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New here saying hi! Warning, I got a little long winded

y4mk55hy5d
y4mk55hy5d Posts: 1 Member
in Introduce Yourself
Hi everyone, my name is Staci,54, from Louisiana. I was in law enforcement for 13 yrs, then moved to the education arena, until I retired. i am now sole caregiver to my 92yr old disabled mother.
I had gastric bypass in 2003 and lost 137 lbs and was happy there. Three years ago, i became ill and the doctors couldn’t figure it out, so they almost let me die. I’m 5’10 and i weighed 87lbs and was nothing but skin & skeleton.
A new specialist figured it out and got my nonexistent thyroid and endocrine back to where they were supposed to be but i couldn’t gain weight. So another doctor told me to eat everything that I’ve ever been told not to and 6 meals a day to get my weight where it needed to be. Well that worked but i would get up at 4am to eat breakfast and eat till midnight. It took a year to gain it back but I kept gaining. Even though i had cut back and didn’t eat near as much, i had gotten addicted to sweets and carbs. All my clothes became too snug and now I’m about 11-12 lbs heavier than i was before i got sick. I know from my past how that 12 can become 20…30 and i can’t let that happen. I have a disorder where in my mind and in the mirror, 140lbs looks like 300lbs or more.
So I’ve been on MyFitnessPal for 8 days this a.m. and I’ve GAINED 1.5 pounds!! I think it’s water retention because I’ve met my calorie goal 6/7 days and was only over on carbs and fat 1 day.
All i drink is water but i do eat a good bit of sodium due to a medical condition. i do take a fluid pill because I have been swelling badly from my waist down some days but today is not that bad, so that’s why i weighed. Any suggestions?

Replies

  • mtaratoot
    mtaratoot Posts: 14,612 Member
    Welcome Staci,

    You have been through an awful lot. That's more than enough stress for one person. You should be proud of yourself for struggling through, improving your health, and continuing to work on being a better you. It sounds like you've got plenty of tenacity, so I predict you will succeed if you stick to it.

    Take some time to check out some of the most helpful post, and don't be shy about asking questions. Folks here are friendly and willing to help!
  • AnnPT77
    AnnPT77 Posts: 35,395 Member
    A handy rule of thumb is that when we've been sticking with a sensible calorie goal and activity routine, but see a sudden big scale jump . . . it's water weight or some extra digestive contents in the digestive system on its way to becoming waste, not body fat.

    Body fat changes creep along quite slowly in the background, and can easily be masked by those water/digestive fluctuations.

    This is a good read about some of those factors, especially the article linked in the first post:

    https://community.myfitnesspal.com/en/discussion/10683010/the-weird-and-highly-annoying-world-of-scale-fluctuations/p1

    My advice to you right now would be to hang in there, and stick with your current plan. Do that at least until you've gotten 4-6 weeks of experience with the new routine, so you can look at average weekly loss over the whole time period. (If you have menstrual cycles, compare body weight at the same relative point in at least two different monthly cycles.) Once you have those many weeks of personal-experience data (calories logged and body weight changes), you can use that experience to revise your calorie goal if necessary.

    One way to miss insights about our own bodies is to be too quick to change routine based on random weight fluctuations that we mistake for body fat changes. Hang in there, because fat loss show up in multi-week trends, not day to day.

    You can do this. Hang in there. I'm cheering for you to succeed!

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