Tag Archives: womens-health

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NEW DAY 365: One-year anniversary! đŸĨ‚

Committing to weight loss isn’t a decision you make once.

It’s a series of decisions you make every day, throughout the day, multiple times a day.
The days turn into weeks.
Then months.
Then, somehow, a year.

A year’s worth of thousands upon thousands of decisions range from seemingly inconsequential to monumental to overwhelming — as do the results.

The person I was a year ago today was shattered, tentative, reeling, and supremely unhealthy in every way. She got moving because her mind became so paralyzed by external inputs that it shut down and her body took control. She was in no way the “she believed she could, so she did!” meme; she was trapped kinetic energy, desperate to escape the confines of her physical being. A year ago today, she wasn’t trying to do anything beyond survive the next 10 minutes.

She would be floored to hear what she was about to do over the next 365 days.

She got reacquainted — painfully, slowly, and sweatily — with the elliptical, in 5-minute increments, until she could do a continuous hour. It took her 4 months to go from 6 miserable minutes to 60 manageable ones.

Then she ran 4 elliptical miles in 60 minutes.
Then 5.
Then 6.
Then 7.

Then she ran 8 elliptical miles in 70 minutes.
Then 9.
Then 9.3.

She ran 30 seconds on her bum ankle on the treadmill, at a pace barely above walking.
Then 60-second intervals.
Then 90-second intervals.
Then 2-minute, 3-minute, and 5-minute intervals.
She increased her speed and ran a full mile.
Then 2.
She dutifully iced and elevated her ankle after every run until it learned it could handle it.
So she increased her pace and kept at it.

She signed up for, self-trained for, and finished a half-marathon.
She saw her finish-line photo and, for the first time, saw a runner.
She then registered for 2 more half-marathons.

She became an athlete.

She tried 75 Hard. She got sick, got rained on, got injured, and bled through her clothes while refusing to abandon her workout. She completed the challenge.
She rediscovered her love of being outside and how restorative it is to her mind and body.
She got trapped by 14 inches of snow before vacation. She spent 4 days digging out, arrived at her destination only to have to dig that out, too. She went running on the frozen beach the next day.
She made up and tried Power 11. No one was watching. She finished it as competitor, coach, and cheerleader.
She dealt with illness, pain, interruption, inconvenience, and deterrence. She found ways to move anyway. It made her stronger.

She became someone who does not quit.

She cut added sugar completely out of her diet for several months, both in a row and in a cumulative-intermittent fashion.
She experimented and figured out what type of eating schedule her body responds best to.
She gained new nutritional knowledge.
She learned her hunger and satiety cues and no longer has cravings or urges to snack.
She found herself deaf to food noise and disinterested in consuming anything that wouldn’t support her health.
She tested new recipes and gave second, third, and fourth chances to foods she’d previously decided she didn’t like — and discovered she liked them when prepared differently.
She turned herself into an exceptional menu planner and meal prepper, and a creative experimental chef as well as a more-adventurous eater.
She learned she could be healthy by liking everything she eats, even if she doesn’t necessarily eat everything she likes.

She became someone who nourishes herself.

She eats to feed herself, not her cravings.
She keeps promises to herself first, not last.
She exercises for self-love, not self-punishment.

She became someone who takes care of herself.

If I could somehow sit beside Past-Me and tell her what her first decision one year ago would lead to today, she would hardly believe it. Looking at it now — knowing it happened — I admit there’s a small part of Present-Me that hardly believes it, too. Would vocalizing a year’s worth of select spoilers to her make it feel more real to both of us?

Hey girl. Life is about to change profoundly for you.

You’ll go through stretches of cooperation with an alacritous scale, reliably dropping pounds in a way that motivates you to keep going — yet no one notices you’re getting smaller. But you don’t care, because this feels fragile, and having other people’s voices enter the conversation you’re having with yourself feels like a possible destabilizer. You’re not trying to have that right now. This is yours. You protect it and you keep moving forward.

After about six months, you enter what feels like interminable stagnation with what the scale shows you. You seriously consider burning your scale and buying a new one that isn’t such a damn liar. Then one day, you stop to eat on your five-hour drive to your brother’s baby shower for the weekend. When you get out of the car and close the door behind you, your ring goes flying off your finger and skitters across the parking lot. You chase after it in maniacal laughter. You suddenly don’t care about the scale anymore.

You’ll become obsessed with the process. You’ll get sick of it. You’ll be nonplussed by it. You’ll be unfazed by it. And, eventually, you’ll be integrated with it.

It will challenge you. It will teach you. It will strengthen you. It will humble you. It will empower you.

It will you-ify you.

You will start to love the person you’re excavating. You’ll understand her in ways that were too inaccessible, too intense, too scary before. But they’re possible a year from now, because you trust yourself after the months of investing in yourself.

And when it feels too hard, you’ll invoke one of your two mantras:
1) “This is easy.” Not because it is, but because after everything you’ve done — like coaching yourself through those first breathless minutes on the elliptical at nearly 300 lbs — running that measly treadmill mile is nothing. Every time you push yourself, you put your arms around the version of you who truly wanted to go, but genuinely couldn’t. The person you’re becoming is doing it for the person you used to be. She lit the match. You carry the torch.
2) “I am so strong.” Because you are. And you know it.

You’ll become your own inspiration. You’ll become your own cause to honor. And you’ll become your own best friend.

As your process continues, you’ll clock the outwardly visible changes:

  • Your face is narrower. You can see the piercings in your ears without turning your head — including the 4 new ones you’ll get in the first half of 2026 that punctuate your progress.
  • Your collarbones, shoulders, and neck muscles are poppin’. You think it makes you look more feminine.
  • Bye bye, boobies / ta ta, titties — the girls have done some shrinking.
  • Your arms are thinning out. The gardening gloves that are supposed to be roomy, finally are. The wristband for your VivoFit has more excess band beyond the closure notch than it does before it. Sleeves don’t cut off circulation anymore.
  • Shirts don’t squeeze your torso anymore.
  • You’ll spend a small fortune trying to keep up with replacing the underwear that hangs and slides off your ass in a constant struggle with gravity.
  • Your legs don’t brush together with every step anymore. Your knees are bonier. Your quads and hamstrings show definition as if you’re some kind of… runner.
  • Your over-developed calves still touch when you stand, but now so do your ankles when you lie down.
  • There’s all kinds of space between your toes now.
  • You go down a half shoe size.
  • You go down 5 dress sizes.
  • You go down 6 pants sizes.
  • You go down 4 shirt sizes.
  • You lose a cup size.
  • You can wear a necklace that, when it was first gifted to you, inspired the indignant thought, “whose neck is that small?!”
  • You can wear a ring on your middle finger that, when it was first gifted to you, fit none of your fingers.
  • You can wear what you want instead of settling for what fits.
  • You look happy, not haunted.

You’ll note the things your body can do now that it couldn’t a year ago:

  • There’s not a seat you can’t sit in. Airplane. Theater. Stadium. Desk chair. Restaurant booth. Behind the wheel, you have to move the seat forward one day simply because the excess fat is no longer pushing your whole body forward and closer to the pedals, and you can’t reach the steering column without adjusting the position. When you put on your seatbelt, you pull it across your body and buckle it in one fluid motion instead of pulling it out as far as it can go in order to fasten it.
  • Regular belts? Also a thing you can fasten.
  • You can carry purses and bags with long straps without having to hold onto them the whole time so your hip isn’t bumping them off because it sticks out too far when you walk.
  • You aren’t constantly making contact with the shower curtain or running out of breath when you shower.
  • Those two creaky bottom steps that embarrass you at your parents’ house? They stop making noise when you walk on them. Actually, you don’t really walk on them; you run up and down stairs now. On your tiptoes. The way you did when you were a kid.
  • Your ankle is chatty and whiny sometimes, but it doesn’t refuse to play. In fact, it takes very little — if any — ice or elevation to recover from what you ask of it. Inflammation in general is barely even a thing for you these days.
  • You almost never get headaches anymore.
  • You do half marathons.
  • You do Pilates. It’s hard. It kinda sucks sometimes. You love it. Oh yeah — you have core strength now.
  • You do 6+ miles on the elliptical in an hour and it’s a casual cardio night.
  • Perhaps to your greatest surprise, your menstrual cycle comes back. It will come regularly, like clockwork, every month for you, starting in October. At the start of each one of the first five periods you get in a row, you will cry on the toilet. And then you will laugh at yourself for crying on the toilet.

You’ll log the stats:

  • You don’t randomly wake up with your heart racing anymore. Your average blood pressure is 101/68 and your average resting heart rate is 57 bpm.
  • 21 DietBets won (and you’re working on 3 more).
  • 252 total inches gone since you started tracking various body measurements1 in January 2026.
  • Your BMI drops from 50.2 (Class III obesity) to 29.5 (Overweight — just regular-fat!).
  • You’ve lost exactly 126 pounds since February 2025 as of this morning, 106.4 of them since today’s date a year ago — since you decided to try something.

But the most meaningful things you’ll notice are the unquantifiable changes in the way you behave and how you feel:

  • You stop suffering from energy spikes and collapses.
  • Your brain fog decreases significantly.
  • You don’t always sleep that well — some things never change — but the sleep you do get is more restful. At some point, you stop snoring.
  • Your relationship with food becomes so normal that it barely qualifies as a relationship. Food is fuel, not temptation.
  • Your confidence surges.
  • You remember how good success feels, and you want more of it.
  • You chase a challenge because you’re curious about how you’ll do it. Not if you’ll do it; HOW.
  • You find clarity and peace from movement. You look forward to it. It is not an instrument of suffering; it’s an instrument of regulation.
  • You take pleasure in experimenting with new exercises that strengthen you as a runner, because that’s how you see yourself now.
  • You stop using an apologetic tone when you say things like “I don’t eat sugar” or “I can’t, I’m going on a run”.
  • You actually say things like “I don’t eat sugar” or “I can’t, I’m going on a run”.
  • You stop hiding from things like cameras and mirrors. And from doctors and masseuses. And from new experiences and opportunities.
  • You know the difference between challenging and unrealistic.
  • You know the difference between discomfort from growth and discomfort from pain or risk of injury.
  • You understand your body’s limits, and you respect them.

Just last night, on the eve of your one-year anniversary as you were drafting this post, you had ice cream. It was the new Häagen-Dazs peanut butter brittle flavor that you bought over a week ago — along with 3 other pints — and kept in your freezer until you wanted some. You loaded a medium ramekin with the 6 spoonfuls that you’ve learned is the maximum amount your stomach can handle without knotting up.
You ate it slowly. It satisfied you. Then you didn’t want any more.
In fact, you determined the ice cream was too sweet.
You decided to drop what’s left of the pint at your parents’.

Who even are you?

You’re you, you-ified.

Thank you for taking that first step. We did this. We are doing this.


Happy first anniversary to all my Mes: past, present, and future.

Same time next year?

  1. upper arm (L), forearm (L), wrist (L), ring finger (L), bust, upper waist, lower waist/stomach, hips, upper thigh (L), calf (L), ankle (L) ↩ī¸Ž
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NEW DAY 307: A fruitless quest

I’ve gone no-added-sugar for the past two weeks, and am now a few days into the third. This is part of a reset I did to bust through a plateau that I realized after the fact was the result of A) body recomposition, and B) a too-small calorie deficit — but it was nonetheless effective in getting my body to cough up the pounds it was clinging to all winter. As an over-zealous twist to my sugarless adventure, I thought, let’s run an experiment and see what this “no fruit” thing is all about.

After two weeks of no sweeteners and no fruit, I can tell you what it’s all about: NONSENSE.

I’ve been at this weight-loss business for over 10 months now, and never once in that time did I have a single craving. Not once. Ever. Unbelievable, right? But it’s true! I mean, did unhealthy food sound good sometimes? Sure. Did the wafting scent of something delicious beckon to me here and there? Of course. But there was no sudden overwhelming urge that struck out of nowhere to raid the bakery section and snack aisle of the grocery store and gorge myself on everything within reach. Hell, there wasn’t even that pesky little “go on, just one little treat — you deserve it!” or “it’s a special occasion!” or “one piece of that won’t hurt” or “everyone else is having some”; because I simply didn’t want that poison in my body. Besides, after being off it for a while, it doesn’t taste like it used to, anyway. The few times I did indulge, I immediately got stomach aches. It’s the very best kind of “hits different”: a natural deterrent.

Enter No Sugar, No Fruit Experiment Weeks. GURL-UH. Now, I will say, I probably couldn’t have timed this worse if I’d tried: the two weeks of this ill-informed, self-imposed challenge were PMS week, immediately followed by period week (cuz that’s how that works). That alignment did me no favors when the cravings struck — and strike they did. It wasn’t a nonstop desire to throw down, but god damn if a Bagel Bite didn’t suddenly sound like the best thing in the world. Maybe followed by some ice cream. And hey, it’s been a while since I’ve been inside a Starbucks. White mocha, anyone?

It even infiltrated the sanctity of my dreamspace: suddenly, I was eating the literal forbidden fruit in my subconscious adventures, in addition to chocolate bars, brownies, and cookies.

The craziest thing was, I still didn’t even want to eat any of that stuff! How is it even possible to crave something you don’t want?

This is what a total absence of sugar does to a person. It flatlines logic.

But the worst part of all? Days-long stretches of constipation.

Hey. You know what’s important? Fiber.
You know what fruit is great at delivering? Fiber.
You know what you get when you cut out fruit and don’t replace it with a zillion vegetables? Stopped the fuck up.

I’m here to tell you that going sugar-free is an excellent health move. My skin is glowing. My energy is even and sustainable through long days and demanding workouts. My thoughts are clearer. Everything tastes better. My relationship with food is rational and my nutrition is in check. I genuinely, sincerely don’t miss sugar 95% of the time, and the 5% of the time I want it, I let myself have it — with no out-of-control fallout.

What is NOT a good move is eliminating an entire food group because it carries some of that stuff naturally. I already knew this; the driver behind my masochistic little experiment was a pathological curiosity to experience the My 600-lb Life diet. Why? Because.

And now I know-know.

Never again.

Fruit is back. Cravings are gone. Normal dreams are restored. Plumbing is running normally (after a major blockage was cleared — shoutout to my new BFF and personal hero, the chia seed).

Sugar is staying right where I want it, though: the heck away from me.

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NEW DAY 242: Talking body

The past full week tested me.

I saw the scale dip below 200 lbs for the first time in 10 years. I did this mid-week weigh-in specifically because I had my August 11th – February 10th weigh-out to do, which is *the* exception to my Power 11 rule about only doing once weekly weight checks (on Sundays). I handily won that Transformer, going from 268.4 pounds in August to 202.8 pounds on February 11th1 — nearly 2.5 times more than what I needed to lose. Even better, it was the most I’ve ever raked in from a Transformer bet: $343.70! Conversely, it was the smallest group of people I’ve ever played with in a Transformer bet, and possibly any DB at all — so it was a VERY pleasant surprise to clean up like that! My theory is that people signed up for it in August and either lost track of it with the calendar busy-ness between start and end dates, or they fell victim to it: back to school, Labor Day, Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s, and all the functions, parties, events, and promotions that come along with all those occasions.


It’s always a great day to collect. And I felt pretty proud to review these 6 months of pretty fantastic effort and results.

But the good times ended there.

At the beginning of the week, I was contending with intense lower back pain that seemed to hit out of nowhere last Saturday when I woke up. It followed me into Sunday and Monday, and finally fucked off on Tuesday after some desperate interventions I made on Monday night that either paid off quickly or perfectly coincided with the natural ending of the pain. One of those was changing from sleeping on two pillows to sleeping on only one pillow. After losing 100 pounds, my shoulders are narrower, which means I don’t need a stack of pillows to properly support my neck as a side sleeper. I never thought about it until my back started complaining, but I made that adjustment and not only slept better, but woke up on Tuesday with no pain. I felt rejuvenated enough on Tuesday to hit a PBR on the elliptical in my workout that evening: 7.05 miles in one hour on the elliptical. Woohoo!

On Thursday, I had a bit of an emotional hangover from putting myself through some mental health processing work on Wednesday night. It was a positive development overall that came from that, but it did leave me wrung out on Thursday — which consequently felt like a VERY long day. Friday also kind of dragged, but it ended with dinner with a friend I hadn’t seen since the end of June. Catching up with her was lovely and a much needed top-off of my social cup. (And yes, she was floored to see how different I look now!)

Yesterday was the roughest, though. I woke up with my period, which is a bit of a mixed-bag way to wake up. Now that my cycle has seemingly regulated itself, I feel this intense relief, joy, and gratitude when it shows up… and I also feel a bit of apprehension about it. Will it be debilitatingly heavy? Will the pain immobilize me? Then this spins out into feeling that I don’t even have the right to complain about any of the downsides, because I’m lucky to even be having a period now. (Yes, I have managed to emotionally complicate menstruation. Welcome to my mind.)

Anyway, I went for my haircut and lunch with a friend as planned, and everything was fine. Unfortunately, it all took a turn into death by a thousand cuts when I got to the gym for what was supposed to be my half-marathon training session where I’d be running 25 minutes straight for the first time, after multiple missed attempts at this since last week. Spoiler alert: it didn’t happen again. I got on the treadmill to do the damn thing, and my ankle instantly started whining. I figured I’d try to run anyway; it’s about 50/50 whether the pain subsides or not when I give it a shot when this happens. In the final minute of my warm-up walk, someone decided that the machine beside mine was The One — out of all the unoccupied machines beside absolutely no one in the gym that afternoon — they needed to use. Um, no, ma’am. So I hopped off and changed to a different machine that was apparently not good enough for her. I started my run speed, and my ankle all but tea-kettle screamed at me. I tried a couple of minutes, a couple of foot placement changes, trying to see if it would loosen up… but it wouldn’t. So I had to stop.

I was pissed.

But I was at the gym, and the second half of my planned workout for the day was strength training. I was able to complete my circuit without event, but my earbuds did die two minutes into the first exercise. That’s annoying on its own, but I had JUST charged the suckers because this same nonsense happened earlier in the week. Between reps, I was rage-ordering a USB-C wired pair when I realized that not only was my ankle was still making its displeasure known, but my head had joined in. I suddenly felt the pain of a raging headache that was going precisely nowhere. I used to get headaches pretty regularly, but since I’ve started exercising every day, they’ve been a rare misery. When they hit, though… ugh. Right on cue, I moved to my next machine and felt violent cramps join the full-on assault my body was now waging against me.

This gym session was cursed.

That’s when I decided two things:
1) I was absolutely finishing this strength training, unless my limbs fell the entire fuck off; and
2) My evening plans were not happening.

I did finish the arm weights. With sincere apologies, I did cancel my dinner.

And then I went home, did the barest of minimums of prep work, ate what could passably be called dinner, dosed up on Excedrin PM, and promptly passed out on the couch with my ankle icing and propped up.

When I woke up some time later, my headache had not subsided at all. The recommended amount of time between doses had not passed, but I had no energy and no fucks left to give. I popped two more pills, crawled on top of the heating pad in my bed, and was asleep before 8 PM.

And there I stayed for the next 13 hours.

I woke up today feeling a million times better: no trace of a headache, an appeased ankle, and weaker cramps. I’ve been able to be as productive as I needed to be today to make up for the total unproductiveness of yesterday, and my whole list is now accomplished as of almost 6 PM: 2 loads of laundry, 3 meals prepped and snacks pre-portioned for the week, dishes cleaned and put away, and Power 11 Sunday tasks completed. I also went on a brief social call to atone for my last-minute jilt last night, got gas in my car, and transferred the contents of my work bag that broke this week (because of course!) into the replacement for it I ordered that arrived today.

After the weird week I’ve had, it’s no surprise that my total weight loss this week was 0.6 pounds. It’s frustrating, but not terribly; I am a walking skin sack of bloat, sleepiness, and emotional wear. I did the best I could at balancing my training against what my body told me it needed this week, and I can’t expect the scale to reflect that. And now, that week is over. I am letting this Sunday sunset with my yummy dinner, then taking my cramps to bed before they start biting again.

The most important thing I have learned over the past few months is that when my body talks, I need to listen. Feeling a little behind in my training is the price of admission for ensuring I don’t sideline myself for days or weeks because I was trying to prove the wrong point.

One positive thing I can say with full force is that even though this week tried my patience, disrupted my plans, and forced me into what feels like stalled progress, I have NOT fallen into past traps.
I didn’t get angry and storm out of the gym, costing myself any amount of movement altogether.
I didn’t push myself to keep plans — with myself or with others — that would have involved suffering for me.
Most importantly, I never once reached for comfort in the form of sugar-coated sabotage.

I’ve said it before, and I repeat it for a reason: that’s how I know I’ve changed. Unhealthy food doesn’t solve my problems. It is was my problems.

My body doesn’t want bad food that tastes good. My body wants care.

Some days go smoothly.
Some days go roughly.

All I can do is keep going safely.

I trust myself now. Nothing feels better than that.

  1. If you are reading this and noticing that 202.8 pounds is not below 200 lbs — yes. My below weigh-in at 198 was at 5:30 AM, after a pee, nothing new in my system, and buck-ass naked. This is not how I usually weigh in; my typical checks are between lunch and dinner, fully clothed. I have to submit photos for DietBet, so I follow their guidelines in my normal weigh-ins for consistency across my own records. Why the change, then? Because this milestone was important for me, and I wanted to do it this way. Enough said. ↩ī¸Ž
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NEW DAY 210: Probationary period

I started a new job this week. It’s been a wonderful experience so far, and has been living up to all my hopes and excitement from the interview process. As luck would have it, my body chose Sunday — the day before my first day and the actual first day of Power 11 — to come down with a head cold.

It chose today to start my period.

Last year, before June, I had exactly two periods. That’s it. For 5 months. They were long, heavy, painful, and obviously irregular.
Starting in (and including) June, I had 7. The first 3 were still irregularly timed and chaotic, but I’ve had one every month since October now, with only one of them being debilitatingly heavy.

This is a very big deal.

I have never had naturally regular periods, even as a teen or young adult. In college, I was diagnosed with PCOS, which — cruelly — both exacerbates and is exacerbated by obesity. For unrelated medical reasons, I’ve been off the pill for several years and can never again take hormonal birth control, so my body and I have been trying to navigate my erratic cycle on our own since then.

It has not gone well.
Until now…?

With my age (fertility-old), size (still big), and health (PCOS doesn’t magically go away), I never imagined that my periods would one day regulate themselves. I almost added the phrase “without intervention” to that sentence, but in fact, there has been an intervention: I broke up with sugar.

Sugar is a known hormone disruptor, and I’ve been poisoning myself with it for my entire life. Just 7 months into a drastic sugar reduction, and my grateful physiology was like “THANK YOU, I will now immediately repair decades of damage in a shockingly small fraction of that time!” I’m on a whole deep dive with this right now that I will spare anyone reading this from spiraling into with me, but suffice it to say this is a rich topic. The superstitious part of me hesitates to pronounce anything actually “healed” when it comes to my reproductive health, but something has been mended. Even if that’s not the case, all the symptoms of improvement are there, and the only thing that’s changed has been how I care for my physical health. Exercise has certainly been a positive factor contributing to this development, but I’m convinced it has a majority to do with nutrition.

Whether or not the return of my regular, naturally occurring periods is a fluke, I am happy and relieved about it. But I’d call 6+ months a pretty long probation. I hope my normal cycle still going strong by the time I’m no longer “new” in my job — and well beyond then.

Welcome back from probation, period. Most women won’t relate to this, but… I missed you.