Martha Thurston
I’ve thought about change for the last two months. Change in my life, my lifestyle, my health, and my mental health. Change is something I need. I also need a place to hold myself accountable to everything.
I’m going to preface this by saying that I am not a doctor. This also is not my first time at changing my life. I’ve done this before with great success, but I was also in my late 30s and early 40s. I’ll probably touch base on why things went awry. I mean, who loses 100+ pounds and then decides to revert back to old habits? Me. I did that.
The starting point
I am not happy about where I am in life right now. I’m super-stressed. I’m usually depressed. I struggle physically. My health is in serious decline.
Let’s give a run down, shall we?
Height: 5′ 9″
Weight: 262.8 lbs.
Diagnoses: High blood pressure, diabetes, hypothyroidism, dystonia brought on by stress, depression, anxiety, PTSD, and ADHD.
My weight has been steadily dropping for the last two years, but it isn’t due to lifestyle changes. Most of that is due to the fact that my blood sugar has been severely out of control and my stress levels cause me to, at times, vomit. It isn’t a good situation.
The picture above makes me hate the dress that I wanted to make for myself so bad. I loved the pattern, the fabric, but I had to alter the pattern so much to fit over my breasts and my stomach, that it just didn’t look the same when I finished. I even had to cut off the bottom of the pattern and change it so that I could make it work, because I was too big.
It’s time. It’s time to change.
What I know
When I lost weight the first time, it sort of started off innocently. I was sick and when I started back eating, I didn’t have much of an appetite, but I realized quickly that I didn’t require as much food as I thought I did. I was able to get by with one sandwich and not my normal two. I made my portions smaller.
When I took a Biology class, one of the research papers that I wrote was on why diets didn’t work. Diets, unless you plan to eat like that your entire life, don’t work. Once you stop with the diet, your body will resume a state of homeostasis. Meaning, it will balance back out. It will resume its natural state. It’s why dieters plateau. Your body is trying to find that balanced state. It will even begin storing fat if it thinks that you are going through a period of starvation (eating less food). If you are fasting, it will store fat from your food when you do eat. Our bodies are designed to maintain themselves.
What I learned in that college Biology class made a huge difference for me. I realized that it wasn’t about dieting. It was about the quality of the food you were consuming. You put good things in and you get good out.
I started reading labels. The more natural the food, the less ingredients. Reading labels made me realize that when things were light or fat free, they had added sugar. It was better to have the full fat version in smaller amounts than to switch to the fat free or light.
When I lived with my father, I changed his diet. He complained to his doctor that I was trying to kill him by feeding him his favorite food and REAL butter. (I don’t buy or use margarine or anything else, just butter) His doctor looked at his labs and told me to keep it up. It was the healthiest he had been in some time. All that time he was eating on his own, he was eating frozen “healthy” meals and his blood work was horrible!
Why change and why now?
When I lost all of that weight, I felt so much better about myself, but when I allowed my depression to take over, I gave up healthy habits of eating right and exercise because I really wanted to disappear.
Now, due to my health, I’m close to disappearing all together, and I’m not ready for that. I want to be able to have the energy to keep up with my grandchildren. I want to be able to travel and see the world. I need to be around to do all of these things.
My goal is to start today. I need my blood sugar under control. It’s been as high as 600 in the last few weeks and that is not good for my heart or anything else.
My first goal is to walk at least twice a week. I need to change my diet, too, but I know that without exercise, I’m not going to make it. I need the exercise to help me regulate my mental health. That’s the first change. It’s the biggest change I need to make.
First weight loss goal is at least 2 pounds.
