I wasn’t sure if it was too late into my weight loss ‘journey’ to start a blog. After all, people do tend to do these things from the beginning and I am doing it halfway through my rather long journey. However, I decided that it is better late than never and that includes the blog.
I can’t really say when my start date was because I didn’t sit down and decide it was going to be the day I started to lose weight. For similar reasons I can’t say for sure my actual starting weight. I sort of played with losing weight for years. I would go on whatever diet (often weight watchers) and lose pretty much the same 15 pounds and then I just couldn’t get any lower than that. Then it would all come back on and bring a pound or more with it. I have known for a number of years that I have PCOS (polycystic ovaries) and I guess I was using that as my reason (excuse) to accept that I was getting stuck at the same weight loss each time.
Then on November 24,2004 my world totally and very suddenly changed. My husband, who I had been married to for 8 years and two days shy of 1 month, had a heart attack and died. He had been left disabled due to an accident some years before and those injuries contributed but he was a very big man that didn’t really watch his diet and that no doubt was the real contribution that horrid night.
For the year or so after that I played around with weight loss a couple times again. I even joined a gym which for me was a massive step because just the idea filled me with horrible flashbacks to gym class. Still, I kept hitting that same place. Then one day after a night of really hating my lack of willpower and browsing pages about weight loss surgery I decided to swallow my pride and go to my doctor and ask for help.
She was very helpful and could see that I had lost some weight on my own and asked me if I would be comfortable trying Xenical. Now, of course I had read about Xenical and I was filled with visions of spending the rest of my life on the loo. Plus, in my life I have spent so much time in the BBW community and weight loss medications were always such a taboo topic not the least because so many people in the community had tried then and died. Still, what I also knew was it was one of the few around that didn’t mess with your brain but only your guts.
In desperation I decided I would really try with Xenical. I soon found out that if I stuck to the rules (less than 40 grams of fat a day) there were no loo related problems at all and the weight started to slowly move down. It took a long time but finally I had broken that barrier I had never been bellow but it was still moving slowly. Still, slow was better than nothing.
Then my real breakthrough happened about a year into taking Xenical and losing very slowly. It dawned on me that even though the materials I was given when I started taking Xenical set fat gram limits it didn’t mention calories at all. Calories had always been evil and calorie counting to be avoided at all cost in my past. At this stage though I was already writing down every thing I ate and counting fat grams. So, decided to count calories too. As soon as I started doing that the weight began to move much faster.
I don’t know why it took me so long but after finally taking calories into consideration I realised that even though I could have barely any fat in my daily diary I could still get a ton of calories. For example, pasta has very little fat but a lot of calories. So, I started eating to be low calorie and low fat and really if I watched the calories the fat fell in place. I like big meals and so I wanted to get the most food I could for as little calories. This lead to me ditching most of the meat from my diet and eating largely vegetarian meals. I am not at all a vegetarian but by keeping meat to a few times a week my weight and my lifestyle finally changed.
I am nervous because in July I will have been on Xenical for two years and in the UK you can only be on it two years and then you are required to stop. I am nervous about going it alone but the nurse that I see to get weighed every month pointed out that with how little fat I am eating and how closely I am counting my calories that Xenical has probably had little to do with my weight loss. In other words, it was training wheels that let me find the way to do it myself.
Still, I am nervous that maybe it was the need to go get weighed by the nurse every month that has kept me so strict with myself.
I have lost nearly 75 pounds but I have a very long way to go and it is going to be slow. That is why I am deciding to start this now so that maybe I won’t be going it as alone as I think I will be. Perhaps that will keep me on track and allow me to prove to myself that it isn’t the Xenical that has achieved this but it has been me and it will be continued.
I am getting married again on July 19th. The same week I stop taking Xenical so I want the start of this new life to be strong and confident.
Anyway, hello and I promise my normal posts will be a lot shorter..lol
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