, I got away with weighing in my socks because the meeting had already begun as I was late, and the clerk that was helping with the weighing didn’t notice I’d taken my shoes off. This week however I took along my lightest pair of pink slippers and put those on, took all my jumpers off, and clambered on to the scales.

To reveal I’d lost a pound.

One Pound.

In my first week.

I must be happy about this I know; but I am not. There’s something on the Weight Watchers website that says it’s the equivalent to a box of butter but that doesn’t make me feel any better. In the past when I have been to slimming clubs my first week has always been something between 3 and 5 pounds which always made me feel spurred on and inspired. A lot of hard work to lose a pound just does not inspire. What made it worse was that a girl of a similar age to me joined last week at the same time as me. When we had our new members talk she was saying that she was Cabin Crew i.e. an air hostess. I didn’t think she even needed to lose any weight as she was very slim already, but I can imagine working in Cabin Crew you do need to be as light as possible. She comes back yesterday and had been weighed before me and she had lost SIX and a half pounds! Half a pound off losing half a stone! JEALOUS! I know that she followed the ‘Core’ plan, whilst I am on the ‘Points’ plan and it did make me tempted to try that plan this week, but I just don’t think that the ‘Core’ plan would work with what I cook for TuT and I. I do cook from scratch most nights, but sometimes I do use a jar of ready made curry sauce for example, which I could take off my weekly allowance of 21, but if that happened a couple of nights a week, using points on a ready made sauce, I’d have little left for wineage, a few crisps, or anything else that I would deem a proper treat. I’ll stick to the points plan for the time being.

I should be pleased as I did have four days off over the Easter weekend with TuT and could have quite easily have gained a pound, so to lose and not gain weight is a good thing – especially as I am still under the effects of the injection.

It has made me so angry and so upset the way it has not only destroyed my confidence in my appearance in having gained all this weight, but has taken my actual confidence in myself away. When I went on the injection I was losing a lot of weight fairly rapidly – it wasn’t healthy, but I loved wearing size 10 and 12 clothes and was happy in my appearance and confident. Looking back I stopped losing weight once I went on the injection, but around the same time I moved in with TuT and my eating habits improved from what they were when I lived on my own. I put the halt in weight loss down to this and continued to eat in a healthy way and exercise.

Over TuT and I’s first Christmas together I gained 5 pounds, I didn’t think too much of this – everyone gains weight at Christmas. But despite going back to being more strict with my eating and exercising, the weight didn’t come off, in fact by Easter I’d gained a stone.

I put this down to unhappiness and lack of exercise – I was spending a lot of my days as a “house cat” – not going out, except to walk to the local shop to buy a paper or something.

Then we moved to Northamptonshire to a tiny village in the middle of nowhere and TuT had to use my car as he’d lost his company car in changing jobs. So for two months or so I was an enforced housecat and although I managed to get out on my bike or go for a run, it wasn’t done with any consistency as last summer it continually rained for months on end.

When I eventually got my car back I joined Cannons Gym in Northampton. It was a bit of a drive, but aware of my increasing weight, I didn’t mind. I had a personal training session where upon I was weighed and by this point I’d gained 2 stone 6 pounds. I set about my new gym routine with vigour and tried to embrace carbs as the fuel I’d need for all the exercise I was doing.

The weight never shifted and when we moved to Milton Keynes I persuaded TuT to let me go to the local Weight Watchers meeting. By this point I was now near enough exactly three stone heavier than I had been the previous year. I put this down to eating more and being less strict with myself and not really following any sort of diet, along with a continued dip in my exercise levels. The months of having no car and being stuck inside with the pouring rain outside had established a bad routine of actually being content to stay in all day and do no exercise.

I started doing more exercise to earn bonus points and did manage to lose a couple of pounds, but I was once again eating very little as eating the full points allowance just seemed far far to much food from what I was used to eating normally and I wanted to lose weight, which meant to me, reducing the amount I was eating currently.

I wasn’t in the right frame of mind and the dark winter months were not really the right time to start drastically cutting down on my food intake – in fact, no time is the right time to do this! So I dropped out of Weight Watchers just before Christmas, treated myself to some new size 14 clothes and just decided that I was meant to be a size 14 and try to accept it.

In January we moved to the sea side and I thought finally I’d be able to tackle my weight – long walks and runs by the sea, attending the gym, fresh sea air and healthy food. So almost as soon as we moved here I embarked on a health kick and started doing loads of exercise and expected the weight to start falling off – except, it didn’t and hasn’t.

I know it is down to the injection but it has just made me so sad – the whole of last year I’ve always found someway of blaming myself for my increasing waist line; lack of exercise, eating more, eating more carbs – everything all related to me and having bad eating habits. I haven’t been able to go out for a meal and just order what I wanted without feeling guilty about the extra calories I was eating. In so many ways I have just been so unhappy in the last year all related to my weight and food intake and although in some way it is a relief to find out it wasn’t my fault I have gained all this weight, it is still here, it will take a lot of hard work once the injection does wear off to get rid of it and in the mean time I feel a fat frump with no confidence and rock bottom self esteem.

Win The Weight War!!

Published
by
thetoad
on 20 March 2008
in Losing Weight
. 1 Comment

I posted yesterday all fired up after my 5km run/walk I’d been on – with all those endorphins rushing around my body I couldn’t help but write a positive entry after the gloom of writing about my weight misery the previous day. I am thinking that I should update you all on what happened when I went to see lovely Triage nurse Jane and what has happened since on the battle of my blubber.

I saw Jane, she spoke to me about what I ate and weighed me. I told her I thought it was the Trazodone and Amisulpride combo that was piling the weight on and making it difficult to shift. I then half-heartedly mentioned that I was on the Depot Provera injection – now is not the time for pregnancy! Surprisingly Jane told me that would be the cause of my weight gain and that it is famous for putting weight on.

“Whenever any of my patients go on the injection I warn them that they should be prepared to gain weight.”

Jane said gravely. When I went on the injection nearly two years ago I was very borderline anorexic and spoke at length with the nurse in the North about weight gain. She said it was possible because it increased your appetite. I had ultimate control over my appetite at that time and was pretty used to feeling hungry so if the only way I could gain weight was by eating more, then I would ensure I continued to eat very little.

However, the weight has slowly crept on in the last 18 months since being on it. When I got home I looked on the web and there were similar stories to mine out there, women that had gained three or four stone in the years whilst they had been receiving the injection.

It was a great relief to find out the cause of my weight gain. I spoke to Jane about what I generally eat in a typical day and she could see no problem with what I was eating, although she does want me to keep a food diary for a week and return to see her with it, and of course, I no longer want to use the Depot Provera injections to prevent pregnancy of bambino Toads.

I felt as though a weight had been lifted off my shoulders (if not yet off my body!) – if Jane had confirmed my suspicions that it was the Amisulpride and the Trazodone I would have just had to continue taking them as I am the most stable I have been in a long time on that combination of medication. Whenever I have been taking my medication in the last year since the weight started to creep on, at the back of my mind I have been thinking they are making me fat. For a while I messed about not taking my doses properly thinking that would aid weight loss, but getting mentally poorly at the same time. (and funnily enough, not losing any weight!!)

After seeing Jane I quickly hot footed it to my local Weight Watchers meeting which was taking place the very morning I was seeing Jane – Tuesday mornings at 10am. I was a bit late so had to creep about whilst Melanie conducted the meeting, getting myself weighed with a clerk and signing up for the monthly pass that not only saves me money on my weekly meeting fee, but gives TuT and I access to the ‘e-source’ which contains an online points tracker, recipe builder – basically everything you need to accurately track your points of the food you are cooking and eating.

Finding out my weight wasn’t too much of a shock as I’d already just been weighed at the Surgery with Jane. When I attended Weight Watchers in the North it was Tuesday mornings at 10am with the lovely Jenny. Now it’s Tuesday mornings at 10am with Melanie in the South, but she seems just as lovely – conducting her meeting wearing a pink rabbit ears headband for Easter! At the end of the meeting myself and another newbie spent some time with Melanie as she went through the two plans.

Melanie had joined Weight Watchers nine times before cracking it and losing her weight – it took her 18 months to lose something like 30 pounds, and then she became a Weight Watchers leader. I asked her what was it, on the ninth time, that everything clicked and she lost her weight. Melanie explained that she began staying to the meetings and just taking the programme more seriously, she began cooking whereas previously she would have four or five takeaways a week. I was advised to try the points plan and make small changes this week. I am slightly concerned that I have joined the week before Easter – I am not expecting any eggs – but TuT and I are off together for four days with days out planned and it will take some discipline to stick to my running programme. In some ways I feel as though I have joined the week before Christmas and if I’d realised I might have joined next Tuesday.

But the war on my weight is now waged! I am determined to stick to my points over the Easter weekend and get some sort of weight loss on Tuesday – even if it’s just a pound.

Time is ticking on – it is time to stop writing about weight loss and get out for my run and do something proactive to lose that pound!