Miscalculations

In the world of weight management, there is one factor that can silently sabotage your efforts...bad information. While much of the world is doing a great job of listing their calorie counts on their menus and in nutritional data online, not every restaurant does this yet. When having to do it on your own, it is quite possible that you will miscalculate things you eat.

This week, I did that. And I gained weight because of it. Thanks to My Fitness Pal, I was able to look at which foods I KNEW I got right, which then allowed me to see what I must have counted wrong. This did several things for me:

• It allows me to never eat those foods again, since I clearly can't properly account for them
• It allows me to NOT beat myself up for the weight gain
• and most importantly, it allows me to NOT let this to be a setback 

When you're trying to be healthy and lose weight (or gain it), as with everything in life, there is going to be a learning curve. Some days, weeks, months everything will go the way you think it will. And some won't. That's normal. When you don't know why it happened, it's easy to tell yourself that you failed, that your body is against you, that you might as well just give up because you clearly can't do this.

But when you know why, when you have the right tools and the means of changing your thought life to support you instead of sabotage you, miscalculations can be seen for what they are. Miscalculations. Not an attack, not a failure, not a character flaw. Just a simple, human, miscalculation.

So as I start my Friday, instead of feeling weaker, I actually feel stronger. I know how to do better next week, I know what to avoid and what doesn't support my efforts. I feel empowered.

***Sidenote: You'll notice in my post on what I eat, instead of deleting the things that contributed to this gain, I lined them out so that you too can avoid them :)

Steroids and weight gain

Being an asthmatic and sick is no fun. Part of the joy of it is having to take steroids so you can breathe. No, they aren't anabolic steroids...they're corti-steroids which reduce inflammation and help my lungs relax. Yay for breathing, but along with it comes weight gain, grumpiness, insomnia and a general lack of energy. I only have 1 more day of them, thank goodness. They resulted in a gain of 4 pounds this week...ugh. They also make you hungrier, which doesn't help the matter.

When I was a kid, my well meaning grandmother got me a cat for Christmas. Soon after, my mom found me on the sofa after school barely breathing. When we got to the doctor, my asthma had returned with a vengeance and I was immediately put on a grip of steroids. Within the year I had gained 85 pounds. As a ballet and tap dancer, this was devastating. It changed my whole world and was sick to my stomach with an ulcer by the end of the year. I ended up taking myself off of all of them and just avoiding anything and everything that triggered my asthma.

It is that weight which I'm still trying to get rid of now at 34 years old. 25 years of weight from those steroids. I can forget sometimes why I got here, but moments like this...having to be back on them and seeing things change so quickly...reminds me of it all and the struggle I had at such a young age. It makes me grateful to have a strong prayer life now, a strong support system now, and the self-esteem to talk about it so that it no longer has a hold on my emotional health.

I know that next week I will be back on track and feeling great, this is just a blip, but it stinks just the same.