Okay, so I've been having a frustrating time with my weight loss journey for the past several months. I hit a plateau around November, and then my weight shot back up ten pounds in January, even though I was still eating well and exercising. And I haven't been able to get my weight to budge since. Oh sure, I can go down a pound or two, but it bounces right back up, no matter what I do.
I've tried varying my diet and exercise routines. I've tried more intensive workouts with higher resistance. I've tried keeping a food journal and downing so much water I nearly made myself sick. It's not like I can cut my calories back any further. I'm already down to the 1200 calorie lowest possible mark, and yes, I've tried bumping up my caloric intake for a day every four or five days, so my body doesn't slow my metabolism to a crawl.
Nothing worked, so I brought it up with my doctor yesterday.
Turns out there's a strong chance it's a side effect of the medicine I've been put on to prevent migraines. There's no way to know for sure until my blood work comes back, though.
Looking back it does make since. I was put on the medication at the start of November. One tablet every day to prevent them since I was getting one every single week, that lasted three to five days at a time. And then another medication on top of that to squash any migraines that broke through anyway before they put me down for the count for a few days. They worked like magic for a month or so, but then I started getting a breakthrough migraine every couple of weeks. Still a great improvement, but they tended to be worse than the ones I'd had before if shorter lived. (Imagine not being able to read because trying to focus enough to make sense of the letters felt like someone trying to gouge your eyes out.) So, they doubled my dosage. That was in January.
Thankfully I've only had one full blown migraine since then. It usually doesn't get any worse than a painful aura these days.
It's deeply discouraging though. I mean, what am I supposed to do? The doctor yesterday was telling me to focus on fitness and forget about the number on the scale or the size of my clothes. Like I'm not!
Am I more fit than I was a year ago? Yes! I know muscle weighs more than fat, but I also know I still have a lot of fat on me, and too much of it is detrimental to one's health. I know my fat percentage. It's down 9% from what it was two years ago, and I am incredibly grateful for that. However, it's still at least 5% above what's healthy, and nothing I've done in the past several months has been able to make the percentage drop any lower.
I do try not to think of it in terms of being smaller and that number on the scale, but it's hard when I'm so blasted uncomfortable in my own skin! I still remember how proud I was when I finally fit back into pants without elastic in the waist when we were school shopping before sixth grade. Maybe I was a little slow on the uptake, or maybe I was just too focused on other subjects of interest at the time, but even though I knew eating healthfully and exercising were important for staying healthy, I didn't figure out eating less and exercising more would make you smaller until sometime in junior high. (You better believe I started cutting my meals in half when my breeches got a little tight once I found out though!)
I well remember two or three years of being called fat and comments about how bad my clothes looked and having no clue what I was supposed to do about it. It's not like I ate a lot or sat around like a lump all the time anyway, even if I didn't know anything about dieting at the time. Looking back, I know I wasn't unfit or really even fat back then. It was an uneven growth spurt. My torso decided to grow to it's adult proportions before my height caught up. Does that mean I no longer feel compelled to cross my arms over my stomach every single time I sit down in a pathetically useless attempt to hide my stomach? No, I've felt it every time I've sat down since I was nine! I'll probably feel that compulsion until the day I die; thick or thin, it doesn't matter.
Maybe uneven growth spurts are genetic. My girls have the same growth pattern. Their weight will spike a few pounds, then a month or so later, they'll shoot up an inch or four. Sometimes it works the other way around. It makes finding clothes for them a pain, but I'm going to try my best to bite my tongue about any frustrations it may cause. So what if every few months, they have to wear their pants and skirts a little long, or I have to cinch in the waist for a few weeks if they get the height first now and again? Children can't help how they grow. Other children might not understand this, but I can. I can't control what anyone else says when I'm not around.
It might not be much, but all I can do is try to give my girls a healthy understanding of the roles food and exercise have in our lives and keep them from developing a hate/loathing relationship with their bodies the way I did. Prevention is so much easier than correction.
If anyone's figured it out, I'm all ears.
I've tried varying my diet and exercise routines. I've tried more intensive workouts with higher resistance. I've tried keeping a food journal and downing so much water I nearly made myself sick. It's not like I can cut my calories back any further. I'm already down to the 1200 calorie lowest possible mark, and yes, I've tried bumping up my caloric intake for a day every four or five days, so my body doesn't slow my metabolism to a crawl.
Nothing worked, so I brought it up with my doctor yesterday.
Turns out there's a strong chance it's a side effect of the medicine I've been put on to prevent migraines. There's no way to know for sure until my blood work comes back, though.
Looking back it does make since. I was put on the medication at the start of November. One tablet every day to prevent them since I was getting one every single week, that lasted three to five days at a time. And then another medication on top of that to squash any migraines that broke through anyway before they put me down for the count for a few days. They worked like magic for a month or so, but then I started getting a breakthrough migraine every couple of weeks. Still a great improvement, but they tended to be worse than the ones I'd had before if shorter lived. (Imagine not being able to read because trying to focus enough to make sense of the letters felt like someone trying to gouge your eyes out.) So, they doubled my dosage. That was in January.
Thankfully I've only had one full blown migraine since then. It usually doesn't get any worse than a painful aura these days.
It's deeply discouraging though. I mean, what am I supposed to do? The doctor yesterday was telling me to focus on fitness and forget about the number on the scale or the size of my clothes. Like I'm not!
Am I more fit than I was a year ago? Yes! I know muscle weighs more than fat, but I also know I still have a lot of fat on me, and too much of it is detrimental to one's health. I know my fat percentage. It's down 9% from what it was two years ago, and I am incredibly grateful for that. However, it's still at least 5% above what's healthy, and nothing I've done in the past several months has been able to make the percentage drop any lower.
I do try not to think of it in terms of being smaller and that number on the scale, but it's hard when I'm so blasted uncomfortable in my own skin! I still remember how proud I was when I finally fit back into pants without elastic in the waist when we were school shopping before sixth grade. Maybe I was a little slow on the uptake, or maybe I was just too focused on other subjects of interest at the time, but even though I knew eating healthfully and exercising were important for staying healthy, I didn't figure out eating less and exercising more would make you smaller until sometime in junior high. (You better believe I started cutting my meals in half when my breeches got a little tight once I found out though!)
I well remember two or three years of being called fat and comments about how bad my clothes looked and having no clue what I was supposed to do about it. It's not like I ate a lot or sat around like a lump all the time anyway, even if I didn't know anything about dieting at the time. Looking back, I know I wasn't unfit or really even fat back then. It was an uneven growth spurt. My torso decided to grow to it's adult proportions before my height caught up. Does that mean I no longer feel compelled to cross my arms over my stomach every single time I sit down in a pathetically useless attempt to hide my stomach? No, I've felt it every time I've sat down since I was nine! I'll probably feel that compulsion until the day I die; thick or thin, it doesn't matter.
Maybe uneven growth spurts are genetic. My girls have the same growth pattern. Their weight will spike a few pounds, then a month or so later, they'll shoot up an inch or four. Sometimes it works the other way around. It makes finding clothes for them a pain, but I'm going to try my best to bite my tongue about any frustrations it may cause. So what if every few months, they have to wear their pants and skirts a little long, or I have to cinch in the waist for a few weeks if they get the height first now and again? Children can't help how they grow. Other children might not understand this, but I can. I can't control what anyone else says when I'm not around.
It might not be much, but all I can do is try to give my girls a healthy understanding of the roles food and exercise have in our lives and keep them from developing a hate/loathing relationship with their bodies the way I did. Prevention is so much easier than correction.
If anyone's figured it out, I'm all ears.
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