About a week ago my boss was telling me that he wanted to do a friendly health competition at our office where we all would have the choice of paying a small amount of money into the pot and whoever lost the most weight would win. I loved the sound of this! The only thing though is that I'm just not sure if we will end up actually doing it and if we do when we will finally start it. Then yesterday I was reading an article about different weight loss options out there that suit different personality types. When I read about this sort of thing on a much larger scale than what we might have at work I knew I wanted to give a competition like this a shot. I discovered dietbet las night and signed up immediately because it felt like the perfect thing for me to do at this point in time on my journey to losing weight and getting healthier.
Here's my history with weight gain, weight loss, and dieting: Right around the time that I turned 4 I started having seizures. To treat my epilepsy I was put on a variety of different medications that either didn't effectively control the seizures or had adverse side effects. One side effect of several of the medications I was put on was weight gain. In most of the pictures that exist of me from the ages of 4 to 8 it is quite obvious that I was chubby. I've always loved eating and I can't remember a time that my intense sweet tooth did not exist, but I don't recall having a bad relationship with food at that time in my life. After it seemed like we had exhausted the medication route my neurologist thought it was time to try brain surgery. My mother was oposed to this possible course of treatment at that point in time and wanted to exhaust all other possible treatment options before letting any doctor cut into my brain. Then what I consider to be a miracle in timing happened. My mother was watching dateline one night and there was a story on about a young boy who had had no luck with anti seizure medication OR brain surgery. His parents had grown desperate to find a way to help their son and they found hope in a random book they stumbled up. The name of this hope was the Ketogenic Diet. The Ketogenic Diet had been used as a treatment option about 80 years earlier for kids with difficult to control epilepsy, but when a slew of new drugs came out in the 50s the diet was thrown aside as a possible treatment option and for the most part was practically extinct by the time Charlie's parents read up on it. They discovered there was only one dietician in the country (maybe even the world) still trained in administering the diet properly. They took Charlie to her, all the way from Los Angeles out to Baltimore, and he was put on the diet. It was like magic! He had better seizure control on the diet than he ever had on any of the medications or following one of his brain surgery's.
My mother showed me a tape about Charlie that explained the diet and she asked me if I would be willing to try it out. I just wanted my seizures to stop so I said I wanted to try it. I started the Ketogenic diet by spending three days at the hospital where I fasted all three days. The nurses had to check my uring at different times to make sure that I was going into ketosis-when you're body switches over from using carbohydrates for fuel to using fat (this it what happens to people who are starving so that they can use their backup reserves for fuel-fat). I got to go home after that and ended up spending the next to years of my life in ketosis. This wasn't a "one and done" type of thing. It required specific down to the ounce menu that I had to follow to a t. Approximately 80% of my diet was composed of fat, and then a little protein, very very little carbohydrates, and practically no sugar. The diet was designed to mimic the effects of starvation (that's the being in ketosis part) without the dieter actually starving. If I deviated at all there was an overwhelmingly good chance o f me having a seizure (they completely stopped when I was on the diet...MIRACULOUS). If I drank too much water I would have a seizure. Saying I was on a strict regimen is an understatement to say the least. I won't sugarcoat things, it was Hell. I had to bring my own food everywhere and couldn't go off the plan. I hated going to any type of social gathering because food was always part of the equation. Although being on the diet wasn't exactly a positive experience I would do it all over again if I had to because of the overwhelmingly positive outcome-being cured of seizures! I'm 26 now and haven't had a seizure since I was 8 years old. The diet was worth it!
The thing that kept me going during those two years was a realistic hope for seizure freedom, and I kept telling myself that once the diet was over everyhting in my life would be perfect. That was not the case though. When I was weaned off the diet when I was 10 years old the seizures did not return. I knew it was all worth it at that point. The diet had achieved it's desired effect. For all intensive purposes I had seemingly been cured of an incurable chronic condition. I've said it before and I'll say it again...it was miraculous! Life did not end up being perfect as I thought it would be though. My parents got divorced and my father moved out of our house, my mother started working full-time again after being a stay-at-home mom for as long as I could remember, my teacher retired at the same time (in the middle of thw school year), and I started having very intense anxiety attacks after not being able to cope with all of the changes happening around me that I had no control over. Being on a diet designed to mimic the effects of starvation for 2 consecutive years allowed me no room to use eating/food as a coping mechanism, but that was no longer the case. Food became a way for me to calm myself down and numb myself to these intense feeling that I didn't understand and didn't know how to deal with them. I was put on Prozac to help with the anxiety, but food continued to be a staple in how I dealt with life...something that continues to this day. I was always fat/chubby/thick/pleasantly plum to one degree or another, and looking back at how I ate that played a huge part, along with the fact that I have a thick/curvy body. I tried the Slimfast diet in the 8th grade and did Jenny Craig twice in high school (as well as other "diets" here and there). It was a roller coaster of weightloss and gain, with periods of either strict dieting or binging, but no healthy medium.
We've all heard about the "Freshmen 15." For me it was the Freshmen 45. I gained 45 pounds my first year of college, which encompassed a span of about 9 months. I avoided the mirror at all costs because I hated looking at myself and never stepped on the scale. I was in denile about my weight issues. I was away from home for the first time ever and didn't have my mother monitoring what I ate, so I ate whatever I wanted, which meant everything. I topped out at 231 lbs before I got serious about doing something to lose the weight. I had two wake up calls. One was seeing a picture of myself that really showed me how big I had gotten, and I also stopped getting my period after hitting a weight of 215 lbs. I did Lindora, which was another Ketogenic diet. I lost 25 lbs in 3 months and have managed to keep that off over the years. A few years after that I did Jenny Craig for the THIRD time (gained all of that back). Last year I started going to a boot camp in that offered a nutrition program as well and lost about 30 lbs, which I have managed to mostly keep off.
In January I moved out to Pryor, Montana. Pryor is a rural town located on the Crow Indian Reservation. Before this I only had experience living living in urban areas (Los Angeles and San Francisco). This move has been good for me and so far I have been managing my weight. I miss having a community of people I can work with towards my goal though, and I am ready to get more active and healthy. I never want to go on another diet and frankly I don't need to. I know what to do, but doing it is a whole different story. I'm ready though, and with everyone else who will be doing this with me I'm confident we will push eachother and support eachother to reaching out different goals. LET'S DO THIS!!!