I swear, if one more medical professional says something along the lines of the title of this to me, then I may just open my mouth and scream at them long and hard.
So, I've always been bigger than my peers both in height and width. Looking back at pictures of me, it's mostly my build that does it as I am 5' 10", with a 63cm circumference head, and really broad shoulders. I always felt bigger than everyone I was in class with, and of course the kids at school liked to call me fat - and I believed them because I def didn't look like them. But then, I played rugby, lifted weights, did shotput, archery, etc. I was very athletic, but in sports that needed you to be strong in the upper body - because that's what I'm built for. I see pictures of myself back then and I'm not at all fat, I'm just well built.
My hormones never really worked properly due to me having PCOS, so the waist pinching in and the breasts developing never really happened. I have a very standard PCOS body which is small, pointy breasted and straight up and down like a rectangle. In my 20's I found that I could eat absolutely anything I wanted, so long as I was active. So I cycled and walked around Edinburgh and didn't think anything of it. Both of my jobs were ones where I was on my feet the entire shift, one even had me going up and down 5 flights of stairs regularly to find things in the various stockrooms for customers. So I was a size 12/14 on the bottom, and a size 16/18 on top - just to get things to fit across the width of my back! I drank like a fish and lived on pizza, like any good student does, but becaue I was active, that was ok. Yet still, I felt huge because I was so much taller and wider, and with a bigger head, thn those around me.
Then I moved on and got an office job, so my diet had to change and I had to find things to do outside of work to keep the activity levels high. I walked partway to work in all weathers, I cycled 12 miles every Saturday and helped with my Gran's gardening halfway through, and I walked the hills near my house. I was however working stupid hours a week, regularly clocking in a minimum of 85 hours a week. So it became a stop in at Tesco after 10pm to see what they had that I could just grab and eat before I crashed out to sleep. So late night eating coupled with not the best choices saw me creep up to an 18 on the bottom and an 18/20 on the top. And that's where I stayed, knowing I needed to increase my activity but having no time or strength for it, until the cancer diagnosis came along.
My activity dropped to 0 because the treatments and operations left me in pain and/or exhausted, and as I'm sure many of us do, I reached for the junk food for both convenience and comfort. On top of that, it was thyroid cancer, and thyroids are well known for helping to determine your weight. So of course, my weight increased. A few years later, I was diagnosed with another cancer, endometrial this time which was quite possibly caused by my new weight, or it was at least a contributing factor. To treat this, I went for the hormonal route as it was less dangerous for me, and should have less side effects. Unfortunately, one of those side effects is weight gain, and I've certainly seen it increase since starting on the tablets.
So, I have the hromone tablets that increase my weight. I have thyroid issues that increase my weight. I have PCOS which makes it 3 times easier to put weight on, especially around the middle in the danger area, and makes it 3 times harder for me to lose it. Then I have cancerous mets in my spine that make any sort of movement or activity painful, as well as chronic fatigue so even if I manage to do something a little physical, I then need a 3 hour nap to recover.
Then you go along to whatever specialist you have to see this time, and you know that losing weight would improve the issue - Google told you so. But you've no idea how to lose it due to the issues already mentioned. Calories have already been tracked and reduced, and you're eating between 900 and 1,200 a day. The types of food are well controlled as well to make sure it isn't just fat and sugar, and in fact lots of things have been cut out of your diet completely - RIP Crisps! So in you hobble to see this medical person. You take your bag off, you lean your crutch against something so it doesn't fall over, you take your jackety thing off if it isn't already from the roasting waiting rooms, and then you sit down. They start to talk about whatever results have come back, and then you see and feel it. Their eyes slowly, or sometimes quickly, drifting down over your frame to take in your lardy arse in its entirety and then comes the comment you've been waiting for. "You know, it would really help x if you would lose some weight"
No shit Sherlock.
You sit and wait, looking at them, waiting for more information such as how to achieve this miracle - but nothing more is forthcoming. Instead, they're sitting there with a smile, waiting for your reaction to this revelation, like you didn't realise you were fat, that you didn't look at the clothes lables when you were buying them and seeing the numbers 2 and 6 or 8 staring back at you. Like you don't feel gross every time you look in the mirror or get in the shower. Or when you go to events, having to sit on the floor because the chairs provided don't look strong enough to hold your weight. They seem to think that telling me I'm fat, is some giant revelation and I've been living the last few years blind and in denial.
It used to be that I'd smile at them, nod, thank them, and say I'll try. Now, now I'm challenging them. If they want to tell me to lose weight then they damn well had better have a plan on how to do that! Funnily enough, none of them are prepared for the question "How?!", and they always end up siting there like stammering idiots. I had one woman, a sleep apnea doctor, tell me that I should go out for a 20 minute walk twice a day and then I'd see the lbs just drop off. I stared at her, then slowly turned to look at my crutch, then looked back to her again and blinked. She got the message, and didn't have anymore bright ideas. But seriously, the number of doctors who just open their mouths and parrot about going out for a walk is unbelieveable - especially when we've just been going over about the pain in my spine, the degradation, and the exhaustion. It's like they turn on autopilot and don't actually think before speaking!
I think though that my favourite has to be the people calling themselves dieticians. I swear, I think that as long as you've passed healthy eating in Primary School you can call yourself a dietician. I've seen 4 or 5 of them now in the last 18 years, and every single one was useless. Most of them just gave me a picture of a plate, showing you how to balance a meal - I'm sure you're all seen these things. Then there's also the table of good things to eat lots of, middling things to have now and again, and bad things to have never or sparingly. So you've got fruit and veg in good, fats and sugars in bad, and most everything else in the middle. The stuff is so basic, it's laughable. Then there was the lady who asked me to keep a food diary after insisting that I was OBVIOUSLY eating too much of the wrong stuff, and did the eye run over me. So I did and sent it to her. She came back to me saying she didn't know how to help me because I actually wasn't eating enough food, so had put myself into the caveman mode where everything I ate was being turned into fat. However she could also see that from an older diary I sent her, that eating healthily and well balanced meals was making me put on weight.
Here in Leeds, the only weight management service type help is a scheme called One You. So I self referred along to them to see what they could do to help. Well, first off I wasn't allowed to join the exercise portion of it because my health issues are too complex and they can't cater to me. Then when I went along to the healthy eating section, they discharged me after 2 sessions because there was nothing wrong with my diet, and my weight issues all stem from my medical issues which is beyond their expertise.
So why this post now?
Well yesterday I went to see my endocrinologist who gave me a load of 'great' news. My Vitamin D has plummeted again. My fatty liver test results have increased. My cholesterol has increased. My cancer markers have increased. My thyroxine isn't working properly. And I'm now in the pre-diabetic range. So he suggested I lose weight. Even just a stone would help. Great. How? Well, apparently if he knew that then he'd have done it himself...... NOT HELPFUL! However, he highly recommends the Mediterranean diet because we in the UK eat too many carbs. My carbs come from veg on the whole, so that's def not my issue! But thanks for the tip....
On the plus side..... kinda, maybe, sorta. He says he can't believe how well I'm doing after all I've had done to me. I can't say that I feel like I'm doing particularly well, but maybe from an outsiders perspective I am, who knows. But it was a confusing comment that he made, and I've still not fully processed it or worked out how I feel about it. It's still being mulled over.
So yesterday I came home, had a bit of a frustrated cry, and then tried to find the positives while ignoring the overwhelming urge to go and buy crisps and stuff my face with all of them. The thing I focused on is that someone told me about an exercise class that's happening at my local Macmillan Centre. I found out about it the weekend before it started, so it was perfect timing really! There have been 2 sessions so far, and the lady running it is a lecturer at the local University, who lectures in PE and how to adapt things to people with special needs. So she's creating a routine that I can do everything in that will hopefully then help shift some fat. I've also been doing what I can from my Samsung Health app, and I've found 3 routines I can do most of. The issue is, that it takes me the full day to find the energy to do the 3 routines, and then there's at least one nap involved. So for what's less than 30 mins of exercise, I'm using up a full day of energy so those 3 routines have become a full time job and everything else is falling by the wayside as I just don't have the energy to do it. Or if I go out somewhere and do something, I then don't have the energy to exercise once home. I don't want to just live to exercise, but without it I'm not going to lose the weight - so what do I do?
I've been doing this for about a month now, and everything hurts, and things hurt that I didn't even know could hurt. But I'm 10lbs lighter than I was when I started. But it's a hard slog, and there are days when motivation is seriously lacking, or emotions say they need me to eat everything unhealthy. But you plow on and don't give in. Yet still when you see the doctors, despite all you've done and all you've tried, they don't see the weight loss, they only see the size of the person sitting in front of them. And yet again you hear it.....
You're too fat, you should exercise more.
