Injecting Incentives

Some of you may (or may not) remember that last year about this time I started commenting occasionally about losing weight. Losing some weight had been a necessity for some time, both due to appearances and health, but I had a really good incentive to get serious about it (because serious health problems are not enough of a reason) when my son decided decided to get married.

Obviously I wanted to look my best for the wedding since, as the mother of the groom, I was completely unimportant the most important person there. Clearly, the way I looked was the most important part of the day for these two.

Seriously. Don't let the picture fool you.

At any rate, I was quite pleased as I chiseled melted the pounds away. You may even recall that I boasted about losing almost seventy pounds. I still have more to lose (I say that with shame), but I've been really proud of what I've accomplished so far.

Until now.

I've enjoyed getting new clothes and tailoring others down to fit me again. I know I look better than I have in a long time. But just recently I discovered something that sucked a lot of the joy out of my new look. I've discovered that I'm just as bad at math as I ever was.

You might wonder what that has to do with anything. It had a lot to do with everything when I realized that I had not subtracted properly and I'd actually lost sixty pounds instead of seventy. And please don't comment that it's still an accomplishment. Yes, I know it is, but would you be happy if you learned that you'd lost ten less pounds than you thought you had? I didn't think so.

In addition to that disturbing news, my weight loss has dramatically slowed for the last few months. My doctor ran more blood tests and discovered that my sugar levels are still too high and, in his words, my body was still struggling toward diabetes. On the heels of that distressing revelation, the doctor assured me that I wouldn't be getting diabetes on his watch. I was more than ready to cheer on his determination and his efforts (since I had none of my own) until he told me what he wanted to do to get my sugar under control.

It seems there's a new medicine on the market that helps control sugar levels. A new, injectible medicine. I must say, he had my attention when he started talking about injections. I started shaking my head just that fast. I couldn't imagine trying to stick myself with a needle every day.

The doctor assured me that it wasn't that big a deal, and that the medicine was a great incentive. I'd say so. I was already plotting what promises I would make about getting my diet back on track if he'd hold off on the injections for a while. Unfortunately, he wasn't convinced. And he said that as long as my sugar levels were off, trying to lose weight was an exercise in futility.

At least I'd be getting some exercise.

After showing me the injection pen and the tiny needles, I finally agreed to give it a try. I must admit, though, that my motives weren't strictly for my own health. Indiana Jones has a huge fear of needles and the thought of his face when I told him I'd have to give myself injections was enough to make me say yes.

The medicine is working, my weight loss is back on track and now I have lost almost seventy pounds. Plus, Indiana shudders and groans every time I mention something about the injections. I guess it's a win-win. Or maybe a loss-loss.

What would you call it?

It's All In How You Measure

As much as I love my family, sometimes living with six males (seven if you count the dog) can be overwhelming. Recently I found myself struggling with the ever-increasing desire to scratch and spit in public--always a sure sign that I need a little more estrogen in my life. Thankfully, I was able to get back in touch with my feminine side by taking a four day weekend to go visit a close friend. We hadn't seen each other in over two years, and her husband was out of town, so it was the perfect time to reconnect. We shopped, ate out, talked incessantly and watched movies where no one got blown up or shot. In short, it was the perfect chick weekend.

That Sunday I visited our home church in Alabama, where people seem surprised that I would take off on my own without the rest of the family. In truth, my guys accepted that I wanted to get away, but they didn't really understand either. So today I will attempt to explain exactly what I needed to take a break from.

1. The smell. Guys have a scent all their own. If they're not actively sweating, they have a musky male odor that can be endearing when taken in small doses. Multiply it times seven and it gets a little overpowering. Add to that the odor of their sweaty clothes and old sneakers and you know why even Febreeze is not strong enough for my house.  Consider the fact that I often drive home from church with guys who have played basketball after the service. No matter what the outside temperature, they generate enough sweaty steam to fog up my windshield. Every. Time.

2. The competition. Hey, I'm a bit competitive myself, so I understand a little healthy competition. But in the life of guys, everything is a competition. And my guys are in it to win. When applied to sports, I understand the mindset. I do have a problem, though, applying competition to bodily functions. Our house tends to be quite musical in the morning, and my boys take it as a challenge to best each other in the amount/volume/odor of flatulence they can produce. It doesn't seem to matter that there's no market for that sort of thing in life, nor that the ability to win this sort of competition is not admired outside of a guys' dorm. Nor does it seem to matter that I'm constantly reminding them that they don't live in a guys' dorm.

Sometimes I think I do.

3. Mostly I needed a break from the male mindset. Guys are not tactful by nature, and quite often they blurt out whatever thought crosses their minds. For instance, I've lost almost 60 pounds. My guys have been complimentary and encouraging. Sort of. In their own way. Some examples--

--I announced my most recent weight loss, and the boys all complimented me enthusiastically. Wanting to go that extra mile with the encouragement, one of them commented, "I knew you were losing weight. Your arms aren't nearly as big as they used to be."

--We went through a drive through and I asked my 11 year old to hand me my wallet. When I finished the transaction, I turned to him and found him staring at my driver's license. He had the same look a person gets on their face when they're passing a traffic accident and they simply can't look away. (I can't blame him. Driver's license pictures are supposed to be ugly, but I went the extra mile with mine. Obviously, I was 60 pounds heavier. My face was flushed and I was wearing a bright orange/red top. I gave a great impression of a squashed tomato.)

"Driver's license photos are supposed to look bad," I told him.

"Can you have it retaken?" He still couldn't look away.

"Not until it expires." I decided to go ahead and let him get out what he had to say. "It looks pretty bad, doesn't it?"

"No," he lied, struggling to tear his gaze away. "Except for the chin. And the cheeks." Pause. "And the hair ..."

--My husband has been extremely complimentary and encouraging on the weight loss. And mostly in a very good way. But even he occasionally can't hide the male thought patterns that come crashing through. Every once in a while he'll ask me for the current number of pounds lost. I'll proudly tell him and then congratulations start all over again. I'm still losing, but the loss has slowed some. Recently he asked me and the number of pounds lost was the same number it had been the last time he asked. Seeing his surprise, I hurried on to explain that weight loss isn't measured in pounds alone, but also in inches. Rather than detailing the specific inches lost from hips, thighs, waist, etc., I simply told him I'd lost 46 inches so far.

When there was no sound, I glanced up to see a horrified look on Indiana's face. "46 inches?" He repeated. "Where?"

I was insulted. Hadn't he been telling me all along that he could tell I'd been losing? Where did he think the inches came from? I told him I'd lost from hips, thighs, waist, etc.

"Oh." I could see some male-type thoughts tumbling through his mind. "Wow." Pause. "That's almost four feet." Seeing the look on my face, it was his turn to be surprised. "What?" he asked. "Isn't that good?"

Forty-six inches sounds good. Four feet sounds like I had a dwarf growing out of my hip. Apparently only a female would understand that you don't convert measurements when discussing weight loss.

And that, dear readers, is why I needed a break. I needed to smell some perfume and shop for girly items for a while. I needed someone who didn't have to discuss pounds or feet(!) to know that I'd lost weight. Instead we simply chattered about sizes and giggled that I had to go down another size in skirts to find one that fit.

Sometimes females just need to get away from the dwarf growing out of their side. Either that, or they'll find themselves joining in on the competition.

So What's The Difference?

Obviously there are good things about losing over 20 pounds. One is just being able to say it. You'd be surprised how often that works into my conversations. "Cooler weather today. I hope my sweaters fit, now that I've lost over 20 pounds."

Another bonus is the fact that I'm gaining another wardrobe. I haven't bought any more clothes, but I never got rid of ones that I outgrew either. Now I'm fitting into them again. I've pulled several skirts out of the "I have a dream" section of my closet, and I'm thrilled that they fit again. And I mean they seriously fit. No sucking it in so that I can zip them up, or having to change them after lunch. They actually fit!

On the down side, some of my tops don't fit as well. I mean they fit better; there's more room in them. But they're a little, um, lower than they used to be. Guess I don't have quite as much to hold them up? A side effect I wasn't expecting at any rate.

A few other odd things:  some of my rings are starting to twist a little more around my fingers. And I'm starting to slide around a little in some of my shoes. Nothing real extreme, just a little bit of oddness I wasn't counting on.

The guys in my family have been very supportive--in their own way. My husband is smart enough to compliment me often and encourage me in positive ways. The older boys cheer me on and manage to look interested for about 30 seconds when I announce my latest weight loss. The younger boys are earnest in trying to be supportive, but brutal honesty plays a role as well.

For instance, one morning as we were driving to school/work I announced the latest loss. They all congratulated me/told me I was doing a great job/told me I looked great. And then I made the mistake of asking, "Can you guys really tell I'm losing weight or are you just saying that?"

"We can tell," one of them answered. "You're arms used to be really big, but now they're getting smaller." I told them right then and there that a discussion of body parts and size comparisons would never end well, and I would forevermore be satisfied simply to hear that I looked great.

Clearly I will never have a problem with maintaining humility, no matter how much weight I lose!

As a side note:  When I started these posts, I had lost 23 pounds. Now that I'm finishing them, I've still lost 23 pounds. I'm beginning to wonder if accountability is once again cursing me!

But I Don't Wanna Be A College Girl!

To read the first part of this doctor/weight odyssey with a little romance thrown in (and really, who wouldn't?) you need to go here.

So the doctor asks me what we're going to do about the weight problem. To be honest, I really wasn't hoping for a miracle here. But a push in the right direction would be nice. "Have you got a goal in mind?"

Suddenly I don't feel like such a failure because I do actually have a goal in mind. A good goal. After all, you can't succeed if you're not actually aiming at something, can you? And my goal is reasonable, too. I don't want to be a model. I just want to be an normal, average weight. So I tell him my well-thought-out goal.

And he frowns. And then he asks how tall I am.

What? My goal is average for my height. And my build. And my age. I looked it up. It may be a little on the high side of the range, but it IS within the range.

And then the doctor asks what I weighed in college. And once again I want to poke him in the eye.

Is he serious? I was nineteen in college. I was nineteen when I got married. I was a giggly little teenager when I got married. Now I am a mature, forty-four year old woman who has born multiple (many multiple) children. Why, why why would I want to aim for the impossible? Why are we even discussing what I weighed in college? I told him the truth. I weighed 115 back then. I didn't tell him this, but my nickname was Olive Oyl. I think that had to do as much with my clumsiness as it did with my lack of a figure, but whatever.

I hate to speculate, but for some reason he looked surprised. He actually said, "Really?" I wanted to asked if he thought perhaps I had passed that weight when I was ten. Then he said, "Well we won't aim for that now."

Well good. Who said we wanted to?

He consulted a chart and said, "If we aim for your goal, that will put your BMI (body-mass index) at ... " his voice trailed off for a minute. "It'll put it exactly where mine is," he finished.

I felt vindicated. The doctor is a normal, average weight. And after coming to that conclusion, he certainly couldn't argue with my choice. HA!

So with my goal finally established as reasonable, that still left the problem of how I was to reach the goal. After blood work revealed that I am as healthy as ... well, do I really want to finish that comparison? Anyway, I have no major problems so the doctor suggested I try the Atkins diet. Apparently it's been revamped in the last few years, with a lot more vegetables added to the initial phases. Since carbs and sugars cause problems with my blood sugar levels anyway, it is a good diet choice for me.

I've been on the diet for a little over six weeks now, and I've lost twenty-three pounds. I'm feeling pretty good about that. Plus, I've managed to control my blood sugar levels more so I'm dealing with less spikes and dips, meaning less mood and energy swings. And that means everyone's happier. : )

I am not even halfway to my goal, but people are starting to notice the weight loss, and that's a fun thing. Surprisingly enough, there are a few odd things I discovered about weight loss as well, but I think I'll share those with you tomorrow.

There is Definitely An "I" in Weight

So to bring you up to speed, my son fell in love and I ended up having to see a doctor. Yep. That about covers it.

The day of my appointment, I braced myself to deal with my phobias. The first was The Scale. Is there anything worse than the scale in the doctor's office? I'm used to being weighed. I weigh myself every morning in my bathroom at home. That scale knows me. It's not my friend, but it knows me. I feel like it has a sense of where it needs to go when I step on it. It's got a starting point, anyway. The doctor's scale doesn't have that. It doesn't know me from Adam.

If I have to be weighed, I want an accurate reading. Accurate meaning the least possible amount that I can get away with. In order to get that, you need to weigh first thing in the morning. First thing in the morning before you eat breakfast. Before you eat breafast, after you go to the bathroom and buck naked if you really want to get down to it. There's no other way to get a truly accurate (re: lowest possible) reading on a scale.

So right away I have issues with The Scale at the doctor's office. My appointment was at 2:00 in the afternoon. Right there we're way past breakfast. And lunch too. And obviously I'm keeping my clothes on. At least until I get into the room with the stirrups, but that's a whole other post. (One you might want to skip, by the way.)

Bottom line is, I know that scale reading is going to be several pounds more than my "true" weight. And if I'm there to talk about my weight problem, how are we going to deal with the issue if we don't have accurate facts to start with?

But that's not my only problem. My other issue is that this doctor is a male. Male doctors have their place. After all, all my children were delivered by male doctors. But can male doctors truly understand female medical issues? And really, isn't weight a female medical issue? Can a male doctor understand the need for chocolate? Or stress eating? Or the fact that I could have used both while waiting for him to come into the examining room?

The doctor finally comes in and introduces himself, and then we discuss my medical history. Then he sits back and says, "Why have you come to see me today?"

I debate giving him a truthful answer:  "My husband made me come." or "My son's getting married." But I've noticed most doctors don't have that much of a sense of humor. "Thank you. I'll be here all week, and don't forget to tip your waitresses."

So I mention some pain in my wrist. His diagnosis is tendonitis brought on by too much typing (oops), and he suggests a brace at night. Which I've already started doing, thanks. Anything else? I mention a few other minor things, easily taken care of. And finally I say I need to lose weight. He smiles, and I almost expect him to say the first step is admitting there's a problem. I want to poke him in the eye.

"So how are we going to get the weight off?" He asks.

We? I've just met the man and we're a team? Why do I doubt this? Maybe because I will struggle on a day to day basis and then show up and have my efforts judged by him next month? I hate accountability. (Hence the lack of dieting results up to that point.)

And why was he asking me what to do anyway? Wasn't I paying him to come up with some miracle cure?

Whose idea was this anyway? To figure that out, click here.

The Weight of Woe

Several of you noticed that I didn't participate in the Random Dozen this week (actually, I guess this week it was the Random Eleven), and I just can't tell you how much I appreciate being missed! I didn't join in because I wanted to post about something else, but then life intervened and I didn't get to post about anything at all. So today you're going to get yesterday's post which may also turn into tomorrow's post because I tend to get long winded like that.

See, it all started because I'm under a doctor's care. Now doesn't that sound ominous. Except it really isn't. The only thing is, I haven't been under a doctor's care since I last gave birth. That was almost eleven years ago, and I have no plans of needing a doctor again for labor and delivery any time soon. Or any time at all for that matter. And I certainly don't think I would have needed a doctor now if it weren't for the fact that my oldest son thinks he needs to get married.

Actually it all started, really, because my husband needed major surgery. Among the many doctors he saw during his medical odyssey was a family physician that he liked. So once he finished accumulating medical bills, he decided I needed to see this doctor for my needs.

Oh goody.

My needs are basically two. My blood sugar levels, which I like to believe I keep under control. That's not always true, but I like to believe it anyway. And my weight which is never under control and I just don't like to think about it at all. See, I never had weight problems until my husband and children came into my life. So isn't it their fault I gained weight? Why should I have to be the one to suffer in trying to get rid of it?

Weight is one of the reasons I avoid going to the doctor. It's demeaning to have someone else weigh you. I always wonder if they honestly underestimate your weight or if they're just being kind when they don't move the 50 lb weight over far enough on the scale. And then I wonder if I should say something, or just reach over and move it myself. Today's digital scales are no better. Especially if I look down and I can't even see them. That's never a good sign. And all of this before I ever even see the doctor? Especially if I'm feeling physically well in the first place, why would I want to put myself through all that?

So for the last eleven years, or since I stopped bearing children, I have tried on my own almost every diet there is with limited (re: no) success. I had a 10 pound weight loss here or there, followed inevitably by a 10 pound gain. I think it was a combination of not having enough discipline, not finding a diet I could live with, and not having the motivation.

My oldest son finally took care of the motivation part. It seems he has begun to care very deeply for his girlfriend and their relationship has turned serious. He has informed me that there can and probably will be a wedding in the future. The thought of a multitude of wedding photos and wedding finery has at last given me a goal because, of course, a wedding is always about the mother-in-law.

On a side note, I am thrilled for them, and I love his girlfriend. I am not so sure about this pushing me into the next phase of my life, and I'm not at all sure I'm ready to be a mother-in-law. (And if anyone says the "G" word, please consider yourself cyber-slapped!) At the moment I am respecting the couple's privacy, but as their plans become official, there will be much blog conversation on these topics, I can assure you!

So with the inevitable marriage handwriting on the wall, I agreed to go see the doctor. In this case, I had to download forms, fill them out and send them in, then wait for the office to call and set up an appointment. That was find with me, as I was in no hurry. After all, my husband needed surgery, and it still took them a month to call with an appointment. Maybe I'd lose a few pounds before I actually had to go see the doctor.

Of course they called within the week. (Stay with me. I really do have a point in these posts!) To follow up on the doctor's visit (get it?) click here.