Trust Your Gut: Tish’s Story; Part 13

Trust Your Gut: Tish’s Story; Part 13

by | May 17, 2017 | Trust Your Gut

 

Trust Your Gut is a series of stories about real people with weight issues, and complications arising from those issues.  It will explain what the person is facing, what their options are, what they have decided to do to take action, and why they chose the path they are on.  Each person’s story will be based on truth, so it won’t all be happy, but it will be real.  The goal of this series is to get people talking about options that are available for people who have weight issues, on either end of the scale.  If you would like to contribute to this series, there is a contact form linked on my Home page for this blog.  I know there are people out there that want to help people like them; as I do.

 

The names here may or may not reflect the person’s real name.  If someone wants to remain unknown, we will choose a different name for that person’s story.  The goal is to help people, and anonymity is a valid personal choice for contributors.  I will use a person’s name only if they give permission to do so.

This week I am pleased to share another of my own stories.

Here is  Trust Your Gut: Tish’s Story; Part 13

I am retaining water.  The scale is climbing.  I am still fighting a sinus infection and on antibiotics.  I am not scared to eat this week (I see the results of that on the scale) because my insulin and my body have started working together again.  That being said, I still do not feel well.  I am getting my sugars back under control, which is a good sign.  I am still experiencing sinus pain and pressure, my face is still puffy, and the headache is still bouncing around with an aura or two just to keep things interesting.

Where am I headed with my story this week?  Back to the doctor.  My sugars were slipping out of control for a while now, and I was avoiding a trip to the doctor because I thought I was doing something wrong.  I was not eating the healthiest choices and was blaming myself for the sugars being high.

People talk about that little voice in your head.  The negative one.  The one that whispers so quietly you aren’t even really sure if it is in there, but it is.  It’s the one that says my sugars are high because I am failing at my diet and the doctor isn’t going to want to help me anymore because I am not doing my part to take care of myself.  It is whispering that it is OK to try that ice cream because it is a new flavour and once you try it, you won’t wonder about it anymore.  Don’t get me wrong, treats are OK, but they aren’t meant to be an everyday thing in the life of a person with type 2 diabetes.  If I didn’t give in a little once in a while, I would give up and stop caring altogether, and that is not the path I want to walk on.

Another little voice is nagging in the back of my head, telling me that there might be something REALLY wrong.  Like when my knee was infected and my life had to go on pause in order to fight that infection and get better.  My knee still hurts, a little, from time to time.  It is not a muscle pain from any exercise related injury.  It still feels like jello sometimes.  You want to know the scariest part about that whole experience?  They still don’t know why or how it became infected in the first place.

I did what the doctors said.  I stayed as still as possible.  I got better.  I wore bandages for two months on my calves to reduce the fluid in them so I could be fitted for compression stockings.  They work really well because I force myself to exercise.  I have a job where I need to sit for most of my day.  I listen to music in my down time, and I dance in my chair.  I have a stool at my desk to elevate my feet to keep the fluids from pooling in my calves.  I put up my feet and bounce in my chair as much as I can.  Sitting still in a chair all day is not good for anyone.  So I move around to keep the blood pumping, and the music does keep me in a decent mood at work.

I have missed Zumba a lot the last few weeks.  With a migraine, I didn’t go.  With the sinus infection, I didn’t go.  I have decided that I need to revisit the doctor I saw last week.  I am on day 8 of the antibiotics.  Day 10 is on a Friday.  The doctor is only at the clinic Monday to Friday.  Saturday is not a day I want to spend waiting to see a doctor.      I am not getting better fast enough.  I need more help.

When you have issues with weight, it is easier to live in denial about the state of your health than to go to the doctor about it.  It is a vicious cycle.  Eat sleep avoid living and just exist.  If you are morbidly obese like I am (I am fighting for the day I can stop having to use that description for my weight) then it is just that.  It is so much easier to not care and eat whatever you want and be miserable on the inside, faking the happy person you appear to be on the outside.

Because it is all a huge cover up.  Acting.  Pretending everything is OK.  It’s not.  Anybody that has issues with their weight like I do is not happy.  Not truly.  And if you are listening to that little voice and believing it when it says that the junk food will make you happy, you are letting that little voice in your head lie to you.  And you are falling for it every time you listen.

If you are like me, there are discussions that happen with more than one voice in your head at the same time. (That will be a good thing when I am hearing the characters from my book  talk in my head when I write).  I spend more time talking myself out of things than I do talking myself into them.  Because it is easier to do the thing that is not the best choice most of the time.  Easier does not mean better.  If you want something, you have to work for it.  It is easy to be fat.  It is hard work to be healthy.

And then the littlest voice of all whispers that I will still need surgery when I lose the weight because I will have flaps of skin left hanging around.  It is a fight I have been having inside of my head for years.  That one little voice has been working against my wishes to be a healthier person.  It is so quiet, and then it sneaks in and gets a little pushier and louder and then I realize I went off plan again.  I tell myself that I won’t feel guilty about it, but I have layers and layers of guilt protecting my body from the healthier person that I could be.

I have also had a former doctor treat me like a hypochondriac.  I stopped wanting to go to the doctor because he wasn’t listening to me, or taking anything I was telling him seriously.  When he moved away I was lucky that my next doctor was one of the good ones.  He is an advocate for people that try to improve their health, and he was supporting me in my efforts to become a healthier person.

Last month a letter came in the mail.  My current doctor is moving away too.  I am afraid that the next doctor will be another bad one.  So scared that I have been avoiding making an appointment to go, and avoiding my regular blood work as I know the numbers are not going to be good.  Not at all.  I am secretly terrified of what is going to happen when I get another doctor.  That is not how I want to live my life.

So, I am going to the clinic in the morning before work tomorrow.  Not where my new doctor will be, but to the one in the mall where I work.  He diagnosed the sinus infection, and he saw me a little more than a week ago.  I need to feel like trying again.  So I am going to ask for more help.  Because what I am doing now isn’t working, and it is time to try something different.  I want to be better.  I want to get back to living my life, not just merely surviving it.  It is hard to go back to the doctor because I am scared that I will be told to give the antibiotics more time.  Or that he will prescribe the same ones for a longer time.  That is a part of the reason the other doctor thought I was a hypochondriac.  He thought everything that was wrong with me was because of my weight.  He made me doubt myself, and that is why I am having such a hard time with all of this.

My gut tells me that the antibiotics aren’t working.  Tomorrow I will let the doctor know what I think, and I hope that he will help me find another way to feel better.  I hope that a week from now I am back to prep cooking, and Zumba, and feeling like trying to be that healthier person I want to become, again.

Trust Your Gut.

Trust Your Gut: Tish’s Story; Part 13

Trust Your Gut: Tish’s Story; Part 12

by | May 11, 2017 | Trust Your Gut

 

Trust Your Gut is a series of stories about real people with weight issues, and complications arising from those issues.  It will explain what the person is facing, what their options are, what they have decided to do to take action, and why they chose the path they are on.  Each person’s story will be based on truth, so it won’t all be happy, but it will be real.  The goal of this series is to get people talking about options that are available for people who have weight issues, on either end of the scale.  If you would like to contribute to this series, there is a contact form linked on my Homepage for this blog.  I know there are people out there that want to help people like them; as I do.

 

The names here may or may not reflect the person’s real name.  If someone wants to remain unknown, we will choose a different name for that person’s story.  The goal is to help people, and anonymity is a valid personal choice for contributors.  I will use a person’s name only if they give permission to do so.

This week I am pleased to share another of my own stories.

Here is  Trust Your Gut: Tish’s Story; Part 12

Sometimes I am scared to eat.  I know;  a morbidly obese person is not expected to write those words.  I am so overweight that it could kill me, and I certainly didn’t end up weighing this much by not eating, that is for sure.  But there is this thing I have called type 2 diabetes.

Let’s get it straight.  I am a person that has type 2 diabetes.  The same way I am a person that has thyroid disease.  The same way I am morbidly obese.  The same way I have allergies.  All of these descriptive phrases contribute to different parts of me, but they do not define me.  I think that it is the time that we all take a look at that and really think about it.  Because saying that someone is a diabetic is almost the same as saying they are not a person, because of how you say it.  I am a person that has diabetes.  I am a woman that has blue eyes.  The colour of my eyes does not define me, but it is a part of many things that contribute to me, the person as a whole.  In a world where people are way too quick to label people and judge them, I think it is time to stop doing this.  The world is changing all the time, and people are trying to be more politically correct.  If we all think of each other as people that have many adjectives to describe them, it is a good place to start.  We all have our good qualities and we all have our issues.  Mine are not the same as yours, but we all have issues and good qualities.  That is the common ground we all have together.

Back to being scared to eat.  I am learning how to treat blood sugar lows.  I have learned to drink a juice box, and have a sucker or a candy, and wait.  I then check my sugars again.  If they are responding to the treatment, I stop panicking and move on with my day.  If they don’t, I may go overboard and eat too much candy to get my sugars up, and then I have to figure out what to do to bring them down again.  If I overreact and they are high, it means I am not panicking about them being too low anymore, but that means they are too high.  This is one scenario similar to what I am writing about, except there is another time when I am really scared to eat.  When my blood sugars are high, and I don’t know why.

I am starting to learn what I should eat to bring my blood sugars down.  It is not an easy thing to figure out.  I take insulin, and if you take too much, it is possible to die from an overdose.  I am very scared that this could happen to me.  So I am careful if I have to take more insulin than a regular dose when my sugars are higher than normal.  But how much is too much?  Some days I don’t even know how much I should take.  On those days I either play it safe by not taking too much which is usually not enough,  or I check my sugars every couple of hours to make sure I am not dropping if I take that larger than normal dose.

If my sugars are high and I am not able to get them to a normal level with insulin, that is uncharted territory.  I am fighting with them a lot this week.  I am worried that there is a reason behind them being so high, and for why it seems so hard to get them back under control.  It can be a sign that something else is going on in my body like it is fighting an infection. I will be honest here, I have never seen them as high as they were this past Sunday night.  I took insulin.  Got up the next morning, and they were down, but still high.  I took 2 doses of insulin that were quite high when I added them together, because of how close the doses were taken.  Only after the second dose did I see a change, and it wasn’t drastic, and I didn’t crash with a blood sugar low.  I went to Zumba Monday night, and they were almost within normal range.  I have not had a spike in high blood sugar like that today, but I am STILL fighting to get them under control and keep them within normal range. (I am writing this on Tuesday evening).

When this is happening, I am scared to eat.  I am scared that anything I put into my mouth will cause my sugars to go even higher.  It is not a weight thing.  I am worried that my blood sugars will just keep climbing and I won’t be able to get them back under control.  I know I need to eat.  I know that if I make healthy choices, things will have to change, it is just a matter of time.  But delaying that meal can be detrimental to what could happen.

Let’s say I just don’t eat.  My sugars might spike as my body tries to keep sugar in my bloodstream without the addition of food.  Eventually, the sugars will drop.  I then become a little desperate, hangry, and indecisive.  That combination will eventually lead to my blood sugars dropping.  This is not productive and does lead to a panic when I realize that my sugars are starting to drop.  It is at that time that I reach for an easy meal or snack that may not be the healthiest thing for me to eat, and the roller coaster has fuel to continue.

What I have learned is that if I wake up with a pattern of high blood sugars, I do need to increase my long-acting insulin dose.  A little at a time, until I have normal fasting blood sugars in the morning.  Then I can ease it off.  Protein is supposed to help with this also, and I am trying to find a bedtime snack that does more good than harm.  Throughout the day I have to test frequently, to help sort out what is causing the blood sugars to be high and not normal.  This may cause me to skip a snack because of the level I see when I test.  It also may cause me to delay eating because I am scared that it is only going to make things worse.

And then it happens.  The insulin starts working again, and I am not having blood sugar highs anymore because I am now fighting blood sugar lows.  This is a byproduct of getting them back under control.  When my body decides to accept the insulin, it does it suddenly, and I am scrambling again to get my sugars within normal levels.  If I am not monitoring them constantly during this time, I risk them staying too high if I am not taking enough insulin, or having to lower my doses because my body is responding and I am taking too much insulin.  It is difficult at times to try and outsmart this diabetes that I have, and that is why I am scared to eat sometimes.

Trust Your Gut: Tish’s Story; Part 13

Trust Your Gut: Tish’s Story

by | Feb 2, 2017 | Trust Your Gut

 

Trust Your Gut is a series of stories about real people with weight issues, and complications arising from those issues.  It will explain what the person is facing, what their options are, what they have decided to do to take action, and why they chose the path they are on.  Each person’s story will be based on truth, so it won’t all be happy, but it will be real.  The goal of this series is to get people talking about options that are available for people that have weight issues, on either end of the scale.  If you would like to contribute to this series, there is a contact form linked on my Home page for this blog.  I know there are people out there that want to help people like them, as I do.

The names here may or may not reflect the person’s real name.  If someone wants to remain unknown, we will choose a different name for that person’s story.  The goal is to help people, and anonymity is a valid personal choice for contributors.  I will use a person’s name only if they give permission to do so.

Here is the first of many Trust Your Gut stories, I am starting with my own, Tish’s Story.

I have always struggled with my weight.  My issues began as a child.  I have always been overweight.  Growing up, dessert was used as a reward for eating all my supper.  I used to gobble all of my supper as fast as I could and be the first one done so I could have my dessert.  When I was in grade eleven,  my mom and I went through weight watchers together.  I was at goal weight when I graduated from high school and went to university.  Then I was in charge of what happened.  I got sick, in my first year.  I fought mononucleosis and tonsillitis at the same time.  While I was sick, my throat was very sore.  When I was able to be at class, I dozed while taking notes.  Doctors wanted me to eat, they were concerned that my sore throat would prevent me from eating and that the illnesses could cause an unhealthy weight loss.  I was told to eat whatever I wanted, as long as I was eating.

I took that literally and ate whatever I wanted during my university years.  When I finally graduated, it was six years later.  Cafeteria food didn’t always win with the healthier choices.  It was hard to choose salad over french fries.  When I moved off campus and into my own apartment, I had more control over what I was eating, and a budget to deal with.  Eating healthy is not easy to do when you are on a budget.  I still struggle with that now, but it is easier with a larger budget for groceries.  At that time, it was easier to have fast food and the less healthy options for groceries, because they would be more affordable.

As my weight ballooned more and more out of control, I developed other health issues.  I became a Type 2 Diabetic.  I was also diagnosed with thyroid disease.  I take one pill a day for this, and I will have to forever.  I am OK with that.  Then I tested positive for sleep apnea.  I have not started any medical treatment for this condition. These health issues are a normal combination for someone who is considered on the BMI scale to be morbidly obese.

The first time I heard that term, it had shock value.  I didn’t know how to react.  A term like that is really hard to apply to yourself.  Being so overweight that you could die from it.  It’s a lot to absorb when you don’t feel like it applies to you.  I know I am overweight, don’t get me wrong.  But there is some denial there too.  Until the scale hits a certain number.

For me, and this is hard for me to put out there, I weighed more than 300 lbs.  There, I wrote it.  It is just a number, but it is a really significant one.  I remember sharing a different, lower weight with a friend in university, who replied, “No, you can’t weigh that much.  You don’t look like you weigh that at all.  You carry it well.”  This added to my denial of my weight problems.  I didn’t look like I weighed that much, so it was OK to keep going like I was.

Only it didn’t stop there.  I was close to 320 lbs at my highest weight.  At that point in my life, I made a decision, after finding an ad on facebook for Trim Healthy Mama (THM).  What I was doing wasn’t working, so it was time for me to make some changes.  That was my aha moment, as it is commonly called.  What I was doing was not working so I had to make a change. 

I have implemented several changes in my journey to becoming a healthier person.  I am following the  Trim Healthy Mama plan.  If you want to learn more, this is a link for your own research: https://trimhealthymama.com/

I am not on plan 100% of the time, but I have adapted it in my life over the last year.  I have successfully lost 15-20 pounds since I started making small changes.  I am bouncing between the two, and on the verge of two-ville (299.99 lbs).  That is retaking my first small victory, to be under 300 lbs.  The next goal is 290.  Going by 10 lbs at a time is reasonable goal setting at this stage.  Too large of a goal will cause self-defeat because it is too long between accomplishments.  When I no longer have 20 lbs to lose, I will decrease the goals accordingly.  I have a lot of work ahead of me, and a long way to go.

Another change I have made was to become more active.  For a few years, I have been going to Zumba Classes twice a week.  I did extra walking also, my Zumba teacher has dogs, and there was a steady time that I was going to visit and help her walk the dogs.  She and her rescue dogs were rescuing me from being a couch potato.  🙂  In the spring I hope to adopt a rescue dog of my own, so I can start having a reason to walk every day.

I started noticing a trend from people I know, or people that are my friends through social media;  and even on tv, the new show This is Us.  Weight loss surgery is something that people are doing.  This is why I decided to start this blog series.  Weight loss surgery is not for me, and I have my reasons at this point for saying so.  I can still move, therefore if I put in the work, I can make changes to lose the weight.  I am not fooling myself.  I see what happens when I do work really hard, and I have had success with THM.  When I work hard I see results.  It is up to me.  So with that mindset, I am doing it.  For me and my health.

Being a type 2 diabetic is something I would not wish on anyone.  While I am on THM, I have noticed some trends in my blood sugars, the most significant one being I have sugar lows.  This is a new and scary side to being a diabetic.  It also means that there is hope that my body can start effectively producing and using its own insulin.  I have been on insulin for about ten years now.  I take 2 types, one short acting, and one long acting.  I went from 2 needles a day to 5.  This is what a person fears the most when they hear the words from a doctor, confirming that they are a diabetic.  That you have to take insulin. You have to take needles.  It is hard to adapt to this at first.  What do you tell people, when you are taking insulin?  Stabbing sounds violent.  It is what I said at first.  Then I decided it wasn’t the correct term, it was more like jabbing.  Then it clicked.  One morning I was trudging into the bathroom to take my insulin, and I blurted out to my roommate, ” I have to go Jabba the gut.”  It stuck, and he thought it was hilarious.  I have a fantastic sense of humour, and I do love a good pun.  It takes an unpleasant necessary action and makes it funny.

A good sense of humour is something I can be proud of.  It is a part of me that keeps me going.  Laughter is something I do enjoy sharing.  I take great pride in delivering a successful pun or joke.  Sometimes people don’t know that my joke was actually thought about before I tell it. 😉  Some people think I tell too many stories, and don’t want to wait for the punch line.  My sense of humour is a huge part of my coping mechanism, and I rely on it heavily, pun intended.  It is a great deflector, to take the focus off me and my health, and to laugh about something else instead.

It is no laughing matter.  Wearing size 24/26 clothing, and having to take 5 needles a day is no fun.  I have started my weight loss journey, and I am going to keep going.  I owe it to myself.  No matter what your weight issues are, they are yours.  You have to decide that your health is worth the effort.  You are worth it.  Whether your issue is being overweight, like myself, or if you are on the other end of the scale, and underweight, you are worth more than what the number is on the scale.

I wanted to start this series to try and help people like me.  I have chosen my path, and I intend to keep on it.  It won’t be straight and narrow, I am a curvy woman who likes to choose the path less travelled; when I am not forging a new path on my own.  I am hoping that by sharing my story, and other people’s stories, that this series will make people with weight issues start thinking and talking about it.  It is an issue for a lot of people, and by sharing our stories and information, we can help someone out there that needs to make some changes but doesn’t know where to start, or what options are out there.  I intend to write more Trust Your Gut stories, with help from other people, so that someone out there can have their aha moment, and start making changes towards their own healthier lifestyle.