Part II

I have been taking progesterone for about seven months now. After several weeks of testing different doses and other supplements, i found which worked for me and finally, after long last, am feeling like my old self again. For me the fix was not a quick one but don't let that detour you. Your endocrine system is like a line of dominoes, once one goes, it brings down the whole line. My body had gotten to a point where my other systems needed help too. I plan to give all the intimate details of my trials and errors but i am excited to let everyone know that it is now time for me to move onto Part II of my project program.

Now that i have told about where i have been and how i came to be where i am now, i want to tell about how I'm going to get where i want to be. When i started this blog i was still trying to get my hormones under control. I feel like i have accomplished that, so now i am excited to take on my other physical problems. As of today, i am 250 lbs and a pant (tight) size 22. The depressing thing is that i have never been this big even when nine months pregnant!

My plan is this, i will follow a Body for Life 12 week program three times in a row only with certain adjustments, I will be eating gluten free (i have a whole entry planned to talk about this subject later).

*check it out at www.bodyforlife.com*

The first 12 weeks will be aimed toward healing. My body has been like a runaway train for the past four years and even though i feel like i have got the breaks fixed, it is still going to take some time for it to slow down and get into reverse. Progesterone and supplements go a long way in healing hormone problems but they cant do it alone. Diet and exercise absolutely need to be a part of the equation for it to work. During this 12 weeks, my focus will not be necessarily on weight loss (i actually don't expect any for the first several weeks, but i would love it if i did!) but more on giving my body the nutrition and exercise it needs to gain back energy and balance.

The second time will be geared toward loosing the fat that i have gained over the past few years. My goal will be to get back into the many clothes i already have in my closet that i don't fit into presently. Ideally, i will be back into a familiar size 14-16 by the end of this section and then i will feel like i can pick up where i left off.

The third time will be to reach my ultimate. To finally have a flat tummy, to go shopping for "on the rack" clothes, to not have trouble moving around and be able to physically do all the things i have always wanted to and to look HOT in a swim suit! By my birthday in December, i would like to at least be a size six.

All of this i hope to accomplish in the 290 some odd days i have left on my project countdown.

Last December i turned 30. I wont lie, for a little while i felt a bit freaked out. I just felt like "where did my twenties go?" Well, they went by the way side as i had two pregnancies, changed a lot of diapers and went crazy. I decided right there and then not to let the next ten years of my life slide by in a fog, i was going to have my "twenties" in my thirties. I'm glad i had my children when i did because now that i have my brain back i can do so many fun things with them! I am looking forward to having energy to run and play with them and teach them to dance and go horseback riding with them. I am looking forward to being a fit and healthy role model for my girls.

I am looking forward to being the "old" Vanessa for my husband, the best friend that he fell in love with back in high school. Out of the eight and a half years that we have been married i have been mentally/hormonally stable for only about 18 months of it, and about half of that time he has had to be away from me! (yes, i know, he is a good man) He has been so supportive and helpful in me getting back on track. It has not been easy at times for us to be intimate because even if i was in the mood, it is hard to feel sexy in a body that feels so heavy and cumbersome. I am fortunate to be married to a man that loves me for me and has never made me feel bad about my body and has always found me beautiful, but i am looking forward to having a body that i feel sexy in and to be as there for him as he has been for me.

In the end, that is what this healing is all about. I long to be physically fit but not without the mental and spiritual well been to go with it. One depends upon the other and they are designed to complement each other.

That having been said, my ultimate goal is to be a size 6. I actually don't care how much i weigh when i get to that point, as long as it is healthy. A lot of people get caught up in the scale but because i plan on having a lot of muscle definition, i will most likely weigh more than other girls of that size.

Muscle weighs more than fat, we hear that a lot but it is true. Case in point, my collage room mate was always pretty thin, soft but defiantly not fat, i think she was a size 7. After graduating collage she joined the Marines. She told me that after boot camp she had gained 20 lbs, but had shrunk to a size 4! I realize that i have a lot of fat to get rid of before my muscles comes into the weight picture, but i just want to be clear that I'm not going for "be as skinny as i can be!" and letting the scale dictate what that is. I have spent a large part of my adult life being unhealthy and have no intentions of trading one problem for another.

I feel my biggest challenge right now is just waking up my body to movement. During the past several months i have had to keep a pretty sedentary lifestyle to keep my anxiety under control. Lots and lots of sitting. I usually consider myself a pretty strong woman but have as of late found my self not being able to do things that have always come easy to me. Like opening jar lids or walking long distances.

I have come to the startling realization that there is no cap to my possible weight gain. There is no point at which your body says "oh, all full, there is no possible way anymore fat can be stored here". In fact, there is always room for more. My body will grow as large as i allow it to. It was a shock to me when i had to get a size 20 and i thought that that was the largest i would ever get, until i had to buy a size 22.

It is true that i could say "this wasn't my fault", i honestly did try to lose weight, several times without success because of my hormone problems. I can honestly sympathise with anyone who has had that frustrating experience, it is possibly one of the worst feelings in the world. On the other hand i have to take responsibility for my actions, i sure didn't do myself any favors in my diet quite often.

Now that i feel able, (and that is where anyone has to start) i am ready to give changing my body another try. I am both frightened and hopeful. Frightened because i have failed so many times before and because i have never had to start from being this out of shape before. You could say i am at the bottom of my barrel. But i am hopeful because now i have answers where there were none before and mentally i feel more clear than i have in a long, long, time.

Like i mentioned before, this blog has several purposes and one of them is to keep track of my progress. From now on, my posts will end with updates on my diet and exercise progress. Thank you to all my friends who read my ramblings, your support means more to me than you can ever know and i will do my very best not to let you down!

P.S.
It is part of the Body for Life program to take 'before and after' pictures. So here i am today, in all of my 250 lbs of glory. Because i love you so much, I'll spare you the picture of me in a bikini, but you still get the idea, it is time for a change.

The Power of Progesterone

I don’t consider myself an uninformed or unintelligent person and so i hope im not the only woman out there that has gone through menses and two pregnancies and never understood (or really even knew) what progesterone was. As far as i knew, estrogen was the woman hormone responsible for all of my reproductive workings. I have had reproductive classes in high school that spelled out the whys and wherefores of a woman’s cycle and so im sure at one point in my life i was aware of such an important hormone. But, the truth is, the only one that anyone ever seemed to care much about was estrogen. "Estrogen keeps you younger" "i take estrogen for my hot flashes" "Estrogen levels are making me crazy!" "Estrogen is the woman hormone" "you need estrogen to regulate your cycle" see what i mean? What i found out is that, thought estrogen is indeed an important hormone, it is only half of the equation, it only works as long as it also has progesterone to work with it and progesterone is literally ten times more important than estrogen as far as being a fit and healthy woman.

*major national geographic moment*
Let’s learn about our menstrual cycles to see how important it is for these hormones to work together. I don’t mean to insult anyone's intelligence here, but i seriously had to go back to sex ed 101 and so, now you do too.

A women's menstruation is based on a 26 to 35 day cycle. Some women have short cycles and some women have longer ones. On days 1 through 15 (day one being the first onset of bleeding) your body has shed the blood that has build up in your uterus and has a little rest period where estrogen and progesterone levels are low and steady. This is called the follicular phase. During this phase, estrogen begins to rise causing the walls of you uterus to start filling with blood and your ovaries to get another egg ready to go. Around day 15 your progesterone rises sharply, telling your body to release that egg and let it float into the fallopian tubes. This is called ovulation.

With a ripe egg and cushiony uterus, you body sits around waiting for it to be fertilized. This is called the lutreal phase. If you don’t have sex (the only 100% sure form of birth control) or otherwise don’t allow sperm to get to that part of the body, it gets tired of waiting around and expires. Around day 21, your progesterone will plummet below the levels of your estrogen, signaling your body to flush the lining of the uterus along with the useless egg and start all over again. This is called menses. The dramatic fall of progesterone below estrogen is why so many women experience depression, swelling, weepiness, mood swings and food cravings before their periods, otherwise known as PMS (pre menstrual syndrome).

If your methods for birth control don’t work, or the egg is otherwise fertilized, the egg will implant on the lining of your uterus and your progesterone will stay steady to support it. In about nine months that little seed will become a crying, giggling, hungry, pooping, wonderful bundle of joy, your baby. And the miracle of life continues.



This delicate balance of bodily chemicals affects every woman on earth from her first period (mine started at 12) through menopause (usually between the ages of 40 to 50). A lot of women think that "hormone problems" are limited to women going through "the change", but not so! Perimenopause can start as early as your thirties and because of the massive amounts of hormones in our environment, our young daughters are experiencing heavier and harder menstrual problems every year. We women in child bearing years should also remember that our bodies have a hard time bouncing back from baby sometimes. (btw, using progesterone can help with post partum depression in a major way, more on that later)

Also, progesterone is not there just to make your cycle go round, it is one of the major players out of all your body's hormones. It is the building block for the key hormones your adrenal gland makes and your thyroid uses. So if you don’t have enough progesterone to go around, those systems suffer as well and your whole body goes to crap! Now that you see how important progesterone is, you can see why having too little of it can cause a BIG problem!

When your progesterone consistently rides below your estrogen levels, it is called estrogen dominance. Remember how, in a normal cycle, that causes moodiness? (Or as they used to say, "Women’s Complaints") Well, if you have low progesterone it is like living with PMS all month long, only worse, your estrogen can literally become toxic to you. Some symptoms of estrogen dominance are:

• Depression
• Anxiety
• Panic attacks
• Aching body and joints
• Fatigue
• Breast tenderness
• Decreased sex drive
• Mood swings
• Mood swings
• Allergy symptoms
• Insomnia
• Weight gain
• Water retention
• Hair loss
• Migraines
• Heavy periods and bad cramps

But it doesn’t stop there. Because your body is an amazing thing, it can run on fumes for a long time. A lot of women will go for months or years not knowing they are feeling like crap because of a hormone imbalance. They soldier on (or are given an antidepressant) until they become crippled with one or more of these conditions:

• Uterine fibroids
• PCOS (polycystic ovarian syndrome)
• PMDD (premenstrual dysphonic disorder
• Infertility
• Miscarriage
• Autoimmune disorders
• Adrenal gland fatigue
• Thyroid dysfunction
• Fibrocystic breasts
• Hypoglycemia
• Insulin resistance (and diabetes)
• Accelerated aging
• Fibromyalgia
• Chronic fatigue
• Gallbladder disease
• Breast, cervical and ovarian cancer

If you have been suffering with any of these things, i am sorry, i know how bad it can feel and affect your life. The good news is that supplementing with bio identical progesterone can help and heal you. Here are the steps you need to get started:

1. GET TESTED
No doctor offices or drawing blood. ZRT hormone saliva test kits can be bought online. You can find them on Amazon or eBay or from www.supplementspot.com. These tests are designed to take on a number of different hormones and you will usually pay by which ones and how many you get tested. I would suggest that you test your progesterone and both kinds of estrogen, estradiol and estrone. The cost is about $50 per hormone tested.

You doctor's office may offer progesterone testing, but you should know that a blood test is not near as accurate as a saliva test. Your blood chemistry changes rapidly over the course of the day because it is a carrier system. It delivers chemicals and hormones and all sorts of other things to all parts of the body. Once it has "dropped off its package" it can be hard to tell how much of that hormone is actually being used in your body. That is where saliva can help. The proteins in your saliva give a much more accurate picture of what and how many hormones your body is actually using.

It is important to know where both your estrogen and progesterone levels are because you can have estrogen dominance where your progesterone is low and estrogen in normal (that’s what mine showed) or where your estrogen is low and your progesterone lower (this happens a lot with women going through menopause and may need both supplements) or estrogen is high and progesterone is low. At any rate, it is important to know where you start so you can check your progress later.

Once you package comes in the mail, just follow the instructions. You will want to test on days 15-20 of your cycle. Just spit in the vile, mail it in to the lab and you will have your results about 10 days later.

Depending on your results, you will be able to figure out how much and how often to supplement with progesterone. You should know that even if your results come back completely normal, it is still safe to use progesterone to help with bad PMS or in times of high stress. (i will fill you in more on that later)

2. SUPPLEMENTATION WITH BIO IDENTICAL PROGESTERONE
The bio identical part is important. There is a big difference between progesterone and a progestin. Bio identical progesterone is derived from natural sources and because it is, your body recognizes it and more readily accepts it. Things found in nature cannot legally be patented; therefore, if a pharmaceutical company wants to sell its own little pill, it needs to change the chemical makeup of the hormone. That is why a progestin (commonly used in birth control pills) is really not progesterone at all. Because it has been chemically altered, your body's rejection of it is usually the cause of all the nasty side effects.

There are a lot of progesterone creams being peddled out there, but a reputable brand is Progest. You can usually find it at any health food store and costs about $35. The store may have more in their selection and i think that as a rule of thumb, if they are there, you can trust them.

The cream part is important too, it is the most efficient way to take your progesterone. If taken orally in a pill, most of it will be destroyed by your liver before your body can use it. You can take shots, but honestly, wouldn’t you rather just rub on the cream? The progesterone is absorbed through the skin and held in your fat cells to be used. It is a gentle and efficient method.

A typical dosage is a quarter teaspoon, twice a day. This is a very basic dosage and a good one to start from, but don’t worry if you have to adjust it. This website has been instrumental in helping me follow my symptoms and adjusting my dosages to a helpful level, www.natural-progesterone-advisory-network.com. It may take several months of using progesterone to cure the underlying causes of your problems, but you can feel relief from your symptoms in as little as 48 hours from using bio identical cream.

3. EDUCATE YOURSELF
I have so much to share on this blog that i feel i haven’t even scratched the surface and even as i make new entrees, i am constantly learning something new that will help me or you. Every woman i different and your path to healing may differ from mine, learning as much as you can can help you make the right decisions for you. Here is some suggested reading:

"What Your Doctor May Not Tell You About Menopause" by John R. Lee, MD
He has another book of the same title about perimenopause.

"From Hormone Hell to Hormone Well" by C.W. Randolph, Jr., MD

"Feeling Fat, Fuzzy or Frazzled?" by Richard and Karilee Shames, MD,PhD,RN

These books offer a lot of great advice and information.

Why i dont like doctors

Now don’t get me wrong, i believe we need doctors, after all, who else is going to put your finger together after you cut it off carving a pumpkin? They have a place and a purpose and i am grateful for that. so i guess that it would be more fitting to say that i don’t like general practitioners or their little toties they pass you off to. in the last four years it has been my experience that unless i have a cold or infection, they are pretty much useless.

I have already talked about the runaround i had while on a quest to find out what my shaking was all about but during that time i was also fighting a battle for my general health. On top of the shaking, depression and anxiety, i didn’t know, for the life of me, why i was so exhausted all the time. i had the hardest time thinking, i could no longer function. doing basic things like cleaning and cooking and getting dressed took everything out of me and as always, i was gaining weight. I also knew that a brain candy pill wasn’t going to help me, so i decided i had better find out what was the real problem, and fast.

My first thought was that it was my thyroid. Several of my friends suffer from an underactive thyroid or hypothyroidism and i am familiar with all the symptoms, i had most of them. i had already been tested a few times and was frustrated that the tests always came back with the score of someone who should be a size six. It just didn’t make sense to me so i did what i do best, internet research.

I discovered that most tests just test the TSH and not the other hormones that make up the inner workings of your thyroid. i found out that it was extremely possible to have an underactive thyroid and still test "normal". (i will give all the details about this subject in a forthcoming entry). Armed with this information and printed proof from my computer, i demanded my doctor give me another, thorough, detailed test. he was more than willing (which totally deflated the entire speech i had prepared to convince him) because he already knew everything i had told him.

*rant moment*
Let me line this up for you: i go to him because i am an all out wreck, but part of that is many symptoms of hypothyroidism, that is why he gave me the test in the first place. the test come back normal so he sends me on my merry way, leaving me to suffer for months before i come back and say "maybe we didn’t look close enough" and he basically says "i know, well, since you are here, let’s do that now."
Maybe you can tell me, why, if he saw all of my symptoms and knew that he should look closer, why the heck didn’t he the first time?!
*rant over*

The test did come back with some abnormalities this time, but he couldn’t help me, he had to send me to a specialist, an endocrinologist. An endocrinologist is a doctor who specializes in the study of the endocrine system in your body. that is all the glands that produce your hormones. i was lucky because a lot of people have to wait three to six months to get in with an endocrinologist, i was able to see one in two weeks.

I was very excited, finally i would be able to get the help that i needed, finally my life would return to normal, finally i would be able to shed my ugly fat! the doctor came in and looked at me, looked at my chart, asked me how i was feeling than sat back and began to lecture me. he told me that my test scores were fine and that all i needed to do was diet. he assured me that as i got older like him, i wouldn’t be able to consume as many calories and that it didn’t really have anything to do with my thyroid. he also assured me that all my other ailments were just in my head and that i should see a psychologist.

Ok, here is the thing, when you have a proven method of weight loss and all of a sudden it stops working and you gain weight instead, that is not normal! saying that as a fifty-something man he could no longer consume the 2000 calorie diet of his youth and that is why he had a potbelly is not the same for a woman who is not yet out of her twenties! he would not listen to me as i tried to plead my case. he suggested that i cut my calorie intake from 2000 to 1500 a day and we would see where we were in two weeks.

That may have seemed like a reasonable request on paper (less calories + caloric burn = weight loss) but really it only works for someone who wants to loose a few pound from the holidays or a model who's career depends on it. (i will have a lot more to say on this subject later) The idea of starving myself, (because that’s what that would be) the sheer anxiety of adding hunger and calorie counting to my stress load was too much for me. It wasnt that i was unwilling to eat healthy, it was just that what he was saying was ridiculous and unhealthy.

By the time we were done with my appointment i was in tears. i had gone in there with so much hope, i had been praying for help, and he had utterly crushed me. i sobbed in my car in the parking lot before i drove home.

I was depressed for a while, but i am also a determined woman, i demanded that my doctor refer me to a different endocrinologist. this time i was not so lucky, i had a three month wait ahead of me.

Those months were like riding the waves of a stormy sea. i would rise high on the expectations of a doctor's help and then fall into a depression as i was written off or passed off to another doctor who never bothered to look past a test that said i was fine. i obviously was not. up, down, up, down and all the time my anxiety and depression and growing waistline raged all around me. at times i began to wonder again if i really was just crazy, if it was all in my head but deep down i knew that i wasn’t and i kept praying for an answer.

That summer i was given a wonderful opportunity to go out to California for several weeks with my husband and children. we would be taking a workation, taking over my mom's nanny job during the week and hitting the beach every weekend. i love the bay area of California and was very excited for the change of pace and scene.

Going out to California meant that i would have to miss my long awaited appointment with the endocrinologist but as luck would have it i was able to take someone else’s canceled appointment just a day before we left. This doctor listened to me and looked me over really good and sent me for a gauntlet of tests. she said that taking these test was like taking a snapshot of my body and that they may not reflect how i was feeling (no kidding, right?) and that she wouldn’t just write me off if i was still not feeling well. that did comfort me until she called me with my results a couple weeks later.

She told me that my thyroid was fine, that i had signs of insulin resistance and had low vitamin D. she didn’t know what all of that meant or what to do for me but that i should look up a book on insulin resistance and take a vitamin D supplement. yadda, yadda, yadda....she never called.

As you can imagine i was disheartened. i did look up some info on insulin resistance which I found out is the precursor to diabetes (more on this subject later) but opted not to take a vitamin D pill. i figured that if my body was having a hard time making it from the massive amounts of sunshine i had been getting, a supplement wasn’t going to get the job done. once again, i prayed for an answer.

I received an answer to my prayers one day as i was preparing for a family outing to the beach. I was looking for a good magazine to read while working on my tan and was attracted to one that had "bio identical hormones" written across it. It was the magazine First for Woman, one of those two dollar magazines that every month promotes the latest and greatest in weight loss. (they are my literary junk food and i love to indulge ever so often)

I had heard a bit about bio identical hormones before. while waiting for my doctors to come to their senses and give me a prescription that would make my thyroid work like a well oiled machine and melt all my unwanted fat, (hey, that is exactly what happened to one of my friends) i was determined to find a supplement (legal or un) on my own so that i could finally end my (and my family's) suffering. I had been determined to take matters into my own hands because no matter what my doctors were saying, i knew something was wrong with me. it simply did not add up that i could have a healthy thyroid while haveing the sympotoms of an underactive thyroid!(I warned you, i can be freakish about this sort of stuff) what i learned was that thyroid bio identical hormones are from natural sources so that your body uses them better, but that you still need a prescription. Always willing to learn more, i got the magazine.

I was disappointed at first to see that it was talking about estrogen and progesterone (a hormone i was not very familiar with) but as i read the stories, i was amazed; it was like they were telling me my life! in a three page article i found that having a unbalance between your estrogen and progesterone causes you to have anxiety, depression, low sex drive, weight gain, insomnia, tender breasts, mood swings, brain fog, migraines... basically bad pms all the time and that is just the beginning. basically it listed everything i had been suffering for the last three years and the stories of the woman in the article were like pages out of my diary.

What was even more wonderful to find out was that to confirm if that that was my problem, all i had to do was take an at home saliva test. no doctor visit, just order it on line, spit in the vile and send it in. What was even better was that if that was my problem, the fix was even easier! i just go to my local health food store and get a bottle of bio identical progesterone cream, OTC. i was flabbergasted! no doctors to go through, no several weeks of waiting to be heard, no "i don’t know what’s wrong with you", no stupid chemical prescriptions with gosh-awful side affects!

I ordered the test, i spit in the vile, i waited on pins and needles for the test results and when i got them they confirmed that i was indeed out of balance. the normal range for my progesterone for that time in my monthly cycle should have been around 175, my test came back at 44.

It is a funny thing, because i expected that when i finally was able to know what was wrong with me i would be so happy and relieved, just to know. here i was with the cause and cure finally presented to me ......and i was spitting mad.

I was grateful but overwhelmingly furious! all of those times i went to a doctor for help! all of those horrible times i was stuck in the deep dark places of my mind! the years, the wasted years that i could not be the mother my children deserved or the woman my husband fell in love with! all because of a freakin hormone imbalance! What three doctors and two endocrinologists couldn’t tell me, i found out in a two dollar grocery store magazine.