Weeks 5 and 6-- real food and more weight loss!

Positive Choice Week 6 and 7 

I will start off with the news I’m sure all are waiting to hear with bated breath…..

I’ve lost 27.6 lbs in 35 days!

This last week my weight loss was 3 lbs (before it had been between 4.2-4.6 lbs), so it is slowing down, but still pretty good. It should be higher next week, but we shall see.

Real food!

I mentioned before I was instructed to add another shake to my day. That did great for a couple of weeks at making me feel full, but Feb 24-27 I was so hungry I started shaking and was light-headed most of the time. I called Positive Choice. The PA I spoke with instructed me to  add a meal each day. So now I get to have 6 shakes a day (which is 150% of the nutrients I need) and then 3 oz of lean protein, 1/2 cup of non-startchy vegetables, and a small salad. So far this has helped me and I haven’t been shaky or light headed.

I am a bit concerned because I had all those shaky feelings, etc on days that did not exercise. I am really wanting to exercise. In fact, I did all the work in the program work book as well as accompanying book they gave me to set up an appropriate exercise program. I hadn’t started it yet because I was afraid that if I shook and was light headed without exercising I might feel worse with exercise, even with the extra food. I spoke at length with a NP before my meeting last night. Basically, she said I should be fine as long as I stick to the guidelines from the program.

My theme for this year is “Happy, Healthy Kornoff’s!”. In that light, I have been trying to add health to my entire life- including my family life. This means that my hubby and I got a babysitter and went on a proper date! Wohoo! We went to a restaurant and then a coffee shop to spend time together. It was even extra fun because I actually got to eat at the restaurant we went to— 6 pieces of wonderful sashimi!! It was the best tasting food I have ever had. I mean, it was good sashimi, but having that fantastic texture in my mouth was so exciting!! And the ginger they had to eat with it was delicious! Who knew ginger could be so delectable? We have another date set for Saturday during the day and I am looking forward to it as well. 

My pile of clothes to donate

In terms of my mental health, I have been doing better and taking time for myself. I have been feeling pretty successful and happy with the progress I am making towards whole person health. I was able to get rid of almost all the clothes I have been wearing for the last 5 months! It’s so exciting! I feel pretty and can see a difference in my face from the weight loss. I also realized that I have lost all the weight I gained after giving birth. This means the rest of the weight I have to lose is from IVF medications and pregnancy. This is encouraging to me because I gained exactly the recommended weight during pregnancy and had no power over the weight the IVF drugs put on me. This has helped my perspective immensely as I look ahead feeling like there is still so far to go.

In terms of spiritual health, I have been experiencing such renewal of the my spirit and can sense a change in myself. I find that I am first turning to God with situations that in the past would have caused me extreme anxiety and then maybe a couple days later I would think about praying about the situation. I will go more into that later.

Have a wonderful day!

Why I have a lemon in my freezer

Why I have a lemon in my freezer: coping/regulation strategies during the pursuit of healing

I chose this weight loss program because it addresses more than just weight loss. Each week I attend a group. This group is fantastic. I leave feeling heard, supportive, and with a feeling of community. The leader, Heather, is organized, but also fantastic at giving each member invested attention each week.

Our first group topic was Coping Strategies. I have degrees in Psychology and Sociology and a Master’s in OT, work experience with children specifically targeting emotional regulation strategies, and years of therapy. Even with all that experience, education, and mental health work, coping strategies/regulation strategies never seemed to be truly something I could integrate into my life. I do a great job helping Katya in this area and she now automatically put in a lot of her strategies to regulate herself, but I struggle to incorporate them in my life- perhaps because many of my maladaptive coping/regulation strategies have been in place for decades.

Coping strategies we came up with in class

Our leader, Heather, explained that if, on a scale of 1-10, your stress level is a 7-10, in order to cope with the situation you need distraction to help you manage and to regulate yourself. When your stress is between a 3 and 6.9, you need self-soothing strategies. Once you are between 1-2.9, you are able to implement strategies to improve the moment. I love this, because it has shown me a lot. she had us come up with examples of strategies for each category- non-eating ones of course!

One of the strategies she mentioned in using a frozen whole orange as a grounding technique. A grounding technique is a technique that immediately connects you with the present moment. I have tried some with mixed results. Heather said to freeze an orange and then when you are at a 7-10, get the orange out of the freezer and hold it. The cold will get your attention (distraction) and help you get to a place where you can use your other senses to connect with the present (e.g. scratch the peel and smell it, look at the color, etc). I decided to try it out. We had a plethora of lemons at the time, so I froze a lemon instead.

I am undergoing EMDR therapy targeting trauma. In correlation with this, I’ve had some difficult days. I find that once every couple of weeks, I end up being having an immediate trauma response to a trigger. The other day it happened when I was dealing with the toddler the other day. I was really struggling. I decided to get the lemon out of the freezer and try it. You know what? It worked! It brought me back to reality, helped me calm down, and helped me feel in charge of my body. It was wonderful. 

I’m not proud of how my morning went, but I can look back and see the good things that happened. While I was sitting there on the floor of my kitchen with the frozen lemon in my hand, Katya was sitting in her rocking chair— one of her favorite calming strategies. I did lots of story-telling (where you talk about what happened as a story to help process an event that was upsetting or traumatic) with her the rest of the day and eventually she drew a picture of what happened and then changed it to show we were happy now. My play-therapist mom, said that this demonstrated that Katya had processed the events healthily. So, there you go- I used a new strategy to help me and was able to help her process as well. While not my best day, I think I could have done a lot worse.

I think the lemon will stay in the freezer for now. At least until I am done with EMDR and don’t have any more trauma responses.

Weeks 3, 4, and 5- over 20lbs lost!

As of today I have had 27 days of shakes

Welcome back to my blog the few of you who have checked it out. 😁 I had planned on writing on a weekly basis, but 7 days of toddler illness followed by 4 days of my own illness and then a busy week has made it difficult to get around to blogging.

Now to what you all want to know...how much weight have I lost?

On Tuesday the 12th I had lost another 4.8 lbs for a total of 15.8 lbs in 14 days!

The following Tuesday, the 19th, I had lost another 4.4 lbs for a total of 20.2 lbs lost in 21 days! That's almost a pound a day. I was told that what you lose your 3rd or 4th week on the diet is approximately what you will continue to lose, but that seems too high. We shall see.

My next weigh in is tomorrow/Tuesday night. I am excited that I have already lost 1/4 of the weight I want to lose.

My sick toddler making some animals

I have to tell you, it was HARD not to eat when I was cooped up in the house for so many days with a sick toddler! I did good though- I had all my shakes and nothing more. I decided to do the work in the books that Positive Choice gave me when I felt the urge to eat. It was extremely beneficial. I plan on writing about them more later. I also made a separate bullet journal for my weight loss program so that I could have a place to write notes and do the exercises from my books.

During the second week of shakes, I was SO hungry that I was waking up in the middle of the night because my stomach was growling. On the 12th I spoke with the Nurse Practitioner at my meeting and she suggested I go to taking 6 shakes instead of 5 each day. She said that sometimes people that are taller need to have more Calories to stay in ketosis. (click here if you don't know what ketosis is) So instead of getting 500 Calories a day, I get to have 600 Calories a day. I did this the last time I tried this diet as well and actually later ended up on having to add in lean protein each day too. I'm curious to see if this happens this time or if 6 will continue to be enough. I cannot tell you the difference having 6 shakes a day makes compared to one!

I made "pop hearts" for Valentine's without tasting!

For Valentine's our plans were changed due to illness. I made "Pop Hearts" for Andy and Arya's breakfast and then a ham dinner for the two of them. It smelled yummy, but I didn't even taste! I got beautiful roses from my hubby and a homemade card from both hubby and the toddler. I did miss the dark chocolate candy bar I know I would have received if I were not doing this diet, but all in all, I had a good successful day.

Can you see the exhaustion on my face?

I got to watch Fiddler and relax!

The day after Valentine's day was when I got sick. That was rough! I actually didn't want to eat much at all and was so exhausted and cold. It was pretty awful. I'm pretty sure I just had the adult version of the croup virus Katya had earlier that week. As all SAHM's know, when you are a SAHM and have a toddler, there is basically no rest time for you on a sick day- especially if your toddler feels well and was just cooped up for a week! Thankfully, on Sunday my hubby took Katya to church and the in-laws most of the day so I was able to rest and watch Fiddler on the Roof. That was a lifesaver and even though I was sick on Monday, I was able to enjoy having him home for the holiday.

Can you find the moon?

On the 19th, the topic in class and left me feeling convicted. So this last week I woke up and went on a walk in the 33 degree morning air twice (I live in southern California about 15 minutes from the beach- it hardly ever gets that cold!). It was SO cold! The scenery was beautiful and on the day of the first walk the moon was still out!

I also wrote up one of the recipes I use to make a spicy hot chocolate with my shake mix. If you are reading this blog because you are on the same diet, using the same meal replacement shakes, etc, you can look for the post just before this one and print off the recipe.

Here are some changes I have noticed lately:

1. When I was sick, my body was significantly more fatigued than the virus seemed to warrant. I was extremely tired and the only other sign of illness was a sore throat! I could hardly think straight. In class they said that this is often common when you are in ketosis and on such a low Calorie diet as the body literally does not have the same amount of energy to tend to your illnesses.

2. I always thought I didn't like my clothes because they didn't fit well, but it turns out I didn't like them simply because I don't like them. Not that they fit well I still don't like them.

3. I can fit into jeans I haven't been able to wear for almost a year.

4. I do not seem to have the ketosis energy kick yet-- at some point most people in ketosis get a burst of energy and are known to do things like clean late into the night and have a hard time sleeping, but I am not.

5. I do have ketosis breath! I don't remember having it like this the last time around! Everyone and everything says it will get better soon, in the meantime I am chewing gum and brushing my teeth often!

Living in Hope-- in the Midst of Infertility

I have been thinking about this post for over a week now. I have written it in my head a dozen times- each time it is different. It seems every day there is something different that I would want to share, but the overwhelming drive behind this post is to expound on how it is even possible to live in hope during infertility. I am not going to give a timeline or go into detail about the medical part about our infertility journey in this post. I will save that for another day. This entry is about how what seemed impossible (having hope during infertility) not only became possible, but currently is my life.

NOTE: "IF" is the abbreviation for "infertility". So if you see "IF" in my writing, you now know what it means.

Decisions to start a family are all about hope-- hoping for pregnancy to occur, hoping for a boy, hoping for a girl, hoping that you have a baby in the Spring, hoping that you will be a good parent, hoping that your children won't have any disabilities. It's scary and exciting. These hopes are also very personal and dear to the heart-- usually the most precious of these hopes are only shared between partners, although I'm sure no one shares all their hopes even with their partner. I'm sure there are people that find it more scary than exciting, but for me and Andy, our decision to start a family was full of hope and we were excited!

I don't know if I can explain how it feels to be told that all these hopes may never come to pass without ART (assistive reproductive technology-- read more here). I have never experienced any other situation that caused me an emotional response that this news provided. I was grieved, disappointed, discouraged, lost, depressed, in despair, frightened, and angry-- just to name a few of the intense emotions I felt. All those hopes I had when we decided to go off the birth control and begin planning for a baby had been replaced by worry and stress as we went over a year with no success, but being told not only were we BOTH infertile but that we have significantly less than 1% of a chance of getting pregnant on our own was a horse of another color. You cannot understand it unless you've been there-- and even then everybody experiences it differently as every person and every story is different.

I can tell you how I experienced the despair this brought about:

• random bursting out in tears in privacy, at work, in the car, at the doctor's office, etc
• intense jealousy whenever I saw a pregnant woman, heard a story about how easy it was for so-and-so to get pregnant, etc
• bitterness and resentfulness whenever I heard someone complain about being pregnant "again" or tell me "you're young, don't worry" or "just relax" or "just adopt"
• panic attacks before baby showers
• fighting with Andy
• anger whenever I heard someone talk about how they would be willing to have a baby and give it to so-and-so who is infertile (as if that will just fix things?)
• stopped attending church on a regular basis as church seemed to make everything worse (in reality I was also mad at God)

The good things I did were:

• I joined a local infertility support group (if you are currently undergoing infertility and live in the San Diego area, please check us out at http://sandiegocookies.proboards.com. If you live elsewhere, Resolve.org has lists of local infertility support groups).
• I began to be open about my journey
• I started therapy
• I began spending my alone time telling God exactly how I felt, no matter how negative the emotion
• I began setting boundaries to avoid the painful situations I could not handle

About a year ago, I realized that when I thought about who I am the first thing I thought was "infertile". I decided that I WOULD NOT LET INFERTILITY DEFINE ME. I would not live in despair as that was not fair to me. Just because Andrew and I are infertile, does not mean that all of the other good things in my life are any less good. I began to work really hard at following through with all the "homework" my counselor gave me. I began to focus on the good things and talk to God about the good He has put in my life. I began to see opportunity. I began to nurture my inner child. I continued to be active online in my IF support group even though I stopped going to meetings. Andy and I decided to take a year off of all IF related things and were able to interact simple as a newly married couple and actually RELAXED and had FUN! All this revealed to me that there is so much hope-- even in my situation. I have a God who is hope and loves me! I have a husband who loves me and is always there for me. There is more to me and more in store for me-- even if I never have a child, even if Andy and I decide to be childfree!

My life has been changed because of hope. Of course, I still have moments where the sadness and grief overwhelm me. When I heard my brother was having a baby, I was so excited for him and immediately loved the baby. However, my sense of loss was great. The losses I thought about included:

• my not having a baby
• my not having a cousin to give this nephew to be and maybe never being able to give him one
• being unable to give my brother and sister in law of any advice or words of wisdom as they start this part of their journey
• potential loss of any shared parenting experience alongside my brother and sister in law in the future (e.g. never having the opportunity to take our children to Disneyland or camping together, never having a chance to exchange parenting stories, no future opportunity to exchange hand me down clothes, this list could go on and on)
• continued empty womb and empty arms with no promise they would ever be filled

Once I was dealt with my grief for a few days, I was reminded again that my loss does not mean the good things in my life are any less good. Just because I experienced loss, does not mean remove any of the love and excitement that I have about my nephew that will be born in October. Once I remembered this  I began making items for the baby and was able to focus my attention to him (I think I will refer to him as Miller Mouse until I know what his name will be- a reference to a nick-name my brother gave himself around age 3). I was able to focus my attention on how good of a father my brother will be, on how great an aunt my sister will be, how nice it will be to have the Miller family name continue on, etc... Now the loss is diminished so I don't notice it. I am so filled with joy, excitement, and HOPE about Miller Mouse's arrival. I am looking forward to being an aunt and see possibility and good things. October can't come fast enough!