Huge big milestone day today! I finally made my 10%, as we call it at Weight Watchers. I have officially lost ten percent of my starting weight, in my case 26 pounds. Ten percent is a big deal healthwise, because it's where you start seeing major long-term health benefits when it comes to mortality and morbidity risks. It's an especially big deal to me because that is why I started on Weight Watchers in the first place.
When my doctor told me that I'd had a stroke last year and didn't even know it, I was terrified. I'm a little bit of a hypochondriac on my best days, maybe from all the years when I had no insurance and couldn't go to the doctor, I remember feeling bad last summer, scary bad, and wondering if there was something really wrong with me, but I didn't do anything about it, and eventually it all went away except for a lingering faint numbness on the left side of my face and a left shoulder and arm that seemed to get tired and achy more easily than they used to. I didn't really change anything about my life. Then months passed, and I learned what had happened, and suddenly it felt as though my body were a primed explosive, ready to go off without warning. Every ache was ominous, every bit of fatigue or skipped heartbeat a prelude to my early end. It sounds really melodramatic, but I was scared, down in my guts scared.
I think that the best thing that Weight Watchers has done for me is help me shed that horrible fear by turning it into action. I know what I need to do to save my own life, and I'm doing it, slowly, day by day. The first weeks were strange and miserable, I had little appetite and was afraid to eat anything at all. There are no real nutritionists in Laredo who aren't associated with fake weight-loss clinics, so I couldn't even get a referral, it was all research online and listening intently at my WW meetings. I tried to ask my doctor, but he completely blew me off, which has been his standard practice and why I'm looking for a new one. My poor family subsisted on low-sodium shrimp fried rice I made with brown rice, frozen veggies and shrimp, and on pan-grilled tilapia several times a week. I did lose some weight, but that wasn't the way I wanted to live.
Gradually I learned some stuff and began to loosen up a little. I talked to my parents' naturopath friend who recommended some good vitamins and supplements, as well as a modified Mediterranean-style diet. Lots of fruits and vegetables, whole grains, fish, cooking with olive oil. My cardiologist ran me through enough tests to show that my heart is not the ticking time-bomb that I feared, put me on some beta blockers and baby aspirin, and told me that weight loss would do the rest. He told me I could exercise, so I joined a gym and started going five days a week. I felt lucky that I wasn't working, so I could concentrate on myself as a full-time project. I have a husband and a four year old son that I love more than anything. If anything happened to me, I never wanted them to feel like I didn't love them enough to do everything I could to stay with them.
It's been a little over three months since I joined Weight Watchers, and things are different now. My cholesterol is down, and my liver enzymes are improving. My energy is up, my acid reflux is all but gone. I drink more water than I ever have in my life. But it's not just me. Bug comes with me to my meeting every week, and we talk about healthy foods and why we eat or do not eat certain foods. I've stopped taking him to McDonalds just to kill time by letting him eat Chicken Nuggets and play on the playland (this was not a popular decision!) But he loves fruit and some vegetables, and he's stopped fighting the idea that he only gets one serving of juice per day, because too much is not healthy. His meals are healthy now because my meals are healthy, and that makes me happy. If there is any gift I can give him, I want him to never have the screwed-up relationship with food and with his body that I have always had. He can do so much better!
In any case, 26 pounds is just the tip of the iceberg. My next "official" goal is another 10%, which means 10% of my current body weight, or a goal of 213 pounds. It's a pretty good goal. My personal, unofficial goal is 15% of my starting body weight, or another 13 pounds down, for 224 pounds. The holidays are coming, which will make things harder, but I intend to keep going. I lost 26 pounds in three months, I can lose another 13 by January 1. Ambitious! My final-final goal is still almost too far away to talk about, my proper BMI weight of 155 pounds. I haven't weighed that much since puberty, so it's hard to contemplate it at all, but anything is possible!
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