~.♥.~ Absent ~.♥.~

I know that I have been absent for a few days but I've been really down and out and can't figure out how to fix it. I hate living like this and I feel like I'm beginning to fail and the thought of gaining the weight back plus more is killing me. I hope that I can get over it and very fast cause again I hate feeling like this!

*Joanna*

I quit!

OMG losing weight is the most single hardest thing ever to do! I continue to be stuck at this weight and can't get it to go ANYWHERE! I really hate feeling like this and really wish I could overcome how I feel.!

Fat Day!

OMG I'm having the worst fat day ever today. Everything I put on made me feel like a tub of lard! I hope my day gets alot better than it is right now. Welp I just thought I'd share that I wasn't having a good day be back with it later.

*Joanna*

Ughhh.

Today has not been a good one for me. I have gotten maybe a total of 2 hours of sleep all night/day. I've had NO energy and had the worst headache ever. I hate not being able to sleep because that causes them to be 10x worse than normal. I had to take my little cousin to the doctor this morning due to her headaches she has been having and he sent her to have a CT scan later in the day! I hate having a family history of migraines because that just means it's gonna effect our children like it has us! So this is why my day has been Ughhhhhhh!

*Joanna*

~.♥.~ Happy Easter ~.♥.~

Hello everybody. I know today isn't actually Easter anymore and no I didn't forget about posting I just haven't had time until now;) I hope that ya'll had a great fun filled Easter! We spent the afternoon with some of my close family for dinner like we do every year and had a good time with talks and kids playing. I was so nervous going into eating Lunch because of all the food in the world it all seems worse on holidays LOL. We'll I did GREAT! I had just a little bit of Rice, some ham, half of a biscuit, and green beans (there wasn't much to choose from:) For dessert I had a very small slice of banana nut bread and a nibble off a chocolate chip cookie with Lemonade to drink.

My little man loved everything that he got from the Easter Bunny and his mawmaw and pawpaw and enjoyed his Easter egg hunt once we returned home. Well I'm off to work on some things because I'm one of those people that suffer from insomnia and I can't sleep right now. Peace until later!

Day 2♥

Okay so today is Day 2 and I'm back! We had an upsetting morning this morning. We had the funeral service of our best friends MawMaw and it was hard on us all. Afterwards we came home and started cutting up a tree that fell in our yard a few weeks during a bad storm that came through and hit us in the South pretty bad!. I got lots of sun though and very proud to say that the scale says another 3 pounds down. Just 2 more to go before I make it under 230 pounds for the first time in a VERY VERY long time:) Wish me lucks that I don't fail tomorrow with it being Easter and being with Family and GREAT food:)

~.♥.~ The Beginning ~.♥.~

Okay so I tried the blog posting last year but I gave up on it like so many other things I've given up on. But since I've lost 41 pounds since October I feel and know that as long as I put my mind to it I can do anything. I've read online and heard from other people that if you keep a journal throughout your weight loss that it will help you to keep it off. So looks like I'm gonna be trying this and keeping with it. I will post a little something everyday even if it's just saying I had a bad day or a good day or that I lost a pound but I will keep with it this time:) I hope you enjoy my blog and my posts! Where to begin. I’ve been overweight my whole life! It kinda runs on my dads side of the family. Just about all of my female cousins are on the heavy side and its been that way for as long as I can remember. I’ve always hated how I look and got sick every time I got near the mirror. Well I topped my heaviest at 280 pounds when I was pregnant with my son in 2006 and after that I just gave up. I ate every time I got stressed and that was mostly @ night while everyone was asleep. During my pregnancy I had gestational diabetes and was told that since I have a family history of diabetes that it would most likely continue on to Type 2 after my son was born. Well low and behold in September at a check-up they told me I was a diabetic. I took the medicine and did the nutrition classes but I just didn’t get anywhere so I gave up. In February 2008 I started having HORRIBLE unbearable headaches and was having the worst double vision ever. I figured it was my contact prescription changing so I called my eye doctor and got the first available appointment. Well on the morning of February 10, 2008 I got there and told him my symptoms and he hurried out of the room and came back two minutes later telling me to come into the area where they do the little air in the eye test thingy because he wanted to get some photos of my eyes. After they were finished he walked me back in the exam room and said he would be right back. When he came back he came straight out and told me that I had Pseudo Tumor Cerbri or Intracranial Hypertension. This disorder is basically where the body produces more spinal fluid than normal and since your skull is overfilled the fluid has no where to go so it just collects there and causes pressure on the brain and the optic nerve. To shorten this long story up I saw my neurologist and he did test after test and told me the same thing and put me on so many medications I felt like an elderly person on tons of them. That summer the medicine had stopped working and my little brother had to come and take care of me and my child while my husband continued to work. These headaches aren’t like any other. It hurts to open your eyes, close your eyes, move or get outta bed. So since my brother was here I basically slept ALL the time so there was no pain. I stopped eating and simply put I lost 30 pounds during that time. I know it wasn’t healthy but I couldn’t help it. After months of torture and pain my neurologist (at this time) had me have a spinal tap which actually helped release the fluid and get rid of some pain. After that I had about five taps in a two month period when finally he sent me to see a neurosurgeon. At that time he refused to preform the surgery due to me being overweight and my ventricles in the brain were way to small. So back to the neurologist who kept telling me to my face in these words and I quote “Your FAT! You need to stop eating, just eat like I do I eat a few baby carrots and some Roma tomatoes for lunch.” First off you don’t tell a FAT person to eat just that, and secondly I’m diabetic for crying out loud do you want me to die from low blood sugar? I refused to see him anymore. Once that got me in with a new neurologist he gave me medicine that helped for a short time then it was right back to spinal tap after spinal tap until Mother’s Day 2009 when I lost vision in my left eye. The pressure had built up so much that it caused me to be blind for a total of 10 minutes! He upped my meds and called the same neurosurgeon as before explaining what was going on and telling me that I needed the surgery if he couldn’t do it he would find somebody else. He agreed to see me again and let myself and my husband decide which surgery to have. There are two major types one being an LP shunt which involves a catheter like tube to be inserted in between two discs of your spine and the tub attached is stretched under the skin around to your stomach where the fluid is dumped and eventually is passed through urine output! The second was a VP shunt same type of procedure except the fact that its my brain and not my back! The only difference is that they cut a hole in the top of your skull and place the catheter down in the hole into your ventricle(where spinal fluid is produced) and the tube is stretched underneath the skin on top of your head and pulled down under the skin on top of your chest plate to your stomach and then its eventually released in urine output. Well on October 15, 2009 I went into surgery at 4:30 pm and had the VP shunt placed(yes I had brain surgery). I awoke in recovery around 11 or 12 somewhere around there and once I was completely awake and aware of my surrounding they moved me upstairs to my room where i was for four LONG days! After surgery my neurosurgeon kept pushing the subject of losing weight and telling me that it would help and yada yada yada. I mean who wants to keep hearing “Your Fat! Quit eating and lose weight’.? Well once I started getting better I started taking my diabetes medication again and lost 10 pounds only to gain it back:( In October of 2010 a year after surgery I looked in the mirror after getting out of the shower and puked! I knew then I had to make a change. I went from 275 in October to 259 in March and then it stopped I was stuck and kept doing everything right but not losing anymore. I talked with my physician and he prescribed me Adipex! OMG I love that stuff! It’s helped get me up and moving again. I now have more energy than I ever had and since March 11th I’ve lost an additional 25 pounds! Looking in the mirror now is so much better than before and I don’t wanna puke when I do look in it! I can’t wait to get down to my goal weight and be able to buy new clothes and play outside with my son and not feel like I’m having a heart attack. I look forward to meeting everyone and getting to know others that suffer just like me:) Thank you for reading!