What We've Gained From This Experience

Weight.

We've gained weight.

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How much?  

Couldn't even tell you but I can tell you it's a bit more than end of vacation weight which is usually about 20 lbs for me if when we go off the deep end.  I'm going to assume 25-30 if I'm being honest.  

Going to the hospital almost every day for three weeks and eating whatever was open or available when you got home whether that was oatmeal, a big bowl of cereal or whatever wasn't a great habit to get into but dinner was our "grounding" time each night.  We would come home from the horrors of the hospital hoping that mom's pain meds were going to give her a decent night's sleep and we would just stare into space, go up to watch TV but fall asleep 10 minutes later and wake up at 1-2am.  I'd usually do email updates in there too.  There was a point in the beginning we thought we could throw a walk in there but that 90 minutes was going to be better spent with her and exercise was not a priority.

When she was gone, it was the overwhelming gut kick of WTF just happened?  She started the last month here and this one, she's gone...with zero warning.  You go over all of the mistakes that were made that cost her the opportunity to even fight and losing her ability to communicate with us and now there are funerals to plan, calls to make, papers to sign, "adult" crap rolling downhill onto you and you can't breathe.  The last effin' thing we cared about is making sure to eat properly and exercise.  Some days I wanted to not cook dinner.  Some days I wanted comfort food.  We might throw two walks in there at some point thinking we're getting back into a routine but we weren't because it was more for mental health.  There were a few times I pushed myself to make healthier meals just so I didn't feel like I was failing the Mr as a wife.  Flashbacks to gaining 60 lbs after losing his dad and the toll being the researcher to try to save him (and we would have) are prevalent.  We didn't have the tools then to handle things properly and now that we do, it's still hard.  The days of wanting to phone it in because you can't handle more than that are right there saying "next week" or "tomorrow."  I want to say we're getting back on track this week but as I'm writing this we're only two days back into that and resisting the urge after a morning walk to walk straight to our fancy bakery and order a morning bun. 

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I have felt like a failure here for about a decade because that's the last time I lost any weight consistently.  We used to be able to count on being a size smaller the following year and would buy clothes at the end of the season to have new clothes.  When we started doing more than one vacation per year, that all stopped.  Now as we're in that gray area that is past middle age if you're going off of life expectancy, our hormones are fighting us.  What vacation weight used to be pretty easy to lose has been horrible the past two years.  Before this stuff with Mom, I still had 10 lbs of Vermont Christmas weight to lose.  I don't know how I'm going to do this when every fiber of my being wants to curl up into a ball and say f**k it.  I have one month before my annual with my gynie and I really don't want her to look at my weight and say "uh, you've gained a lot of weight since I saw you six months ago" so I can break down for the 83rd time and explain what I'm going through.  

If I thought it was hard before, now it feels insurmountable with the anvil of grief we carry.  I am still very firmly planted in survival mode as the BS of life waits for no one.  (Yay me for needing a biopsy on yet another part of my body in a month.  Is life just waiting to find out when you have cancer?  Sure feels like it.)  I feel like adding all of the things that need to happen to lose weight are just like "are you friggin' kidding me?" but I know I need to at least try.  I have these little smiley face stickers from Mom's that I'm going to use to hopefully motivate us.  We used to do that back in the day and it was always nice to see a month full of stickers looking back at us.

So here's the loose outline of a plan.

This week: 

Get back into walking since the weather is letting up and the Mr's schedule is flexible.  

Increase water intake even if it's only by a few ounces.

Don't succumb to eating out and calling it a victory if you 'only' do it once.  You already blew Sunday.

Next week: 

Continue walking

Keep up water consumption.

Start tracking food again.

Weigh in.

I know if I weighed in right now, it would completely make me whip up a batch of brownies and cry in the corner and say "I can't do this."  We need to work back into exercise and my hope for the weeks following is to add strength in there starting slow at twice a week.  If we add in bands or something before that, so be it but I'm not putting it on my to do list for two weeks.  

I feel like we're starting from square one.  I know Mom was so proud of her weight loss which kills me because we now know it's because of what some of us feared.  But I won't negate that with the joy she felt when we gave her a $200 gift card to one of her favorite online shops so she could buy new summer clothes that would fit her.  She was thrilled with them...even if she never got to wear them.  I want to feel that joy again not just for her but for myself, for us.  Right now I just want to know what it's like to throw on a shirt and not have to stretch out the gut.  I'd like clothes to fit me and anything past getting back to what we were before our Christmas trip last year, will be that much better though I know that isn't happening this year.  

Anyone else struggling right now?  If you want to re-commit, lend support or just say woot, have at it!

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