changes are coming
Also, the sighting of a snowy owl. Now I didn't see it myself, but in my hometown/birth town in Virginia, there has been a rare sighting of the all-white, normally tundra-dwelling, Arctic snowy owl. Yes, the same kind that Harry Potter fans saw in the movies, in the form of Hedwig, Harry'sowl. This is supposed to be lucky, as well. What I'm trying to say is that I hope it proves to be a good year.
The biggest change to come is that my parents really are going to leave Virginia, the state they have called home since 1970, and move to out to Colorado to be near my older sister. It's been in the works for the past couple of years, but it looks like it will finally happen, and sooner than I anticipated, most likely. I guess when change happens, it comes flying at you full-speed.
I have more thoughts on this, but maybe another day, or maybe not. I am having a hard time accepting it, but seeing the new house they bought just five minutes away from my sister makes it more real, and makes it exciting. Nonetheless, it's hard to let go becuase, living an hour away has meant that as they've gotten older, I have been the one to help them out in countless ways. And I've enjoyed getting to know them as an adult, and having a closer relationship than I would have, had life circumstances led me to live in another part of the country, or at least farther away than a one hour drive.
As for me....I'm still looking at other options professionally. My job is at the same place as my post-doc was, and while I've carved out a lot of opportunities and really made the most of opportunities by creating them for myself, there is limited opportunity for growth as I see it. And some of the same negative forces such as people and policies that have driven others to seek opportunities elsewhere over the years. For a while, it looked like a job opportunity just outside of DC, in Maryland, was promising. The problem was not that they didn't want to hire me--they said they did, but it appears that it is indefinitely on hold, due to government red-tape. The job itself was very appealing to me, but unfortunately, when the US government shut down in October, things came to a griding halt, and employees there were furloughed, and there have been no new developments there other than "we want you, and you are our top candidate and the job is yours to take when we are given the green light to hire".
But I can't wait indefinitely, and I certainly didn't think I'd be still waiting for my next opportunity on the cusp of my 40th birthday, which is in just four months.
So I'm following other leads and we'll see where that lands me. Perhaps this is the year of change also for me.
I'm not sure if I wrote this, as well, but over the years, I have written about unexplained, continuous weight gain despite having the right lifestyle factors in place, and not the typical things that would lead to the type of weight gain I have experienced since 2007. I never thought that I'd be chubby with my diet and exercise regimen. As it turned out, my doctor found that my cortisol levels were too high (higher than what would be written off as just being stressed out), and my ACTH levels (another pituitary/adrenal hormone) were too low.
So I had another test to see if it might be a pituitary or adrenal problem. That test was normal but my doctor was stumped. So she asked me to go off of birth control, because in fairly rare cases, it can give you a pseudo-Cushing's like reaction where the synthetic hormones in contraceptive pills can mess up your cortisol binding globulins and cause you to basically gain weight and get osteoporosis/bone loss, and other bad things.
I went off of the pill and after half year, had my blood and urine re-tested twice, and those hormones are back to normal, confirming that it was the Pill that was seriously messing up my body.
Unfortunately, I am still heavy and my body isn't back to what it was, but I am also trying to be patient and keep doing what I've been doing right all along in terms of diet and exercise. My understanding is that any time your hormones get messed up, it can take a long time to get back to normal. I just hope they do.
And in blathering on, it's not vanity or a messed up body image (at least more than any other average woman) that makes me go on and on about this. We know I've blogged about this topic of unexplained weight gain before, like since it started mysteriously happening in 2007. It's truly that I want to be healthy, and I want my healthy habits to add up to me actually being healthy rather than feel like I'm doing the right things, and be told objectively by my doctor and nutritionist and friends/family that indeed my behaviors aren't ones that would typically be "fat traps" leading to weight gain, and yet keep watching my body change in unfavorable ways.
So on that note, I got what may be my favorite Xmas gift this year: a Fitbit One. It's so much more than a pedometer. It is also confirming that I am quite active, and not sedentary at all. I wear it all the time, and even log my sleep every night.
Now that I'm back from the holidays, I also plan to use the Fitbit website to log my calories just to confirm that intake doesn't surpass my energy expenditure. I love this little device so much, and love that it doesn't register false steps the way cheap pedometers log steps when they so much as bounce. I love how it's calibrated to my height, age, gender and current weight, too, so it's more accurate than what an elliptical trainer or treadmill at the gym tells me I'm burning. And it tracks every move even if I just get up to walk down the hall.
Also, you've all seen that having a desk job does kill because it can lead to weight gain and heart disease for a lot of people. So now that I'm back from winter break, I'm excited to wear it at work on a day when I'm buried in desk-work, and see if it is sabotaging my wellness in any way.
I've known of Fitbit for a while, but I also got inspired when I saw my former post-doc mentor at a professional meeting in Philadelphia in early November. She had gained weight over time and had some health issues which prompted her to want to make some big lifestyle changes. When I saw her, she had trimmed down and looked great, and she told me she and her husband both had these fitness meters (hers is a Body Media armband, her husband has the Fitbit wrist band) which they first saw on tv on the "Biggest Loser".
The only downside is there isn't yet a fitness meter designed for swimmers to wear. So for now I'm logging my swims manually on the website and iphone app, and waiting for the underwater iPod and the truly water-proof Fitbit to be invented.
There you have it...
And I see that my Sitemeter no longer works, so I have no idea if anyone stops by here anymore. But it's nice to come back here whenever I can b/c it's like the best kept secret on the internet.
