How?!?!

How am I going to lose more than half my current weight and not wind up in the hospital, nuthouse, or cemetery?

I'm following a very low fat, starch based food plan, keeping the sodium under 2000 mg a day and calories between 1200 - 1400.

I'm getting 5 to 6 hours of cardio exercise each week, much of it in my target heart rate zone. I mix it up between different videos, the treadmill and exercise bike. Many of the videos incorporate weight and toning work, too.

I'm using meditation and relaxation techniques, along with an ACE inhibitor, to keep my blood pressure down, and sometimes it goes a little too low, so low I'm about to pass out.

I try get eight hours of sleep a night, but some days life just interferes and I only get 6 or 7. I've been making up for it on weekends.

And my weight still keeps yo-yoing between the same 4 pound weight range that's still 140 pounds above my target weight, as set by the cardiologist in December. I haven't lost any weight in about a month.

Is it any wonder why the doc recommended weight loss surgery? Well, that plus the fact that as a surgeon he's knife happy, and probably gets a kick back from everyone he sends for a consult to one of the surgeons in our hospital's brand new bariatric surgery section, modeled after the cardio-vascular center the hospital built for him and brought in big bucks to the institution.

My food is very bland, meals are unenjoyable, and there's not much of them so I spend the majority of my days - and nights - hungry. My hypoglycemia is acting up, some mornings I wake up so dizzy I can barely walk and find my fasting blood sugars 20 or more points below the normal fasting levels. Between the low blood pressure, low blood sugars, and under active thyroid that my doctor refuses to treat more aggressively I'm barely functional!

My body is falling apart. Because of the degenerative arthritis in my back, many of the upper body movements cause pain in my shoulders, neck and upper back and the sciatica causes pains in my right hip and leg. My feet, malformed to begin with (Thanks, Mom and Nana!), are even worse, with the constant pounding on them from various exercises aggravating the arthritis, fasciitis, tendinitis, and now my podiatrist says some bones are shifting out of position, causing not just more pain but affecting my gait, which aggravates the back and hips even more. My already wide feet are now wider than any shoe on the market so no matter what I wear they don't fit right and cause even more pain.

I consider constantly changing food plans, going for a calorie counting plan like Richard Simmons' Foodmover, or even following the DASH diet, which is not only very low sodium but low calorie, too. Then I look at what foods I have available to me, not just in the local stores but what money I have in my weekly food budget to buy them, and sigh. I looked at chicken breasts yesterday that were loaded with bright yellow blobs of fat and whose packages had small puddles of "chicken juice" comprised of not just blood but I'm assuming the saline solution injected into most chicken breasts on the market today. Ground beef is constantly getting recalled for bacterial contamination, and besides, it's usually too high in fat content to be considered a healthy food, and the lower fat version is too expensive. I know, I could buy a cheaper grade and par boil it and pour off the fatty water, but then I'm left with meat that tastes blander than the packaging it's in.

I could also switch to a vegan plan that relies more on fresh vegetables - greens, mostly - and fruits and restricts starches, but I can't even find enough ingredients for one decent bowl of salad per week and certainly won't be able to find enough to make a pound of salad a day. Then there's another plan that limits you to around 1000 calories a day of mostly starches and fruit and later limited veggies. I don't think all that fruit would be good for my hypoglycemia. I may as well stick with the vegan food plan I'm already on and just pay really close attention to portion size and maybe lower the calories down to 1000 - 1200 a day again.

My hypothyroidism is as bad as it's ever been, with my PCP refusing to raise my med dosage for fear of "blowing out" my thyroid. He refuses to believe the fact that hypothyroid can lead to high blood pressure, high cholesterol, depression, muscle aches, rosacea (Another ailment of mine that keeps me indoors a lot) and of course, weight gain.

I have no energy for anything by the time I finish my daily exercise. I have no mental energy to read or do any of my former hobbies, and I fall asleep at the drop of a hat, making watching even a tv show impossible unless I record it and play it back in bits and pieces. Most days I don't even get dressed.

So I plod along, constantly hungry and in pain, constantly tired and frustrated. I dread each upcoming doctor's appointment because I know I'll get reprimanded for the lack of weight loss each time, whether I lose or not. I have no energy to leave the house most days, and the few times I do it's never for anything pleasant, but for mundane things like grocery shopping or going to the laundromat or to care for the elderly relative with Alzheimer's disease. Her mind is getting worse, her finances dwindling, and we know that sooner or later we'll be forced to move in with her to care for her. Sure, she can afford live-in homemakers right now, but refuses them. We're lucky she allowed us to hire one to come for a few hours on weekdays for the winter. But her money won't last forever, so to keep her safe we'll either have to place her in a nursing home or more in. Since every nursing home we interviewed told us the same thing the assisted living place did last September, that they can't force her to stay there if she doesn't want to, we know we'll never be able to place her. With our luck, as soon as she got settled in and we were lucky enough to sell her house, she'll decide to go home, so the house has to stay, at least for a year, yet we can't afford to care for both her house and pay for a nursing home (Over $3000 a month), so moving in with her is the lesser of the financial evils. This is a woman without a friend in the world, one whose entire family hates her (Including us) and hates to spend any time with, even before she started showing Alzheimer's symptoms, a woman whose own husband used to yell at her to stop being such a bitch to her sister and go to her room until after we left if she couldn't keep a civil tongue in her head. When he husband died there was no one left to reign her in and she berated her sister, my m-i-l, until the day she died. She only has one other nephew and one niece, both live out of state, and both want nothing to do with her. Because we live the closest, her care fell to us. My husband is trying to find a way to have someone else - ANYONE else - take over, maybe make her a ward of the state, but so far no luck. He refuses to accept legal guardianship because of all the paperwork involved, mostly the financial side of keeping every receipt to prove how every penny of her money gets spent. She can't even remember to eat, much less where she spends money each week, which is why we only leave a small amount of cash in her place and took away her checkbook after she once handed it over to a contractor who knocked on her door and offered to do work for her and told him to make out any check he needed. We had to threaten him with legal action to get him to leave her alone and stop coming around. See why she needs someone to be with her as much as possible? I dread the day we have to move in with her.

Heck, I dread many things in life right now. This isn't the life I thought I would be living when I was younger. This isn't even half as good a life I was living even five years ago, five MONTHS ago. Sometimes the alternative does look better, to twist the old saying around.