Where the Hell Have You Been?

Yeah, I've been AWOL since February.

Why?

I got really, really, really frustrated. I've been dieting off and on for most of my adult life, and I've been intermittently blogging on this topic since 2007. My weight has been up and down, with a low that still gave me a BMI over 40.

I've lost weight, but only if I practically starved myself. I did Cambridge Diet shakes, I've tried intermittent fasting. None of it was really bringing the weight down like I thought it should, especially considering how little I was eating.

Around January of this year, we got a Wii, and I faithfully started working out every day. I started doing 30 minutes a day, then an hour, then 90 minutes. After three months, some days I was up to doing two hours of step aerobics a day. No, I wasn't doing all two hours at a single sitting -- I broke it up into three 40-minute stretches.

But guess what? Even after all that, my weight really didn't come down all that much. After a month of really making a concerted effort at weight loss, I'd only lost three pounds. My lack of amazing progress continued, despite my good efforts, until the end of March, and then I just gave up.

Fuck it, I thought. If I was going to work that hard and eat that little and see nothing for results, I might as well give up.

And so I did. I felt like crap and I looked like crap, but I just ate what I wanted and really didn't put on that much weight. By that point, my weight was hovering pretty close to the weight I was back when I started in 2007.

I figured I just had a crappy metabolism, and way too much stress on my plate. The Kid had been acting out in some pretty horrible, terrible ways and my stress levels were sky high. I wasn't sleeping well, I'd wake up in the middle of the night feeling as if someone had turned on the adrenaline valves.

So when I went in for my annual physical back in July, I complained to my nurse practitioner that I wasn't feeling well. I was tired, I was cold, I was trying to lose weight and the weight wasn't coming off, and I'd even gained weight during times when I was really limiting calories and increasing exercise.

She looked at my chart and noticed that my thyroid values (which had been taken a year before by another doctor) indicated that I was hypothyroid. She checked my chart, and we discovered that labs taken as early as 2006 were also hypothyroid.

I have been needlessly suffering for at least four years, and probably longer.

The nurse practitioner ordered new lab work, and once we got the results, she started me on thyroid medication.

And I feel better. I don't think my dosage is quite right yet because I still feel tired. Granted, I'm not exhausted to the point of paralysis like I was, and I've got the energy to exercise without feeling completely dead afterward.

This week, I even started the couch to 5k program. The Wife, The Kid and I have gone running twice this week.

So yeah, I'm still old, grossly overweight and out of shape, but I'm giving it a try.

And since I started the thyroid medication a month ago, I've lost a bit more than 20 lbs.

I'm embarrassed to admit how much I weigh right now, though. I'll update my sidebar when I'm less disgusted with myself.

But that's why I haven't blogged.

And now I'm back.