I have been overweight for almost as long as I can remember. I wasn’t an obese child but I wasn’t as tiny as the rest of the other children out there on the playground. When I started high school my doctor told me I had to lose 50 lbs. I had no idea how I was going to do that since I was really active, I never stayed home I was always on my way somewhere by foot and in the summers I was on my bike. He’s sage advice – eat less. I weighed 175 lbs and everyone thought I was fat. It was horrible. As the years went by I put on more and more weight, though little had changed with my eating habits.
Looking back I’d kill to weigh 175 again.
In 2006, I moved to Munich to work on my doctoral thesis. When I arrived I was tired – dead tired. It was like I was a walking zombie. I don’t think I had ever been that tired in my whole life. A few weeks in I found out that my roommate had mono. So I decided that I should go to the doctor to have some blood tests done. The very wonderful doctor that I had there said my symptoms didn’t sound like mono but he’d include it on a blood panel along with testing my thyroid function. My tests came back the next day and he called me back into the office to do an ultrasound on my thyroid gland. The results were shocking – almost 75% of my thyroid gland was not functioning. He took some more blood to run some tests to see which type of thyroid disease I had. The end result was I have Hashimoto’s disease. The doctor put me on Synthroid and I started to feel better immediately.
Being the inquisitive person that I am I asked the doctor what causes Hashimoto’s disease and he told me it was autoimmune - that the cells in my body that regulate my immune response were attacking my thyroid gland. He said that judging from my test results how much of my thyroid gland was damaged that I have had this problem for years and was surprised that no one had picked up on this sooner. I told him that I had asked for the tests before because I was overweight and tired and the nice doctors I had in Canada told me the problems with losing weight were because I eat too much and needed to exercise more. He assured me that with a regular diet and moderate exercise that I should start to see some weight come off.
Now I am not a sit down and take it as it comes kind of girl. If anything I am uber pro-active. If I don’t like something, I change it. If I am not happy with an answer, I look to see if there are other explanations. So I started to poke around the internet and see if there were any special diet programs out there or people with underactive thyroids and to learn more about my type of thyroid disease. I didn’t find too much more than general information on the condition. So I kept on doing what I had always done – watched what I ate and went for regular walks and bike rides. The result – my weight continued to go up.
In July of 2007 my stress level reached an all-time high. My thesis was crap – I had spent a year working on a new experimental set up and we couldn’t get it working properly. While doing a test run with my colleagues I started to feel unwell. We all assumed it was just because I was tired and anxious about getting the set up to work. So I left the lab and headed to my boyfriend’s (now husband’s) work. When I got there he knew something was not right with me. I was struggling to breath, I had a tingling sensation down my left arm and pains in my chest. Vijay rushed me to hospital. I spend 3 days there. They ran every test they could think of related to my heart – EKG, EEG, ultrasound, stress tests, etc. They didn’t think they could make me to the stress test because I was so obese – I think my self-esteem also hit a low that day. Too fat to take the test on a treadmill. The doctor was wonderful and he told the nurses they were full of it, and so he arranged for me to do the test on a recumbent bicycle hooked up to heart monitors. As I rode along they continued to increase the levels and I wasn’t even close to breaking a sweat and showed no signs of having a heart problem. They called the doctor in and I kept on riding and pushing my tired legs on and on while he continued to increase the resistance on the bike. “Are you sure you have no chest pain?” “Now?” “Well how about now?” Continuing to increase the resistance with each question. Finally, after what seemed like forever he stopped. I had taken the bike as far as it would go. He said now stand up. So I did and he started to laugh, one of those full belly laughs, and said that the last person he pushed that hard was the captain of the Women’s Ski team for Germany and when she stood up she passed out. No wonder he was laughing, my heart and oxygen uptake were stellar for a woman of 26 who was pushing 300 lbs. When he came in to talk to me before I was released to go home he said that I would never die of a heart attack as proven by my stress but I was at high risk for diabetes due to my weight.
A month later I ended up back in the hospital with the same symptoms. This time they knew it wasn’t my heart. The ER doctors did and EKG and an ultrasound, confirming again that it wasn’t my heart but said I had fatty deposits in my liver and recommended that I see a doctor he knew that specialized in helping obese patients lose weight. Before being released the most horrible doctor I have ever seen comes in pushes on my stomach, rants about my weight. “You know what is the problem with all you Americans – you are all fat. Fat, you just can’t stop putting the food into your face. And you keep on getting fatter and fatter. It’s acid reflux from being fat – lose some weight.” My response to him was rather colourful and tart leaving his interns laughing. He sent one of the interns back with a prescription to help with the reflux.
Something about the fat comment just stuck and I wanted to change things badly. I went to my family doctor on the recommendation of one of the doctors from my less than positive hospital visit and was set up with an obesity specialist who recommended the Volumetrics Diet plan. This plan was a low energy density diet. I found it extremely easy to follow and with regular gym visits I had lost 65 lbs in 6 months. The new slimmer me was happier and was in love with the new body.
I managed to keep all the weight off for a number of years. Then I moved back to Canada. The lifestyle here is really different. There were no bike rides to work every day and no walking to the grocery store. Really there was little walking at all. Still I managed to keep my weight stable but it was talking a lot of work to do so. I had changed my thyroid medication upon returning home to Canada because we didn’t have the same drugs here. I didn’t see the correlation at the time but combined with less exercise on a daily basis it made a huge difference in keeping the weight off.
Then one day after several moves, having a baby, finally getting my husband into the country and losing my job days after he arrived I cracked. Weight started creeping back on. My stress level was 1100% and I had gained about 25 lbs back. Eeeek! I decided to start seeing a Naturopath. We got my diet back on track I started exercising and took Rhodiola to help with my adrenal gland fatigue. However, the weight was just sticking to me. She recommended I get my thyroid levels rechecked. So I did and they were way off. I was so overactive. Yep you read that right overactive. My TSH level was extremely low. So I stopped taking Rhodiola and they changed my meds by 25mcg. Guess what happened??? I gained 15 lbs in a month and then when they increase my dose slightly and I still gained weight but at a slower rate. By the end of 2014 I had gained ever single pound I had lost while living in Germany back.
And that’s where I am today back at my heaviest with the added twist of having a bad back. That excess weight it still here. I have it. I have tried 4 diets. I can stick to them for a few weeks and maybe lose a pounds or two but not much. All my husband ends up with is a cranky wife. Now I have to be really honest - I don’t eat terribly. I am gluten intolerant, I have a tonne of food sensitivities that keep me away from processed foods and I am allergic to peanuts and hazelnuts. I have kept my eating in check since I left Germany. I never wanted to gain this much weight. I wanted to actually get smaller but I couldn’t get any more off after I came back to Canada. Lately, I have given up on the whole diet thing and just have been eating. Not anything crazy and not binging cause it is not healthy but I tell you if I eat bad I automatically gain more weight. It only goes one way…on!
So today I am going to try this new alternate day fasting method. Happened across an article yesterday and I thought why the hell not. It has to be better than getting fatter. It is sure as hell better than gastric bypass or that new Swedish Aspire Assist. The later grosses me out so much.
So here we go…..
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