First Update of 2023!

AND hopefully not the last.

OK so I’ve got a bit to catch up on. I’m going to skip almost all of it and announce that I’m working on losing weight again.

SINCE I tend to be wordy- I’m posting my physical stats (weight loss) first and if you want to read more about my life, see below 😀

Below are my measurements from nov 2021, weight from Nov 2022 compared to what I measured last week.

Date	11/7/2021	2/21/2023	Difference
Weight	251 (11/30/2022)	235.3	15.7
Neck	14.625	14	0.625
Bust	50	47	2.5
Under Bust	42	40.5	1.5
Left Bicep	13.5	13.5	0
Right Bicep	14	14	0
Waist	50.0625	45.5	4.5625
Hips	51	48.75	2.25
Left Thigh	26	25.5	.5
Right Thigh	26.5	25.5	1
Left Calf	17	17	0
Right Calf	17.5	17	.5
Body Fat %	61.5 (my calc so maybe not accurate)	46 (official)	I have no way of really comparing these 2 values, since I’m not sure of accuracy of 2021
BMI	38.368233	36.8	1.568233
Skeletal Muscle Mass	??	69.7	?? (I do want this number to go up though :D)

GOOD NEWS- I’m getting slimmer! Though I honestly don’t feel like I look any different… Top photos are from Sept 2021, bottom are from Feb 26, 2023. hopefully as time goes on I’ll slim down more noticeably! Also I’ll not put my camera right in front of my face LOL

ALSO don’t know why I did such bad lighting in the 2021 photos… which makes it hard to compare the 2

I will do a more weight loss centered post- talking about my immediate goals, and what I’m doing. But for the rest of this I’m going to talk about a more general life update that led me to starting to lose weight.

My last post was Nov 7, 2021 I cannot remember exactly why I stopped writing but I assume it had something to do with general burn out with a dash of depression. The end of 2021 was a bit of a train wreck for me. I had a hard time caring about ANY of the things that I needed to care about. 2022 honestly started out ok (stressful but ok), but for whatever reason I couldn’t bring myself to get back into any of the things that I’d burned out on in 2021 (Pampered Chef, Drawing, Usborne (now Paper Pie), and like… really anything else.)

What snapped me out of this funk?
It was kind of a weird thing… my older sister was working on some sort of journalling thing I think? One of the prompts was about things that her siblings liked. So she posed the question on our family’s Marco Polo. I responded with the most Eeyore answer ever- I could probably look it up, but it was basically something to the effect of ‘my life is boring, all I do is take care of kids and clean the house, and I don’t do either of those things very well.’ I sent the video message then sat down and continued to be a drag… for a few minutes. Then I looked over at a basket full of books my kids and I had just gotten from the library and was like- ‘well… maybe I should go through that’ so I pulled out some of the books I picked out for myself and then did another video message where I showed them off to the family with a ‘these are things I like’ sort of response. I’m honestly not sure how this (laying on the couch feeling blah and showing off books) led to me running around the house posting 30 second to 3 minute videos of ALL the things I enjoy doing, and basically dropping all of my indoor hobbies on the family (not sure if I went over the outdoor ones). HONESTLY I think most of my siblings must’ve skipped over the messages, I sent too many and they honestly weren’t that interesting lol. HOWEVER it lit a spark in me.

That spark led me to start working on cleaning my studio/office to get it to be a better environment for working. From there things spiraled (in a good way) where I started taking an interest in my own life again. It was good timing because I got an email that told me I had a table at SLC FanX. SO I spent much of the summer drawing like crazy to get ready for that.

After FanX I was still riding high, and decided that one of the big things I needed to do was get my house in better order- so that I could spend less time cleaning and catching up on cleaning and more time doing things I loved. I’m still working on that- but I’ve made great progress. (this is a topic for another blog post)

Also after FanX I discovered I was pregnant. Which was great, because I’d love to have at least one more kid before I’m 42. I’m starting to run out of time! Because of my age and my weight I went ahead and got an official pregnancy test at the clinic that I’ve gone to for all of my babies, it came back positive so I set up my first prenatal appointment to happen about mid October.

I didn’t make it to that appointment. In between the pregnancy test and the appointment I miscarried. Since we’ve moved into our lovely house I’ve had at least 4 miscarriages, and before that I had at least 2 after the birth of my 3rd child and before we moved.

I think this had something to do with my general funk in 2021.

Most of these have been around 8 weeks along, one was closer to 12 weeks (that was my first after my 3rd baby, and it was the hardest of the group) this latest one was early term, probably only about 6-7 weeks. I was more angry than sad.

SO I switched my prenatal appointment to a well woman appointment, and during the appointment talked to my doctor about some of my frustrations and concerns. We did a month of bloodwork and other tests to make sure everything was ok. Everything came back normal and perfect. No problems detected. My last appointment was on Nov 30- basically I talked to my doctor and he suggested some more tests, that he guessed would come back normal based on my previous results.

At that appointment I’d also weighed in at 251 lbs. Which for my small boned 5’7″ frame… is a LOT… After a little bit of talking about the test options that I could do, I asked if maybe my weight could be a (big) contributing factor to my inability to stay pregnant (I was the heaviest I’ve ever been) and he readily agreed. I found it interesting since online people act like all doctors want to talk about is their weight, and here I was thinking he’d bring it up (because it was absolutely relevant!!) and he didn’t say a word until I brought it up.

After a little bit of conversation he also pointed out that women carrying more weight going into pregnancy are at risk for a whole slew of pregnancy complications. ALL OF WHICH I’VE HAD WITH ALL 3 OF MY PREGNANCIES. Yes, even my first pregnancy- and I got pregnant with him at a pretty healthy weight. SO that was the moment I took control of my health care and suggested that I focus on losing weight then we could come back together to work on infertility when I was at a healthier weight. He agreed.

I set up a weight loss appointment set up for 2 days before Thanksgiving. First time I’ve ever tried a health clinic. As I didn’t know what to expect I put together a tracker so that I could have information to talk about with the health coach. I started tracking my sleep, started being better about my supplements, tracked my food intake and started working on my activity levels.

My experience at the weight loss clinic deserves it’s own blog post. This is mostly an update. I will say it’s been positive experience. I love the amount of information about myself I have access to now. It’s really great- but again another post 😀 this one is already pretty long and took longer than I intended it to.

This has a lot of info in it, but still not as much as I could have typed out lol.

SO since today I’ve only gotten in 5341 steps out of my goal of 10k… I’ve got to do something healthy… I thinking biking tonight… since I’m really not in the mood for the treadmill lol.

❤ Alicia

PS if you are someone who knows my personally and your gut response to this is to tell me to my face “I’m so sorry!!” or some type of sympathetic reaction like that. DON’T. please for the love. I didn’t post all of this for sympathy, I posted it for this: I’M KICKING BUTT AT LIFE AND THINGS ARE AMAZING!!! not perfect of courses but amazing!! SO if you read this and you want to say something (to my face or in the comments) let it be more of a YAY type of comment. (I know of at least 5 people who upon reading this are now going to make it a point to show me sympathy. You know who you are and I love/hate you. 😘)