My Story - Part 1 (Prior to 2018)
What do Zach Efron, a 20+ year friendship and a dietician from Cleveland have in common? They’ve essentially changed the trajectory of my life. In the best way possible. Let me explain…
I’ve never had to pay much attention to how/what I ate. I was an active teenager and was very fortunate that I was always pretty curvy and slender. In the context of comparing myself to Brittany Spears in the 90s and sex appeal, the only thing I was missing was being blonde and tall. Otherwise, I always loved my body and didn’t have any complaints.
At 18 I went on birth control to “control my acne” and spent the better part of 10 years off and on different pills, skipping my “sugar pill week” so I wouldn’t get a period, etc etc.
I went to Indiana University for 1 semester of grad school and was so home sick, I survived on a bagel with cream cheese and a coke from the gas station in the morning, and McDonalds for dinner almost every night. When I finally decided to move home, I was 99 lbs. So in order to gain weight back, I ate everything under the sun and got back to a “healthy weight” while working in retail and walking well over 20,000 steps a day.
In 2017 when I moved home from Columbus and AJ and I were in the final stretches of planning our wedding, I decided to go off of birth control. Risky, I know….but it was literally making me crazy. My anxiety was through the roof and my heart constantly raced. Never once did I think it was the fact that I was moving home 6 months before our wedding, into a house with a BOY who happened to also have his brother and sister, 2 cats and a dog as roommates and trying to plan a wedding, but hey – lets go off birth control! Throw caution to the wind, what the hell!
I also started a new job and have always said that I was the only bride to GAIN 10lbs before my wedding and I chalked that up to all the dairy treats and lunches I was served at work. Never even occurred to me that I could have actually gained the weight because I stopped taking birth control.
Fast forward to my 30th birthday and AJ and I decided it was time to start trying for a family. Well, 6 months later, not once was there even a missed period to take a pregnancy test. And that’s when, for the first time in my life, I was diagnosed with PCOS. Poly cystic ovarian syndrome. Actually, looking back, it’s pretty impressive that I was diagnosed at my first appointment because in my research since, the majority of women spend YEARS waiting to be diagnosed and seeing multiple doctors. I am very grateful to my doctors and how well they listened to me and were able to help so quickly. And to this day, they are still possibly my very favorite doctors I have ever visited. At the time, they told me I should see an endocrinologist if I wanted to tackle PCOS, but if I was focused on fertility and getting pregnant, I should see a fertility specialist (who also happened to be an endocrinologist, I just didn’t know that all fertility specialists are also endos at the time). I was impatient, so I chose fertility and pregnancy. All of our friends had either had their first baby or were pregnant with their first and I wanted to join the fun. Looking back, I should have seen the endo and changed my diet and done all of the things to try naturally, but like I said, I was impatient. I’ve spent a lot of time the past few years saying “looking back” and “If I had only known” but I’ve worked through a lot of that, and that’s a story for another day...
To be continued...
