Weight Loss Journey Update

Driving shot on my trip up north 

I’ve mentioned my numerous struggles with weight loss that started a little over a year ago before, but I haven’t updated that story very much considering nothing’s really happened—just 7 or so months of me teeter-tottering a one pound weight loss, a very self-deprecating journal entry, and more doctor’s visits with no help moving forward.

Then I gave up gluten a little over a month ago and things started changing.

The pain relief was pretty immediate. I’d become accustomed to an all over aching, slow post workout heal time, sore joints, etc. To have all that disappear was kind of jarring.

The constant nausea and bloating lessened about a week in, which—according to an old journal—started persistently back in 2007. I’ve been dealing with nausea for so long that I couldn’t remember what it was like to eat and not feel sick immediately afterwards. For the first two weeks, I was over eating simply because nausea had always been how I knew it was time to stop.

About a month in, I stepped on the scale. 5lbs down. I can’t describe the feeling at seeing those numbers. I became a bit obsessive with weighing myself then, afraid that maybe it was just a fluke in the scale.

But it kept dropping.

6lbs

7lbs

8lbs

It’s been two weeks now, and I’ve managed to maintain an 11lb weight loss.

I’ve decided to stop weighing myself now as to savor this successful feeling. I know it’s going to slow soon, and I don’t want to be disappointed.

But, I’m excited about working out again and actually seeing results.

I’m in a funny clothing place now. My fat pants are too big but my next size down are still too snug. No matter though. My closet could probably support a small clothing shop with its variations in sizing. I have pants in five different sizes floating around in there.

I do want to make it clear that this loss isn’t simply from giving up gluten. I’m not saying I have Celiac disease, because I haven’t been tested, but it has become abundantly clear post giving it up that something about gluten containing products was making me ill and affecting my metabolism.

Case in point, my heart palpitations are back. I haven’t had problems with those for a couple months when I adjusted to my higher thyroid medicine dosage. But a couple weeks after giving up gluten, they returned and I have a feeling my dosage may be too high now.

This gives me great hope my hypothyroidism might be from the gluten. Maybe I’ll be medicine free again soon!

Also, my period is back, which is probably the best thing about this process as the hubs and I are planning to start trying for kids in the coming October. I’ve spent the last couple of months worrying that I wasn’t going to be able to conceive since a working womb is kind of central to the process.

I will update a lot more on this now as I progress…now that I am progressing. I have a doctor appointment at the end of the month, so hopefully I’ll get the heart issues straightened out.

Camping and Temp Work Frustrations

How to describe my life right now: stressed, in a constant state of anticipation, vacillating between ‘Everything’s going to be okay’ and ‘Holy sh*t, what are we going to do?’

The hub’s work contract is up in two weeks and despite everyone’s assurance that something will get worked out, nothing seems to be even remotely decided except for the roundabout expiration date of his current contract. It glows on the calendar, mocking me.

It’s tense around here. I try to keep the support alive, but then I have to pay a bill or something on a car breaks and I am reminded of how much money we don’t have and how much worse that’s going get if this doesn’t pan out.

Not that we won’t get on our feet either way, but I’ve done the unemployment game before. That game sucks.

So when my parents offered to pay for us to go camping with them this weekend, we jumped on board. We may have stayed at a federal campground with no electricity, showers, or any signs of modern society—the outhouses were rsurprisingly clean—but it was the most relaxing weekend I’ve had in a very long time.

 The hubs and I decided that money, jobs, and future financial crises talks would be pinned on the board of things we’d worry about after we returned to the land of internet, electricity powered lights, and heated water.

I’m back now, but I’d rather not be.

On Monday the official 2 week mark drove in carrying truckloads of stress behind it. I spent two hours that night combing job boards, another hour trying to go through bills to see where we can trim more fat, and a couple more hours coming up with the statistics on how long we could live off our available credit.

Give me mosquito bite covered legs and dirt seasoned food over this uncertainty any day.

 Temporary work shouldn’t be a thing …

Short Story Love

 

My well loved short story collections. 

In honor of the start of Camp NaNoWrimo and my endeavor to write a short story anthology, I thought I’d point you toward some short stories available online that have left a mark on me as a reader/writer.

As an English graduate, short stories were my bread and butter during my academic days. In some ways, I learned to love short stories more than I do novels. All texts, whether 1,000 words or 100,000 words, require a level of bravery and talent to leave any kind of mark on the world, but I think a short story has a lot of work to do in a very limited space that gives them a certain appeal unobtainable by longer novels.

If a short story can elicit some kind of visceral emotion from me within their short pages, I hold them to a different level than I would a novel that did the same. There is no room for background, slow building, or space to grow a strong bond between reader and text in a short story. It’s all action, and if done right, powerful, lasting action.

—That’s not to say I don’t love full-length novels. I’m a reader of all—

I’ve fallen in love with many short tales, but these are my favorites:

Leaf by Niggle by J.R.R. Tolkien

            If you read any on this list, let it be this one. It has Christian undertones, some might say overtones, like most of Tolkien’s work, but it’s also simply a story about people, about appreciating your neighbor and looking at the world through their eyes. It’s also about an artist, a pastor, death, and a leaf.

The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas by Ursela K. Le Guin

This one had me in a moral quandary. If you’re a lover of Utopian/Distopian stories, give this short one a read and decide what you would do. It’s about a perfect society, what is responsible for that perfection, and what one would do in the face of that thing which makes it perfect. I’m writing in circles, just give it a read.

The Lottery by Shirley Jackson

            Another moral quandary story. This is about a town that holds a lottery once a year as a ritual to bring prosperity to the town. I won’t tell anymore, but it’s definitely worth a read.

The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

            This is about a sick woman who is locked away in a house in the country at the advise of her husband to help her get better. Strange things happen in her isolation and the ending is just creepy perfection. Read it.

Honorable Mentions:

Rappaccini’s Daughter by Nathaniel Hawthorne

The Gift of the Magi by O.Henry

The Pit and the Pendulum by Edgar Allan Poe
In the Penal Colony by Franz Kafka

Garage Sale Haul

I’ve lived in my city for three summers now, and this year was the first time I realized there were neighborhood garage sales nearby.

The weather was beautiful, one of those Michigan summer days where it was in the high 70s and mercifully the humidity was relatively low too, so it felt somewhere around low 80s. A blessing for early June. It made walking the five-block circuit of sales enjoyable instead of a sweat soaked struggle. And they were those awesome kind of garage sales filled with old antique sewing machines and fine china. Even if I have no use for such things, they were cool to look at.

One particular house was selling a host of wingback chairs, seemingly a yard designed to lure me in (I’ve been looking for that type of chair for my office since forever). At first, I fell in love with a white, jacquard patterned set with matching footstool, but they were obviously new, and the seller wanted $150 for them. I was working with $20, so I had to walk away. But I circled the yard hopeful, and hidden off to the side next to the books table was this beauty:

It’s old and stained and not my style in the least, but it was … wait for it … $3. My first thought was that someone must’ve died in it. There was nothing wrong with it aside from the stains, the bottom held, and the wooden legs were in tact. Why so cheap? Me and my worst-case-scenario mind were thinking I was going to be lured in by its cheapness and bring a haunted chair into my home.

Luckily, it’s been in my house for two weeks now, and there’s been no uptick in the supernatural. My fears seemed to be unfounded. Now, my only concern is how successful my first attempt at upholstery is going to be. I want the chair to be my statement piece in my office. Right now my room is of the black and white variety with my inspiration wall and book spines the only bits of color. I was thinking this fabric, maybe: 

Click pic for Amazon link

Speaking of books, I found these for $1.25. 

Yes, I picked up a Norton Anthology as a throwback to my academic days. The other two are a gift for my grandma—who doesn’t love Agatha Christie?

Bonus pic of Punkin on her throne. 

Anyone hit any garage sales or have any valuable re-upholstery tips?

Birthday Catharsis

I’ve spent the last year of my life trying to lose weight, dealing with ramped up anxiety and panic attacks, feeling nauseous on a day-to-day basis, worrying about womb health considering my female processes went out of whack right when I decided I wanted a baby, dieting all kinds of different ways, visiting doctors once a month, adjusting medication, trying to find a job, trying to find time for the job I have, balancing the budget with a partner who’s job is only temporary …

If reading that paragraph exhausted you, try living it.

I didn’t unload all of this on the blog because a lot of it was shrouded in negativity and fear, and I just didn’t want to create some kind of space for that. Dedicating post after post to my problems seemed somehow counterproductive to solving them.

But I’m human and I have issues and sometimes I need to vent those issues. Besides, how can I really celebrate my successes if I can’t look at what I’ve overcome to achieve them.

I turned 27 last week. 27’s not my favorite number, but it could be worse. I’m not going to sit here and write about how I’m not where I thought I’d be. At age 5, I thought I’d grow up to be some kind of modern day Picasso; I failed that mission awhile ago (I’m ok with it). So I thought my 27^th birthday could be more cathartic. Sort of a farewell to the shitty 26.

It was also my second week without gluten, so I had to substitute the real joy of a cupcake with a gluten free one worth double my weight in calories—I ate it with no shame and no stomach ache after, win win!

I ate the fattening fake cupcake with its pound of icing; I accepted that I’m not 21 anymore and this whole weight loss thing is going to take a lot more work this go; I realized that in the grand scheme of my anxiety, I’m managing the best I have in the past four years; I’m doing the best I can with what I’ve got.

And this year is already starting with a win, because finally, after a year and a half, I’ve lost 6 pounds in the past week.

Here’s to being 27 and things actually changing.

Monthly Visits

A certain complacency comes about mid cancer treatment when it is going well. My dad had just completed his third round of chemo, and his was going extremely well the last time I visited home. So well that I’d almost forgotten he was sick at all.

            The gruesome picture of a cancer patient didn’t, and still doesn’t, fit my dad. He had all his hair. He still worked sixty hours a week. He still went golfing and mowed the lawn on Saturdays. He looked healthy, healthy enough to spend the morning out on the boat enjoying the sun and catching fish. Chemo, at least outwardly, hadn’t had much of a lasting effect on him.

            Seeing him was comforting. I could almost pretend he didn’t have cancer. My mom had tried to reassure me over the phone every week that he was doing fine, but being two hours away and unable to see him for myself, the only thing I had to go off was that other picture of a cancer patient. Spending the weekend with him and watching him do things in a distinctively non-cancer way was reassuring and solidified the fact that everything was going to be fine.

            When I went home, I felt safe in the memory of that weekend with him. I think it was the first time I’d visited post diagnosis that my eyes didn’t tear up on the way home. My dad was going to be ok.

            Scrolling through my Facebook feed later that week, my sense of security was erased when I saw that a good friend’s father had passed away from Lymphoma.

            I remembered going to the bar the weekend I came home after finding out about my dad’s diagnosis. I’d gone to meet up with some old friends and told them why I’d come home at such an odd time of year. As soon as I told them about his Lymphoma, my friend told me about his father battling the same cancer for the third time.

            All I could think at the time was great, another part of the cancer process to fear: its reoccurrence. I wanted to pick my friend’s brain then, find out all the inns and outs of his father’s cancer battles, but I also didn’t want to know. I wasn’t ready to know. I still lived in the world of denial where this whole cancer thing was a joke or a mistake. The doctor’s were going to retest and find out it was really just swelling or that his results got mixed up with someone else’s (not that I’d wish the diagnosis on anyone). In the end, I didn’t ask him anything. I told him I hoped his father won his fight just as desperately as I hoped my father won his.

It’s hard, now, to place the two men side by side. My dad sitting outside on a sunny Saturday night shooting the shit with a few beers while another dad sits dying in a hospital bed, both with the same killer running through their veins. I feel selfish that I’m the one sitting in a lawn chair instead of a hospital one. But also eternally grateful.