Life with Pots-Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome (NANOWRIMO2019)

Weight

I feel like crap still. I've been sick since Sunday. It's no fun. Baby H had to go to the ER last night because she was so mucousy she could barely breathe. They gave her steroids and thank God my husband took her. Here's the thing, I'm the medical maven in the house. I'm not a doctor but I know enough to make doctors think I am and get asked often, "are you a doctor?"

No I'm just one of those know-it-alls that likes to study a lot. I sent my husband instead because it was 10pm and if I didn't get some rest my POTS symptoms were going to flare in the middle of having a virus and that just would not be pretty.

Anyway weight is an interesting beast with POTS. I've read on forums, although I'm not sure the truth of it that most POTS patients are skinny. I've looked for stories or cases of overweight POTS patients and it seems people like me are few and far between. You see, being over 300lbs had it's complications. I started writing about my journey. I wanted to focus on weight loss and getting us out of debt. We were in a very dark place in our relationship, by we I mean my husband and I, and our finances and my health. Weight loss and debt are kind of the same thing. You have X amount of a budget, if you overspend your debt will go up. If you have X amount of calories in a day you will either lose weight or go over and gain weight. It's kind of the same thing.

My motivation was my health. I kept telling myself, "if something is wrong with my heart, having less of a body to pump blood through will be very helpful." It was my mantra through losing weight over. I kept telling myself and kept working  at it, my symptoms would get better...yeah no.

Losing weight physically felt better but it did nothing for the POTS symptoms. I put this here because people often ask me, "if you lose weight wouldn't it help?" My POTS is neuropathic in nature, meaning there is an issue with my brain and nervous system. The most losing weight helps is to just make sure there is less work my heart has to do. 

This post is going to jump around, mostly because I'm exhausted. There is one thing I learned while working on my weight before I got pregnant and that was how to talk to myself. One of my motivations was watching Chris and Heidi Powell on Extreme Weightloss. I want to be honest, I looked up almost all of the participants and most of them had gained their weight back. So I definitely did not want to lose weight like that. I wanted to lose it bit by bit, but there was a part of me that was like yeah! I'm going to train for a 5k and that's what put me on my back for half a year.

Which again goes back to wait. In high school I was around 160lbs. I was always told I was fat and overweight and ugly. My mom was an abusive bitch. Everything that was ever wrong with me was weight related, but I remember my best friend and I would go hiking all the time, at least 2 times a week. We were very active. I rode my bike around the neighborhood. But no matter what I did, my heart always felt like it was pounding out of my chest. I could hear it in my ears and I would get light headed. I never said anything to my mom because I didn't want to hear about my perfect skinny sister and how I was the bad one for being fat. But that was one of the signs that I had POTS. It's kind of ridiculous to be honest...

So I'm still on a quest to lose more weight and get my stamina up. I've spoken to a weight loss doctor and finally found a nutritionist to work with me. I'm telling you, "all the kings horses and all the kings men...."