"Never be bullied into silence. Never allow yourself to be made a victim. Accept no one's definition of your life; define yourself." - Harvey Fierstein
It's been six days since my last post to you. I'm not even going to try and pretend that I meant to write or that I did write, or even try to catch up on each of the days in an each by each segment in this blog. You deserve better.
I've pretty much spent the last six days feeling sorry for myself. Yeah, I said it, the cheerleader has become depressed. When I was younger and I'd have a bad day, or an incident with one of my friends (as 12 year old girls are want to do from time to time), my mother would say "Oh my aren't we feeling sorry for ourselves!" (I'm not sure if she said "exclamation mark", but you have to imagine a highly ethereal waving of the arms into some nether place). Back then I never really thought I was feeling sorry for myself, but rather just feeling sad or bad about what was happening.
To this end I can truly say I have been depressed. Since starting at JDFT, I have actually gained weight. As of my weigh-in yesterday, I was 150.7 pounds. 150.7 pounds. 150.7 pounds. If anyone has been keeping track, that is an increase of 10.8 pounds. The good news is 3 of those pounds are muscle. The bad news is that leaves 7.8 unaccounted for pounds of ...FAT!
For you mathletes out there, let me explain how this works. One pound equals 3500 calories. 3500 calories. In order for me to have gained this 7.8 unaccounted for pounds of FAT I would have had to eat an additional 27,300 calories. 27,300 calories. Did you know that the average original Twinkie (http://www.hostesscakes.com/twinkies.asp) has 150 calories? That would mean that I would have to eat 182 Twinkies to gain the weight that I have gained.
Further to this, I have been working out 6 days a week. Thanks to Jo Dumont, of Jo Dumont Fitness Training my training schedule looks something like this:
Monday Training - 700 calories
Tuesday Circuit - 500 calories
Wednesday Hardcore - 700 calories
Thursday Running - 700 calories
Friday Hardcore - 700 calories
Sunday Running - 600 calories
That is 3900 hundred calories burned through exercise. If we only need to burn 3500 calories to burn a pound - how in the world am I gaining weight?!
So, as you all know, I had gone in to see a doctor. I didn't actually start seeing the doctor about my weight gain. I actually went to see the doctor in response to what presented as a bladder infection. The reason we found out about this bladder infection was because my period was late and I'd been peeing in a cup faithfully every Monday for about a month. ANYWAY, I digress. The bladder infection really wasn't a bladder infection at all, but what it did alert the physician to was that I was feeling pretty crappy, tired, achy a bunch of things, so he sent me in for blood work.
The results of the blood work indicated that I was hypokalemic. What is hypokalemic you ask? Well thanks to the wonders of Wikipedia I can tell you that Hypokalemia (American English), hypokalaemia (British English), or hypopotassemia (ICD-9) refers to the condition in which the concentration of potassium (K+) in the blood is low. The prefix hypo- means "under" (contrast with hyper-, meaning "over"); kal- refers to kalium, the Neo-Latin for potassium, and -emia means "condition of the blood."
In short, the blood tests indicated that I was very very low in potassium. Why is this important you might ask? With thanks to Three Fat Chicks on a Diet (http://www.3fatchicks.com/), I can tell you this: "Potassium helps you lose weight by converting food into energy and assisting to build muscles. The bigger and stronger your muscles are, the more calories they burn. With a healthy intake of potassium, your muscles will get bigger, and in turn, burn more calories. By helping you build bigger muscles, and by providing the energy you need to exercise, potassium is a dieter’s dream mineral! Keep up your potassium levels, and your muscles will overtake your fat in no time! Potassium also helps you balance the sodium in your cells, which helps with weight loss and provides other health benefits including reducing your risk of high blood pressure."
Now, I'm not saying that my lack of potassium has ANYTHING to do with the weight that I've gained, but at least I'm feeling somewhat hopeful that by getting on these wonderful potassium tablets and eating more potassium rich foods, that we can finally break that barrier of weight gain and turn it into a weight loss!
You'll forgive me if I don't celebrate until I'm at least back at my starting weight.
Goal weight - 125 pounds. Pounds to go - 25. ugh.
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