I’m Not Healthy Anymore

I don’t really know where this year has gone, feels like just last week it was the start of the year and I was getting ready to announce my pregnancy and feeling excited and nervous about what the future would hold.

That was almost a year ago now.  A whole twelve months and I find myself wondering where they went.

I was depressed for a long time, long before I realised, even before my son was born.  Looking back I can see it now.  The closer it got to the birth, the less excited I felt about it.  Even after he was born I didn’t feel the way I should have.  It was months before I felt a connection with wee Bubble, which exacerbated the depression and left me in a ball of Anxiety, ruminating endlessly about my lack of emotion.  Not long before I had to go back to work I fell in love with my baby.  Now I spend my days missing him while trying to focus on earning a living.

I ate my way through that depression and came out the other side with a dramatically expanded waistline and an increased addiction to junk food.  I’m talking next level addiction.  None of this ‘I felt so terrible, I ate the whole bag of Doritos.’  That was childs play.  I was eating all the food.  Just last Tuesday I ate a big bag of chips and 4 muffins before a dinner of fish and chips including a deep fried donut only to finish it off with another 4 filled donuts before the night was out. That was on top of the McDonalds breakfast which has become a daily feature due to my disorganisation, and the rest of the days food which would be calorie laden chips and muesli bars and sometimes chocolate, whatever was on hand at the time.  I’d still have my omelette or sandwich for lunch too.

I’ve been exceeding 5000-6000 calories on a daily basis, not including drinks. Some days are worse than others. Some days I eat really well. But not very often.

And I never feel physically hungry.

I’m tired though.  All I want to do is sleep.  I’m irritable most of the time, it takes nothing to annoy me anymore.  The eczema is back with a vengeance and I’m sore.  My knees hurt, my back hurts, my feet are swollen and sore and I literally cannot sit on the ground without trouble getting both down and up. I’m constantly sweating from being too hot, even on the cold days we’ve had recently.  I get puffed so easily and the clothes that fit round my giant baby bump (my son was 11 pound 5, I had a massive bump) now don’t fit at all.  

People keep telling me to go easy on myself, ‘you’ve just had a baby’ is something I get told all the time, but my son has nothing to do with my weight gain.  I weigh 119 kgs.  Before I got pregnant I weighed 82.  I stopped weighing myself while I was pregnant but a week after Bubble was born when I got home to the scales I weighed 97 kgs.  I’ve gained 37 kgs in a year, more than half of it in the last five months.

I’ve been eating my way to diabetes, heart disease or worse, an early grave.

I’ve been drinking too.  The old ‘pump and dump’ has come in quite handy.  I tricked myself into thinking that it was only every now and then, but it’s been regular. Not every day, not even every week sometimes, but considering that I’m breast feeding, I shouldn’t be drinking very often if not at all.  Bubble has been getting a lot more formula that I ever intended for him to get and while it’s probably better for him than milk from a mother with a terrible diet, it definitely hurts the budget.

I don’t really know how it got so bad. I eat when I’m depressed, so I know how it started, but I guess once I got back to work it was just easier to keep eating badly. I’m still trying to find a work life balance, still trying to be more organised, still trying to find more hours in the day… It’s just easier to grab and go with food. That doesn’t make it right though.

The more I eat, the worse I feel, which makes me eat more.   I have a huge problem and until Christmas Eve I didn’t even realise it.  Or maybe I was in denial.  I knew I was getting bigger, I’d complained about it a bit but mostly because I didn’t like the number on the scales.  I even stopped weighing in to a Facebook weight loss support group I’ve joined with some friends because I was too ashamed that my weight was going up a couple of kgs a week.  I took advantage of a friend who said my scales were a few kgs higher for her and lied that my scales were broken.  They’re not, they work perfectly fine.

Luckily, on Christmas Eve I had a moment of clarity and realised that I can’t keep going on like this.  The Christmas just passed is the first one where I haven’t over eaten.  I only had one helping of main and one of desert.  I didn’t even overload my plates.  I’ve decided no more drinking at all is the best option for all involved and I want to start actively undoing the damage I’ve put my body through for the last six months.  I want to be healthy again, like I was last year.  My son is so full of energy and is already rolling around the house and he deserves (and needs) a mother who can keep up with him.

Extra chins and arms thicker than my baby. But surprisingly I’m still relatively happy

I need to make a plan.  I’m going to try and blog more to keep myself motivated and honest.  I’m coming clean to the weight loss group about my scales, no more sneakily eating a block of chocolate after Zombie goes to bed, no more swinging by the service station on the way home for a caramel slice, no more breakfast on the run, regardless of how late I’m running and no more turning a blind eye to my cravings.

I guess it’s a good time to start being 2017 in a few days time.  In my next post I’ll hopefully have lost a kg or two from the amount of excess food I haven’t eaten this week and I’ll be coming in with a full on plan of attack on how I’m going to get back to 2015 Katie.

In the meantime, I hope everyone has an enjoyable holiday period, no matter what you are celebrating or getting up to and I’ll hopefully see you all back here next year.

Smiles and Sunshine
Katie