Tag Archive for 'running'

Needing to Move More!

Published
by
thetoad
on 14 April 2008
in Dieting, Excercise and Losing Weight
. 0 Comments

I haven’t been posting for the last couple of days. The weekend days are always tough for me to sit and write, but last week I was feeling really down and despondent about life. My motivation to do things and fill my day productively just went out of the window.

I haven’t got a proper routine established at the moment, so I have been doing very little exercise. Earlier posts will reveal that I was actively training for the 5km Race for Life that I have entered. This has fizzled out and I haven’t been out for a run in nearly two weeks. The time when my 5km training began to dwindle was finding out about the effects of the Depo Provera injection on my weight. I was running most days, believing that I would firm up and get skinny and light. After six weeks or so, giving it a proper chance to start showing some positive effects on the scales, I actually ended up slightly heavier, although my fitness had improved. There’s no way I was running enough to build up any sort of muscle weight in that time and the whole experience of consistently running and not getting any results has really put me off.

I am not a natural runner, I never have been. But when I am lighter and fitter, going for a run is enjoyable and brilliant way to keep the pounds off and get some fresh air and exercise.

I now know that my lack of results on the scales despite my running is due to the injection playing havoc with my weight. TuT and I have basically worked out that it fools the body into thinking it is pregnant and hence predisposed to put the weight on. There’s people out there that say it just increases your appetite and that’s why you put on weight, well, that may be true for some people, but not for me. Through tracking my weight watchers points, I am probably eating more now, than I was previously. That’s how little I was eating – that Weight Watchers points allowance of food is more food than I am used to eating. So the increase in appetite theory of the weight gain is not something I agree with in my case.

The injection would have been due this Wednesday 16th April, you can have the injection a week either side of it, so as of a week on Wednesday I am into the detox zone I feel. I am not going to change what I am doing now with regards to the eating plan I am following I am just going to keep going as I am – I am within my points allowance easily most days and eating pretty healthily (hence the recipes for the soups I made last week). I just hope that once the effects start to wear off and my body adjusts and detoxes off the injection that the pounds will disappear at a better and more consistent speed.

In the meantime, I do realise that I need to move my butt more than what I have been doing in the last couple of weeks. I got an email from a friend I haven’t heard from in a while and she said

“are you still doing loads of exercise….I bet you’re really fit now”

This made me remember that when I first moved to the coast I was doing a lot of exercise, and on the whole enjoying it, and just because it didn’t show on the scales doesn’t mean that it won’t show on my body.

I have been reading sara’s blog www.sanafit.blogspot.com and she has just completed a 12 week training programme and lost 3lbs. You may think, as I was, that 3lbs is not much, but the “before and after” pictures speak for themselves and the 3lbs difference is really noticeable on her body and she looks very good – I would love to have the fit, toned and slim body that she is modelling on her blog pages today.

So this week I plan to get myself booked into some classes at the gym; I bought a new swimming costume on Saturday so I have no excuse not to get some lengths done in the pool, and I am just going to focus on the inch loss and toning my body up whilst getting super fit, as opposed to what the scales say.

Borderline Personality Disorder makes for Disordered Day

Published
by
thetoad
on 27 March 2008
in Mental Health
. 4 Comments

After posting yesterday’s entry things went totally crazy. I suffer from a severe and enduring mental health problem in the form of what is called a Borderline Personality Disorder. It is so called because it is a mental health condition that borders on lots of other mental health problems. I border on symptoms of schizophrenia, manic depression (bipolar), depression and have an Eating Disorder. I suffer from symptoms of these problems, without having enough of the symptoms to have something like Bipolar diagnosed in its entirety. I get very paranoid and lately have been getting really angry.

My anger is just crazy when it comes over me. I shout and totally lose my temper with TuT. I become convinced that my paranoid thoughts are the truth and anyone that disagrees with me just ignites my anger further. When I get into my disordered thinking as a result of my personality disorder I stop being able to care for myself. I don’t eat properly or take showers or baths. I can do dangerous things like self harming; my left arm is a mass of scars from the days when I would channel my anger towards myself. I’ve attempted suicide numerous times, and as recently as last August I locked TuT out of the house and took an overdose. I really am one crazy chick when the Personality Disorder comes out to play and it’s scary.

I am so angry about my weight gain. In gaining weight I have lost so much of myself. My confidence, self esteem and feelings of self worth are all rock bottom; bordering on non existent. When I first starting seeing fiancé TuT I’d lost a lot of weight and was continuing to lose weight. We had a big chat one day in the car coming back from shopping and TuT was saying not to lose any more weight. I agreed with him but said under no circumstances did I want to gain any.

“Just a small gain of a couple of pounds and it’ll destroy me. I won’t go out the house. I will be depressed. I stay this weight and that’s it – no gains!!”

I said with strong emotions running through me. For the first time in my adult life I was a nice size 10/12. I loved buying clothes and getting dressed up. Now my uniform is my black track suit bottoms and blokey black fleece I flinched from TuT.

I know that the gain is not my fault, although I have spent the last 18 months thinking that I have been eating too much, and it is going to take some time before this way of thinking changes and I can enjoy a healthy meal without feeling guilty. I got a fantastic email that really made my day today from a lovely girl called Sara Lake. Her blog, www.sanafit.blogspot.com, is brilliant reading and so inspiring. I had some questions about how she was going about getting fit and slim so I dropped her a mail. Sara replied so quickly and had even taken the time to read this blog and told me she loved the story about the red-coated lady cheering me on when I was running. What was really interesting was what Sara wrote about my weight gain :

“As for your weight gain, I think you can stop blaming yourself. I have seen two cases like this of massive, ‘unexplained’ weightgain. One of them was taking Depo Provera injections (as a nice bonus, she also got full-face acne every time she got the shots), the other was on anti-depressants. Both returned to normal weight once the meds were changed.”

This made me feel so much better, especially the part that once the meds were changed their weights returned to normal. I had TuT frantically searching the web last night to find out how quickly the injection will be out of my system and when I can start to expect to see some improvement on the weight loss front. A part of me wants to stop trying to lose weight until the injection is fully out of my system, but doing this will probably lead to more weight gain and I will have to start from a higher weight once the injection gets out of my system. It just feels so horrible to diet hard at the coal face all week and have no chocolate at Easter to lose a mere pound. And this makes me angry. And Frustrated. The injection is not going to be out of my system until mid-May and this is stressing me out as that’s practically the summer and if I am still this weight into the summer it is going to be the worst thing – no vest tops, no short skirts, no nice dresses. Just me sweating away, probably in the blokey fleece that hides my rolls of flesh and fat.

As you can tell from today’s blog entry and the previous ones, this weight gain and trying to lose it is one of the biggest things on my mind at the moment. It feels like it is always there, never going away or changing or getting any better. This has had a knock-on effect with my mental health problems. TuT is worried that losing weight could flare up my borderline anorexia; when he expresses this I get SO ANGRY because I think he trying to stop me losing weight and wants me to stay fat and miserable. This is not true, I know this, he just wants me to be healthy. But yesterday the lid on the pressure cooker of my mind just exploded and I had probably my first borderline episode since moving. My anger knew no bounds, I believed TuT was playing mind games with me and my paranoia was out of control. All I could think about was how fat I am and there’s nothing I can do about it. I hate not being able to change things. My thoughts went round and round in circles winding me up more and more; getting more and more angry. Things got so out of control that I left the flat and refused to speak to TuT.

Things got so bad that TuT had to leave work as he feared for my safety. The state of mind I’d worked myself into, anything could have happened. He found me outside SpecSavers. He’d attempted to adjust my glasses the previous day and made them worse. This small thing became so important to me – it was essential that I got them adjusted correctly and did it that day, although I was wearing my spare pair. It was one of those days where the smallest things grow into mind-mountain-sized problems.

My glasses were fixed by a lovely optician and I started to feel calmer. TuT arrived and talked to me calmly and accompanied me to the library to return my books and bought me some lunch as I never eat when I have a borderline day. It took me a long time to eat my sandwich and drink my coffee but I felt better afterwards. Gradually things returned to normal, I just felt very very tired.

Today sees me back at the dieting coalface and not so out of control with my mental health. I managed to go out for a run after neglecting it for almost a week. I decided to walk for two minutes and run for three minutes for a total of 4km. This was fine until at the 2km mark it started hailing. Being pelted with sea-side hail hurts!! I managed to get shelter for a little while, but then the hail turned into steady rain and I just had to get wet and get myself home. I was reluctant to go running but TuT persuaded me as I haven’t been for so long. I can’t say I enjoyed getting pelted with hail and getting soaked to the bone wet, but now I am warm and showered I am glad I went for a run afterall, and wouldn’t you know it, the sun is now shining.

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!

“Good Luck Darling!” – Upon My Running

Published
by
thetoad
on 19 March 2008
in Excercise
. 0 Comments

I am just not long in from my run. I can’t say that I was totally in the mood to go this morning, I haven’t been out since Sunday. I know that’s only two days off pounding the coastal path, but I am only in my third week of training and at this tentative stage, mornings spent watching television in my pyjamas and reading library books and magazines are not a so distant memory. This morning the temptation was there to do just that; but after a bit of persuading from The Toad undergoing Training (fiancé TuT) via msn messenger, I was out the door.

I only intended to do 4km. I am training for the 5km Race For Life. My race takes place on 20th July, so at this stage I still have a good couple of months to train, the main thing at this point is that I am running four times a week, no matter what the distance or time. I am lucky that last year TuT treated me to a Garmin GPS training watch, so I know exactly how many kilometres I have run. Today when I hit 2km, the point where I was going to turn around and come back, I thought I’d carry on for the other 0.5km, that on completion of the run would mean I’d done 5km instead of 4km. I did 5km on Sunday and I was feeling ok at 2km, so I carried on to 2.5km and then turned around and ran back.

There I was approaching the 5km mark, Kasabian’s ‘Club Foot’ was beating through my veins via my ipod – “…you’re messin’ with the enemy” I sneered along as I summoned my body to a sprint finish. At which point a crazy red coated old lady with matching pillar box red lip stick moved out of my way, but as I ran past she touched my arm in the way that only the older generation ladies can and said:

“Good luck darling!”

I’d hit my 5km, but after the words of encouragement and kindness I felt I owed it to her to keep going. So I ran the last bit to the road crossing and then stopped my watch having done a little over the 5km I intended to.

I felt brilliant walking back home and wasn’t even disappointed when I plugged the Garmin training watch into the computer to see that I was slightly slower on average than my run on Sunday and didn’t hit my top speed. I was just glad I’d got back in the saddle after yesterday and was back on track with my running training.

I am quite proud of how quickly my running fitness is improving. I started out in February just running a mile – 1.6km, which I was able to jog all of, but I didn’t enjoy it and it was hard to keep a jogging pace up for the duration. Then a little over two weeks ago, just into March, I picked up a health and fitness magazine that came with a free water bottle (in pink as well!) and featured a beginners running programme. This programme means you run further in the beginning stages than just a mile, but you have walk breaks. This seems to be improving my running as it gives me the confidence to run further as you have the security of having walk breaks.

After a week and a half of following the run/walk programme I decided to tackle the distance of 5km to see how I managed it and I did it in just over 40minutes. I didn’t die of exhaustion and was pleased. Until the next day when I got out of bed and was stiff as a board! Walking hurt!

By the following Friday I tackled the 5km distance again, improved on my time and better than that, on the Saturday I didn’t suffer any stiffness in my legs, so on the Sunday, taking Saturday as a rest day, I went out and did 5km again.

So as the lady in red said – “Good Luck Darling!” – I just need to keep my training up and enjoy seeing myself improve.

Watch this space…..