my diet and exercise history

Exercise, diet and I have a long, on-again off-again relationship. As a teen, I didn’t have the most active Jr. high/high school experience. You see, I took a LOT of music classes, and because of this, they let me bump my Phys. Ed. I took PE in Jr. high, but in high school, I believe I only had to take one quarter of it, because I was in 3 different choirs. Should they have let me do this? Meh- who knows. I was never very sporty or athletic, so I highly doubt PE would have changed that for me. But, physical exercise and movement is important… so, who knows what would have been best.

I tried in high school a couple of times to lose some weight, but really, I wasn’t that overweight. Maybe 15 pounds or so. I mean, that’s not NOTHING, but it wasn’t horrible. Never really succeeded though, and carried my extra weight into college.

In college, I gained the freshman 15-ish, and as I said, I was already probably about 15 pounds overweight. So, in my sophomore year of college, my roommate and I went on our very own design of a weight loss plan. It really wasn’t much of a weight loss plan; but when you’re 19 and you’ve never been much of an exerciser, then you add in exercise 5 days a week, plus cutting calories, the weight comes off pretty easily. Ah, the metabolism of high school/college. For exercise we did a Kathy Smith work out tape as often as we could, and that’s pretty much it. We also cut calories in probably a not very healthy way. I mean, we didn’t starve ourselves, but we still didn’t eat that healthily. Just ate LESS of the junk we were already eating. It worked though, and when Is started my junior year, I was down about 35 pounds.

Throughout the rest of college, I kept the weight off MOSTLY, but probably gained back about 10 pounds. I wasn’t really exercising, but I was really busy, so that helped.

In my early 20’s, I slowly started gaining it back, so my friend Jamie and I went on Weight Watchers. We also started working out together every weekday morning. It worked swimmingly, and I lost about 40 pounds. Then, I broke my foot. This was devastating to me, because I had been doing so well, and still wanted to lose a little weight, but because of my injury, I couldn’t exercise, and I got depressed. I gained back about 20 pounds.

The next time I lost weight was when I was doing a show, and found out I had to be in a bathing suit on stage. Now, granted, it was a 1940’s bathing suit so there was a little more coverage, but a bathing suit nonetheless. I started doing Weight Watchers again, and also started running. I had very little free time, as I went straight from work to the show, but had about an hour after I arrived before I had to start getting ready for the show so I started running during that time. I wasn’t a very fast runner, but I’d run for 30-45 minutes, take a shower, and then do a very dance heavy show for two hours. I probably lost about 20 pounds during that show.

Sadly, it’s all uphill from there. We moved to California for two months because my husband got a show, and then moved straight there to New York. I just slowly gained and gained. I think I gained because we were lonely and didn’t have many friends, and didn’t know what we were doing in this big city, and, I was in my 30’s; my metabolism slowed down. Then I discovered I had PCOS, which explained why weight loss had always been a little slow going for me. I tried a couple of times to lose weight while living here, and I think I was able to lose maybe 10 pounds each time, but then would gain it back.

When we started trying to conceive; I really wanted to lose weight beforehand. But, I had a lot to lose, and once we decided we were ready, we wanted to start right away. I think I knew it was going to be hard for us to conceive with my wonky cycles, so I didn’t want to waste time. When we started trying and nothing was happening, and then we started facing hurdle after hurdle, I slowly started to gain weight. I was depressed and discouraged. You’d think I was gaining weight because I was gorging myself or something, but no, I had just stopped paying really close attention, and the weight slowly climbed up.

After my miscarriage, the bottom just kind of dropped out of our worlds. I think I gained another 5-10 pounds after this happened. And now we’re here. I’m pregnant with twins, and started out at a not very desirable weight.

I think and worry about it constantly. I don’t want to get so huge that I can’t move around very well. I mean, this will already happen since I’m carrying twins, but if I gain too much weight, how will my frame carry it all? I don’t want gestational diabetes. Now, I know that GD doesn’t only happen to overweight women. It can happen even if you’re a perfectly normal weight. But with my extra weight and my PCOS, and my twins, my risk goes up.

I have a doctor’s appointment tomorrow, and I will face the dreaded scale. So far, by some miracle, I’ve only gained four pounds. I am worried about my weigh in tomorrow though, because I read that starting this week, weight gain will happen faster. The babies are growing faster. Of course I want them to grow. Grow babies, grow! I’d just prefer that my ass, thighs, and arms don’t grow along with them. My doctor had said it would be great if I could only gain a total of 15 pounds. It makes me nervous that I only have 11 more pounds I can gain from now until the end of June. I mean, that’s a little over 16 weeks. So, to do this, I can only gain a little over a half a pound a week from now until the end. GULP.

SO. What to do. Even though I should have been doing this all along; I’m going to start exercising. Why haven’t I yet? Well, mostly because I’ve been tired. All of my first trimester I was just exhausted. Couldn’t make myself do much of anything except for go to work and come home. Now that I’m 2/3 of the way through my 2nd trimester, I’m realizing; this isn’t going to get any easier. I just have to start now. I have 3 pregnancy tapes, and I plan on also doing some walking. I can’t do anything too totally crazy, because I wasn’t working out too heavily before I was pregnant, so I can’t change things up so dramatically. But, I can get some in, and hopefully be healthier for me, and for the babies.

I’m going to work out tonight when I get home, and I’ll let you know how it goes. I’m not really looking forward to it, as I didn’t sleep well last night so I’m already tired. But I know it’s for the best, for me and my two girls. So, it will be a focus of mine from now all the way through my pregnancy. Wish me luck! :)

~M

courage and strength and health

I thought I could stop reading baby blogs.

And I have stopped reading a lot of them. But some of them- mostly the ones where the baby is brand new, or the mom is still pregnant... those are harder to stop reading.

Why do I read them? I don't consider myself self destructive or someone who likes to be in pain. In fact, I quite hate being sad and in pain. I tend to avoid it at all costs. I think though, the blogs make me feel connected still, to the things I lost. I lost the identity of being a pregnant lady. I lost the chance to ever have my "first pregnancy." I lost my husband's nightly talks to the little blueberry and the pride and happiness and love on his face when he did so. I lost the excitement of looking forward to April of 2011, knowing that we'd be a family of 3 by then. I lost a little piece of my heart.

I lost my baby.

But I think sometimes these blogs make me feel like it wasn't and isn't so far away. Though sometimes they just make me cry; and when that happens I just click back to something less sad to read.

Also, I wish I didn't have envy of pregnant people. I don't WANT to. I hate envy; it's the ugliest emotion, and it's completely useless. I guess I have little blips of envy; not constant, but it's there every once in a while. I hate it.

Today I was reading a design blog, and since the author is a new mother, she posted birth stories every Wednesday starting when she found out she was pregnant. They were so fun to read, because every story was different, and it really gave you a sense of how you just never know how your birth will go. I think reading some of the more negative ones would scare some people, but I liked having the knowledge and I also liked seeing the strength of all those women that went through hell, and in the end, it didn't matter, because they had a sweet little baby in their arms. But today's story was different.

It was a story about a woman who at 36 weeks, had a placental abruption, and the baby died in utero- but she had to deliver it naturally, because she was losing too much blood for a c-section. She had to go through labor, knowing her baby would not be alive when it was finally born.

It sounds so sad (and it IS) but she got through it, and derived so much strength from what happened, and eventually did go on to have a healthy baby. She really really inspired me.

I realize that what I went through is COMPLETELY different. My baby was only a little over 7 weeks old. It just doesn't compare to what she went through; but I still get a lot of inspiration from hearing her story and reading about her immense strength. You'd think that it would just make me horribly sad to read it (and it did, for a few minutes) but it also gave me strength. Courage. Knowing that I can handle this. It's hard; but I can do it.

On a slightly different note, last weekend (after pizza, 3 nights in a row of gin and tonics and dinner at a pub that may or may not have included splitting a pitcher of beer with my man) I decided I was done being self destructive. You see, though I was THRILLED to be pregnant, (and I was. I've never been happier.) I always was a little sad that I wasn't exactly at a healthy weight when I conceived. It wasn't a vanity thing; it was a concern for my baby and their future health. You read all of this literature about how being overweight when pregnant has been tied to children having problems with their weight later on in life. I didn't want that. I knew that most likely my child would inherit my genes for weight struggle, but I didn't want to add on top of that. However, I was pregnant, and I just decided that I would have to be as healthy as possible during my pregnancy.

Now that I'm no longer pregnant, this weekend I decided that for my future children, I'm going to do my damndest to lose some weight and be healthier before I'm pregnant again. I've not spoken to my doctor yet, but everything I've read said that you should wait 2-3 cycles before trying again. Not sure if that applies to me, since unmedicated, my cycles can last upwards of 3 months a piece. So, I guess we'll see on that front.

Now, don't get me wrong; I ate quite healthily before, but my body holds on to weight like crazy; so when I lose weight, I have to be VERY strict about calories in and out, portions, and I have to exercise a great deal. So, that's what I'm going to do. For the next few months, I'm going to push it, hard. I am motivated and get strength from the thought of my future children, and how I want to be the healthiest I can be when I carry them, and after. I re-joined Weight Watchers, and will start exercising twice a day- 5-6 days a week. This may sound like a lot; but lets remember that I'm sitting on my butt for at least 10 hours a day (1 hour commute on the subway both ways, and 8 hours of work), so 60-90 minutes of exercise in one day isn't actually too much. And, it's necessary.

Necessary to get healthier and lose some weight, and also to distract and empower me. I always worried about getting lots of exercise while we were trying to conceive, because they say that lots of exercise can screw up your cycle. Having a fairly screwy cycle to begin with, I was worried I'd make it worse. But right now, I don't care. My only focus is health. We can't try now anyway, and I'm not sure if emotionally we'd be ready to try if we could.

So, I do this for my future babies, my husband, and me. Every day is still hard. Today has been an oddly hard day. But, after reading that birth story, and realizing this weekend that self destruction with food and alcohol isn't going to make anything better, I'm committed to being healthier. And soon, I'm sure, happier.

~M