Tag Archive for 'weight gain'

1st May – New Month – New Start

Published
by
thetoad
on 1 May 2008
in Dieting, Food and Mental Health
. 0 Comments

Greetings audience, I offer my apologies for neglecting the blog for as long as I have.

Basically, after the psychiatric assessment I lost the plot a little bit – going over the past and stirring up the mud at the bottom of the pond is never good for me and I got a lot ill for a couple of days. I didn’t much feel like blogging, in fact, I didn’t feel much like doing anything much at all.

Then when I’d just about got myself together, TuT had to go away for a couple of days for a training course for his job. I know couples that don’t mind separation, that can deal with one of them spending Monday to Friday away and just spending weekends together, but that is not the relationship TuT and I have. We both HATE being apart. Especially at night. It was playing on my mind, TuT’s impending departure for a few days, and this further added to my stress in trying to get over the psychiatric assessment.

TuT left on the Sunday afternoon, leaving me with an empty hollow feeling in my stomach, that was never full, no matter how much food I ate. I tried to stick to my weight watchers points, but was comfort eating. I hate spending long periods of time on my own. I was also scared to death that something would happen to TuT on his long drive to the North.

On the Monday I decided to treat myself to something nice for lunch as I was hungry and hadn’t really eaten a proper evening meal on Sunday evening. In town there is a sandwich shop – doing all the typical sandwich fillings and jacket potatoes, but it is run by Thai people. In addition to doing the normal stuff you expect from a sandwich shop they have a Thai menu.

I was craving a Chinese take away with TuT away, but, they are never open at lunch time, so I thought I would satisfy my craving with a Thai Takeaway. I ordered the Thai noodle soup – with eager anticipation. What I got was a bag of micro-waved supernoodles, the vegetable component was carrots and cauliflower – I had no idea that cauliflowers were Thai?! And a few pieces of sandwich chicken. I was disappointed, but starving, so ate a fair bit of it, but then felt really bad.

Supernoodles can be up to 12 points – and they are certainly not worth 12 points. So I just felt like I had ruined weight watchers on something that wasn’t even worth it.

I recently read an article that explained that cravings are not actually your body signalling that you are low on a particular vitamin or mineral. For example just before your period you sometimes justify the chocolate craving as your body needing sugar and magnesium. Or if you crave crisps it’s because your body is low on sodium. In actual fact these cravings are down to a craving for comfort as these are the foods that we associate with happy and comforting times. It’s a psychological craving as opposed to a physical need.

I read this article after the Chinese takeaway cravings I’d experienced whilst TuT was away; and it made sense. Chinese takeaways are my favourite take away and TuT and I often enjoy one together on a Friday night at the beginning of the weekend – I have rarely ever ordered a Chinese take away on my own before moving in with TuT – so I was craving the togetherness of enjoying a Chinese takeaway together, which is something I always associate with Friday nights and the beginning of TuT and I’s weekend together.

On the third day of TuT’s absence my parents arrived for a short stay. They weren’t up for bedding down on the inflatable air bed in our spare room, so stayed in a nearby hotel.

Spending days with my parents also spelt diet disaster. Already, thanks to the evil “Thai” noodles and comfort eating I had a 1lb gain on the scales on the Tuesday morning weigh – in. It was annoying, but not unexpected, due to the foods I had been eating.
My parents took me to the posh sandwich shop over the road for Tuesday’s lunch and then we had some lagers whilst watching the football in the evening, and finally, for me, a Chinese takeaway!!! Craving satisfied, whilst sharing with my mum.

The next day saw us going to Brighton for the day and we went for a lovely lunch at an “all-you-can-eat” Italian – pizza, pasta, salad and garlic bread. It was delicious and I tried to focus on filling up on the delicious salad bar.

In the evening I wanted some “mum cooked goodness”; so I got mum to cook tea for us all out of the ingredients I had in the flat. We had savoury mince with mashed potatoes (the aunt bessie’s frozen version! – thank you Delia!) and vegetables. It was comforting and delicious and fairly healthy I would say; although by this point I had abandoned sticking to my weight watchers points allowance as I had no idea how to point what I had eaten so just tried to keep things as healthy as possible, whilst not pointing.

TuT returned on Wednesday night – hurrah! So happy he returned safely. The parents left on Thursday lunch time and I was pretty stressed out by all the changes. It was wonderful seeing the parental units, but a total change to my usual routine and with TuT being away as well, plus still getting over the psychiatric assessment; the upshot was by Friday I lost the plot big time.
I had this constant churning feeling in my stomach and was convinced that cosmic forces were out to get me. I couldn’t stop crying and my head was constantly buzzing with sounds and thoughts. I managed to get through to the nurse that had conducted my psych assessment – by this point I was thinking that I needed to be on the psych ward I felt so spaced out and frightened, all the time, with a churning stomach. It was awful.

The nurse agreed to see me that afternoon, and there was talk of a doctor being called in to potentially give me something to calm things down a bit for me. I was a total state.

After seeing the nurse things calmed down a bit. I talked through everything and the churning feeling eased off somewhat. The psych nurse explained that there had been a mess up with my referral to the day hospital and it would be a while before they picked me up, so in the meantime she would see me – “off the record” as it were, to keep an eye on me until my support system was properly in place. This was reassuring.

TuT and I enjoyed a wonderful weekend together, without the shadow of TuT going away as we had had the previous weekend.
Tuesday morning revealed another 1lb gain, which to say I had been comfort eating with TuT away and hadn’t pointed my food the whole time my parents were staying and when TuT came home, was expected, and to be fair, with what I’d eaten, I could have deserved to have put on a little more.

I just need to focus now. I bought one of the weight watchers journals, and I am going to fill in every single bite of food and every single drink and track all my points properly from now on.

I am also wearing my weight watchers points pedometer and trying to beat the previous days bonus point earning score.
So yesterday, armed with my trusty pedometer on my pocket, I marched to see my psych nurse for my second appointment with her and to find out the progress of my referral to the day hospital.

What surprise news I was greeted with when we met, She has arranged to take me on her case load officially and will see me until my referral to the day hospital comes through and continue to support me during my attendance at the day hospital. She is my official care co-ordinator and I now have the support of my own permanent CPN (community psychiatric nurse). This level of support is something I have not had since I lived in the north and is a big relief.

Today is the 1st May and I am a big believer in starting new things, or improving on old things. So first thing, I need to keep all you readers entertained and get blogging again! I think I’ve got off to a good start!

Tale From The Scale

Published
by
thetoad
on 8 April 2008
in Dieting, Food and Losing Weight
. 0 Comments

So today was my Weight Watchers meeting. I had a mad moment about my slippers beforehand. At my meeting you can’t weigh in your socks, it has to be the shoes you have on or slippers or flip flops. It is too cold for the flip flops option so it’s slippers for me.

Today I weighed in my “Bear Head” slippers, they are more like socks in their fabric, and have a little strap going over the top of my foot and then a teddy bear head at the top of each slipper. I would say they are more like slipper socks than proper slippers and hence I chose them as they are the closest thing to socks I can get away with when getting weighed.

After last week’s gain I felt I needed all the help possible to get a good loss this week.

I have lost one pound. But with the 2.5 pound gain from last week, that actually still puts me at 1.5 pounds heavier than when I joined 3 weeks ago. I feel this has got to be the injection – who ends up 1.5 pounds heavier when following Weight Watchers?!

I posted about this on the Weight Watchers forum to see if anyone else had found the same, a few people were, I felt, a bit unkind in their replies, saying I am using the Depot Provera injection as an excuse and it’s down to me not following the Weight Watchers programme correctly. Feel a bit low in myself about this. My leader has asked me to fill in a tracker this week so she can see exactly what I am eating and if I am going wrong anywhere. I will fill out my tracker properly this week and see what the verdict is next week when my leader, Melanie, looks at what I have eaten.

Melanie also mentioned drinking lots of water again, like the stand-in leader from last week, so will continue getting my water down me. Currently I am managing about 3 litres of water a day, plus tea and coffee. It gets bugging going to the toilet all the time, but think it must be helping.

I have been to the farm shop today to stock up on lots of point free vegetables. I got lots of things from a fennel bulb, mange tout, apples and cauliflowers. The cauliflowers are huge and were on offer for “2 for a £1”. Our fridge now looks like a greengrocers stall and I couldn’t fit both the huge cauliflowers in! So I made some zero point and core friendly cauliflower soup; here’s the recipe in case you have some cauliflowers that you can’t fit in the fridge (!) or you just fancy a nice tasty zero point soup : -

Curried Cauliflower Soup (zero points and ‘core’ plan approved)

1 Large cauliflower, split into small florets
1 Large Leek, finely chopped
1 Tablespoon Curry powder (more or less depending on how hot/mild you like it)
Fry Light Oil Spray
1 Litre Vegetable stock made up with 2 knorr vegetable stock cubes and boiling water
Fresh coriander (optional)

Spray a non-stick pan with fry-light and add the leek and sweat over a moderate heat until slightly browned and softened. Stir in the curry powder and keep stirring the leek in the curry powder for about 30 seconds, to combine, but careful not to let the leek stick once the curry powder is added. Add in 1 litre vegetable stock and the cauliflower.

Simmer the mixture until the cauliflower is tender and starts to break up when you push a floret with a wooden spoon.
Using a stick hand blender whizz up until totally smooth, adding some fresh coriander, if using, before you whizz it up.
This makes enough for four large portions and is a very comforting and warming meal.

The Great Breakfast Debate

Published
by
thetoad
on 7 April 2008
in Dieting, Food and Losing Weight
. 1 Comment

Years ago, possibly ten or more, a magazine recommended a book that you could only get in America; it was called simply ‘The Skinny’ “What every skinny knows about dieting but won’t tell you”. I HAD to have it. I managed to get it from Amazon and when it arrived I could not put it down until I had read it.

To write the book the authors had conducted a series of “skinny lunches”, inviting skinny women to lunch to find out what exercise they did and what they generally ate to stay slim. Each chapter of the book, there are lots of them and all fairly short and includes funny topics such as “What to do if you accidentally drink a full fat coke instead of diet coke” how much weight you can expect to lose or gain depending on life events – moving house, a divorce etc. As well as comprehensive calorie lists for fast food restaurant foods. One chapter was entitled “Breakfast”.

I was brought up on breakfast before school. No matter if I couldn’t really face it or want it, I had to eat a bowl of cereal before school. We were never allowed the sugary fun cereals that were always on TV when I was watching kids television. The most exciting it got was rice krispies! I had some kind of belief that bad things would happen if I didn’t eat my breakfast.

Then I started my famous “breakfast/tea diet” which I have written about in an earlier post, and I always began my day of starvation with a large bowl of cereal. During this time cereal was a bit of an obsession. I’d spend ages wandering up and down the cereal aisles, checking the fat content of any that I hadn’t tried before and fancied. It was just about the only food I could eat without guilt, without measuring out, just enjoying it.

Then I read ‘The Skinny’ which explained that there are no proven benefits to eating breakfast. The people who think if they don’t eat breakfast they will faint by 10am have probably never skipped breakfast to see if this was true. That not eating breakfast saved loads of calories that you could spend later when you were actually hungry and on something more worthwhile than a bowl of cardboard tasting cereal. This seemed to sink in with me, so when I stopped the “breakfast/tea diet” and followed a more calorie controlled Weight Watchers style of diet, if I could get away with skipping breakfast then I did. Firmly believing what I’d read in the ‘The Skinny’; that I was saving calories, it was an unnecessary meal. I was rarely hungry first thing in the morning so it wasn’t hard.

I did lose some weight following this method of not eating breakfast. But I was being very careful of what I did eat during the day. And the summer of my Atkins style of eating I never ate breakfast, but then I was not eating very much during the day and for my evening meal either. So what impact not eating breakfast had on my diet and weight loss at that time can’t really be gauged.

But since reading the book and going through a long phase of not eating breakfast it is a meal that I always struggle to eat, thinking I am saving myself calories by not eating it.

However, more recently people like Ian Marber, The Food Doctor, sometimes seen on Richard and Judy, advocates eating breakfast as part of his “10 Principles” for losing weight. It’s just that I never really feel hungry in the morning, but then having read through the CORE Plan in my Weight Watchers book I am thinking that maybe I think feeling hungry is feeling absolutely RAVENOUS, starving hungry, which is not the correct hunger to feel. The hunger scale makes for interesting reading; and in fact the more I read about Core and seeing the results that you can get from people in my Weight Watchers meeting, I am wondering whether trying a week on core would be worth a trial?

So this week I am going to make sure, as much as possible, that I eat my breakfast within an hour of waking up and see if that has any effect on my metabolism and weight loss. Has anyone else noticed whether eating breakfast or not eating this “most important meal of the day” has had any effect on their weight?

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.

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!

Nothing Tastes As Good As Being Slim Feels

Published
by
thetoad
on 18 March 2008
in Dieting
. 2 Comments

Welcome to the first proper entry on this new and exciting blog.

Last night I was full of happiness and optimism. My fiancé – TuT (Toad undergoing Training) had spent so long setting the website up, making sure my email was working and helping me load up my first entry, everything was good.

I watched my Delia which I really enjoyed and spent the rest of the evening reading and watching television – a pretty typical Monday night. I didn’t have any wineage and going to bed with a low calorie hot chocolate I felt healthy and virtuous, having been swimming and for a brisk 3km walk during the day and cooking a healthy stir fry for tea.

Then I wake up this morning, expecting to feel lighter and happier. I have spent the last hour and a half in floods of tears and have made TuT late for work. He hasn’t even had any breakfast and I feel like living shit about it. I just hate my weight, my appearance, and the fact that the majority of my clothes don’t fit.

When TuT and I moved in together I was a size 10/12 and sometimes if a particular shop was generously sized, an 8. I enjoyed shopping for clothes and the weekend was always a chance to get a little more dressed up than during the week and I was happy with how I looked and felt about myself.

The dark side of being that size for my 5 foot 10 inches frame was that I was achieving the size through strict avoidance of carbohydrates, a sort of Atkins diet that I had fashioned. However, after years of watching fat grams and counting Weight Watchers points, I wasn’t embracing the Atkins philosophy completely by eating mounds of cheese and cooked breakfasts, I was still avoiding the high fat foods as well as the carbohydrates. I just wasn’t eating very much at all.

I wasn’t taking any medication at this time for my mental health problems and the weight was just dropping off me.

“Nothing tastes as good as being slim feels”

Despite the ill health I experienced whilst following such a restricted diet and the fact that in its latter stages I was borderline anorexic, I loved being slim and wearing my size 10 jeans.

Now 18 months down the line I eat a much more varied diet, whilst still trying to be healthy, but including carbohydrates and pretty much all food groups. But I have gained four stone in the last year. I know I am healthier because I don’t permanently have some sort of cold or flu but I feel so bloody FAT. I am a size 14, pushing 16 now and I absolutely HATE IT.

One of the main differences is that I am now on medication to help manage my mental health problems. I take an antipsychotic called Amisulpride and an antidepressant called Trazodone. The weight has pretty much started creeping on slowly since I went on to these two medications. However, my web research this morning has said while it is possible to gain weight on these medications, although it is a rarer side effect than other antidepressants and antipsychotics, it is possible to LOSE WEIGHT whilst taking them.

So I need some sort of diet to follow and need to do a good amount of exercise. I have no idea where to start as TuT and I reckon we are pretty healthy at the moment and there isn’t much I can cut out of my diet. Following my hours of tears this morning I have rung the doctors and I am going to see the lovely Triage nurse, Jane. I saw her a few weeks ago and she was so lovely, so I am hoping she can make me feel better and offer some advice on how to get to a healthier weight and size.

Watch this space…