Thoughts, Epiphanies, Insights, & Quotables

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  • PAV8888
    PAV8888 Posts: 13,393 Member
    Garfield is firing on all cylinders! Smart cat 👍
  • lauriekallis
    lauriekallis Posts: 4,545 Member
    My thoughts exactly!
  • PAV8888
    PAV8888 Posts: 13,393 Member
    edited September 2021
    I hear you mention prednisone and hunger and inflammation; but not once did I hear you mention direct water weight gain and water retention associated with prednisone.

    As in you (COULD potentially) retain water when taking it.

    LBS in multitude that (COULD) take a while (sometimes months) after you've tapered to go away depending on dosage and individual.

    Also... if long term on prednisone consider reminding your dr/watching your bone density especially since you mentioned having bone density problems.

    (sources: relatives who took prednisone and had both problems I mention)

    You may also want to implement a trailing moving average. I use trendweight.com which takes ~10 days into consideration. Libra for android is user configurable. You may also want to generally compare similar points to your cycle. This is all mostly for after you're not dealing with prednisone.

    By the way anyone not GAINING on prednisone is a miracle, so you may want to take this aspect into consideration!

    Where were you, BTW, when I was desperate for a stat nerd spreadsheet jockey to interpret my data for me and prove that the BMI scale was full of it and was only changing numbers based on weight loss not on any actual measurements?????

    There is a share your numbers section you should join, especially when you go into freefall once your prednisone issues are sorted out (fingers crossed, of course) :)

    Would say more but this is like the third time I am continuing after the laptop bonks me on the head... so i;ll click post before I lose another post!



  • lauriekallis
    lauriekallis Posts: 4,545 Member
    Made it to the end....and to the end of PAV's post and there is not a thing I could say that would add anything except...Sometimes we just gotta go on faith which takes a lot of strength - but wow, NerdyGrl, you seem that have a lot of that!
  • NerdyScienceGrl
    NerdyScienceGrl Posts: 669 Member
    Thanks for the feedback and taking the time to read the novel I wrote! ❤️

    Prednisone is the devil in disguise no doubt! I consider it a necessary evil at times.

    I’m my experience weight “gain” (from prednisone), for me, is associated with two things — breaking down willpower and becoming a slave to the see food-eat food diet and (yep, you’re right) water retention. STUBBORN water retention at that, which is incredibly odd (IMO) because prednisone actually has a really short half life and should be completely out of your system in a short window after taking it.

    So, this time, prednisone use was limited to 6-7 days (green bar). Thank goodness! My “see food diet” only the last two. I ate things those days that created inflammation on top of inflammation. Knowing that the prednisone was going to create weight gains, but temporarily, from water retention specifically, I didn’t weight myself directly after use was complete plus one week (mental health needed that love). The next time I did weight in, I’d gained over 7 lbs. In the averages for “actual weight” (red line), it shows up as the highest point nearly 2 weeks later, about 5 lbs lbs higher. Although the dose was short term, week use, I’m assuming that’s still a cumulative extra inflammation from food intake and water retention. For whatever reason, my body holds onto prednisone water for much longer than I’d normally see. …the devil in disguise. I’m guessing the last few actual dots are my gradual loss of that stubborn water.

    Unfortunately, I don’t have a steadfast way of looking at cycle, due to a medical procedure but I still experience all the hormonal shifts but without any notice. The symptoms of those shifts are generally unnoticed unless I have an unusually bad case of “PMS” that leads to cranky, munchies, and excessive bloating — which hasn’t happened in quite awhile, so that comparison would be purely speculative and with a high likelihood of being off as much as a week. 🤷‍♀️

    I’ll have to try a moving 7- or 10-day average and see how it looks. Great idea!

    As for your BMI mention — on a personal level BMI is absolute BS. BMI was never meant to be used how it is by the public as perpetuated by the medical community in general. Since it’s the middle of the night and I’m foggy, I won’t go look for references, but maybe this will make you feel better about your thoughts on BMI - the perpetuation of it’s use is lazy (sorry BMI lovers) because frankly there are better indices to use (body fat % ranges, for example). However, it’s been standardized as a “tool” for classifying things without regard for WHY it was developed in the first place. I could argue a harmful tool since the vast majority of people don’t know it has some real restrictions. I will likely never (and it’s not my goal), see a healthy BMI. Why is it BS? Simple, BMI was developed, to be used, in experiments or summarize data for entire populations of people. NOT an individual within a population. From a statistical standpoint a metric developed for population characteristics should not be used as a description of one (you’d want quite a few more). In the case of BMI specifically, that means — do you have extra muscle? Overweight or obese is the outcome. Many professional athletes are obese using BMI. Are you large framed? Congrats, you are likely overweight according to BMI. There may be other things that throw you outside of “normal/healthy” as well. Hopefully that was helpful and not a rehashing of something you already knew. 😂
  • NerdyScienceGrl
    NerdyScienceGrl Posts: 669 Member
    Made it to the end....and to the end of PAV's post and there is not a thing I could say that would add anything except...Sometimes we just gotta go on faith which takes a lot of strength - but wow, NerdyGrl, you seem that have a lot of that!

    Thank you! I’ll keep this short and sweet because I could probably write another novel on faith, strength and ultimately perseverance. The day I dropped the “I HAVE to lose weight” and shifted to a wellness perspective - my entire outlook changed. The expectations shifted from fighting my body to finding peace in the imperfections and speed bumps. Catch me at the wrong time (luckily infrequent) and frustration will have its say but it’s short lived - tiramisu helps 😉🙃😊
  • conniewilkins56
    conniewilkins56 Posts: 3,391 Member
    I read everything, too!…although I do not suffer from this, my husband has severe RA and Spinal Stenosis along with Type 2 Diabetes and some heart problems with a stent….( he is a mess! )… so I understand what you are going through….he also had prostate cancer but has been cancer free 15 years!…too much prednisone causes severe nose bleeds and makes him hungry…although at times he is depressed and has so much pain, he gets up hopeful every morning and keeps his wonderful sarcastic sense of humor….constantly makes me laugh….

    Keep up the great progress you are working on and keep putting one foot in front of the other….my thoughts are with you!
  • PAV8888
    PAV8888 Posts: 13,393 Member
    Go Connie and nerdyscience! Impressive reads Laurie: I've been training you, right? 😇

    I mistyped because remember upside down on a couch with a laptop bonking my head every time I nodded off!🤯

    BMI above = BIA (bio impedance) my bad.

    Comparison I was after was bia to dexa during weight loss to see if BIA was providing anything approaching usefulness.
  • PAV8888
    PAV8888 Posts: 13,393 Member
    There's a lot of threads on BMI in the main forums.

    My take is clear and pretty much mirrors this article I wish I had found before reading a whole bunch of other stuff re BMI and the various historical revisions to BMI ranges and categories (where they start, end, and to whom they apply)

    https://www.quickanddirtytips.com/health-fitness/trends-fads/is-bmi-accurate-measuring-body-fat

    To what the article mentions as possible errors I would add the much bigger categories who have a higher probability of incorrectly predicting body fat based on BMI: shorter (esp women) where a normal BMI has a higher likelihood to understimate fat levels, and taller (esp men) where a higher BMI may overestimate fat levels.

    A BMI measurement together with a visual inspection should be enough to see whether any further investigation re fat levels is necessary. It is incorrect to use BMI in isolation.

    Waist to height, hip to waist, BIA scales and even skin calipers all have huge margins of error and measurement issues too, and are far less simple to implement.

    Furthermore fat levels by themselves do not determine current or future health!

    Disclosure: in my personal case it is incredible how closely I tracked to population averages.

    TDEE a tiny bit below predicted now, though during initial weight loss it was bang on.

    Dexa scan body fat results in close proximity to fat % expectations set by various BMI to body fat conversion equations.

    If you want to cry about body fat measurements, Krieger's weightology blog articles, though now getting a bit dated, have interesting discussions about margins of error and various body fat estimation methods
  • callsitlikeiseeit
    callsitlikeiseeit Posts: 8,627 Member
    I am going to totally jump in with nothing relevant at all to anything youve been discussing so feel free to ignore me.

    on another thread somewhere I was replying to something and then I kind of went off on this tangent. which... wasn't totally IRRELEVANT to my reply but also wasn't totally RELEVANT. But I had taken ALL THIS TIME to TYPE ALL THIS OUT and felt i needed to put it SOMEWHERE.

    so this is that... SOMEWHERE.

    feel free to... comment or ignore or .... whatever. LOL



    Heck - PERFECT case in point- me in the grocery store this morning. typically, I make pancakes or waffles and breakfast sandwich's for my son (teenager) in a big batch and freeze them individually, and he pulls out however many he wants and heats them up before school. cheaper (and healthier) than buying the premade jimmy dean ones. I hadn't made any more this past weekend, so he ran out from the previous batch I had made. ALMOST- CAME SO CLOSE to just grabbing a box of them at the store this morning. just to fill in for a couple of days till the weekend. thats all. i didnt feel like coming home and making freaking sausage, egg and cheese biscuits (even though i do cheat and buy frozen or refrigerated biscuits, i still have to bake them lol). had the freezer case door pulled open, even. then finally the logical voice in my head shouted loud enough for me to hear 'really? what ELSE do you have to do today? ' and i went and got the sausage and biscuits because literally, I had cheese and eggs LOL.

    But how many DON'T make that choice? Or think they dont have the time? Or think it's more expensive? (granted, I dont have to buy the eggs, but I have to buy everything else. I could make the biscuits, if I wanted to... save money there, I suppose). Take what I buy in the store, or you (though I have more carbs- in various forms, and more fruits and veggies? probably?), or even most of us who are on MFP, but then (I'll use for example) the family in the till right across from me at the store this morning. young family, maybe mid-late 20's. cute little girl- no more than 3. both parents probably into the obese category (observation, not judgement, im trying to get OUT of it still!). and a buggy filled with every processed food the store had, it seemed. Now, we dont know what they had at home. only what was in their buggy. frozen pizzas and spaghettios and hot pockets, and raviolis, hamburger helper, mac and cheese, frozen waffles and pancakes and not a veggie or fruit in sight. couple of bags of rice. lots of sodas. and its not that i dont buy any convenience foods- i do. i had one of those little EVOL frozen things for lunch today. I buy a 6 pack of sprite zero every week and have one almost every day. its literally the only soda i can drink .i eat oreos and chocolate. Not saying I have a perfect 'diet'. i eat crap foods and dont deny that. but i also eat an overall, fairly well balanced diet most of the time that is primarily 'real' foods that are homemade. a lot of salads and veg. a lot of lean meats. not much comes out of a can or box. if anything, i need to eat more meat. PLENTY of room for improvement in my 'diet', so I am under no pretext of being perfect. But, I like to think, that maybe, I do slightly better than the 'average' american household. And, if based on what I see in our local stores is indicative of 'average' - I'd say I'm doing pretty damned good.

    but a lot of families- people- for whatever reason, do not. my sister is one. always off and on fad diets, usually off, I long ago stopped giving advice, because despite my weight loss, she knows FAR more than I do. Pretty much lives on a diet of chick fil a, taco bell, frozen meals, cookies, chips, and guacamole. and hummus 'but its healthy'.... well into the obese category, not sure if shed fall into morbidly obese yet because of her height, but maybe. its just her. she doesn't know how to cook. she moved to a new city, signed up for hello fresh, bought all new pots and pans and kitchen utensils, and cancelled it within 2 weeks because 'it took too long and was too much effort'. She is 30 years old almost 31 and literally called me not long ago asking how to cook link sausage. My husband does not know how we can possibly be related. LOL I do remind him that we were raised basically, by entirely different families LOL

    no point to any of this really.

    discuss amongst yourselves. :P
  • conniewilkins56
    conniewilkins56 Posts: 3,391 Member
    I read this and hear you loud and clear….my doctor says it is amazing how I am his only overweight patient that actually tells him they are fat because of what they eat and the amount! SMH!…I love it when an overweight person “ doesn’t eat a thing”…obviously they are eating something!…and when you tell them you lost weight by counting calories, they look at you like you have three heads!….it breaks my heart to see obese children….usually the parents are, too….
  • Bella_Figura
    Bella_Figura Posts: 3,579 Member
    edited September 2021
    @NerdyScienceGrl I made it to the end too, and it was one of the most inspirational posts I've read in a long while!

    Nothing much to add to what the others have already written except to second the observation re the prednisone hunger and water retention. My husband suffered huge bloating and water retention when he was on prednisone (6+ litres would be removed at each dialysis session, compared with 2 litres when he wasn't taking prednisone), coupled with ravening hunger. Since his transplant he's on a lifetime triple therapy regime of prednisolene, cyclosporin and Azathioprine and he finds prednisolene less problematic than prednisone, though obviously they have much in common. Like @PAV8888, I think it almost miraculous that you didn't actually gain when taking prednisone...everyone I know who's taken it has gained actual fat from the hunger side-effect.

    I also want to second @LaurieKallis when she says that you seem to have strength and faith in spades. It sounds like you need it, but needing it and having it don't always coincide, so kudos to you for keeping your spirits high and managing your mental health through what sounds like a frustrating and challenging set of obstacles.

    @ConnieWilkins, it's wonderful that your husband wakes each day with a positive attitude. During the 25+ years that I've sat beside my husband during his dialysis and other medical treatments, I've seen some patients make their spouses' lives an utter misery. I've never been so grateful for having a stoic and uncomplaining life partner!
  • NerdyScienceGrl
    NerdyScienceGrl Posts: 669 Member
    I read everything, too!…although I do not suffer from this, my husband has severe RA and Spinal Stenosis along with Type 2 Diabetes and some heart problems with a stent….( he is a mess! )… so I understand what you are going through….he also had prostate cancer but has been cancer free 15 years!…too much prednisone causes severe nose bleeds and makes him hungry…although at times he is depressed and has so much pain, he gets up hopeful every morning and keeps his wonderful sarcastic sense of humor….constantly makes me laugh….

    Keep up the great progress you are working on and keep putting one foot in front of the other….my thoughts are with you!

    Aw thank you! ❤️ I feel for your husband! Spinal stenosis.. 😣. I wouldn’t wish nerve pain on my worst enemy and it’s not something easily described for those who don’t have it. It turns me from a chill, accepting human into a reactionary, impatient jerk (to put it nicely) in seconds. But, let’s talk about how lucky he is to have a wife that stands by, supports and looks forward to his sense of humor! You are amazing lady! 😁. Sometimes it’s awfully difficult for us messy folks to remember to show gratitude for our loved one.
  • NerdyScienceGrl
    NerdyScienceGrl Posts: 669 Member
    PAV8888 wrote: »
    Go Connie and nerdyscience! Impressive reads Laurie: I've been training you, right? 😇

    I mistyped because remember upside down on a couch with a laptop bonking my head every time I nodded off!🤯

    BMI above = BIA (bio impedance) my bad.

    Comparison I was after was bia to dexa during weight loss to see if BIA was providing anything approaching usefulness

    I don’t know anything about BIA 🤷‍♀️. Time to research!
  • PAV8888
    PAV8888 Posts: 13,393 Member
    edited September 2021
    Don't bother! Electronic scale fat measurement,
    Bioelectrical impedance analysis
  • NerdyScienceGrl
    NerdyScienceGrl Posts: 669 Member
    edited September 2021
    @NerdyScienceGrl I made it to the end too, and it was one of the most inspirational posts I've read in a long while!

    Nothing much to add to what the others have already written except to second the observation re the prednisone hunger and water retention. My husband suffered huge bloating and water retention when he was on prednisone (6+ litres would be removed at each dialysis session, compared with 2 litres when he wasn't taking prednisone), coupled with ravening hunger. Since his transplant he's on a lifetime triple therapy regime of prednisolene, cyclosporin and Azathioprine and he finds prednisolene less problematic than prednisone, though obviously they have much in common. Like @PAV8888, I think it almost miraculous that you didn't actually gain when taking prednisone...everyone I know who's taken it has gained actual fat from the hunger side-effect.

    I also want to second @LaurieKallis when she says that you seem to have strength and faith in spades. It sounds like you need it, but needing it and having it don't always coincide, so kudos to you for keeping your spirits high and managing your mental health through what sounds like a frustrating and challenging set of obstacles.

    @ConnieWilkins, it's wonderful that your husband wakes each day with a positive attitude. During the 25+ years that I've sat beside my husband during his dialysis and other medical treatments, I've seen some patients make their spouses' lives an utter misery. I've never been so grateful for having a stoic and uncomplaining life partner!

    Okay, so this made me tear up. Thank you for your kind words. I was hoping beyond the “patience and compassion”, this would be a post I could return to when I do get frustrated with the scale or get impatient. That it’d remind me that weight loss is not a perfect science.

    I tend to be sensitive to medications and have to go into any prescribe corticosteroids with a clear head and remind myself that my inner, instant gratification seeking child is going to want to eat — and eat everything. I held the voice at bay for 5-days which was a huge success. The last two, I should have turned the TV off — if I saw people eat, I wanted their food too. I am lucky in the sense I know I’m not hungry, it’s all a switch that flips and craves anything and everything I see, literally. This time donuts for whatever was the trigger. I probably hadn’t had a donut in years or thought about buying one. I don’t know much about steroids in general like the cause of water weight. It’s an uncomfortable side effect. I find it strange how long it lasts too.

    Maybe someday when I have the mental fortitude, I can share some of the tools in my toolbox that have really helped find the strength and drive. I find inspiration in hearing about others facing much more serious and painful lives that are able to face each day and be kind.

    As I mentioned in my post to Connie, significant others of people with health problems don’t get enough acknowledgment. It sounds like you have an SO that faces the day with his own struggle, it makes me smile knowing others have wonderful support. ❤️
  • Yoolypr
    Yoolypr Posts: 2,751 Member
    Thank you! You have visually captured what I’ve experienced all my life. While I’m within 25 lbs. of goal, my personal Mt. Vesuvius is still bubbling. I’m printing out your drawing and putting it on my refrigerator.
  • conniewilkins56
    conniewilkins56 Posts: 3,391 Member
    Everything….exactly how I feel all the time…..