An explanation

I'm sure you've noticed that I've been absent from this blog for the last week or so. Even though I had only blogged for 12 consecutive days it started to become a chore for me. I found it difficult to think of things to post everyday especially if I had been at work for 10 hours and literally had nothing to report. After about 4 days of not posting I decided I was going to give up. This morning Mum told me that Klara had been missing my blog posts and I thought about the others that had told me they had been following my journey. Today I decided to start it again, although slightly different. I don't want blogging my journey to becoming healthy another negative, I want it to be something that I enjoy doing and sharing. I will no longer be posting everyday but instead whenever I have something new to report or share. I'm hoping to keep the blogs coming fairly consistently, around once a week or so.

I'll share a little of what went on in my life while I was on my little break! On Monday the 14th of Jan I had a minor surgery on my toes which ended up being a pretty bad experience! In June last year I had permanent surgery to fix ingrown toenails which had been bothering me for years. It's a pretty minor procedure where I get two local anaesthetic needles in each toe (this hurt SO much it's ridiculous!) and then a portion of the nail on either side is removed. A chemical is then applied so the nail doesn't regrow and you end up with a 97% success rate and fairly normal looking toes. Theoretically the toes should heal within 2 weeks max but 2 months later the right side of my left toe was still causing me pain and discomfort so I had the procedure re-done on that part of my toe. Unfortunately the anaesthetic decided not to work so I ended up with around 8-10 needles being used to numb my poor little toe. The healing was much better that time round and for a while I was happy. Not too long ago though I started getting ingrown toenails on the inner side of both toes so I had to have it all redone again!! This time the anaesthetic REALLY didn't work and I ended up with 6 needles in my left toe and 8 needles in my right with a total of 14 rather than 4. I hate needles so this totally sucked. All the trauma from the needles left me extremely sore and unable to work both my jobs for a week. I went back to the podiatrist on Monday and although I'm still sore, I'm healing incredibly well so I'm really happy with the result.

Since my last blog post I've been eating pretty poorly and know that I haven't been properly active since my bootcamp finished mid December but I was absolutely shocked when I discovered that since then I've gained a total of 7kgs. This means that to get to my goal weight of 55kgs this year I'll need to lose more like 15 kgs - bummer! This massive gain didn't make sense to me, how could I possibly gain so much. I knew my eating wasn't perfect but it wasn't terrible either so I decided to do some research on how my thyroid antibodies actually affect my metabolism. When I was diagnosed with this, my doctor told me that although I have these antibodies, nothing needs to be done until my TSH levels go outside the normal levels and they are currently normal. My research painted a very different picture. It turns out that several scientific studies show that the presence of these antibodies can cause the exact same symptoms as hypothyroidism (an under active thyroid) The symptoms of these which I have been experiencing are: sensitivity to cold, weight gain, fatigue, dry skin. I went to see the naturopath yesterday and I spoke to her about this. She told me that the doctors are very rigid in their diagnosis of hypothyroidism and that my TSH levels actually showed I was what she called 'subclinical hypothyroidism'. She explained that I can't lose weight because my metabolism had begun to slow and that given I was lacking in the thyroid hormone, my body was reluctant to let go of any of it's energy stores (also known as fat tissue!). To combat this along with my fatigue and constantly feeling cold randomly (even on 40 degree days) I'm now taking a herbal and vitamin supplement aimed at supporting the things which make the thyroid hormone. Hopefully once this starts working, I will begin losing weight and feeling more energised.

So if you're the praying type, I ask that you pray for me in a few different ways. First, that my toes heal up quickly and that this problem is resolved for good. Secondly, that this thyroid medication begins to work, and lastly, that I keep blogging!!

Hope that there are some people out there still reading this!