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