Theme
2:00am May 3, 2013

Woot!

I just weighed myself. I weigh myself for different reasons than people who are trying to lose weight: I have to make sure I’m maintaining a weight. Neither losing nor gaining, whatever the basic weight my body wants to settle at may be. Typically so far, it’s been less than before a catastrophic weight loss, but more than after it.

So I weighed around 240 pounds last summer. Then rapidly lost 40 pounds because of inability to eat, and was 200 pounds. Then gained 25 pounds and was 225. And leveled off there as long as I was careful not to eat too much or too little Ensure.

Then had another big weight loss due to inability to eat adequately. My lowest weight was 193 pounds. Which would be… About 32 pounds lost. And now after all the tube feedings got settled out, I’m about 212 pounds.

Luckily I’m fat and have some room to work with. That doesn’t mean that it’s at all good for me to drop weight quickly. It doesn’t mean I can’t die from malnutrition before I ever get thin. It just means that I don’t become extremely underweight to the point where there’s nothing left to burn. They tell me I still burn muscle when I lose weight that fast, and that could still be life threatening due to cardiac complications. Being fat doesn’t mean you’re free of that. It just means I’m not becoming so thin there’s literally no fat to burn at all, even when I don’t gain back all the weight I’m losing.

(Anyone who tells me this is good for me will get a swift kick to the most painful place I can find. This is not good for anyone regardless of weight. What I’m glad about, is that I’m leveling off at a weight my body seems to think is good for me. I also suspect it’s good that I recognize that 1500 calories is way too much food in a day for someone who never gets out of bed except to go to the bathroom and back. So I give myself a few hours break from eating in the morning, instead of eating the entire container of food 24 hours a day. And it doesn’t seem to be hurting me any. When you are using something like Ensure, or tubefeeding formula like Osmolite, and doing it to maintain a certain weight, you need to figure out the number of calories right for your body and stick to it, it’s different from either eating naturally or eating for weight loss or gain.)

I notice this pattern seems to happens though, where I level off at a weight midway between the weight I had beforehand and the weight I had in the last food catastrophe.

I am hesitant to even write about this, lest someone try and tell me that gastroparesis is good because it makes me lose weight no matter the cost, or that I ought to be dieting instead of trying to maintain a weight, or various other stuff. But this really is the right thing to do for the situation. It would not be good if I stayed at 193, because that’s a weight my body could only get to by not eating enough. Maintaining a weight without much weight fluctuation is the goal because weight fluctuation is very unhealthy.