Weigh-in for June 28

Today is my weigh-in day. I haven’t posted my weights yet. I am so glad to have the first three weeks of my diet behind me. The beginning of a diet is always difficult for me. It’s a time of learning to eat a lot less, and there is no weight loss to spur me on. This has been a good start for me. It helps me tremendously to have my Bodybugg. Losing weight becomes a mathematical equation, removing the guess work, every week wondering: Will I lose weight or will I stay the same or gain?


6/07/2010     191.19

6/14              189.42 -1.77

6/21              186.78 -2.64

6/28              184.58 -2.2

Total lost 1st month   -6.61

Looking For a Better Day

I have had a no good very bad week. After weeks of not sleeping, I started taking Ambien again. It has helped to get some good sleep, and I’m not waking up to binge eat yet. I’ve had terrible bloating and gas, and dare I say serious “irregularity?” And my blood pressure has been extremely high. I felt so bad Thursday night, I went to the ER. My blood pressure was 220/117. The doctor and nurse were sure that I would need surgery. After a CT scan and sonogram proved normal, the diagnosis was a urinary tract infection. Two days of Cipro, and I’m feeling better. No help was given for irregularity. It’s a bad problem to have at anytime, but it’s really bad when trying to drop pounds. My diet is full of veggies, fruits, nuts and whole grains…lots of fiber. I had the juice of a lemon in hot water this morning. That is one of the home remedies that I’ve googled. I’m not sure that I’ve read anyone else blogging about this agony. Oh, well, I have just a few nice girls as followers. I doubt that I have a corner on this problem.


Do any of you reward yourself as you reach your smaller goals? I am designing a Pandora bracelet. I’m planning to give myself the bracelet and one charm when I lose the first 10 pounds. Then another charm for every 10 pounds. Maybe I’ll decide on a spacer after 5 pounds. One time, 8 years ago, when I reached goal, my husband gave me a diamond heart pendant and a gold chain. After I gained weight I was ashamed to wear the heart. Now I wear it all the time. Silly to miss wearing it and it’s a reminder of my promise to myself to reach that goal again. It’s a good thing, because the heart pendant is a great reminder that I need to learn to maintain this time.

Apple Pie and Learning to Cook!

In Kelly's blog yesterday she gave a yummy recipe for Peach Cobbler and a great picture.  It reminded me of being 20-years old and newly wed (not all of my memories are bad) and learning to cook.  My first project was to learn to bake an apple pie.  Until then I only knew how to make toast and cook an egg.  I practiced piano 3 hours a day when I was growing up,  which left no time for cooking lessons. There was a little grocery store near campus, and the owner was the sweetest little lady.  I always went to her with my cooking questions.  As I had only seen my mother bake meringue pies where she baked the crust first, I didn't have a clue how to do a fruit pie.  I went into the grocery and asked the little lady how I could bake a top crust and a bottom crust and then get the pie in between the crusts.  The cookbook left out that part!  Without missing a beat or cracking a smile she explained:  roll out the crust, put the bottom crust in first, then put the fruit filling in, put the uncooked top crust on and bake it all at the same time.  I asked, "You mean put the crust in RAW?"  That memory has served me well in remembering that 20-year olds are very young and still have a lot to learn.

Monday Moaning!

I am so exhausted. I’m trying not to cry. If I cry then I will get a migraine. My blood pressure is already 169/87. I have not slept during the night since I went off Ambien on June 1. After 8 days, I took a 2 hour nap on June 9. I have had a few 1 hour naps on some of the days until June 12, Saturday. That day I slept almost all day. It was so healing, but it still wasn’t enough to heal my body. I didn’t sleep at all last night, but I took a nap this afternoon.

Maybe if I write about it, I can stop feeling like a victim. I have no one to talk with. I don’t suppose I have enough followers to help me, but maybe my two new buds will read this. My husband is my only confidante, and he’s been hearing this and living it for 30 years. Bless his heart (we say that in the south a lot!), he hurts for me, but doesn’t know how to help me. This blog is purposely as anonymous as possible so that my name can’t be googled and someone will read what I write. There are too many children and grandchildren whom I love dearly, and I don’t want them to read this.

I’m at such an impasse. I don’t sleep without a sleeping pill. Even with it, my sleep at night is troubled and sporadic. I’ve mentioned in my blog that I had to quit Ambien in order to lose weight. I have the curious side effect with Ambien of getting up in the wee hours and bingeing. Serious bingeing. I never do that during the day or when I’m off Ambien. My precious husband, probably to keep himself from being a Perfect Man, won’t/can’t abstain from having sweets in the house. Gourmet ice creams, (slurp), several different kinds of delish cookies, and bags of chocolate candy. When I wake up in an Ambien haze, I am into the stuff like a little child with no restraint. What I knew was that I had to stop Ambien to be able to lose weight. He does lock his goodies up at times, but then he’ll forget and I zero in on them.

I have post- traumatic stress syndrome. My first husband was paranoid schizophrenic. The last year of our marriage he turned into a monster. He never hit me, but he was verbally abusive beyond imagination. For a full calendar year he kept me awake every night. Our children were 13, 10, and 3. I was determined to go to any lengths to keep his rage on me and not my children. He would scream, yell, or talk loudly and disagreeably. It started as soon as I got in the bed. He had a litany that he followed every night. When I would refuse to answer him, he would get up and slam the door of the closet, and scoot all of the clothes down to one end.

We shared a long closet, my clothes on one end, his on the other. He knew what a perfectionist I was about my clothes. The closet would get his attention all during the night. Sliding with force the hangers, first to one end, then the other, bellowing his rage the whole time. I couldn’t leave the bedroom, because he would follow me and awaken the children. Later in the night, when I was so exhausted I faked sleep, he would go to the double dresser and pull out each drawer, banging it back as loudly as possible. (Checking for my reaction.) Then back in bed, when he thought I was asleep, he would bang his wedding ring against the headboard and continue to harangue me. Usually something about how I thought my dad was the only good man in the world. He was nasty about both my parents. That hurt me, because all during our marriage, they were the ones who would pick up the pieces for him after he had spent all of our money and then gone to a psychiatric hospital for several weeks or months. I was afraid to let myself go to sleep, because I was afraid he would kill me.

The short end to this part of the story is that I packed the car full on a June day, and took my girls and drove 12 hours (yeah, without sleep for a year) to get to my parents’ house. He wouldn’t let me bring our son, so I left and was able to rescue him before school started. The terrible, wrenching thing was finding out that when I was safe, I still could not sleep. I was 5'6" and weighed 105 pounds.  There would follow 30 years of struggling to regain my health.  On another time I will tell the rest of this part of the story, and how I’ve struggled to cope in the 30 years since. Obviously, it’s still a bleeding wound. I rarely think of what happened to me, unless I’m telling someone (mostly doctors, who are always horrified). I live a life of resignation when it comes to sleep. Except that now every pore in my body is screaming for sleep. I’ve done the warm bath. I’ll meditate, read, listen to music. Those things help if I also have the medication. Now I’m adrift.

Musings on Diets Past

This has been a good day. Thank you, Lord! I have never started a diet, changed my eating plan, and had such peace, happiness, and fullness. Except for the first night, I have not been hungry. And I’ve not obsessed about food or what I would eat for the next meal. After struggling for 14 years, I am wondering why this time feels so different. Is it because I spent several weeks thinking, reading, meditating and planning? I have read a stack of books written by people who have lost weight. I have wanted to know how they dealt with the yo-yoing, the frustration and pain, and what caused them to finally succeed. In each book, I have read things that mirrored my experiences or feelings.


Strangely, this time I haven’t looked for the perfect new diet that included revelations of the “good” foods allowed and the “bad” foods to avoid. It’s a relief to know that I will lose weight if the calories I burn are more than the calories I consume. And if I have an average deficit of 500 calories each day for a week, I will lose one pound that week. All I have to do is move more and eat less. One of my goals is to eat healthy, whole foods with no preservatives. I don’t want to take medicines for high blood pressure. I don’t want to worry about having a stroke, heart disease, or diabetes. Although I also want to look cute in small jeans with my shirt tucked in and wearing a belt.

The first step toward those goals is to lose the weight. And I like feeling that when I have days when I want to eat fast food or go out with friends and family, I can eat what they are eating if I am careful with portions. I can choose to have the hamburger or a slice of pizza or a dessert, and I will not throw up my hands and eat everything in sight because I “cheated” on my diet. In the past, I have binged for days after belittling myself for “cheating.” Figuring this out for myself has helped me with the anger I feel toward myself for having reached my goal weight so many times, and regained the weight when we hit a difficult place in our lives.

We've lived in two different houses when I reached my goal weight, and shortly afterward we found we had mold in the house and had to move into an apartment for months. My difficult times haven’t been trivial. One day I am going to list every time that I have let myself be knocked off the track and have ballooned back to my Cringe Weight. I read that in a blog today. The blogger asked for people to tell her what their Cringe Weight was. My cringe weight is 196. After the first time, right after cancer, I have come close to 196 two times.  Now I'm realizing that in this life I don't say "if we hit a difficult time" but rather "WHEN we hit a difficult time." 

Weigh-in for June 14

My weigh-in day was June 14. I didn’t write on that day. I had lost -1.99 pounds.  Part of the week my scale showed a loss of 3.5. Oh, well. I’m trying not to be so into the numbers on the scale, but it isn’t easy. This week I’ve handled it by not weighing every day. Mondays are my weigh-in days because that’s the way my Bodybugg software is set up.

Day 1 yesterday

Yesterday, June 6, I started on Day 1 of my diet/healthy eating.  My starting weight was 191.17.  I weigh at night, and tonight I was down -1.77 pounds.  I will put up pictures of how I really look now, as soon as I can figure out how to do it.  I need it on the left of the screen, with my weights below the pictures.  Maybe I'll muddle along and find out how to do it.  Maybe I'll find a nice blogger who will help me on some of the blog design that has me scratching my head.  I will make Sunday my weigh-in day.

My new Bodybugg came today.  I am so glad to be able to go back to using it and not having to guess what my deficit calories are.  I had forgotten how easy it is to record what I eat.

I'm still not sleeping at night after going off Ambien CR a week ago.  But I feel better.  One of my goals is to get off all meds.  All I have left that I'm taking are two high blood pressure drugs and Prevacid that is OTC.   My doctor prescribed me 4 addditional prescriptions that I'm not taking because all of them gave me scary side-effects.  One of my biggest problems has been the drugs that doctors have put me on.  They are all poison for me.   He took me off Xanax in March.  I went into shock 2 weeks later and was in the ER and then the hospital for a week.  I was on Clonazepam in the hospital and since March.  All of my doctors are new since we moved to the Ft. Worth/Dallas area.  And they don't have a clue.  I have taken Xanax for years for muscle spasms and migraines.  I googled Clonazepam and wasn't too happy to see that it didn't seem to match my needs.  The curse of my existence is the medicine that doctors prescribe.  I think I'm repeating myself!   I want to be so healthy that I take NO drugs.

 Last week I noticed that I was itching all over my body.  Last night it was dreadful and kept me awake all night.  My ankles were swollen badly and still are.  I had a rash on my lower legs and they felt feverish.  I'm sure these are side-effects of the drug.  Almost all drugs cause me such bad side-effects that I can't take them.  My doctor said to discontinue the Clonazepam.  I was afraid it would be like Xanax and I would have to decrease gradually.  I'm so thankful that I've been able to discontinue with no apparent problem.  I expect to be feeling much better very soon.

Have to start healthy eating NOW!

I can wait no longer.  I must start with healthy eating and no more than 1200 calories tomorrow.  After years of losing and gaining I'm feeling so inadequate to know how to eat.  And that is so silly.  I have been reading and trying to learn about nutrition for decades.   It must be the depression of knowing that I have to plow the same ole ground again.  I read one of my favorite bloggers tonight who says to start now...not to wait until tomorrow or Monday.  For one thing, I am so bloated that I am miserable.  This is something new for me.

 I wanted to wait to start until my new Bodybugg arrives.  I used one for over a year and lost weight more easily than I've ever done.  For the first time I learned why I "couldn't lose weight."  I simply didn't move enough, and I didn't have a deficit of calories.  My old bugg is not compatible with my 64-bit computer, so I finally bit the bullet and ordered the latest version.  When I used it 2 years ago, I ate a lot of fruits and veggies and good foods, but I was also able to eat what I liked and let the bugg compute my calorie intake and calories burned.  Well, I will try to sort it out tomorrow.

 I was awake all night last night, so I tried to figure out how to start a blog.  I haven't slept since Monday night.  I've taken Ambien CR for several years, and I have that strange side-effect that causes me to get up during the night like I'm sleep walking and binge eat.  Sometimes when I awaken in the morning I am shocked to see the remains of the cookies and candy that I've eaten.  Although I always try to avoid sugar when I'm in my right mind, my lean husband keeps lots of sweets.  He now locks the ice cream in a plastic tool box, before it goes in the freezer.  And he is supposed to keep everything else locked in a duffle, but he sometimes thinks he'll just hide it.  HA!  I always find it.  I haven't binged since last Monday night, but I haven't slept either.

A swimsuit that takes off 10 pounds?

Mercy. I looked at an Oprah magazine cover and there’s an article, “Want a swimsuit that takes off 10 pounds?” No, ma’m. I want a suit that takes off 60 pounds. Go away. I’ll think about swimsuits next summer…please, God!