We are now in May/June/July of 2023. I feel like the scale was going up every day, but that’s probably just an exaggeration. My weight was still moving in the wrong direction and I started meticulously tracking my food again and being very serious about my workouts. What made this more difficult emotionally is that talking about my weight gain was always met with people telling me things like, “You are far from fat,” or “A lot of women would kill for your body,” and “I don’t see it”. While it’s nice to know that other people don’t view me as fat or out of shape, I have a standard for myself, and my body was not adequately portraying the effort I was putting into it. In my heart, I just felt like something was wrong…but no one was hearing me.
Fast forward to September. Jared and I had matched on Hinge way back in May. He had asked me what my schedule looked like, and I realized that I couldn’t tolerate another talking stage and so I ghosted him. Well in September, he reached back out with a simple “What’s new?” He got right to the point and asked me out for coffee, to which I replied that I didn’t drink coffee but would love an ice cream date. It was set.
We ended up spending three days together on our first date. So many things had happened; his car wouldn’t start, my bathroom sink broke, another driver tried to run us off the road. At the end of our date, we decided we were exclusive. We talked all day, every day, whenever we were both available. Any time we both had off work, we made ourselves available to each other. Within a week I had met his family and was always invited to dinners and football gatherings.
We took turns cooking for each other. When Jared would cook for me, it was always pretty healthy. Typically it was protein with either veggies or a potato. Sometimes he would do one of those chopped salad kits. Things moved very quickly with us, and by the end of October we decided that he should look into breaking his lease and moving in with me. He put in a request to break his lease with the understanding that he was obligated to pay until they found someone to rent his unit out. We were surprised that they had found a new tenant within a week. Also at this time, Jared had put a ring on my finger. We knew we were going to be married and didn’t see any need to prolong the dating phase. So we were living together and engaged. My life was kinda being flipped all over the place, in a good way.
So with that, I made the decision that I needed to relax my grip on my nutrition and just enjoy this wonderful time of my life. There were so many family events coming up and I didn’t want to be the stick in the mud. So through November and December, I ended up gaining 8 to 10 pounds.
January arrived and with it, my courthouse wedding. While we weren’t doing a true wedding I still didn’t want to look awful on my wedding day. I was uncomfortable and felt like I looked soft and fluffy. I had still been hitting the gym, and we were eating healthy. I suppose it’s understandable with the amount of holiday treats that had passed through our house during “eating season”. Still, I felt like I looked awful. I had an appointment to get my makeup done, and I sat in my car crying because I felt so fat.
After we were married, we set ourselves up at a new gym. We had a few sessions with a trainer to get familiar with the equipment and we were given plans. I made a few tweaks to the meals we regularly ate to make them healthier (no more chopped salad kits) and we gave up desserts in favor of frozen yogurt bars. My weight didn’t change.
It’s important to note that I am a certified personal trainer, nutrition coach specializing in macro tracking and carb cycling, a wellness coach and meditation instructor. Health and wellness is my actual life. I know the things to do and yet, nothing was working. So I decided to bring up macro tracking to Jared. I know that it requires a little extra work, and not everyone is down to do it, but I felt like it was what I needed to do. I told him that if we (mainly I meant me) wanted to make changes we were going to have to get serious for a while. He agreed to do whatever I thought was best as long as I was going to be patient with teaching him. It was a deal.
We began carb cycling. We both lost some weight, but my weight was so unstable. I would drop 1, gain 1, drop 2, gain 3. Today as I write this, I have only lost 4 total pounds. My husband has lost almost 25. Feeling incredibly frustrated, I made another doctors appointment.
It took months to get in with my primary care physician. I felt relieved when it finally came. I felt like maybe I would finally get some answers. I showed up to my 7:30 a.m. appointment five minutes early. The doctor didn’t come in the room to see me until almost 8:30 a.m. We went over my concerns. At the top of the list was weight gain and difficulty losing weight despite working out and eating well. Second to that was nausea and dizziness during workouts. This one is concerning because of the arrythmia they discovered prior to my surgery.
The hopeful feeling I had about this appointment quickly turned to anger. My doctor said that maybe I was dizzy because I wasn’t eating enough. I told her that I made sure to eat before showing up to the gym. She said that maybe I needed to eat more, that maybe I didn’t have enough glucose to see me through the workouts. I didn’t see this being the answer because I was already doing that. Then she moved right into the inability to lose weight. I told her that I track macros and that my daily calories are between 1400 and 1700 give or take a few and that I workout four to six times per week depending on my work schedule. She told me to drop my calories to 1200 and workout more.
I was in shock and gave an emphatic NO! This is classic diet culture. It is impossible for someone as active as I am to actually eat less at the same time I am adding more activity. This would be insanity. So she agreed to check my fasting insulin and a bunch of other things. No hormone testing because..honestly, I don’t even know why.
And oh yeah, she also said “You’re not quite overweight enough for Ozempic yet.” This was the doctor that almost 2 years ago said she wasn’t the doctor that would ever prescribe weight loss medications. Guess those kickbacks were irresistible. Needless to say, I told her I wasn’t interested in Ozempic, I was interested in answers.
I left the office and headed to the lab. By the time I left the lab I had been at the clinic for three hours. I got home and was overwhelmed by how hopeless I felt. I used to be a doom thinker, so I talked myself out of just giving up and decided to wait for the test results. Just maybe they would show something. YES, I realize hoping for something to be wrong is crazy. I was really just hoping for answers. I already knew that something was off.
So I waited, and one by one the test results came in. To no ones surprise everything was fine, within normal limits. The final straw for me was the message I received in the app saying, “All of your test results look good Pam. See you in a year. If problems persisit reach back out.”
ARE. YOU. FUCKING. KIDDING. ME?!
This was the reach back out. This has been me battling these issues for years. This is after I even had a uterine ablation (listen, no period is great, but surgery is a huge deal).
It was this moment that I realized it is completely up to me to figure out my health and I set out to make a more detailed plan for myself.
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