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You know those paleo success stories floating around Facebook and the Internet? The ones where they show the before and after pictures of someone who lost 45 pounds in three months and had this amazing physical transformation?
I am not one of those people.
Nope. I struggle. A lot. My scale has a personality disorder and often leaves me feeling inadequate. I would break up with it, but it feels so satisfying when it does give me good news that I find it hard to let go. It’s a thoroughly dysfunctional relationship, I know, but I am committed, apparently.
My weight seems to be fluctuating all over the place. My digestion seems to be improving one week only to revert back to its old ways the next. It’s like being on a rollercoaster that, at times, has caused me to wonder if this lifestyle is helping at all. I mean, I know it is, in my knower, as an old preacher used to say, but without tangible results, it can get discouraging, right? And I have been very discouraged lately. I work really hard to eat the right things and stay on track. Yes, I’m sleeping better, off of much of the meds I used to take, and a bit more regular than going just once a week, but without visible results, people look at me like, “Yeah, right! You’ve been doing this for almost two years and look at you! Nothing has changed. Why would I want to give up my yummy bread if it hasn’t worked for you?” Honestly, I can’t blame them.
Last week I had an insurance exam, and I was really sweating bullets. I had no idea what my weight would be on exam day. It’s like spinning a wheel each morning when I get on the scale so there is just no telling. To top it off, my blood sugar has been an issue since I started this paleo journey. It was one of the reasons I committed to it in the first place. I was borderline prediabetic. My doc wasn’t too concerned about my blood sugar as my A1c, a measure of how well controlled your blood sugar has been over the past few weeks or months, came back normal every time we ran bloodwork. I still didn’t like my fasting blood sugar being over 100 considering I began transitioning to paleo in the fall of 2013. My last bloodwork was in early November 2014, and it was still over 100 then, more than a year after I began transitioning. Hello? I thought that was supposed to improve within a couple of weeks?!?
Yet, I was prepared to accept whatever the exam results were as my current reality without shame and move on. This lifestyle is about more than just some diet to lose weight. It's about nourishing my body to maximize my health. I embrace that the outward reality might look different than I would hope in the interim. It is what it is. No point beating myself up over it. I must just be a slow learner, metabolically speaking.
Well, I just got my results back from my insurance exam, and for the first time in nearly two years my blood sugar is below 100. It came back at 83! OMG! That’s amazing! I’m going to have it retested, of course, by my regular doc, but what a lift I got when I saw that result!
Maybe the scale is being a little bipolar, and my digestion is not as regular as I would like it to be, but things are changing. I know I feel better in many ways. I still have a long way to go before I would call myself healed, but seeing that blood sugar result really affirmed that I am on the right track. What I’m doing is making a difference. It’s just taking a little longer for me to get there than other people.
I can live with that.
