A Weighty Matter

Okay, so that's a bad pun. Take it back-that's an awful pun! My husband would be ashamed. However, this is my blog, not his, so too bad! Of note-I am happy for anyone who wants to read this blog to go ahead and read it-but if we are just casual acquaintances, you will probably find it boring. You have been warned!

So, some of you know this, some don't, but shortly before Josh and I got married, I made the worst medical mistake of my adult life-I took hormonal birth control. I thought that was just what you do-we are about to get married, not ready for kiddos yet, so this is the responsible adult thing to do. Well, to say it wreaked havoc on my body is to put it VERY mildly. The first one I was on made my hormones swing like crazy. Ask Josh-I literally spent an ENTIRE WEEKEND sobbing on the couch in his apartment-for no identifiable reason. I didn't even know it was possible for an adult to cry that long (or any human for that matter!) and I had no answer to the question of "what's wrong???" After that, we both agreed that I was changing pills. That was NOT an experience we wanted to repeat!
The next one I took was better from the hormone standpoint (at least the ones that make you crazy and emotional) so we thought we were good. We got married, came back to Texas, and I started clinical rotations. Then all of a sudden, I started gaining weight. Fast. And a lot of it. In fact, in the first 3 months we were married, I put on 50 lbs. Now, sometimes we are most blind when it comes to our own lives and bodies. I had heard and read of people "letting themselves go" after marriage, and figured maybe that was the problem. Never mind the fact that we were eating exactly the same and I had become MORE active (I went from sitting in a chair 8+ hours/day to standing, walking, running, and lifting that same amount of time), not less. Eventually, I realized that couldn't be it. Well, maybe I was stressed? I was in the clinical rotation from hell, after all. Nope...the gain did not end when the rotation did. So I started seeing doctors. The first one I tried was positive I had an eating disorder I was trying to hide (because people who are trying to hide conditions seek medical care). The second told me in words that are seared into my soul to this day, "I know you are just wanting to sit on the couch and eat chocolate all day, and I am not going to give you a medical excuse to do that." No one mentioned birth control as a possibility.
My sister in law got off of her birth control around that time and mentioned how much better she (eventually) felt. She had been having some of the same fatigue symptoms that I had been having, so I wondered if that would help me. So I got off of mine. It took about 5 months, but finally, FINALLY my weight gain stabilized and I stopped gaining (almost 80 lbs more than I had been at the beginning of all of this). However, no matter what I did, it would not come off.
You know how you watch those extreme weight loss shows and see a contestant who hasn't lost the right amount of weight...and then the trainer gets in their face and says, "Math doesn't lie! If you were doing xyz and only eating this many calories, you would have lost this much weight!" Well, I can't tell you for sure how it is for those people, but for me, the math lied. There were points in time where I was doing 2-3 2 hour workouts per day and eating 1400 calories or sometimes slightly more-and my weight did not budge. It didn't even really redistribute very much. I won't elaborate on the emotional struggles involved with this, but any of you who are women or who have spent any time talking to women, will know what I mean.
Finally, one of my parents' friends (a family practice physician) got involved. And I FINALLY, after over a year at this point, had answers. Apparently this is a fairly common side effect of birth control (about 5% of women who start birth control, especially at a point multiple years past puberty have this "side effect"-which I think is a high enough number to warrant a warning and/or recognition by the medical community!). It essentially can "turn off" your body's ability to process food-and instead it starts storing EVERYTHING you eat...the net impact is that even though you are gaining weight, your nutrition levels are similar to someone who is starving to death, because everything is being stored rather than used. Oh, and it doesn't really matter what you eat, healthiness, calories burned, etc.-it isn't going to come off and you will keep gaining.
So I got on medication-several medications, actually, which were intended to turn my metabolism back on and make my body start processing food correctly again. There were some side effects of those, but I was SLOWLY starting to lose weight. I was eating healthy, taking the meds, and doing P90X-and at the end of the 90 days, I had dropped about 10 pounds. Not much...just a drop in the bucket, really...but it was the first time I had been able to lose weight in almost 3 years.
Then I got pregnant. I was soooo happy, and weight was the last thing on my mind. In fact, I loved my body while I was pregnant. For the first time, I didn't feel like I had to constantly berate myself for my weight and I didn't feel like people were judging me (for the record, both of those are my issues, not due to anyone else!). However, when I got pregnant I almost immediately dropped 20 lbs despite the fact that I stopped exercising. I was quite ill and unable to eat much. I was okay with that, but really not worried about my body-I figured I'd start the whirlwind and craziness again once the baby came.
I gained a total of 12 pounds during my pregnancy (over my prepregnancy weight). In fact, I walked out of the hospital weighing only 3 lbs more than I did before I got pregnant. People had mentioned the possibility of pregnancy hormones "resetting" my metabolism, which made sense since I had gained the weight hormonally, but I didn't hope for it. However, the weight continued to slowly come off, even though I wasn't trying (there was a lot going on postpartum). 2 months ago, I was FINALLY cleared to exercise, and then the weight started coming off more quickly. It was like magic!
The math is finally working. It's crazy.
I am so thankful-it is so freeing to actually have things work the way they are supposed to! As of today, I weigh 21 pounds less than I did before I got pregnant, and in the last month I've been dropping an average of 2 pounds per week. I definitely feel a lot better, and I can fit in clothes that didn't even fit before I was pregnant! I'm not sure if it will continue doing this (part of me is waiting for the other shoe to drop) but I am so thankful to the Lord for giving me this gift.