I've been struggling with my weight only since I hit my 30s. Before that I thought I was fat, but actually I was more like a stick.
Sigh. Why can't we appreciate our bodies for what they are when they are that way?
In my 30s my weight crept up slowly, then I read this book, started to work out every day, went to Weight Watchers, did the "Points," and lost a bunch of weight (got to 115 which is probably ideal for me). Then it crept up slowly again. When I started trying to conceive, it started to creep up a little faster.
I am an internet and book junkie. I read everything I could find about maximixing my chances of conceiving a baby. One of the things I read at one point, I don't even remember where, was that you shouldn't let your heart rate exceed 130 when you are exercising if you are trying to conceive. So I quit jogging. I joined the YMCA to go to the pool, but I almost never went. And I didn't want to diet. Partially I was afraid of depriving my body of some crucial nutrient that was required in order to conceive. And partially because every month when my period came, unwelcome as usual, I needed Reeses Peanut Butter cups.
The combination of no exercise and my crazy diet of health food and junk food did nothing positive for my figure. We kept working on conceiving for more than a year on our own, and during all this time I followed this crappy unhealthy program. By the time I got to the IVF, my weight had gotten as high as it had ever been -- to about 150. I am 5 '1" so that is 20-30 pounds overweight for me.
I refer to 150 as my "pre-IVF weight." It is not my ideal weight, but it is a marker somewhere that is meaningful to me.
During my pregnancy I gained almost 50 lbs. At the end I was just below 200. After Jack was born it dropped down to the high 170s. I didn't realize how bad I looked until I saw myself on a video tape when Jack was about six months old. I saw a fat chick in the video, and I hadn't been thinking about myself that way.
I was pumping all the time (to get the milk to feed Jack), getting no sleep, and not taking very good care of myself. My immune system was a wreck, I wasn't taking my vitamins, and I was getting every daycare cold that Jack brought home. I felt like an overfarmed field. I felt depleted, and I'd been trying to fix it with Starbucks reduced fat cinnamon swirl coffee cakes (9 Weight Watchers points, ugh!)
In January when Jack was six months old I went to get a massage. Over the years I've had my most enlightening epiphanies on the massage table. The process of getting naked, lying on a table in a sweet smelling room with candles burning, and feeling someone hands working out the stress that has accumulated in your shoulders, neck, back, legs, arms, and even your face -- well, it pulls me away from the day-to-day and helps me see the big picture again. (Which is why I went to massage school after being laid off five years ago.)
On this day I saw clearly that my health was in crisis and I wasn't being effective in my life anymore because of it. I resolved to take small steps to get it back, starting with vitamins and Weight Watchers.
So I went to Weight Watchers starting in January and followed the program. The first week was tough, but after that it got easy. Between January and June I lost 22 lbs. I'd gotten my "10 percent award" (for losing 10 percent of your body weight), my "16 week award" (for making it to 16 consecutive meetings, which makes it more likely that you will hit your ultimate goal), and several other "5 lb. awards." But the milestone that really mattered to me (and the one no one at the meetings knew about) was that I was down to what I considered close enough to my "pre-IVF weight." That was the one I'd been shooting for since January.
And since I hit that in June I've been stuck here. Subconsciously I think that now that I'm about to do IVF again part of me is saying, "Hey, why not just wait til the whole fertility thing is over forever before taking the weight loss any further? You don't want to diet and deprive your growing eggs of vital nutrients, yada, yada, excuse, excuse."
To break this plateau, I've upped my exercise and tried to start writing down everything I eat again. (Well, sometimes I write down some of the things I eat.) But tonight I saw this article about how regular exercise of more than 4 hours a week decreases IVF patients' success rates.
Sigh. This is like the whole heart-rate-over-130-being-bad thing again.
Are we, the infertility patients, getting mixed messages about weight? Well, take a look at this other article that I spotted this morning about how not losing the baby weight and/or gaining weight in between pregnancies increases a woman's chances of complications such as preeclampsia, gestational diabetes and stillbirth.
What's a girl to do?
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