Snickers is My Favorite!

Today is Saturday and I had a work meeting to go to first thing in the morning. I decided to stop by Starbucks on the way and get my favorite Venti Carmel Frapuccino Soy milk no whip and a cheese danish. This isn't too bad but I didn't realize the egg sandwich I picked at the work meeting was sooo many calories. 

Frappuccino (No whip) - 360 cal

Cheese Danish - 320 cal

Panera Sausage, egg, and cheese sandwich - 560 cal

Making breakfast 1220 calories which is over half of my daily budget. I didn't realize until I was eating the sandwich when I suddenly felt so full. So that was a bit of a mistake. Then about an hour or so later they were passing around a bowl of full size candy bars. I immediately grabbed a full size snickers bar. I tore open the back and then froze. "I can't eat this." I didn't want to. I was still full from breakfast and I did not need/want the candy bar. I put it down and it stayed there for the rest of the meeting. This is not really like me but I am want it to be. 

The rest of the day is going to be tricky. The other thing I need to work on is hitting my steps on the weekends. I only get about 2500 steps on Sat and Sun while the rest of the week I am exceeding 7000 steps. With the extra steps I get a few extra calories so it helps keep me green each day. Here are my Lose It and FitBit for the week. I only went over calories on Tuesday, though today I will probably go over. 

Overall I am doing well. The scale is doing a lot of fluctuating but I feel my pants feeling loose again. Time to stop blogging and go out for an afternoon walk at a local park.

*Note it is 4pm and I still have not eaten the snickers. It is right in front of me and open but I want calories that fill me and that is not a snickers right now. I am so proud of me! 😃

Never Considered This Before

Over the last few months I have started considering the idea of gastric bypass surgery. I have never considered it before. I always thought, no way I can do this on my own. I thought it was too much and too restricting.  Now I feel like I need that help. I have tried for so long and I fail over and over again. I start and I try and try and I don't feel like I ever see the results for all the work I do. I stress eat and overeat and underestimate how much I eat. It is all so hard! Not that that surgery would be easy. You really never eat again. It would be so hard, and painful, and difficult. I don't know.

I mentioned before the documentary I watched called My Big Fat Body. At one point a doctor recommended surgery and he said he wasn''t interested. I think about what if he had? It would have been hard but he would still be alive. Later I ended up watching a New Zealand documentary about people getting gastric bypass. It followed several people before the surgery but it really cover them after except quick looks of the weight loss. It worked great for all of them. They all seemed healthier and happier afterwards but it was a tv show.

I feel like if I don't do something now then I will die soon. I know that sound dramatic but I weigh 300 lbs and have for over a decade. My blood pressure is crazy and I don't have insurance to get pills to fix it and don't really want drugs to fix it anyways. What is next diabetes and sleep apnea? I feel like I at a point where my health is just going to get worse from here unless I make a change.

So here is the other thing. I just started a new job. I have been there awhile and am just switching to a full time position. I took a look at their insurance and it is actually affordable. It doesn't really fit my tight budget but it is affordable enough that I feel I really should get it with recent health issues. So I thought, well is it possible that I might be covered for a weight loss surgery? I don't have a full list of covered options yet so I don't know if even the highest plan would cover it. I did a search to see if the ins company they use cover weight loss surgeries at all and they DO. There was a whole page detailing out when it is covered and the restriction and details. It turns out I actually wouldn't qualify! I guess that is good but kind of bad too.

I am a BMI of 44.5 right now. If I was over 50 BMI with my high blood pressure I would qualify. Because I am between 40 and 50 I would need my high blood pressure and either diabetes or sleep apnea. So I am not sick enough which is good but... also disappointing.

This leaves me to do it on my own. I still have to do something because I know I can't keep going as I am for long.

Can an app help?

I spent a couple days just staring at the scans. So first the high blood pressure, that is still not down, and now with this scan I have to do something. Years ago and still my older brother and his wife lost a lot of weight and kept it off using the Lose It app. I have it on my phone and years ago I tried using but tracking everything you eat can be hard. I am at a loss of what to do and so I am going with what I know worked for my brother. I opened the Lose It app and even paid the $30 for the upgraded options. 

Throughout a lifetime of trying to loose weight I know that it all comes down to calories in and calories out. As I start logging for the first time in years I find the hardest part is adding in the bad food. When I ate a healthy breakfast, logging is no problem. Lunch was a little high but healthy so I added it no problem. Then I stumbled and ate too much with dinner and treats after. Logging it anyways is hard because I know it will make me over and turn my little numbers red. Though I assume that it is part of the deal. Not wanting to go over should encourage me not to eat that way. Though instead it makes me not want to log at all. I think it is a phycological thing feeling like a day that I go over is a failure. I think I need to try to focus on the week overall instead of individual days. 

Weight loss is such a phycological battle every day and throughout the day!

I Paid for This?

Two weeks ago I turned 36. A couple days later I went in an had a DEXA scan done. If you haven't heard of these they are a CT scan that is normally used for bone density. It helps check for osteoporosis. Besides seeing your bones it can also differentiate your muscle and fat. It gives very accurate results of your fat and lean mass. Athletes use it to see exact areas of their body to work on to improve their performance. It is becoming more common for regular people to use it so they can also see what is going on inside. 

Before I go further I want to explain how I got here. Several weeks ago I was flipping though Netflix and stumbled on a documentary called My Big Fat Body. It follows a comedian named Frank Payne. In the movie one of the things he does is the DEXA scan. I thought it was an interesting look at the body. I do not really recommend the movie. He goes on this journey learning about how unhealthy he is and he looses 60 lbs for the movie. It sounds great till you look him up and see that he put all the weight back on after the movie and died two years later. Though I guess that in itself is a wake up call. I looked up getting a DEXA scan but it looked pretty pricey at $150-$300. Not in my price range. Shortly before my birthday, while scrolling through facebook, a company called Valley Radiologists advertised for a $45 scan. I decided I wanted to try it and signed up. 

You can do a search for other images of these. Because of the way my fat rolls laid I felt that some of the image was immodest. Most pictures you can't see anything but on mine you could so I added the black lines. 

If you zoom in on the picture you can see that they break down each part of your body. One of my arms did not fit on the table so they just duplicated that number. You can see that each leg has different numbers. I have always had trouble when people ask what shape I am; apple, pear, hourglass. This has details that show that it my hips really are much bigger then my hips, well by the numbers at least. 

This is a second picture everyone receives to help understand everything. 

The other number I was interested in when I got this scan was visceral fat. As I understand it most fat is on the outside of your body but visceral fat is the fat around your organs. It is this fat that causes the real trouble squishing and constricting your organs. My est visceral fat area is 261, although it is not the top of the graph it is very very high. 

Sometimes when I think about the scan I am like "Did I really pay someone to tell me how fat I am?" Other times I am happy that I did get it to really see what is going on. One thing that really got me with this is amount of muscle you can't see. If you look at others scans, even overweight, you can see a defined muscle through the center. I am so covered in fat that the muscle isn't seen through it. Yikes!