Weight, food, gestational diabetes and all that jazz

I am a comfort eater and am easily swayed by a chocolate bar. I kept the weight pretty much at bay when I was younger and my most natural dress size was probably a 14 though I desperately wanted to be a 12. How things change!! I pine now to be a size 16. Unfortunately comfort eating because I couldn’t have a child and was working ridiculous hours in a super stressful job meant that was never going to be. I am however excellent at faddy dieting for at least two weeks.

Becoming pregnant as a geriatric mother put some extra strains upon my body besides my death wish unhealthy eating. I was diagnosed with gestational diabetes (incidentally I was absolutely famished during that test!). My understanding of food had to take a steep learning curve. I had a special wireless machine that measured my blood sugar from pricking my finger twice a day and sent the numbers to the diabetic nurse. I wasn’t doing well at keeping it below the expected figure and when she checked in, it turns out Shreddies aren’t a healthy choice. Who knew cereal had sugars in. probably everyone except me but my awareness of the different types of food was raised considerably.

I also had gall stones which meant that I was avoiding fatty foods for fear of the crippling pain that would typically ensue after a tub of pringles and a packet of dips. When you can’t eat sugars and fatty foods are no good either, your food choices become very limited. As a result, when I was weighed at 8 months pregnant, I was the lightest I had been in years! Thank you David.

This gratitude was to be short lived however because it turned out that following the pregnancy, I developed hypothyroidism. (This is the one where your thyroid is under active), so with that and the menopause, and my insatiable desire for mint chocolate, the weight came back and I have now been diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes. Last check I was back in the pre-diabetic scores but as ever I’m up and down with the weight. My desire to see David through to 40 means I have to conquer this and I will.

I have just realised how much I have gone on about me. When I sat down to write, I was going to talk about baby-led weaning. I will talk about that in the next post but to keep you engaged, here is a picture of David with his first green bean: