Me and about a kazillion other people. But I’m most interested in my journey. I s’pose it’s also that my journey’s outcome is a wee bit more personal to me. I’m sort of invested here. /dry
One thing I want to discuss a little is hypothyroidism and its effect on weight loss. Oh don’t get me wrong — I can’t blame all this excess weight on a bad thyroid, but I sure can blame it for why this weight is sticking to me like white sticks to rice. Let me take you back in time a few years. WHEE! Time travel! Who doesn’t love time travel?!?
Anyway, I’d decided that I’d had just about enough of being a giant tub of lard, thank you very much. I’d also been diagnosed as having hypothyroidism, and that was supposed to be under control, so I was ready and rarin’ to go. My doctor prescribed Meridia (which is an excellent appetite suppressant), and I thought I was about to git’r’done.
I started using my treadmill faithfully, at least twice a day, sometimes three times a day. I was burning about 300 calories per session. It felt gooood. I just knew I was burning up pounds and pounds of that ugly ol’ fat. Especially since my food diary (in which I was so honest it hurt sometimes) said I was eating around 1200 calories per day. (Oh, Meridia. How I miss thee, and how I curse our insurance for not covering it without a note from God.)
6 weeks later, I’m scheduled for a checkup. For the first time in God alone knows how long, I was excited to hop up on that scale. I just knew I’d lost so much weight that the nurse might pass out from the numbers. So my clothes weren’t that much looser, but they were a little looser. And besides, I was probably filling them out with my new, fly muscles.
Eight pounds. In six weeks of busting my butt and eating next to nothing, I’d lost eight. stinkin’. pounds. My doctor and I did the math, and both of us were a wee bit perplexed since I should have lost something in the range of 15 pounds, given my diet and exercise. She did some blood work, and lo and behold, my thyroid still wasn’t operating at peak performance. I was told later that the fact that I lost anything at all, much less eight pounds, was a testament to how true my food and exercise diaries were.
Since then, I’ve assumed an attitude of apathy, but mostly that’s so I don’t disappoint myself by failing again. (I know, I know, eight pounds is eight pounds. But for real, it felt like failure.) I’m over that now. I’m so over it, in fact, that I managed to lose 2.5 pounds this week. (I know, I know — I wasn’t weighing again ’til next month, but I couldn’t resist seeing if I’d managed to lose some. Then I got scared that in the time it would take for me to go get my camera and get back on, I’d gain it back, so I don’t have a picture to share.)