Changing My Diet - On the Metabolically Broken

I have Hyperprolactinemia and Poly Cystic Ovarian Syndrome (PCOS) one of the many problems with this condition is that it's horribly under diagnosed. The other is that this is not a problem rooted in the ovaries, but it is a pituitary gland disease. For this particular disease the pituitary gland swells and it secretes excess prolactin. Since I'm not a doctor, I suggest you use Google from someone qualified to get more information.

My main point is that I have this disease. It went undiagnosed for so long that it ended up breaking my endocrine system, but now that my hormones are managed I'm feeling better.

However, my body is still pretty broken in that my triglycerides are off the charts and if I don't get them down my endocrine nurse is going to have her own heart attack. I also have tragic blood sugar issues. The disease also caused me to gain weight, which I now need to/want to lose.

But right now my body is pretty messed up metabolically and along with the disease  the root of this is....dum dum dum...in my childhood. I know, you're shocked.

So when I was 9 I was told by my mother that I was fat. Because she is just a kind and loving mom like that.When I look back on photos I realize I wasn't fat, but reality and my childhood were not really in agreement anyway.

She kept telling my I was fat, which was super helpful to me in both the development of my sense of self as well as wondering what in the hell I was supposed to do about it. She was the person who fed me. I was 9. It wasn't like I had the wherewithal to go do some research on body development and nutrition.

My mom decided to take me to a doctor that  "helped" overweight children and he put me on the tragic 1,000 calorie, low fat, high carb diet that helped make my body the trainwreck it is today.

I was on this diet of horrors until I was in my 20s and my lovely husband helped me to get a grip on reality. Unfortunately the damage had already been done and this along with my disease left me confused and lost.

In my quest to get healthy while I was sick I did lots of research on nutrition, micro-nutrients, alternative diets, etc. My family and friends had the poor pleasure of living with me through the many trends of no sugar baking, putting kale in everything and a whole lot of other nutrition ploys I tried in an attempt to stop feeling like I'd been run over by a car.

So now my body is healing, but I'm still not healthy. I need to change the way I eat so I can get the triglycerides down, manage the blood sugar and lose the weight.

So I'm on Atkins. Which sucks. Atkins is a low carb diet that should include veggies and starts at 20 grams of carbs a day. I have found that I need to stick to less then 12 grams of carbs a day or my body goes off ketosis, which is how you can measure weather Atkins is working or not.

So my body is so metabolically broken that it freaks out if I have really any carbs at all. I think that is so weird. It also means that I eat meat and eggs. That's pretty much it. I dream of brussel sprouts, but if I try to eat one, my body goes of ketosis.

This means that my body is SOOOO sensitive to what I eat that it is like dealing with a twitch control on a video game. One little push and my avatar falls off a cliff.

For a woman raised that veggies are better than anything, fat's the devil and carbs are great. This is a huge shift for me. I keep trying to sneak veggies into my diet, but then my body freaks out. It's so weird!

So I now have a list on my fridge of what I can eat so I stop trying to add in veggies and I'm stuck on this for probably a year. That seems to be how long it should take for my body to reset and stop flipping out.

I am not happy about this. So when you eat your brussels sprouts and your beets think of me kindly.

Ovary Removal is Great!

I had the surgery to remove my ovaries and uterus about a year and a half ago and I still feel amazingly better.

I had an ovarian disease along with a pituitary gland disease that was causing them to fight with each other and kill the rest of my endocrine system.

I was a little concerned to have my ovaries removed since I didn't want to go into menopause and was worried about hormone replacement therapy, but after talking with several of my friends who went through with the hysterectomy only to then have something go wrong with their ovaries and another operation, I decided to just have it all out.

I also decided to take the hormone replacement therapy so that I can have a shot at feeling better for the first time in the past 10 years or so.

My surgery was done laparoscopically with the Da Vinci robot, so I have about 4 small scars and one of them is in my belly button, where they pulled out the organs they were removing.

My doctor informed me after the surgery that I had terrible endometriosis and fibroids in my uterus, which just added to the suckage I was experiencing.

My recovery was about 3 weeks until I felt like myself and was able to be up and around comfortably, which was much faster than I was expecting and it was at 3 weeks that my doctor removed all physical restrictions...yeah!

I was sore as hell during the first week of recovery and I just laid in bed and took Vicodin and ate soft foods (which was really the worst part). The best part was that I had the surgery right before Thanksgiving and so I was able to watch super cheesy Hallmark Channel Christmas-themed romantic comedies, which was awesome!

I'm so different than I was for my kids entire lives that they keep talking about how much more fun I am now, which is bittersweet, but at least they get to see the good side of me.

I know that it's tired and cliche, but I feel like my old self and that I now have my life back again.

Being Hungry

My daughter was talking with me about crazy diet trends and photoshopping and I wanted to share this story, but since I'm trying not to unnecessarily traumatize her I remembered that I have this handy blog to share the story and she can be traumatized later. 

One of my therapists was working with me on my middle school years and when she asked what my memories were of the time I just thought, "hungry."

I was on a strict diet from the time I was 10 until I was 15. I was eating 1,000 calories a day and I was always hungry.

To say that this left me with a poor body image is laughable. When your mom starts telling you how fat you are when you're 9 and puts you on a strict diet when you're 10 you develop body issues. To this day this is one of the aspects of my tragic childhood that is the hardest to let go of. I still have no real idea what I look like to other people and the fact that I had an undiagnosed adrenal gland disease for 10 years that caused me to gain weight regardless of what I ate has really left me reeling in the body love department.

I think that one of my greatest accomplishments as a mother is that my daughter has a positive body image, unfortunately my son has a mediocre body image, which makes me sad.

Anyway, as I will mention so many, many times, my mom was a child star. She acted in lots of big movies and wasn't a big name child actor, but enough of a star to have the trauma. Her mom told her she was fat her whole life and she decided to share the dysfunction with me.

I was told I was fat and would have to count calories and watch what I ate. This was a common theme for so many years and based on the "fat is bad" insanity of the 70s-80s that damage was done to both my body as well as my self image.

I was constantly put on a scale and no matter what I weighed I was told I was "fat." The really weird part of it is that my sister was considered the "pretty one" while I was the "smart one" but I was looking through childhood photos with my sister a moth ago and we looked the same.

I mean actually honest to god, the same. There were photos where we weren't sure which one was which. So I spent much of my childhood being told I was a fat pig and I looked exactly like my pretty sister. What the hell, right?!

My sister is just as smart as I am, but our mom needed something else to separate us, so why not make the younger kid feel stupid while she made the older kid feel fat.

So now I'm an adult who's been through so much therapy and ditched the crappy mom, but I'm still working on the body love. It's my self project for the next few years until I start to feel the love. My body has brought me two beautiful children and a lot of strength, but it will take work.