TL;DR I could go blind if I don't lose weight, and I'm just looking for some support or encouragement.
This is the first time I've ever thought to approach this reddit page. Honestly I haven't been too active on reddit in years but some serious health issues that have presented themselves over the past couple weeks have really scared me into making a serious effort to finally lose some weight.
My history with diet and weight loss is pretty fraught, as I think most people's are. I've always been chubby for as long as I can remember. As a teenager I discovered calorie counting apps and I became obsessed. I never sustainably lost any weight, but I was convinced that if I tracked and reduced my calories enough, eventually I would be skinny. In university I got really into yoga and running and I barely ate out to save money, so I was arguably the healthiest at that point that I've ever been despite not really ever losing weight. After I graduated and entered the real world, life kind of got in the way and I gained more weight. A couple years later I started a job that required very little mental energy and with drastically reduced hours, so I had a lot of spare time to work out and put effort into my health again. I lost a ridiculous amount of inches and gained quite a bit of muscle over the course of 2 months, which I obviously couldn't keep and gained all the weight back over the course of a year. This rapid weight change gave me non alcoholic fatty liver, which took 2 years to correct.
Despite the pandemic, I was managing to stay active and eat well. Then, in mid September I got a call saying that a spot opened up at the end of September for me to finally get breast reduction surgery - something I'd been working towards and waiting for for many years. The surgery went well, but unfortunately I was not allowed to exercise or return to work for 6 weeks post op. This led to a ~10 lb weight gain which didn't concern me because I knew that once I could start moving again I would likely lose the weight. No big deal right?
Boy was I wrong. For the past year I've been dealing with worsening migraines, trialling different medications, and I was being pretty closely followed by a neurologist. The week before Christmas I was hit with the worst and longest lasting migraine I've ever had. After a day in the ER, a lumbar puncture, and a night on an inpatient neurology unit, I was diagnosed with idiopathic intracranial hypertension aka increased pressure in my brain. The word idiopathic basically means "unknown", so this increased pressure isn't cause by a tumour or some other invading source. The only real known correlating factors are that in something like 95% of cases it affects obese or overweight women of childbearing age (20s - 40s) who have recently gained weight, which is exactly my demographic. It doesn't even have to be a significant amount of weight gain - it could be as little as 5 lbs! The known treatments for this condition are acetazolamide (which for any of you who have travelled to high altitude locations, would recognize it as the antidiuretic drug that helps prevent altitude sickness) and weight loss. Failing to treat this condition could result in permanent blindness, as the increased pressure compresses and damages the optic nerve.
So this is how I ended up here. I had to stop the medication after 3 days because the side effects were so awful that I couldn't imagine trying to return to work or real life while taking them, so my only other option at this point is weight loss. I can see that there's an accountability thread, which is cool, but I think I'm mostly just looking for advice or encouragement or honestly anything at this point. I'm an ER nurse so I have a fairly active job where I'm pretty much never sitting, I'm pescatarian and try to eat a fairly balance diet, and I run and do yoga 4-5 times a week. I had really just recently sort of accepted that I was never meant to have a thin body, especially since everyone else in my family is overweight despite also being active, healthy individuals. Now I have to actively try to lose weight without really knowing what else I could possibly be doing, while also not falling into old toxic restrictive habits, or else face a lifetime of debilitating headaches and blindness.
I'm so sorry, I did not mean to make this so long, but it's been really difficult trying to wrap my head and heart around this.
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