Diet and Weight-loss Frustration

Diet Frustration - The Back Story

Ok, so I haven't been writing much lately, and the honest truth is that I am feeling diet frustration. Ugh! So, I guess I'm just going to have to tell the story.

By February 2009, I reached an all-time high weight of 193 pounds. And I decided something had to change. I'd been following a mostly raw foods lifestyle for close to 2 years at that time, but unlike other raw foodists who reported losing tons of weight, I hadn't lost the pounds I wanted to lose. At 5'9" tall, I can carry more weight than most, but my ideal weight hovers somewhere between 140 and 160 pounds. So, at best, I was 30 pounds overweight and feeling it. I decided to get serious about the weight loss. And by mid-summer of that year, I had lost 30 pounds and was down to 160. Weight-wise I felt great! I was thin...people were telling me that I was skinny...and I felt good in my clothes.

An unexpected turn in the story.

Things changed when I started experiencing symptoms. Many of which I would later learn were a result of pre-menopause and hormonal imbalance. But I am quite sure that many of the symptoms were also due to my diet. I had a perpetual deep muscle pain in the back of my left thigh, and I became severely anemic. My energy dropped dramatically, and my menstrual cycle was lasting two weeks to a month at a time. I was fatigued and lightheaded. And during my period, I felt a deep pain from my abdomen all the way through to my lower back.

And I began having such extreme joint pain in my knees and ankles that I believed I would have to live with rheumatoid arthritis for the rest of my life.

I also developed horizontal ridges on my fingernails...a symptom I learned was indicative of iron and vitamin B12 deficiency.

My husband and I decided it was time to reintroduce more red meat into my diet.

Since that time, most of those symptoms have been eliminated...but some new ones have taken their place; I've started having nighttime numbness and tingling in my arms and sometimes my legs. I also have pain in the left side of my neck and chronic charlie horses in the middle toes on my left foot. Occasionally I have felt a slight flutter or pressure in my chest. These symptoms all freak me out because my dad had a double heart attack, and then more recently, my brother, who is ten years older than me, had a heart attack and was diagnosed with diabetes. I have tried to be so careful about what I eat, and it blows my mind to think that I might be pre-diabetic...but I'd be crazy not to consider the possibility.

So, my weight...

My diet frustration is because I have regained almost all of the weight that I lost. It was so easy to keep it off, for over a year and a half, on the raw foods diet I was following. But I felt lousy. Lately, I have been following a low-carb diet. Then I tried the Weight Watchers program, and I have to say that I am no longer experiencing joint pain. And the discomfort in my neck, and numbness in my arms, have all but vanished. But it has become more and more difficult to lose weight since my hormones changed. And it frustrates the hell out of me! My body no longer responds to diet the way it used to...and I don't really know what to do about it. There is more diet frustration because I don't have the patience to lose just 1/2 a pound a week. I want to get back down to that comfortable 160, at a minimum. But don't know the best path to do it. I'm in a holding pattern right now while trying to decide the best way forward for my body. Clearly, raw foods with no animal protein doesn't work for me. But I don't know that low-carb is the answer, either.