Hi!

About 1 year and 9 months ago I began a journey to lose weight and become healthier.  I decided to start this blog to organise my thoughts on my journey.  My thoughts churn around in my head as if I am speaking to an invisible audience and to be honest, this is the best way to quieten those thoughts, to let them out.  So I am not writing this blog for anyone but myself...  but I am aware that there may be others who might find my experiences and perspectives helpful, even if it's just to know others are on the journey too.  As such there will be no photos of me, ever.  I want to remain completely anonymous so I can talk more freely.

I am in my late 40s and have increasing chronic health issues.  Nothing dreadfully serious that can not be treated, but I have always known the direction my health was pointed in.  My mother had type 2 diabetes, underactive thyroid and hypertension and was also overweight.  She however didn't start to have some of these issues until a little later in life than me.  I am not diabetic, yet, and even if I lose weight, I will still have some risk factors for diabetes.  My Mum coped with her diabetes just fine and still lived and I would cope too.  Some people in my family have very strong feeling about my weight and diabetes is a terrifying prospect to them.  It's hard to explain to them that their attitudes have been very harmful over the years and have not helped me to feel empowered and strong.  

If there is one thing you need to be to change your life, its to be empowered and strong.  Its ok to be strong and do everything right for one day, even a week, maybe even a month, but when you are contemplating a journey that will take years, it's tough.  I know I will have bad days, bad weeks, even bad months and that's ok, because my focus is on the long term and I am not going to give up and fall all the way off the path.  Every day is a new day.

Sounds easy? right?  Ha!

It's taken me decades to get to a point where I could even contemplate doing this, where I had sorted enough of my demons and gained the strength and skills to contemplate it.  I also know that if I truly lose hope and focus and give up, I may never regain the strength to have another go.  And I have to do this.

Although my weight risen before Covid, my fitness dropped off considerably during Covid.  I was not going out and my activity level was pretty non-existent.  I didn't even have a set of scales that would measure my weight to begin with so I estimate my starting weight as 26.5 stone (168 kg).  The truth is, it could have been higher.  I was wearing a size 32 but starting to find that I really needed larger sizes, which was a huge issue as they are much less available.  I had reached a point where I was pretty anxious and wouldn't go out by myself.  Things were pretty bad.

There were two catalysts.  My husband works in the NHS and he changed jobs to one where he was doing a lot of wound care including diabetic would care.  I have a skin condition called Hidradenitis suppurativa (HS) which basically causes a range of skin issues around sweat glands.  The sores I have are often in places it is harder to keep clean and dry, places that rub.  They are routes for infection and I have had a few weird skin infections of varying types.  My Dad does not have HS but he has had issues with skin infections and following a stay in Intensive Care with cellulitis that turned necrotizing, he lost a chunk from his leg and is on permanent antibiotics for the infection now in his blood.  All these things swirled in my head, but my husbands change of job brought with it the realisation that as much as my body is able to deal with the infections and sores now, it won't always be able to.  Wound care will become a bigger part of my life, inevitably and the sad truth was that at my previous weight, I wouldn't be the one doing the wound care.  Add to that that people with HS statistically have a lower life expectancy and I could see how my quality of life was likely going to drop earlier than other peoples.  It was a bleak future.

The other catalyst was my family.  I have some family relationships I find difficult.  One family member I had had a very patchy relationship with decided to inform me I should consider bariatric surgery.  I am not currently in communication with that family member and have had to put in place very strong boudaries with other family member, that they will no longer bring up my weight or health in any way.  I don't see them very often, in part due to distance and as yet, they have not noticed my weight loss.  

I was very angry about the bariatric surgery comments though.  I believe unsolicited health advice is more often harmful than not.  If you don't understand someone's complete medical situation and have the appropriate knowledge, then you really shouldn't be doing it.  There is a huge difference in suggesting a skin cream to suggesting surgery and bariatric surgery is a pretty desperate step as far as I am concerned and I am not there yet.  It's one of those things that even doctors had not suggested to me, although that door opened upon request.  I imagine that as my health declined, there would have come a point where my weight became critical or I needed an operation of some sort and then, I imagine a GP would have suggested it.  It's a drastic step with lifelong consequences though and it's about weighing up the pros and cons.

I don't like that the anger I felt helped give me the impetus to start my journey, I don't want to give them any credit for starting things off, but it was in the mix.  If you have a relative with these issues, do not make suggestions, do not nag or body shame.  Love and support them.  Support their mental health, support healthier eating and more exercise.  By this I don't mean making choices for them, my family for instance never brought me Easter eggs, which was hurtful and achieved nothing as I was quite capable of buying my own chocolate.  Inviting a family member to go for walks and just being available for support is helpful.  When I started and felt unable to go out for walks alone, my husband would take me out for walks.  When I didn't feel able to join Slimming World alone, he went with me.  

So far he has lost 2.5 stone and I have lost 5 stone at Slimming World and 6 stone altogether.  I am considerably fitter and more active than I was.  I have worked on my mental health and am now able to go out by myself, although there are still some situations I avoid or prepare for.  I have a long way to go though and I am under no illusions that it will be easy.  There will be setbacks and harder times.  I don't actually know my end goal yet.  A size 16 would be so much better than where I am now and I may find I get that far and it's enough.  I may get really in to fitness and decide I want to be thinner and fitter than that.  Where I am now is so much better than where I was.

So if you are reading this and have similar issues, I hope you find it useful in some way.  I am pretty focused on what I am doing and spend a lot of time thinking, researching and processing.  You never know which thing that someone else has done will be something you find useful.  I have not tried everything but I am doing a lot and the things I am doing are shifting as I lose weight and get fitter.  I will be doing some backtracking to talk about things that have previously occurred.

There is one other thing I think I should add.  I don't have a diagnosis for Autism but I believe I am Autistic.  This is a new thing and it would never have occurred to me.  While I was looking at my anxiety, I was talking to a friend about it, she informed me that she believed I was Autistic because she wanted to explain the filing drawer way of looking at the autistic mind in relation to my anxiety.  This friend is someone with considerable experience and seniority in looking after Autistic people not able to live independently.  I had known her for years before she felt it was helpful to say something to me.  It's not entirely been easy and I am still unsure if I will look for diagnosis but it has helped me a lot in many ways.

That feeling of being different and always trying to be nice and acceptable...  Well now I know I am normal and acceptable, just Autistic (probably).  I feel like I have permission to let some of my quirks fly free...  Like last time I went to the Doctor's, I took a timeline with me, because it seemed the most efficient and accurate way of giving him lots of information at once.  I have accepted that my planning and research makes it easier to cope with different situations.  That spreadsheets are great.  That it's ok that I take time to process emotions and have difficulty dealing with people who are very emotional.  I don't always get jokes and my husband often has to explain them to me.  I struggle with facial recognition.  I struggle with the bit between small talk and deep and meaningful conversations.  I spend far too much time analysing social interactions because this understanding does not come intuitively to me.  Sometimes I miss the obvious and lack common sense, but I also see things others might miss and am pretty academic.

So this blog may get a little off track in places.  It may get bogged down in details.  I have decided not to edit me, you can always skip the bits that are too much.  Just because I am approaching my weight loss with a lot of thought, planning and spreadsheets does not mean you have to, but there may be some things I have come across that help, that you can relate to.  We are all beautiful in our diversity.  You do you.