Wake Up!

Kind of reminds me of the Bond film “Goldeneye” where Natalya Fyodorovna Simonova is yelling at James Bond to wake up and do something before the Tiger helicopter they are restrained in is blown up by it’s own missiles.

Yes, I had a real wakeup call yesterday. I know I have a weight problem. It has slowly crept on over the years, stacked on with 2 late in life pregnancies and really went totally haywire during chemo. I had taken steps to start dealing with my problem in early 2004, only to be diagnosed with breast cancer. My main focus changed. It had to. My first priority was to get through chemo, then deal with the aftermath. One can never predict how they and their body will cope with and react to chemo and other cancer treatments. You think that once a certain treatment is over that you will start to feel “normal” again. Well that depends on your definition of normal. After a cancer diagnosis, nothing is ever “normal” again, or if it is, it’s certainly a different kind of “normal”. Your body is changed, aged, battered. Your brain is fried...

Anyway, back to the subject at hand. I was trying on some long shorts in a department store yesterday and caught an eyeful of my scantily clad deformed reflection of what my body has become, in the mirror. I don’t have a full length mirror at home. I suppose if I did, then I may not have gotten into such a disgusting state.

…
"The time has come," the Walrus said,
"To talk of many things:
Of shoes--and ships--and sealing-wax--
Of cabbages--and kings--
And why the sea is boiling hot--
And whether pigs have wings."

"But wait a bit," the Oysters cried,
"Before we have our chat;
For some of us
are out of breath,
And all of us are fat!"
…

Excerpt from "The Walrus and The Carpenter". Thank you Lewis Carroll.

Strangely, I feel like an icky, fat, out of breath oyster right now.

The question beckons, what am I going to do about it?

My diet is fairly healthy, it’s the night time snacks that have done the damage.

Those snacks have to go and I’ll up my water intake. Portion size will also be closely watched. Exercise is a huge problem for me at the moment, partly due to my weight, partly because of tamoxifen and its effects. My feet are a mess, even with orthotics. The only thing that is likely to alleviate that is weight loss. Tamoxifen’s side effects have been well documented. It causes hot flushes to be more extreme, especially in warmer weather. Sometimes the smallest exertion brings on tremendous body heat and profuse sweating. My face lights up like a beetroot and looks and feels ready to explode after only a couple of passes of the lawnmower. This worries DH, not to say I’m totally unconcerned about it, but I don’t think there’s much I can do about it either.

I know there is no quick fix. It took years to get like this, it will take a lot of time, and sustained effort to reshape this bod, and no jokes about “round” being a shape, please. I know I’ll never have a bikini bod, but that’s not the aim here. Being able to do what I want to do, improving my chances of a long, healthy life and having a wider choice in clothing are important to me. Larger sized (or the more politically correct version, plus sized) clothing is difficult enough to find. When you throw a mastectomy into the equation, the choices veritably dry up almost completely. Larger sized clothing tends to come with deep v-necks, scoop necks, no sleeves, all the things we lopsided ones generally try to avoid. ARGH, the frustration!

My motivation?

That image from yesterday which is etched into my brain. I need to do it for my health, myself, and my family.