A Weight Loss Journey

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Many women who are approaching menopause find themselves experiencing unexplained weight gain, especially around the waists and hips, regardless of their best attempts to lose weight. Often the methods of weight control that worked for them before, suddenly stop working. In fact, abdominal weight gain is one of the most often heard complaints of perimenopausal women. Yet most women have been told, and believe, that those extra ten or twenty pounds are simply the way it is at this time of life and they should just accept their “middle-age spread.”

But you absolutely do not have to!  You don’t have to resign yourself to weight gain at this stage of your life, but you must realize that your body is changing.  For example, hormonal fluctuations, many years of exposure to toxins, and your body’s natural tendency for retaining fat cells which produce estrogen at this time can result in some extra weight. But it doesn’t mean you’re stuck with it.

Check back tomorrow for more . . .

A while back I discovered the most wonderful site at

www.tut.com

that sends daily inspirational messages such as the following:

Thinking brand new thoughts that you’ve never thought before, Cindi, is wildly more conducive to creating big life changes than just thinking different varieties of the same old thoughts.

Think about it -
The Universe

Whenever I get one that hits home with me, I’ll share it with you here.

Bariatric Surgery

What is it?

Weight loss surgery is a serious surgical procedure that decreases the size of the stomach, reduces food intake and can enable you to lose a significant amount of weight. It is a permanent procedure that requires a lifetime commitment to maintaining a healthy lifestyle. Weight loss surgery not only helps you to lose weight, but can help improve your overall health, well-being and self-esteem. Gastric bypass can greatly improve the quality of life not only because of an improvement in appearance and an increase in mobility, but also because it can reduce the number and severity of health problems that overweight people are prone to suffer, such as diabetes and heart/circulation problems.

What Types of Surgery are Available?

Gastric Bypass.  It is a complex procedure performed under general anesthesia. Time in surgery is approximately one to four hours, followed by a one- to seven-day stay in the hospital. Currently, two techniques are available for gastric bypass:

• Roux-en-Y-gastric bypass (traditional and laparoscopic)
• biliopancreatic diversion bypass

Gastric Banding.  Adjustable gastric banding is a restrictive type of weight loss surgery which involves placing a silicone band with an inflatable inner collar around the upper stomach to restrict food intake. This creates a small pouch and a narrow passage to the lower stomach. This small passage delays the emptying of food from the pouch and causes a feeling of fullness. The silicone band can be tightened or loosened over time to change the size of the passage.

Gastric Sleeve.  Technically called gastric sleeve resection, it is typically used to safely initiate the surgical weight loss process in people who are too obese or sick to have more invasive weight loss surgeries or are not candidates for gastric banding.

Put another way, gastric sleeve surgery lets such people reach a safe weight so they can then undergo the more radical surgery.

Duodenal Switch.  Duodenal switch surgery is a variation of another procedure, called biliopancreatic diversion. But the duodenal switch leaves a larger portion of the stomach intact, including the pyloric valve, which regulates the release of stomach contents into the small intestine.

As the name suggests, the duodenal switch also keeps a small part of the duodenum in the digestive system. Foods mix with stomach acid, move down into the duodenum, where they mix with bile from the gall bladder and digestive juices from the pancreas.

Malabsorptive surgeries restrict the amount of calories and nutrients the body absorbs. The malabsorptive component of duodenal switch surgery involves rearranging the small intestine to separate the flow of food from the flow of bile and pancreatic juices. The food and digestive juices interact only in the last 18 to 24 inches of the intestine.

Incision Free.  As an alternative to incision-based surgery, surgeons are using natural orifices (such as the throat) to insert the tools and equipment they need.  While some incision-free procedures are still in their experimental stages, the cutting-edge, cut-free procedures may eventually serve as commonplace alternatives to the more popular weight loss surgeries.

There comes a time when one just has to give up. 

You just gotta surrender to that “evil twin” of yours who keeps your “good twin” from doing what you both know is the right thing for your health.  That time came for me today . . . again.

Here’s an excerpt from an article on KENS San Antonio:

If you need some inspiration to lose weight, read on. A newly-published study shows overweight middle-aged women are significantly less likely to live to a ripe old age.

Fat is the enemy of long life. That’s the conclusion of a new study published in the British Medical Journal. It tracked 17,000 women over 30 years, and it’s a warning for the more than 72 million Americans classified as obese.

Being fat in middle age makes you 80% less likely to make it to old age in good health. “And that’s what they showed,” explained Sue Cunningham, Ph.D., a registered dietitian with the U.T. Health Science Center. “The women who maintained their weight, who managed their weight the best, had a healthier life when they were older.”

Cunningham says the reality is that for most of us, what we weight at about age 18 is probably our optimum weight for our lives, but it gets harder and harder to maintain that.

Here are the hard facts. For every two pounds of weight gained since age 18, a woman’s odds of being healthy after age 70 go down by 5%.

“It’s not so much the length of your years, as the quality of your years,” Cunningham said.

And the truth is many young people are setting themselves up to struggle from an early age. “We certainly are starting out a lot heavier,” Cunningham observed. “Most of us, a lot of us, too many of us are starting out too heavy, too young.”

Certainly our genetic makeup determines much of how our old age plays out. But this study clearly showed that weight is one of the most important environmental factors we can control that will allow us, as women, to become little old ladies.

———————

I haven’t written much lately.  I suspect I am rebelling against my knowledge that I absolutely must do something about my weight.  Fortunately, I am quite tall for a woman at 5′11″, and that helps me to spread out and thus hide the worst of my bulges.  From others, that is.  There is no hiding those bulges from me.

I had lunch today with an old friend.  As you might suspect, we talked a lot about our common friends and health woes caused by their advancing years.  Gawd, I don’t want to be the topic of one of those conversations for someone else.  I don’t want my friends sitting around some day talking about how hard it is for them to see me with so many weight-related health problems.  “If only she had just lost some of that weight she was always worried about.”

I promise you tonight, friends, that I will change my dirty ways.  I know what I should do.  I should quit eating junk, quit sitting at the computer instead of riding my bike, quit procrastinating.  I am starting right now.  Please send me your good vibes.

 

TechCrunch50 was held on September 14 and 15, 2009 at the San Francisco Design Center Concourse on Eighth Street in San Francisco.

TechCrunch50 celebrates entrepreneurship, and invites as many start-up companies as possible. This year, fifty companies participated.

HealthyWage, one of the startups that debuted onstage at the TechCrunch50 conference, is a startup that incentivizes users to stay fit by paying them a reward. Great idea!

The idea goes like this. At the beginning of the year, a person can submit their health basics, weight being the most obvious, and set a target at the end of the year. If they meet the goal, HealthyWage either pays them a reward, or matches and raises the user’s bet that they’ll meet their target.

With the nutrition data users enter, HealthyWage can track the protein, fat, carbohydrates and sodium a person consumes. It also has a social networking function so people can get together in groups to meet a goal.

Their web site announces launch this Saturday. I sure plan to check it out.

Over the last ten years or so, a number of researchers have suggested that reduced-calorie diets can mean better health and a longer life.  Caloric restriction is not necessarily an extremist anti-aging tactic for hardcore longevity-seekers. It can simply mean restricting your intake to just what your body really needs to thrive.

You might be surprised at how much you can eat when you cut empty calories out of your diet.  Cut back on sugar, white flour, and fatty foods, and you will also cut way back on calories.  Those calories that you don’t eat are just empty calories anyway.  They provide very little nutrition.

Focus on fresh fruits, vegetables, and lean protein sources.  Move just a bit more every day.  You’ll feel better and possibly live longer.

Your body continues to require growth hormone after you are full grown.

Human Growth Hormone (HGH) is secreted by the pituitary gland and appears mostly in childhood and adolescence.  Adults continue to secrete HGH throughout their lifetimes, but in ever-decreasing amounts.  By the time you are 40, HGH production is about 20% of what it was when you were 20.  As levels of HGH continue to drop, you may notice a corresponding increase in sleepiness, weight gain, loss of libido, insomnia, decreased mental clarity.

Doctors may prescribe a synthetic, drug form of the hormone to treat deficiencies in HGH and other growth-related conditions.  However, you can also get HGH supplement without a prescription that is very effective, and has very low risk of side effects and other complications associated with the drug form.

Several manufacturers offer non-prescription HGH supplements.  The most common and safest supplements are called releasers and are akin to amino acid “multi-vitamins.”  These supplements are available in capsule, tablet, or spray form.  Releaser supplements rely on the user’s ability to release natural growth hormone, so results vary by individual.  It is apparent that a healthy diet and an active lifestyle amplify the effects of HGH supplements.  If you have a growth hormone deficiency, a supplement will not work for you because it does not contain synthetic growth hormone.

Consumer Products Review (www.consumerproductsreview.org) has compiled testing and consumer reports to rate HGH supplements.  Their ratings are also based on the product, customer service and a strong reputation for reliability.  They have provided 5-star ratings for Human Growth Agent Spray and Sytropin.

Sytropin scored high in various best-of lists during my own research.

Because I am all about weight loss, and also am concerned with improving my cardiovascular health, and Sytropin claims to have a beneficial impact in that area, I have embarked on a Sytropin trial period of my own.  I will let you know how that goes.

I went to my family practice doctor for a med check last week.  I hate having to go there every few months.  Sometimes it seems like it’s a way to get the insurance to pay for another office visit, but I know that’s really not true.  My doc cares about me and wants me to be healthy. 

We were sitting in the office chatting about her divorce, my swollen ankle and disturbing blood test results, when I happened to mention that I was still thrashing around with my on-going fight to get rid of the weight that has followed me around since I was in elementary school, and is now relentlessly piling on around my waist, like a wax figure that’s melting and puddling up on top of a belt.

She paused, glanced at me and casually mentioned that trying to lose weight after you pass 40 years of age is next to impossible.

What!

What kind of a thing is that for a doctor to say to her hopeful, optimistic patient?  Now that I’m well past 40, is there any hope that I will ever be at my normal weight?  Do I really have to resign myself to being a chubby, happy gramma with wildly swinging flaps of skin where her triceps ought to be, and giant stretch-waist pants?

“Say it ain’t so, Joe.”

Most of what I’ve read tells me that the way to lose weight is to tip your muscle-to-fat ratio in favor of the muscle.  That generally raises your metabolism  by burning more calories all day long.  That’s my plan, and I’m sticking to it.  Otherwise, I’ll be relegated to surviving on less than a thousand calories per day . . . forever.  I don’t think so.

I’ve been learning about human growth hormone supplements lately.  I plan to use HGH to build lean muscle, rev up my metabolism, and drop some of the wiggly stuff.

More later.

Ya just gotta love this.

Here’s something interesting, as reported by By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Editor, Reuters

Researchers searching for a cure for obesity said on Thursday they have developed a drug that not only makes mice lose weight, but reverses diabetes and lowers their cholesterol, too.

The drug, which they have dubbed fatostatin, stops the body from making fat, instead releasing the energy from food. They hope it may lead to a pill that would fight obesity, diabetes and cholesterol, all at once.

Writing in the journal Chemistry and Biology, Salih Wakil of Baylor College of Medicine in Texas, Motonari Uesugi of Kyoto University in Japan and colleagues said the drug interferes with a suite of genes turned on by overeating.

“Here, we are tackling the basics,” Wakil said in a telephone interview. “I think that is what excited us.”

Scientists are painfully aware that drugs that can make mice thin do nothing of the sort in humans. A hormone called leptin can make rats and mice drop weight almost miraculously but does little or nothing for an obese person, for instance.

But Wakil, whose team has patented the drug and is looking for a drug company to partner with, hopes this drug may be different. “I am very, very optimistic,” he said.

Fatostatin is a small molecule, meaning it has the potential to be absorbed in pill form.

It works on so-called sterol regulatory element binding proteins or SREBPs, which are transcription factors that activate genes involved in making cholesterol and fatty acids.

“Fatostatin blocked increases in body weight, blood glucose, and hepatic (liver) fat accumulation in (genetically) obese mice, even under uncontrolled food intake,” the researchers wrote.

Genetic tests showed the drug affected 63 different genes.

The idea of interfering with SREBP is not new. GlaxSmithKline has been working on a new-generation cholesterol drug that uses this pathway.

After four weeks, mice injected with fatostatin weighed 12 percent less and had 70 percent lower blood sugar levels, the researchers wrote.

Now they plan to test rats and rabbits, Wakil said.

The drug also had effects on prostate cancer cells they said — something that may help explain links between prostate cancer and obesity.