The DIE in DIEt.

Today I am feeling low. My energy is low, I am tired of eating protein. I want candy. I want to shove carbs into my face or at least go out and buy a lot of stuff. Shopping or eating. Either one would do.

And I have the butt bleeds again. I have one persistent hemorrhoid and whenever I eat too much of something (I have not identified it), probably protein, I get a bad case of the butt bleeds. Then it's back to wiping with Tucks and swabbing the deck with Preparation H.

I do have a GI doctor, so it's ok, I have had it checked out, it's an external little bleeder that he says not to provoke by getting constipated.  Will 80 grams of protein constipate you?

Oh yes.

It's the weekend, which is not, to me, the joy that it is to you worker bees. Weekends mean that everyone is here and my stress is through the roof. I had to drive my son into the city to work and pick him up and it is in the twenties here. I am cold, tired and hungry.

I am also tired and forcing myself these past 4 days to use the CPAP even though it's a misery for me. I have another sleep titration set up for mid-April. I am hoping to get through this readjustment without having to keep that appointment.

I feel like I am dying. My hunger is back with a vengeance.  I want a solid food that is not protein. I know what God meant in the bible which talks about when the children of Israel were in the wilderness and they didn't want the Manna from heaven, they wanted meat:

^{Psalm 106: 
7} Our fathers understood not thy wonders in Egypt; they remembered not the multitude of thy mercies; but provoked him at the sea, even at the Red sea.
⁸ Nevertheless he saved them for his name's sake, that he might make his mighty power to be known.
⁹ He rebuked the Red sea also, and it was dried up: so he led them through the depths, as through the wilderness.
¹⁰ And he saved them from the hand of him that hated them, and redeemed them from the hand of the enemy.
¹¹ And the waters covered their enemies: there was not one of them left.
¹² Then believed they his words; they sang his praise.
¹³ They soon forgat his works; they waited not for his counsel:
¹⁴ But lusted exceedingly in the wilderness, and tempted God in the desert.
¹⁵ And he gave them their request; but sent leanness into their soul.

I think they had the butt bleeds. God sent them Quail to eat. I would gladly take the Manna and not grumble.

My eating is out of balance. I need to get some balance. I need to bring some foods other than protein into my diet. Now.

 

The scoop on fullness

Here is the thing. I don't get "full" anymore.

I know how much to eat, my sleeve can hold two mushy ounces at this point. I can drink 8 ounces of water in an hour, but God forbid I eat over two ounces.

Unless it's whipped greek yogurt, which I no longer eat.

So I have a knowledge of how much to eat and after I am done, I am invariably still raring to eat more.

After about 20 minutes a feeling settles over my sleeve, a pushy feeling. It feels like there is something there and at that point, any thought of eating more is completely gone.

So the old feeling of gut bloating, pants loosening, leaning back in the chair saying, Wow. I am so full. That feeling is gone.

But so are a lot of pounds in a very short and painless time.

I can deal with the loss of that feeling of having feasted. I would rather be thin than to be full.

Getting off of Coffee

Today is the fifth day that I have not had any coffee. It has been a long weaning process. I used to drink it black and I would usually eat vanilla oreo cookies with it. Or toast with butter. Sometimes eight cookies or four slices of toast.

I wanted to stop the coffee because every time that I didn't have coffee in the morning, I would get a massive headache and since I know that I won't be drinking coffee immediately pre-op, I am stopping to coffee to avoid adding a headache to my list of post op issues.

Here is the funny thing: My carb cravings for bread and cookies has dramatically reduced!

That was unexpected!

I guess it's because eating cookies and toast was so tied to drinking a cup of coffee. Man. I am really happy about that.

I had a headache for three days. Now I am not even thinking about having a cup of coffee.

Here is how I weaned off of it:

1. I went from three cups of full strength coffee to one cup full strength and two cups of Green Mountain Half Caff
2. Then I went to all Half Caff.
3. Then I reduced to one cup of Half Caff and two cups of decaf.
4. Then I would use my kuerig on the small setting to fill a large cup half way. I would dump out a little of the half caff, I would then top off with a small setting of decaf, creating 1/4 caff.
5. A week after that I went to decaf for a week
6. I weaned back to one cup of decaf.
7. This Monday I had my last cup of coffee.

So this has really worked for me. It's like titrating off of medicine.

UPDATE From the Post Op Me: I ended up going back onto coffee full bore pre-op. I was afraid it would screw me up post op, but maybe it was the morphine or something...I have had no headaches and no withdrawals and it is nearly three weeks post op and I have not had any coffee. Why bother? I can't drink with meals anymore anyway. 

Who has my back?

I am very happy to have received the call that my insurance company has approved my surgery! I think that this is the last thing on my list of things to think about, things that I needed to "worry about" over the surgery.

Now my focus is on staying healthy and preparing my house and my mind for the surgery. I am taking a friend's advice and plan to get my nose into a book that will keep me from trolling negative surgery stories and worrying my way into "worst case scenarios". There will be ups. There will be downs, but this is for me and I am grabbing it with both hands.

I believe that God has got this for me. I don't have to worry. February 4th is my day.

Food Holidays

Who benefits from these massive binge holidays? From Halloween candy to Easter Bunnies. From getting drunk at St. Patrick's Day to stuffing yourself like the Christmas Goose?

The marketers and the stores get the benefit.

Every month there is another holiday. Throw in birthday parties and anniversaries and you have a lot of days which are only "normal" if they are highly caloric.

I want to stop this cycle. What prompted me?

I was in the card store buying some thank you cards for after Christmas and I saw a whole rack of Happy New Year cards.

Huh?

Isn't that covered on our Christmas cards? Maybe they are for people who don't celebrate Christmas. But more than likely someone just said, 'hey, what OTHER days can we sell people cards on?"

It's like that with food and drink holidays.

When do they put out the candy for Halloween? They do it well before Labor Day. That is so that you will buy early, eat it all before Halloween and then have to buy it again.

Now, I could say that I want 2015 to be the year of no-food holidays, but I am dragging the family with me and that is going to be an uphill battle. But I can decide that instead of a quarter sheet cake for each family birthday, to buy a little 6 inch round cake. Or better yet,  make a cake. That way NO ONE would touch it.

And you know, most of these holidays really irk me. Santa and the Easter Bunny usurp Christ's place in His own days of recognition. I hate making Easter baskets. Yeah, you can turn it around to put some sort of religious slant onto it, but it's still a holiday that has nothing to do with Christ.

More toast. Because carbs are so good for us, right?

Ah. Way off track here. What I wanted to say is that I am  buying a two slice toaster today. Why? Because I don't want to eat four slices of toast every time I decide I want toast.

Yeah, I could put in two pieces, but those two empty slots taunt me. I always grab four pieces of bread. With a two-seater, I would be forced to choose between quelling my impatience to wait for the toaster to brown two more slices and my hunger to eat the toast that is ready and waiting for me.

My actual arms. Yes, I am proud of my guns!

I am not going to obsess about the once a month food holidays and concentrate, instead, on the daily small things that I can do to make my food intake better. Like eating less bread with butter.

The bread is just a vehicle for more butter.

Baby steps.

Hey, it's only 356 days until Christmas!

Shoot me now.

Gaining!

Hmmm. I have been super focused on losing, but what do I have to gain with the sleeve surgery and a new, trimmer body?

1. Buying clothing might just be fun.
2. Keeping up with my daughter's activity level.
3. Being able to be around this world (alive) for a longer period of time. 
4. Meeting more potential grandkids.
5. Twerking. Oh, come on. You want to do it, too.
6. More confidence in the world.
7. A feeling of lightness getting out of bed.
8. Hipbones!

Fat: A Shocking, depressing moment at the Museum.

Weekends and Holidays are the Hardest. And some good news.

I am still in the five month pre-op diet phase with about 12 and a half weeks to go until my surgery date in February. Daily, I log my foods and exercise on My Fitness Pal (username:imawaterbender) and I also keep a written log to turn into the Lifestyle Classes at Magee Women's Hospital monthly.

The week days I have a set routine:

Get up
Get the kids off to school
Go swimming (the pool is usually empty)
Eat breakfast
Clean stuff/laundry
Eat lunch
Go out for a while, oil paint, do some exercise - basically ME time
Get the kids to do their homework after school
Make dinner
Listen to my husband's diatribe about how work went (usually an hour or so)
Eat
Get ready for bed.

On the weekends and when the kids are off for these long holidays, everything is mish-mashed. I don't really like to take my kids swimming with me, but I can't leave Charlie and Rachel at home and there is no sitter.

When kids are in the pool, they keep coming into my lane when I am swimming laps. There are no lane ropes and it's irritating. That means that I either don't swim or I swim when hotel guests tend to be in the pool and they irritate me, too. Same reason, no respect for a swimming doing laps.

 

Disclaimer: Not my actual kid.

Everyone makes such a mess that it's harder to keep things decent. And by decent, I mean, my house is usually not that tidy and they make it look like a tornado hit. Then, when I go to clean things up, it's disheartening to see that nothing lasts. I sweep the floor and minutes later there are chewed up paper towels and paper from the dog getting stuff that the kids have dropped.

I just get pissed off. That makes me want to eat junk. Plus they all eat junk. Don't say get the junk out of the house, because I have done that and my husband just buys more. It's like they love throwing it in my face.

So I usually end up breaking down and eating crap.

Yeah, Not me, either.

Yesterday I nuked taquitos from a box. I had no idea how caloric they were. They are so SMALL! I was still hungry, so I had more. When I journalled them I had to do a double-take. I ate 880 calories of them before I had journalled them, putting me over 1800 calories for the day. I decided that I was done eating for the day, problem was, it was just 1:00 PM.

I told myself that if I needed to eat, it had to be green beans because they are low in calories.

That was hard because I had promised them that we could go see a movie. We went and I only had water, but I was ticked off. Mad at myself for eating that crap and made at them because NONE  of them are having to be constantly on a diet like I am. I went to bed early to keep from eating at night.

God I hate struggling. But I guess I am learning. No more taquitos for me and have on hand foods that are good for me AND satisfying.

But let me end this on a positive. I went coat shopping on Friday and was looking at the 3X coats, wondering if I would fit into one. The last coat I bought was 5X. For some reason I tried on a 2X and it fit really well. I looked down the aisle and was astonished at how many more options I before me, because I fit that size. There were so many more 2X than 3X.

But realistically, just shopping at a store that sells regular sized clothes is a novelty for me. I had been ordering all of my clothes online. This opens up a whole new world to me. And it's just the beginning.

I do feel upset and jealous that others in my circle of life don't feel that they need to control what they eat. They don't have diverticulitis and can eat nuts, seeds, pecan pie and they don't care. Their waists enlarge and it doesn't seem to bother them. I fight it and they mock me with their food.

I am not fucking giving up. 

Star Jones & Rosie O'Donnell and even Me.

Start from about 12:00. The truth that Star Jones has to say about her journey just floored me. She has such insight now.

This was really inspiring to me.

Here is Rosie. She had the Vertical Gastric Sleeve and briefly talks about her mind shift and how it is still strange to her. She sometimes does not see herself as she is.

When I lost a lot of weight, I felt out of body.  I was excited, but it didn't feel like me. I know to expect that now and to realize that even now, I don't feel like me. I guess because I am not constrained to this body.

What I mean is that, in my head, my brain, my mental voice, I am all that I have always been forever.

I am the little girl, the teen, the pregnant woman, the beaten woman. I am the sum of all of my experiences.

This is me today. This is the worst of me.

This was me last month.

 This was me in July, marrying my son and his wife. Wearing a purple tablecloth, essentially.

 This was me in 2007, sick, thin, and ready to relapse.

Whom am I, truly?

I guess we will just have to see.

So tired and sore this morning. Home Renovations

We inherited out home from my inlaws. My mother in law died in the house. She was a hoarder and spent about $6000 a month at QVC. She chain smoked and was dead in the house for three days before they found her. My father in law passed nine months prior to her death.

She died at the height of the recession and we were out of a job and decided to sell our home and move to Pittsburgh, her house would not sell in it's current condition, so we started fixing it up -- to sell it, we thought.

Fast forward three years. We have renovated, cleaned, scrubbed. When we were planning to sell, I had the whole house painted. The guy who did it painted it with cream colored paint. Ceilings, walls and trim, all the same color and all flat paint. It was like being in a cream colored box.

This weekend I decided to paint the living room. I am so whipped now. I hurt everywhere. But here are the finished photos of the painting job and a short video of the renovation that we did to expand the house.

Why did we not help her when she was alive? She would not let anyone do anything. It was so sad.

The renovation

My painting song from painting my son's room last year.

Here are the photos, I no longer feel like I can see nicotine stains bleeding through the paint job.

Before:

After:

 

I sure as heck logged this painting work as exercise!!!

Next up, I still want to repaint the trim and to paint the dining room, but it can wait a bit. At least I have the paint and brushes. Each container of paint cost me about $35 bucks!!