So admittedly I haven’t written one of these posts in a long time because I kind of hit rock bottom with the whole diet & exercise efforts. The last post that I wrote was just before going on our three-week road trip, so you can guess how well I ate during that whole excursion! Sadly, I can probably count the number of times I’ve hopped on the elliptical since then on one hand, attributed to a toss up between stress and just not making any progress whatsoever, but nonetheless I want to start back up and try again for a couple of reasons.
1) As usual, one of my New Years Resolutions for next year is going to be to lose weight.
2) Over the last couple of months I’ve seen some medical diagnoses that are hopefully going to make this goal actually attainable going forward.
First and foremost, a few months back my doctor finally diagnosed me with some sort of thyroid problems, which honestly I don’t know all of the details about offhand except that it can really screw with your metabolism. Admittedly, I was kind of hoping that this would just be the magic pill that would cause the weight to simply fall off once it got stabilized, and it didn’t … but at least it’s one less hidden variable working against me going forward.
The other more drastic change is that earlier this fall I was diagnosed with sleep apnea – something that my wife has been suggesting for a while because I snore like a buzz saw (and apparently stop breathing during the night!), but I never wanted to accept because it would mean that I’d have to wear this creepy gas mask to bed for the rest of my life. Well, after continuing to not show any signs of weight loss after stabilizing my thyroid, the doc sent me off to do a sleep study (a horrible night spent with wires taped all over my body) and at the end of six hours of “sleep,” they concluded that I had woken up from not breathing something like 40 or 50 times over the course of the six-hour period.
This is important because apparently the body needs to actually get rest in order to properly burn fat, which it can’t do if instead it has to focus on waking me up subconsciously every 15 minutes when I start to suffocate in my sleep!
Yikes, indeed.
And as much as I really didn’t want to hear all of this, it was kind of a relief because it actually makes a lot of sense. It’s the same reason that I was feeling lethargic and tired all of the time – because although, yes, I’m fat and that plays a big part of it, at the same time I’m also feeling drowsy because I’m not actually sleeping in the truest sense of the word at night, and of course, shorting myself sleep to stay up late working on stuff just compounds that even further! Looking back, it seems really obvious, but frankly, it took a long time getting here and I honestly probably would’ve kept on denying it even longer if I wasn’t beyond ready to give up with weight loss…
So the long and the short of it is that as a result, I now have to use a CPAP machine when I sleep, which is the creepy gas mask thing where I wear a little mask over my nose that pushes air down my breathing passage and keeps me from stopping breathing in the middle of the night. I hate the thing and it’s a huge pain in the ass, but on the bright side, I do feel a little more rested and I don’t feel like I yawn during the day nearly as much as I used to. At the time I’m writing this, I’ve been using the thing for a little over a month.
Also, Sara says that my snoring disappeared completely, which I know is a huge bonus for her!
That said, the game plan now is this – basically, try again!!! These were two potentially huge variables working against me that I had absolutely no knowledge of over the past years, so it could very well be that now that I’m actively managing them, I actually stand a chance at losing weight on my own. Granted, I don’t expect the weight loss to be handed to me – I’m also starting to accept that as I get older, my metabolism isn’t exactly working for me anymore, but at least if I have a fighting chance instead of doing everything I’m supposed to and then still just failing miserably, that’s gotta be worth another try at this whole thing. For all of those other reasons that I don’t want to be overweight, and now also because I don’t want to wear this stupid gas mask for the rest of my life!
Holiday snacking and our ridiculously cold weather has made diet & exercise tough these last couple weeks of December, but so far that’s the plan and I’m slowly inching myself back into the habits of working out and eating better that are supposed to make this whole thing work. Today’s post is really just an attempt to bring things back up to speed, but I’ll do my best to write more in 2011 once I get things back into gear…
*fingers crossed*