Chronicles of a Very Very Hangry Woman - Week One

Day One

I'm ready. Let's do this.
One chocolate-ishly flavoured Very Low Calorie Diet shake.
One mighty big glass of water with sugar-free low-kilojoule soft drink fizzafied in the Soda Stream. Yes. I'm allowed to have this kid of cheater's water. True.

All I can think about is food. It's only been a couple of hours, but I'm grieving for the loss of breakfast in my life. Breaky is was my favourite meal of the day and I would eat it for lunch and dinner and supper and brunch and afternoon tea if I could. I'm a big (literally & metaphorically) kid and love Coco Pops and Chex and Froot Loops, yet I wouldn't have them all that often. Right now I want them. Oh how I want them. 

I've kept myself busy with the school run, swimming lesson for Me-Big-Girl Scarlett and other kid-related activities. I have a headache brewing and can't wait for lunch - another VLCD shake & a cup of salad veggies.

Oh my God I'm hungry. I have shaky hands and my head is thumping. I do a stir-fry for the family's dinner and a stir-fried cup of veggies for me and wash it down with another VLCD shake. I find I automatically reach for bits and pieces of food to pop in my mouth as I cook, but resist. Yay me. I can do this.

Day Two
I've woken up with a headache again. 

There are Froot Loops strewn across the kitchen bench. Nope. I won't eat them. A VLCD shake with one - no, let's go two - teaspoons of coffee in it. The caffeine can battle it out with the Panadol while I take my 2 year old to music playgroup. That'll help.

I make lunches for my kids. Usually it's a slice of ham on the bread and one or two in my mouth, a slice of cheese on this one, a slice of cheese with ham in my mouth. Crusts off and in my gob, too. So much mindless eating that I'm super-conscious of today. But I'm proud to say I resisted.

I want chocolate.

I watch my youngest partially eat her sushi for lunch. I'd normally finish it for her. Today, I pour the milk from a bowl of cereal I hadn't cleaned away onto the sushi and make sure it gets binned.

I thought I was doing really well until I cooked chicken parmigiana for the clan. The smell. The sauce. The dripping melted cheese. Holy hell on a fork.

 

See this?

This is the left-over parma sauce and melted cheese with a bit of baked potato.

Normally, I'd have cleaned that pan. With my tongue. 
But I didn't.

As my kids tell me how yummy dinner is, I tell my husband how freaking hard it has been cooking dinner tonight and just how much will-power and resistance it has taken for me to make it, smell it, and watch them eat it. "I love you the way you are," he said. "But you want to do this so you have to deal with it." Bastard. He's lucky he said the first part.


Day Three
The headache's still there, but it's quietened down a bit allowing for the noise of the stomach growls to be heard instead.

I'm feeling good and positive this morning. I think I'll make up some positive affirmations to wallpaper the house with. Maybe. I escape the lunch-making torture this morning by ordering The Wondertwins their school lunches via the canteen app. I want to eliminate any temptation today.

Then came dinner. This >>>>

But not for me. Not a fry. Not even the rejected pickle from Scarlett's burger. Just a nice cup of steamed veggies, the shake, and a cup of hot Vegemite water. Yes. You heard right. Vegemite. And it wasn't that bad, either.

My headache's back in full swing. I feel light-headed. I'm shaky and I have a loud ringing in my ears which is giving me the shits. 

Am I skinny yet?

Day Four

I realised this morning that I didn't take my usual antihistamine last night to keep the itchies away. So far, for about 10 years, no one has actually pin-pointed why I need to pop antihistamines, but the need has been acknowledged. I'm no doctor, but I'm guessing it was something in my crappy diet that I'm not having now while I freakin' starve. Maybe I had an allergy to food after all. 

Yep, headachy again. Ears ringing again. Hungry. Again. 

Mega - I'm talking embarrassingly epic - tantrum in the carpark outside my girls' ballet class this morning. I can't tolerate annoying, whiney, sooky, defiant, uncooperative little turds on my best days, let alone when I'm non-caffeinated, hangry and having sugar and Coke withdrawals. Not pretty. This is when I would normally reach for a Macca's coffee frappe with it's full cream milk and lashings of whipped cream topped with deliciously rich chocolate fudge sauce to calm me down and restore my balance. Nope. Not this time. I had to stew in my own juices (crap - why does anger get to have a foodie idiom but I can't angry-eat?)

I was surprised that by dinner time I didn't feel all that hungry. But I realised, as I got things ready to make Grace's favourite chicken quesadillas, just how mindful I have been in the past four long long days. I'm actually noticing just how much I ate without thinking about eating. It was so automatic. So tonight, as the smells of roast chicken begged for me to eat it's skin while shredding it for the meal, I asked Timbo (the hubby) to step up and do it for me. I can't be trusted. Or maybe I can, but I want to eliminate the possibility of being weak anyway.

Eyes on the prize, Lisa. Eyes on the prize.

Day Five

I am so so so so fucking hungry this morning.
I will not give in to Froot Loop cravings.
I will not make butter and vegemite with a bit of toast.
I love my diet shake.
I love my diet shake.
I love my diet shake.
Fuck I'm hungry.

I started hypnotherapy for mind-shifting for weight loss today. It turns out one of the loveliest people I have met in the school yard this year is a hypnotherapist. I thought I'd give it a go. It's probably the only thing I haven't tried before for weight loss. I had a one hour session booked, starting at 11am.

I cried. I laughed. I listened. I remembered. I went to my 'happy place' which was not of me drunk at an island bar with Bradley Cooper and not a child in sight. For a change. 

My mind had me sit on the warm soft sand at the beach, just watching and listening to the waves crash in on the sand bar, and a seagull occasionally squawking in the distance. The water was so clear and blue. I saw my reflection in a mirror and changed its appearance to how I want to see myself in the near future. I was smiling. 

At 2:30pm, we finished for the day. 

I can't begin to tell you just how amazing I felt after that. Just awesome. 

Pinterest

Day Six

I'm still riding the hypno-ride from yesterday.
I feel great. Headaches are gone! Huzzah!
Being around my perpetually hungry family (not much difference between satisfying 5 year olds going through growth spurts than a 15 year old boy who eats like Zac Efron in the movie 17 Again) wasn't much of a problem today. I still have to remind myself not to lick a spoon of Nutella from the jar (erm...how'd that get in there anyway?) or nibble the bits of food from the kids' plates, but I'm stepping away empty handed. Today, I'm rocking this shit.

Could murder a bottle of Moscato, though.

Day Seven

Week One down and what have I learned?

• I haven't had an antihistamine in four days for itchy skin.
• My skin is starting to look a bit better. 
• My boobs aren't resting on a table of stomach already.
• I am considerably less bloated.
• I'm not tired. In fact, I was so tired all the time before I started this.
• My tummy still growls (oh how it growls) but instead of reaching for some Reese's Pieces in all their delicious crunchy peanut buttery evilness I've been grabbing a stick of celery and a glass of water. WTF??
• I'm smiling more already.

Week Two is coming and I'm gonna crank that shit up to eleven. Bring it on!



You can follow me & my other daily rantings on my Facebook page.

Do Not Feed After Midnight

Some of you in Facebookland may know by now that I will be having bariatric surgery in the near future. 

After years and years of trying to fight the fat chick that's taken over my body since having kids, I'm finally scheduled to have a gastric sleeve op.

Now I am in no means blaming my five kids for my perpetually ballooning girth - I managed to bring myself to this morbid point all on my lonesome. I could point the finger at having kids (particularly for making me crave the most greasy, fatty, salty, sugary, deep fried, chocolate coated delicious food to keep morning sickness at bay), or for having depression and anxiety and all the various happy pills I've been on for the past 15 years, or for being time-poor unorganised and lazy at meal times and resorting to The Divine Mr Drive-Thru. It's hard to convince my kids that I haven't always been like this and that I was once healthy, active and sporty. I hope to show them this one day in the not so distant future. Or at least to not be outrun by a 2 year old in a playground. 

My perpetually ballooning girth has come about from not caring about what I was eating when I was pregnant, from become inactive and sedentary during and after pregnancy, from continually giving in to cravings for flavour and sugar and not hunger, and from habitually noshing on anything and everything because I was happy, sad, anxious, bored, tired or just awake. To get to this point, I have had to successfully fail at dieting. And I have succeeded to fail in almost every weight loss program out there. My passionate love and extreme hate relationship with food has found me here, now with chronic pain that makes that oh-so-simple eat-less-exercise-more formula not so simple. Exercise equals unbearable pain. No pain, no gain? Fuck that shit. For now anyway.

So. What's a gastric sleeve?

www.nationalbariatriclink.org

Take a normal stomach. Cut two thirds of the stomach and exorcise that demon along with the portion that produces the hunger hormone Ghrelin, via keyhole surgery. What's left behind is a teeny sleeve of stomach. See how darn cute it will be!!

Pinterest

I don't want to be the jolly fat chick. I don't want to see food as my enemy. Food has been the #1 love of my life (oh, yeah, after my husband & kids, of course) but I desperately need to stop embracing it with all I've got & give it a caring peck on the cheek instead.

I'm a mixture of excitement, fear and guilt.

I should not have got to this point.
I'm grateful to have a chance to get my life and health back in check.
I have been extremely lucky to have dodged the diabetes, heart disease, cholesterol, and high blood pressure bullets.
I should have had more will-power a long time ago.
I feel like I'm cheating.
What if I stuff this up, too? 

By sharing this publicly, I feel more accountable and fiercely determined to make this work. I can't let my family down. So, like hundreds of others who have blogged about their weight loss journey, I will do so too. 


Did you notice I never mentioned in this post how freakin' sexy I'll look in a year or so? Yeah baby...

Two kilos

Dammit.

Here I am on the cover of
LA Confidential magazine.

I've been dieting for a month. A whole month! Why don't I look like Mila Kunis yet? 

In case you've stroked out and don't know, I have been battling with food addiction for the past too many years. Food is my friend, my comfort, my love. I would wake up thinking about how I have to stop eating so much only to go to the kitchen and gorge on whatever I could find, then finish off whatever was left on the kids' plates. I never got to the point of diving through rubbish bins looking for the last few fries from a McDonald's Happy Meal, but my thoughts were always consumed by food. Pardon the pun.

I've been taking the appetite suppressant Duramine for a month now. The first week was hell. Going cold turkey on Pepsi and all things sugary made me want to kill. I had headaches and apparently I was not a happy chappy to live with. Ok, I was a little difficult to be around. Alright, I was a psychopathic fucktard asshat. And I only lost two kilograms. I'd been banging my head against a wall for nothing (150 calories per hour. True.) What a waste of eight hours that was. I bet Mila Kunis never had to bang her head as much as I do to shift calories. 

And I didn't even use
Photoshop!

I know, I know, I should be really happy with two kilos. And really I am. Two kilos is a good start. It's just that a lot of people I know who have been on this wonder drug lost lots and lost it relatively quickly. Some didn't eat at all. I can't do that. I still need to eat. I need to eat because I will need to go off this medication in a few months. I need to eat to reprogram my eating behaviours and habits. I need to eat because I want my kids to see me eating. I need to look at food differently, more of a source of energy than a companion. Oh, best friend and confidant, how I miss thee. I miss our secret rendezvous in the middle of the night. I miss how you'd quietly beckon me with a breathy "eat meeeeee...." I'm so sorry Food, but our relationship was toxic. You made me believe I needed your emotional connection when all it was was physical. 

Two kilograms (or in real terms, Mila Kunis' left arm) is the baby step towards the new me. Looking like Mila Kunis is my carrot dangling out in front. And if that doesn't work, the price tag of the Duramine will certainly do the job.

*No Mila Kunises were harmed in the making of this blog.


Come bang your head on my Facebook wall & lose 150 calories per hour with me!

Listmania 1

Ok, so I'm a bit slow on the uptake. I'm the first to admit it. I have just decided to join in with Home Life Simplified 'Listmania' which started a couple of weeks ago. But, hey, better late than never. Listmania is a weekly list-making exercise to let you know the real 'me'. I thought this might be a good way for me to actually learn a bit about myself and trip down amnesia lane. Here goes...

Currently I am:

Reading

I don't often get time to read. When I do, it's typically a Dr Suess book to the Wondertwins. At the moment, it's P.D Eastman's "Go Dog, Go". And when I say 'at the moment', I mean for the last 23 months. One can never get enough of brown dogs driving around and around in cars.

Surprisingly, you've caught me reading a book that has more than 200 words in it. I'm reading John Marsden's 'Tomorrow, When The War Began', not so much for my pleasure but to be one step ahead of my 13 year old son who will be studying it this term. 


Listening to
Hi5. And when the tiny tots aren't in the car, Foo Fighters 'Wasting Light' and Adele's '21'. Unfortunately, I'm not often in the car without the Hi5 fanclub. It used to be the Wiggles, but since Sam Wiggle was given the boot I will not allow them to be played. Not on my watch.


Laughing at
My kids. Hysterically. Actually, they are the funniest, most entertainingly frustrating creatures I know. They are better than anything on tv. I often have to stifle my laughter at 3 and a half year old Lily, who regularly tells me to sit on the naughty step and calls her Dad 'a idiot'. 


Swooning over

Mmm. Thank you flickr.com

I've had a look-see at other people's lists and found that many Listmaniacs are swooning over their husbands or partners. I would never have thought of that! But, um, of course, I swoon over my husband Tim. But there are many other people and things that I consider swoonworthy. Taylor Kinney from Chicago Fire & Vampire Diaries is one. Passionfruit gelati is another. Mmmm.


Planning
I plan to do a lot of things, I just don't know how to do them. I plan to finish my Masters Degree in Deaf Education. I'm half way through. I plan to study audiology. I plan to lose a lot of weight. 


Eating lots of
This is where I go horribly wrong. I eat lots of everything. I'm a foodaholic. But from today, and with the help of a supportive doctor, I have started to walk the path of a healthier lifestyle. I plan to eat lots of green things, and things that grow on trees and are not deep fried or wrapped in bacon. Fingers crossed.


Feeling
I've been on such a rollercoaster. In the spirit of listing I would say

• anxious
• self conscious
• tired
• out of control
• weak
• appreciative
• loved

Discovering
I'm discovering a joy of watching my children's milestones and firsts. I can't remember much of Campbell (13) and Ella (11) as babies. I struggled with PND and psychosis and was full to the brim with a sleepy cocktail of medication back then. But I am loving watching 9 month old Baby Scarlett discover the world and my 3 and a half year old twins discover their boundaries.


Looking at
I'm forever looking at the complete chaos that is my house. It disturbs me. It bothers me. And yet, it stays. I turn and I'm looking at another masterpiece of wall art drawn by my twins. I love looking at their angelic faces as they sleep.


Wearing
At the moment, I'm ready for bed in my ever so glamorous t shirt and pyjama pants. I have a towel around my head, a stud in my tragus and a cat in my lap. I sound so feral in writing.

Banoffee Pie on Pinterest

Cooking
I'm not a good cook. But I do have plans (aahh, plans, should have adding this to my list) of making a 'Banoffee Pie'. I'm a bit addicted to Jamie Oliver at the moment and I'm determined to prepare one of his 30 minute meals in under 90 minutes.


Wondering
I'm wondering where we could go on a holiday with 5 kids. I'd love to go to Canada or the UK, but I'm seriously wondering if I've got the guts to take them all on a plane for that long.


Trying out
I'm trying out a new 'diet' pill/appetite suppressant under the watchful eyes of my doctor and a psychologist. It's not new new, but it's new to me. We'll see how that goes.

Well, there you have it. My Listmania list. Stay tuned. There will be more to come.

Fatty fatty-boom-bah

I'm determined not to pick on any of my family members in this blog, so they are relatively safe. For now. 

In light of a comment made by a 'well-meaning' friend who suggested, as he regarded me from head to toe, that 'life must be treating me well - a little bit too well', I thought I would lay part of my heart that hasn't yet turned black on your computer screen.

Yes, I am a big fat podgy butter-ball fatty-boom-bah fatso. Thanks soooo much for pointing that out. I don't know how I missed it.

Yes, I do know I've become a little more than Rubenesque. 

Rubens, Venus at a Mirror, c1615
If only my arse was this small. 

No, I didn't actually set out to put on weight.

And no, again, I'm not happy about that.

But for the last few years, I have been constantly thinking of food.

The more I think of dieting, the more I think of food. 

I never had this problem when I was younger. 
I was fit, sporty and fashionable (well...I thought so, anyway) and food was just the thing Mum put on a plate at the end of the day and you ate it whether you liked it or not.

Up until 13 years ago, I was playing competition tennis in Melbourne and country Victoria. I wore my little white tennis skirt and didn't think twice about putting on a tight top. I shopped in cool shops with other cool customers while cool sales staff were more than happy to take my money. 

I remember thinking if I ever went up a dress size how devastated I would be.

A baby and 26 extra kilos put me up more than a dress size. 
Baby number 2 and 20 extra kilos increased that (do you see a pattern here?)
I still ate like I was pregnant during my eight year baby hiatus until I was pregnant with the Wondertwins. I didn't eat for 3. I ate for 10.

             

With twins

   

With Scarlett

I'm more than a dress size bigger.

Now I hate with a passion shopping for clothes, and shopping for food.

And I hate myself for all the times I looked at a larger person and thought 'Why aren't they doing something about that?'

Now that I am that larger person, I think about being a larger person constantly. That and food. Bloody hell. Now I'm thinking of the left overs in the fridge. Excuse me for a moment...

So, in case you're reading this, and still don't get why I haven't just got off my fat arse and done something about it, here are some things I know and you don't have to tell me:

I know I am twice the size I should be.
I know I am at risk for heart disease, heart attack, diabetes, early death.
I know I am not a good role model for my children.
I know I need to lose weight.
I would like to be around for many many more years so that my feral children can continue with their constant and unrealistic demands on my sanity.

I recently went to my doctor to talk to him about losing weight. I went there already with a chip on my shoulder (mmmm chips...) and was prepared to shove my souvlaki up deep within him where the sun doesn't shine if he suggested I should simply eat less and exercise more. My last doctor would at least pump me full of a higher dose of fluid retaining antidepressants so I couldn't care less about my increasing girth. But, to my surprise, my 'new' doctor was great. He looked at my lifestyle, my husband's long work hours, my eating habits, my psychological health, my support network. We talked about the idea of eating less and exercising more and the possibility of gastric banding, and related my food addiction to the notion of telling an alcoholic to only have a sip of a drink three times a day. In other words - it ain't gonna happen.

Despite the self-loathing and desperation to lose the weight, I still have that ever-present magnetic pull to food.

When I was in the Mother-Baby Unit with depression, we shared the ward with people with eating disorders. I couldn't understand how some of the girls believed that you could get fat by looking at food or touching it's packaging. Sometimes I think I can't add anymore weight if I finish off my kids' meals. After all, if I didn't ask for it, then it doesn't count, right?

I've stepped into many different people's shoes, shoes I never in a million years thought I'd wear. Shoes of people who have walked through depression, IVF, infertility, weight gain, miscarriage and death. I've learned a lot and cursed the universe for involving me in these lessons. Dammit. I'm tired.

Under this thick pudding skin is a hot sexy MILF screaming to paint on some skintight jeans, pull on her knee high boots, flash a bit of boob and head out to the kindergarten with her designer nappy bag.

Until then, I'll do a few laps in this tub of ice-cream.

Rant over.
x

PS: I promise not to deviate again from my usual rantings of life with my five precious evil children in the future.


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