it's Sunday again...

and again, I've stayed the same. It is totally my own doing i.e. eating and drinking. I think I'm just going to let it plateau for a week or 2 then get back onto it. Because I don't finish work until 7.30 or 8pm, depending on the day, I've become overly regimented about preparing food so that I eat properly when I get home and am too buggered to cook. This is back firing in a major way and instead of seeing the refrigerator purely as the thing that contains the ingredients for a dinner that will only take 10 or so minutes to prepare, I now see it as an all evening open buffet. There are only 2 and a half weeks left of term so I am going to bumble my way through to the end then get re-sorted. On the up side, next term my latest finish is 5.30pm which will make a huge different to my ability to control my foraging instincts. 

Where have you been all my life, Gazpacho?

Given my predilections for salads and soups, as well as the fact that I live where the weather gets freaking hot, you would think that I would've figured this one out before now. I'm going to blame my total inability to join these colourful dots on some kind of extended/recurring Hashi induced brain fog. Hell, I blame most other things on it, so why not?


Anyway, I have now found you Gazpacho and will never let you go. Oh dear, that sounds a little too much like the man of African extraction who followed me today and tried to initiate contact. Having had experience as the target of a Nigerian stalker when I lived in HCMC (he was well known for this and was a very abusive & dangerous person), I did not hang around to find out what this guy's intentions were. It was enough that he had turned his motorbike around, followed my tuk tuk, gotten off his bike, followed me into my faourite Korean cosmetic shop and tried to talk to me. I rabbited out the door, into the adjacent mall door, went straight up an escalator then wended my way through a couple of hundred clothing and shoe stalls, ending up in a dinky-di-doe electronics shop that sold everything from home karaoke set-ups to dust busters. I bought a cute little pair of speakers for my laptop so it was not a total bust. I then wasted a significant amount of time before heading back downstairs to the supermarket to purchase the ingredients for my cold tomato soup.


I looked online for a recipe and of course there were only about a thousand at first glance. In the end, I pastiched a couple together and hoped for the best. Here's how it went:
 1 hothouse cucumber, halved and seeded, but not peeled (use 3 small - we only get small ones here)

·     2 red bell peppers, cored and seeded (next time 1 red & 1 yellow)

·     1kg tomatoes 

·     1 red onion

·     3 garlic cloves, minced

·     1 litre tomato juice (no sugar)

·     1/4 cup white wine vinegar (next time part raspberry·vinegar part white wine vinegar)

      1 Tablespoon olive oil

·     1/4 teaspoon salt & 1/2 teaspoon pepper

      1/4 cup fresh chopped herbs - spring onions, basil, cilantro whatever is to hand...

·          Roughly chop the cucumbers, bell peppers, tomatoes (deseeded), and red onions into 1-inch cubes. Put each vegetable separately into a food processor fitted with a steel blade and pulse until it is coarsely chopped. Do not overprocess!

After each vegetable is processed, combine them in a large bowl and add the garlic, tomato juice, vinegar, olive oil, salt, and pepper. Mix well and chill before serving. The longer gazpacho sits, the more the flavors develop.

inching downwards and forwards

At least the waist is going down seeing as the scales seem to have gotten stuck again. Now that I've been writing all this down, it looks like there's a monthly pattern to the plateaus that coincide with another another monthly event. I would have thought that the waist wouldn't be a useful guide at this time due to bloating but the puffiness is restricted to the extremities; puffy eyes & feet, and I keep having to make corrections to this as my fat fingers can't get it together on the keyboard.


Weigh 81 kgs  same :(
Waist 31 inches down 1 inch  :) 


School report
My scholarship class finishes up early this week after which they will be taking IELTS exams for entrance into their various masters programmes and preparing to head to Australia for the biggest shock of their lives. Then there is the next year's lot to prepare for. Nothing like keeping busy to keep your mind off stuff.


1 more year and I think I'll be heading back to Western civilization, whatever that means, and some further education of my own.

Looking forward to a break...

We are halfway through the 3rd term and this is what is keeping me focused on the run through to the end and two weeks break. Otres Beach, Sihanoukville. A little challenging to get to in a tuk tuk but well worth it for the lack of masses of pesky backpackers, and the kiddie fiddlers who make the main beaches of Ochhueteal and Serendipity so horrible.

the Hashi's friendship circle

It's been a quiet week for me here in the virtual world as the real world somewhat overtook everything, and the inner wine and cheese hussy went on a mini rampage. 

One area us Hashis tend to make sacrifices in is our social lives. We often don't feel up to plastering on a fake smile to face the world/cocktail hour and exchange equally fake pleasantries/downright lies about how we are doing with a bunch of people who have no idea what it's like to be us. We figured out a long time ago that most people are just not interested in how we really are doing so we fake it. It doesn't take long for that to get old and we start questioning ourselves, "Are these people really my friends?" "If I didn't turn up, would most of them even notice I'm not there?" As we who have weathered this storm and become wise know, the answers to these questions are, No! and No! So we stop turning up. 

What we try to do is maintain a small inner circle of people who seem to be our real friends. Now this is when things start to turn unfortunate. A lot of us Hashis become somewhat unreliable friends. We make plans to meet up only to break them at the last minute because the aliens put their great energy sapping machine over our heads and sucked all the energy out of us in order to power their ships (I hope you are at least smiling and not reaching for the funny farm phone number). Anyway, due to some kind of energy crisis, we cancel late, we don't turn up, or we do turn up when we really should not have inflicted ourselves on good people. We've become one of those friends, which is when things get interesting/sad. We stop getting invites to things, people don't ask us over for dinner as often or they are always busy when we want to have them over. Soon, we are out of the loop and then, if we aren't careful, we won't even be able to find the bloody loop.

All this preamble is leading me into the main point of today's entry. My social life has not exactly been sizzling since I moved to Phnom Penh. It's gone from rather luke-warm in HCMC to an unlit mound of damp kindling here. So, when a socialising opportunity raised itself after work on Thursday night, I thought "What the hey, why not?" instead of the usual "No, you'll be a train wreck in the morning." I socialised, I ate a massive chicken liver salad and quaffed several glasses of rose. I felt like a train wreck in the morning. Almost the same thing happened on Friday during my long break between classes sans alcohol, and then yesterday (Sat), I had already arranged to meet a colleague to do some planning for our next year long course over a nice bottle of rose. After that the shackles came off and the inner wine and cheese hussy experienced several hours of unfettered freedom with more rose, a nice wedge of brie and a French stick.

The net result of these shenanigans is zero weight loss and zero waist loss for the week. So I'll get back on the diet horse immediately and then what? Not turn up next time? Turn up but drink soda water and make the others feel uncomfortable? Question the validity of their friendship/companionship? Wish I'd never bothered in the first place as it's all too hard to balance and retreat behind closed doors? Knowing myself, the latter but I really should try the soda water option because the place everyone goes to after work on Thursdays has really great salads.

Test results

The doc just sent through my test results. They are the most 'normalised' they've been for years so there will be no tut-tuing with meds or diet or anything else.

TSH:  2.63  ref range (0.49 - 4.67) 

T4:  17.8  (9.2 - 23.9)

T3:  3.10   (2.22 - 5.32)

It also seems that my recent energy crisis is partly due to seasonal variations and partly due to low iron levels. I didn't ask for my iron to be checked but after not being able to walk past the offal section of the meat cabinet at the supermarket due to culinary fantasies about chicken hearts and livers, and subsequently fulfilling the liver desires (in the old days, people thought that desire was generated in the liver), I feel significantly better. 

Hmmmmm, maybe I could make a low fat version of chicken liver pate? I like that idea...

weekly weigh in

This week saw me following plan to the 'T' apart from one small thing which is really one big thing in the weight loss scheme of things.


weight 81kgs = down 1kg
waist 32 inches = no change


One kilo is perfectly acceptable for the week and you don't get waist decreases every week, at least not after the initial weeks of loss where the waist reduces quite quickly. What was notable, and what I must, must, must remember (if I use 'must' a lot will it help me to remember?) is to have 2 calcium serves per day. Ideally, I would have a cottage cheese with tomato & chives snack in the morning and a low fat latte/cafe au lait made at home in the afternoon however one of these often gets skipped for various reasons. Low fat cottage cheese is horrifically expensive here so I don't or even can't always get it (you can't always get milk for some weird reason) and sometimes my job conspires to make me too busy or too tired to get to the coffee shop 10 mins walk away. Anyway, for one reason or another I have not been getting my minimum calcium everyday and According to Dr Phil, you can't lose weight without it. I've now stocked up on some individual servings of long life milk.

Does 2-1=1 hold true for the Hashi?

First things first, my TSH test was 'normal,' although the doc didn't give me the numbers so I have asked for them. I expect the lab uses the 0.3-3.0 measure as in Vietnam, and also not that long along there were no labs here so, logically (bearing in mind that logic can be circumvented in Asia), they should not be operating on the old guidelines. We shall see....


Now, getting to the mysterious equation above, there's a little back story first. The doc asked me about symptoms and I was forthcoming about how I feel like large piles of what-the-dog-did-on-the-lawn. I also pointed out that I seem to feel this bad every year at this time even though I live in the tropics. Now this is a red flag for bad thyroid doctorin.' The uninformed doctor would now be starting to narrow done which mental health issue they were dealing with and getting their imaginary prescription pad out. 


What Doctor Elise said however was circadium rhythms. These are set at a young age and persist throughout life, therefore my body is currently operating as though it is the victim of a miserable Invercargill, New Zealand winter and I have most of the symptoms of seasonal winter flu' without actually having it. That really sucks as although it's rainy season here, it doesn't rain that much and it is usually around a very pleasant 27/28 degrees with a gentle breeze. Kind of perfect, but I'm missing out on  the feel-good weather factor big time, most of the time.


So this set me off on yet another great internet search. I had not gotten far when I came across the following abstract at the Annals of Nutrition & Metabolism, which I've copied in. http://content.karger.com/ProdukteDB/produkte.asp?Doi=177254
Adult male Sprague-Dawley rats were subjected to food restriction so that they ate 65% of food ingested by control rats. While control rats had free access to food over the 24-hour period, food-restricted rats were provided with food daily at 10 a.m. The experimental period lasted for 34 days. On day 35, rats from both experimental groups were killed at 08.00, 11.00, 14.00, 24.00 and 02.00 h. Food restriction modified the circadian rhythms of ACTH and corticosterone. In addition, total circulating corticosterone throughout the day was higher in food-restricted than in control rats. In contrast, food restriction resulted in depressed secretion of thyroid-stimulating hormone and growth hormone. The results indicate that time of food availability entrained circadian corticosterone rhythm but not thyroid-stimulating hormone and growth hormone rhythms.


 Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't there an implication that if you restrict calories as you must do to lose weight, that your pituitary will reduce the amount of TSH produced so your thyroid receives less stimulus so thyroid function decreases? Isn't this the ultimate catch 22 for the Hashi who needs to lose weight? I would love to know if this has been followed up however as it was not the main objective of the research it may not have been. It was published in 1987 (so someone's known about this for a long time) and it has been cited 55 times but I have no info on the thrust of the research of those citing. This would explain A LOT!

going-to-new-doctor Hashi nerves

A trip to a new doctor is an event that fills the Hashi with a combination of hope and dread. We hope that this new doctor will be understanding & have sufficient knowledge of our weirdnesses aka symptoms; that they will be well informed by current research so able to offer us insight, rather than the other way around; that they will be open to ideas from the patient as they realise that the average Hashi spends a great time of time feeling like shite so seeks ways to feel better, and again have the capacity to guide us wisely in this rather than judging/medicating us as fruitcake hypochondriacs with depressions/psychoses/schizophrenias we don't have (of course if a person does suffer from such, they should receive the appropriate care & meds), which also happens to be what we dread on that first visit to the new doc. I have a special aversion to doctors who use the word 'believe' when they talk about Hashis as this indicates that they do not keep up to date with research, and in fact think that current research is for doctors of poor quality who don't have firmly held beliefs about Hashimoto's and are therefore liable to be swayed by results of such research. (I should pose this to my students in my critical thinking class!)


Yesterday found me tuk-tuking my way to a new doc to have my regular bloods done with all these thoughts running around in my head. There are any number of clinics I could have chosen to go to that would have been able to do the tests but I chose the main Western clinic, SOS, as I thought the chances of a 'good thyroid doc' were higher. I saw a skinny-as-a-rake, 30 something female Australian doc who was vibrant, funny, intelligent, compassionate and well educated in the thyroid department ; a Lotto winning combination in a doc if I ever saw one. She's a keeper! Results on Monday...

sorry

I know I seem totally preoccupied by my weight at the mo and I am. I have to be this focused or else I won't be able to do this. Take note all you carers-for-everyone-but-yourself out there - in order to lose weight you must become selfish and put yourself first. No one else is going to.

silly, silly me

There was I on Sunday, so preoccupied with point 5 of a kilo this and half an inch that, that I completely overlooked the fact that I had hit a milestone - 10 inches off the waist. Wahoo, congrats to me, doing a little celebration dance. And the icing on the cake is that I now officially have a healthy waist measurement. I thought I had reached that earlier but then the boffins reconvened and lowered it from 35 to 32 inches. 


Just to bring me crashing back to Earth/reality, I decided to do a BMI check. Now my beginning BMI was a whopping 40 which as you can see from the chart below (from Weight-control Information Network), put me at Obese - Class 3 and in danger of all sorts of things.
Today it's 31, just inside the Obese - Class 1 category and nudging towards the merely Overweight catergory. I can't wait/weight to get a 2 at the front of that number!
Just to give you an idea of how out of control my weight was, I used to have a BMI of 15 when I was very fit and played a lot sport and ran and did all those high energy things that now make me tired just thinking of them. 

Your BMI	Weight Category
18.5 and Under	Underweight
18.6-24.9	Normal
25-29.9	Overweight
30-34.9	Obese Class 1
35-39.9	Obese Class 2
40 and Over	Obese Class 3

I

Getting to the truth of the weighing matter

The weigh in after being back on the plan for a second week.


Weigh - 82kgs down 0.5
Waist - 32 inches down 1/2 an inch


A somewhat disappointing result as week 2 should still be pulling good numbers and I also felt in myself that I did have a good loss this week. So, what's going on? I did make some off plan choices during the week but nothing that could be said to have weight gaining properties. I may not have had enough raw food stuff as this does accelerate the loss, however I think it mostly has something to do with waking up sick this morning after oversleeping for 3 hours and having intense & intensely weird dreams. I very rarely oversleep so it's always a sign that all is not well/Aly is not well and I have always found that sickness does weird things to my weight i.e. I gain. I have wondered if this is a thyroid thing. It just has that thyroid kind of perverse logic to it.


On the bright side, things are still heading in the right direction and this week my bum fell off. That's right folks, one day I had a curvy ass bouncing along behind me, that I could literally feel bounce, and the next day, no more curvy ass. Even the mirror shows a flat posterial profile. See this is what bugs me. My ass falls off and I only lose half a kilo so my ass only weighed that much? Come on! ! I've had that thing following me around for years so I KNOW it weighed more than that. Also the half inch off the waist would indicate a real weight loss of 2 to 2.5kgs which is what I thought it would be. Herein lays a very valuable piece of advice. Don't just weigh yourself, also measure the waist as sometimes odd things are going on in our bodies which result in weight loss not showing on the scales. They aren't exactly lying, they just ain't uncovering the truth.