Visiting the depths again!!
Oh boy, I've left it weeks again! I keep forgetting to get online, and then most evenings, I am soooo tired, I just want to sprawl in front of the TV once we've dropped Mum off home.
I think it's partly a side effect of the pregabalin I was prescribed in January. I does knock me out. Another bad side effect: I've gained another stone (14lb). I wasn't warned this could happen and it really got me down. It went on in just 3 weeks and now I can't shift it. Go to Google and type in "pregabalin weight gain" and you'll get pages and pages of stuff; research, forums, drugs sites, all saying it makes you gain weight. Normally I'd have looked it up before taking it, but I was in such a bad way in January, I just wanted anything that would help so I just took it.
Mum's on it too. It can be prescribed for anxiety (me), pain, and seizures (mum). Guess what? She's put on over a stone too!! She needed to gain *some* weight, but now even she is gaining too much.
You go to the doctor and they just shrug, like it's so unimportant compared to what it's treating. But it *is* important, isn't it? It affects your fitness and you feel about yourself.
I've been keeping a food diary and also a log of my activity, to see if I get enough 'exercise'. I've got my bike out again and I'm walking a bit more. All this isn't always possible if you're feeling completely bushed though!
Let me know if you have any weight loss tips!!!!!
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Head-wise, I hit rock bottom a few weeks ago. One night I was crying so badly I went into an asthma attack which was quite scary and I was coughing for a few days afterwards.
I hadn't been as low as I was that day for a very long time and I really didn't want to hang on, but told myself I had to hang on for Luvbug, and Mum, and my gorgeous Scooter-cat, too.
It occurred to me- and sorry if this causes offence- but it occurred to me that dying for someone else is easy in comparison to living for them, once you are in so much pain inside you can't bear to go on otherwise. To carry on for someone else's sake alone can feel a lot harder than dying when you are down in that abyss.
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I've managed to do some cards for people but I'll put them in separate post so people don't have to visit this depressing stuff if they don't want to! LOL
4 comments:
Diet tips huh. Well I have one but it's not easy. You can eat all you want to though! Basically, it's a low-fat vegan diet. Lots of veggies, fruits, whole grains and legumes. I went ahead and ate my morning cereals but used rice milk instead of regular milk. (I think for just weight loss you could use skim milk and not be so strictly vegan). I would eat vegetable rice curries over brown rice, fried rice with almost no fat and no eggs (that would be my whole dinner, the curry OR the fried rice). It wasn't fun but it worked. I wasn't even trying to lose weight but was trying to get some arthritis pain under control.
At least they had a medicine that seems to be helping even if it is causing weight gain.
Yup, dying is easier, however, I find life worth living if I can find one thing to laugh about per day. Since you have the same excuse I do (albeit Bob and Dilly are completely different than Spauld, Ted, and Phil), you know, if all else fails, stuffed animals will make you laugh.
Dieting tip? I don't know how this translates into English units of measurements but it takes 3500 calories to make or lose one pound (American pound, not money. lol) Therefore, if you are maintaining a weight (which you aren't right now, but not your fault) and know how many calories you average a day, then you can subtract a mere 500 calories per day and should lose about a pound a week. (We are women, so our bodies never do "should," so consider three pounds per month as good as one pound per week.) Futz with the 3500 mark to lose according to what is good for you - not as quickly as you can possibly do (another sign of being a woman - the desire to knock off all pounds in a day. lol)
And, if you don't know how to calculate how many calories you should eat per day, for women it's roughly 11 times the number of pounds we should weigh. And, just in case a man wants to know the same thing, they're lucky. They require 14 times the number of pounds they want to weigh.
Personally, I find it a lot easier to subtract 500 calories per day from my diet than start thinking 1 can only eat 1870 calories per day. (I'm tall, so I get more calories than the average woman and it's still not food enough. lol)
Lynn
aka Mom to the Teddy Bear Family
My GP gave me a good diet plan, Helena - I will email it to you when I get home if you like (on hols at the moment). Take care :)
Big hugs. Mega big hugs!!! Thank you for the box of goodies too and I promise not to tell about the ladybug cards!!!
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