This is the Garlic Allergy. Du-da-da-daaah.

I’m not entirely sure what causes it but then it started a few years ago, and it just seems to be that if I eat too much garlic over a few days I have drastic stomach issues and am then wrung out the next day and barely able to eat, which is what today has been. It was two p.m. before I could stand without being dizzy, and just after seven before I could eat much more than a quarter of a sandwich. Though things have been staying down all day so that’s something.

Still it means that I’m a little behind on some things, though there are others that I was already ahead on so I think I can give myself a bit of leeway. I’m still taking it slowly and will be tomorrow too; but at least tomorrow hubbie’s off work and has plans to take the munchkin out into the yard to do some work.

This came about after my GP had come in, after the preliminary heart/blood pressure checks had been done, he asked how I was doing, and I said “eh, so-so,” so he asked me to explain. I told him how I’d been very lethargic lately and I was putting it down to the fact that my weight had gotten higher than it had been last time I’d started the weight loss plan. Though it has gone down about 5lbs in the past two weeks at least but it’s been hard. I’ve been waking up at 9 a.m. when I was being able to wake up at 7:30 a.m. with no problem and be WIDE awake, but yet I’m crawling out of bed at 9 a.m. and have no drive to keep going, yet it’s not a hideous pain flare and it’s not a general lethargy without drive it’s just being tired, which is more frustrating. At least when it was my mental state that was out of whack I had no drive to do anything so didn’t really notice that anything was wrong. Okay, maybe that’s not better…

On the upside though, it’s not Mesothelioma or anything else that’s drastically life-threatening. It’s just problematic because it’s another thing that I’m going to have to continually manage and that gets very tricky when there’s a multitude of people all using the same body, especially as this medication is apparently not something I can take before bed along with the other one. It’s something I’ll have to take in the morning before breakfast or in the afternoon before lunch, at least an hour before I eat. So, yeah…we’re going to have to really work to sort it out; but it’ll be worth it in the long run because it’ll really help us get the weight issue sorted out and have more energy, which is one of the biggest things we’ve been after aside from internal cooperation.

Initially she’d gone into hiding because she didn’t want to be around the munchkin; paranoid as she was about hurting him in some way. She re-surfaced just after we went into therapy in 2008 because Elsie had asked to talk to her and suggested that she make an effort to get to know the munchkin and find out what a wonderful little boy he is. She did that, and she hung around for a few days but she found it difficult to adjusting to life, not only had she missed, for the most part, his first year and a half of life, but we were in a completely different house than she was used to and a completely different body, for that matter, having gained 40lbs while pregnant and not lost any of it, and in fact, fluxing between pregnancy weight and about 10lbs over it. So, it was hard for her. None of her clothes fit. She didn’t feel comfortable physically, and while the rest of us don’t entirely feel comfortable physically we’d at least adjusted to it. For her, she disappeared when we were around 200lbs and came back to us being almost 250lbs. She tried to work out, exercise, do yard work, but in the end she got frustrated by the fact that she was essentially battling the rest of us who had become a bit apathetic to the whole situation, so she challenged us to rectify it, got a plan from our GP, and said she’d come back out once we’d lost some of the weight.

Well, that did and didn’t happen. We’d gotten back down to around 238 when the zombie months hit and the weight came back. We’ve struggled and waffled since then, I’ll admit, starting programs, attempting to cut out soda and things and falling off the wagon more often than not. The other day I weighed and we were 255. Kiddy threw a fit.

We had some discussions the night before about the way things were going and she pointed out that she was done. We’d failed our promise to fix things and apparently a good chunk of that was either lacking willpower, or refusing to act on said willpower (all internal eyes point to Max). So, she said she would come back and that would mean we would HAVE to do something about it. She made some intimations that she could and would be a worse Drill Sargent than Terri ever was. I know Kiddy is often credited as being our “inner bitch” and she comes across as very brash, and at least one of our friends expressed concern about this attitude. However, we do have a cooperative agreement on this factor.

The fact of the matter is we have failed in all our efforts. It’s practically a year ago now that we had spoken to Dr. A about “fixing our body” for our own benefit and continued good health, and in that time overall we’ve gained 6lbs from what our weight was at that time. Our first “going to lose the baby weight” attempt when we were still living at the former apartment. That diet started at 239!! and where are we now? As of this morning weighing in on the Wii 252lbs, which is at least down from last week (we hadn’t done the Wii in 5 days when we signed on this morning). As a side note peak of pregnancy weight was either 246 or 247.

This is BAD. It’s no wonder we have trouble sleeping and feel winded after only a short amount of exercise or walking. Not only are we battling the pain and the fibro, but we have excess strain on our body from all this extra flab. It is absolutely ridiculous, I agree with that assessment. I just tend to flail and waver. I know I do. It’s hard to rectify those patterns, and as much as I claim to have more of a backbone than Ami did I still, well, I eat as though I did more exercise than I do, or I neglect to eat at all, which is equally bad.

So, we have a plan of attack. Kiddy picked up some SlimFast shakes yesterday at the store, and for the first week we’re going to have one of those for breakfast and a few snacks. We’re not going to cut out carbs entirely this first week but we’ve agreed to have less of them than we normally do. Carbs are a HUGE thing with us. There’s some sort of compulsive freak out if we don’t have potatoes when we do the brunch thing and so on, which wouldn’t be so bad if we then didn’t make said brunch into a sandwich. So, if we’re going to have potatoes we either put it in a wrap or we have nothing with it. We reduce the amount we have 2 wraps only, not 3 or 4. No extra potatoes past the original serving. Things like that. Fruit for snacks. We have a huge water melon to work on which will help with that this week, and we can start getting apples and yoghurt again. If we make something like pasta with supper for everyone else only have half a serving.

These are the common sense things we’ve been attempting to stick with so far, and failing miserably at. More salads would be a good thing too, or other vegetables aside from potatoes such as carrots, broccoli, cauliflower, all of which we like.

In added good things, as of right now there is no soda in the house that we can drink. It’s all Cherry Coke Zero and Pepsi, so there’s no worries on reneging with that one. Water and tea it will be for the rest of the day. Mrgh further caffeine detox.

But back on the horse. I’m making sure to keep my portions small and am about to start on the exercise things again. I’ve also ordered a few more exercise-full Wii games, basically a replacement for our very scratched up impossible to run Wii Sports, to help me keep a schedule and for the days that I can’t go outside and walk because the weather would negatively affect the fibromyalgia.

I used to find that I could really work up a sweat doing their boxing and tennis games and $15 for a replacement copy is a lot better on us right now than if I tried to get Wii Fit.

We’ve been working little by little with the ‘room of requirement’ last night we had what amounted to a ‘town meeting’. Each of us ‘alters’ took our place in the room and we had a sort of round table discussion about various things that have been going on, ways we can work together, ways we can continue to facilitate doing things from day to day.

We have to get back on the ‘exercise’ kick. I say ‘exercise’ because most people would consider it doing things normally from day to day. I’m not going to be going out for jogs or running marathons. I can’t. I have to work up to that and it may take several months for me to even be able to jog to the end of our street, let alone sprint, but I will, we want to be able to.

Max was in a ‘rare’ introspective mood about things and admitted that he also needs to take responsibility for actions, for food intake, for sweet intake in particular and wise up. This is not his body to abuse this is OUR body to take care of and we each have a right to have a working body and considering that we’re time-sharing it we have to really manage our time and our resources more so because the body is ‘defective’ much like our poor battered car.

I would love to just get into Gemma and drive her out to Daytona to show munchkin the beach every week or go to St. Augustine take the ghost tours as often as it takes to actually see the ghosts but she’s old and battered and beaten up and so we have to content ourselves with going down to the highway to go to the playpark and have fun there so that she’ll still be right to run on those special occasions when we can all go up to take a ghost tour or go out to the zoo or something else like that.

So, our body is like my car, we have to baby it right now so that we can get it right. Much like we have to put the right fuel and additives and everything else into the car so that her fuel injectors stay clean and she doesn’t choke and die, we have to stop putting all sorts or processed, sugary crap into ourselves, stick to our guns on removing the caffeine from our diet, cut down on portions, and amp up the energy. We’re getting better from the bronchitis now so we don’t want to push things, but it shouldn’t be too hard to start getting up and doing stretches in the morning, gentle stretches that help us ease out the kinks that we usually have because of the fibro and walk, to get out of the house, to build things up slowly so that we can start painting the house again; all those things.

We also need to stop looking at days we don’t walk as failure days, unless we literally don’t do anything else that day. If we’re going to be going to the store or doing other things then those take the place of walking. It’s another bout of spoon theory. Once we’re having a more consistent energy level because we’re carrying around 180lbs instead of almost 250lbs then we should be able to walk, run, jog and do the store things to, but right now we need to focus on having less on our frame so that we can be healthier overall.

I’m trying to cling tightly to the fact that I lost it before and I can do it again. That I shouldn’t push myself when I’m not feeling well. I have some sort of sinus/chest mess that’s making it difficult for me to breathe, and which keeps giving me that sort of horribly throat painful cough that doesn’t actually shift anything. I should focus on resting and getting over this and then I’ll be better equipped to focus on the other aspects of my health.

It’s that pattern though of self-loathing which surfaces because I feel as though I’ve failed. It’s not failure though. It’s a setback. It’s falling off the bike. I just have to get back on. It’s just if you break something falling off the bike you have to wait and let that heal before you get back on the road. That’s where I’m at right now.

Musculature is an issue because of the fibromyalgia. Excessive strain on my muscles becomes worse for me because my body is unable to repair damaged muscle tissue as quickly as others might, so I have to be very careful and slow when it comes to exercising like that because those microscopic tears that everyone experiences when they move around from day to day and exercise do not heal and just get worse if I don’t get enough sleep, which I often don’t.

However I realize that there are other psychological issues which impede me on the weight frontier. On the basic level it’s hard to stick to a diet, it’s even harder for nine people to stick to a diet and that’s often been a chunk of my issue, if there’s just one of us alters who is not on board for the weight program it falls apart. It just takes one of us, and often times this has been Max, to go “OOOH CHOCOLATE! NOM-NOM-NOM!” and eat an entire bar or box, or make his super White Russians with kahlua and chocolate syrup as well as milk and vodka, and then there’s a general dissent because it’s “Oh, well he had candy, why can’t I?” and so on until it devolves and we’re back to snacking on junk food and being lazy about things.

Additionally I came to the conclusion that on some level there’s a desire to be unattractive. My step-father was very into thin women, and would harp on my mother to a greater extent but also me about weight. I know when I was pregnant he was very displeased that I was getting fat, and kept insisting that I should diet, even though in many ways I was eating much healthier while I was pregnant than I had before as it was important to me to make sure the future munchkin was not addicted to caffeine or born unhealthy due to something I ate or exposed him to. I stopped bleaching and dyeing my hair even, refused additional x-rays when I fractured my elbow. I didn’t eat sushi or rare meat. I didn’t drink. Max was very silent during most of the pregnancy, actually. These are things that most mothers-to-be do. They allow themselves small treats, but generally they cut back. I ate more fruit than I ever have while I was pregnant, no wonder the munchkin is such a fruit bat.

However, my condition was extremely distressing to him; and he would tell random people when we were out how displeased he was and how disgusted he was about my weight. Most people looked at him like he was off his nut. Anyway, my point is that I wonder if this has stuck with me on some level, and I’ve subconsciously not been giving weight loss my all because it makes me unattractive to him, and therefore if I do run into him again there’s less likely to be those comments about my butt or my breasts that he was so fond of, or the attempts to touch said areas, and the squeezes and the kisses. As it is I haven’t seen him since I stopped working at the gas station, and even there he had not shown up since Christmas because hubbie Had Words with him.

Though I realized this past week, that this is still giving him power over me. My fear of him is still on some level ruling my existence, and so I should stop. He does not need that power. He does not deserve that power. I deserve to, as I’ve said before, become healthy for me, and to lose weight to help me, to help there be less strain on those muscles, to help me sleep better, to have more energy and to be there for my family, to be able to run around with my son for more than five or ten minutes at a time. All those things. For that I should be healthy.

I’m at 240 now, which is 8.4 since the start of the year, but 16 down overall since my highest point last year. Woohoo! No wonder I kept losing my jeans today. Need to find what happened to my belt.
Also I seem to FINALLY be over the damn plague so I’m going to be back on the “walking” thing. Probably not tomorrow as it’s forecast rain ALL day. Though I do need to go grocery shopping so that will be some good hoofing it there. Saturday walking again. If I don’t post that I went walking you are all instructed to bash me with the verbal mallet.

I’m down a pound since last week, which I’m surprised at, I haven’t done much walking this week because I’ve been sick with a mega-cold, and recovering from work which really did it in for me as I’ve mentioned several times.

So, to have lost a pound is awesome. Again I’m attributing this to cutting out soda, even diet soda, and I’ve been trying to eat smaller portions and I’ve allowed myself treats like a handful of chocolate chips or a cinnamon roll, so that I don’t suddenly binge on six bars of chocolate or something like that.

My eating habits have been pretty crappy too, if I’m being honest. There have been a few good meals in there, tuna salad and grilled salmon with asparagus and wild rice, but then there’s been a lot of crappy meals in there that involved cookies, candy and scones with jam and cream, and the five days of being sedentary other than the 7 hours at work.

However, despite all that and the fact that I wasn’t using even safe diet pills or unsafe ones. I did stick to my NO SODA and NO CAFFEINE rules, and I’ve lost 4.4lbs, so something good is going on.

That’s my weighing scale from this morning. I was very surprised, because I expected to have not lost, or even put on a pound or two. This does not mean I’m going to continue eating badly. In fact this has spurred me with great passion to fix that portion of my diet as well.

We had another walk with Mum and Dee (the dog) this morning, and depending on my work schedule that’s going to continue every day that we can, weather pending and appointments and all that. Until my stamina is built up, then I’m going to slowly integrate Couch to 5K back in until I can do week 1 of that properly and then move on with that.