unquestionable love

This diet is difficult, I'm not gonna lie. It's hard. I feel like I am eating the same things over and over again. I feel like I am one big walking bing cherry. What really sucks is that I have suuuch a sweet tooth! And it's the freaking summer for crying out loud! Summer means cookouts, corn salsa, trips to the ice cream parlor, ballpark food! It's very hard to get sugar-free, carb-free baseball food! Try it sometime.

Most of all, I love my ice cream. I have gone 2 (1/2) weeks with no ice cream and I finally was about to have a meltdown. Literally. (I blame it on the soon-to-be-arrival of AF.) I was really trying to avoid it because I know that even if I found sugar-free, it would STILL be ice cream, and it would still defeat the whole purpose of this diet. Buuttt...the ice cream won. My life feels complete! I found this:

It is pure heaven in a cardboard tub. To be honest, I don't know if I will ever buy full-sugar ice cream again. Why would I when I like this just as much! Granted, it does have a few grams of sugar, but no sugar added and the sugar grams are minimal. For J's sanity, I think we made the right choice! I highly recommend it for any of you PCOSers trying to do a no-sugar diet!!!

(ETA)...how could I forget to fill you in on this, too?! As of this morning, I was down 11 pounds (if you go by the doctor's scale). 11 freaking pounds in 15 days! Pretty amazing, and makes this diet sooo worth it!

Hmm. Well, I'm experiencing some interesting pains. It's almost the same pain as I felt during injectable cycles....you know the ones, where your ovaries are so swollen and huge that it hurts to sit, stand, lay down or move. And that pain, for me at least, usually comes in waves. Yep, that's what I'm feeling.

Except, I'm envisioning the opposite of that. Instead of my ovaries growing bigger and bigger, I am picturing lots of cysts just bursting, kind of like my bursting balloons theory, except cysts! It makes me not mind the pain.

But...in reality...I think I'm just getting ready to get a visit from AF. That's fine by me! I'm excited to have a cycle down and get to trying naturally for a month or two and see if this diet thing is going to be our magic ticket! Anyway, it's just weird for this point in my cycle. I hope it means good things.

• The Angry Infertile
• Being Infertile
• Along Life's Little Journey
• Betty's Loosing It
• Can You Imagine?
• Journey to a Wondraful Baby
• Salvageable
  

Now for 10 things about me!

1. I don't speak to my mom or my dad.
2. I am the most undomesticated woman in America. (True story.)
3. I love love love pickle juice! I get so excited when I finish a jar of pickles so I can drink the juice. Sometimes I can't even wait and I take an early sip!
4. I want to take a European Babymoon
5. I loathe feet. They gross me out. I hate when people touch their feet. I am especially grossed out by the thought of people touching OTHER people's feet. ::shiver::
6. Even though I think I have the best job in the universe, and I have the potential to make a lot of money in this career, I have daydreams about being a SAHM. I think it's mostly for the naps that I think I would get.
7. I feel like we're pretty green. I drive a hybrid car, we have a garden, we compost, we recycle. And I judge people who buy bottled water and don't use reusable shopping bags. I don't mean to but it seems like such a waste to me.
8. I managed a bank for 2 years and came out of it thinking bankers are crooks. (Not people who work in banks...the upper management and owners of the banks.) I worked for a privately held bank and I think the owners might as well be in the mafia.
9. The more I travel and see different parts of the country, the more it makes me wonder why I live in Indiana. But then I remember that this is a fantastic place to raise a family, people are genuinely nice and we have 4 seasons, which I love. We may move someday, but for now I think it's alright...just have to keep reminding myself of that!
10. If I were to have a cheat day and be able to eat anything that wasn't on my diet, I would have 2 slices of thick crust pizza, ice cream (probably an assortment of flavors), a snickers bar and a coke. Lord, what I wouldn't give right now...

Thanks again Courtney!

Hey misfit!

Sorry it's taken me a few days to get back to you on your questions. As an update, I'm 11 days into the new diet and still have yet to cheat once! I'm pretty proud of myself, especially after a huge going away party with the best looking cupcakes EVER this morning!

As the "being too regular" goes, yes...you're right. To an extent. The nice thing is that I'm pretty sure you will be miserable if you cheat. So it is some nice motivation. So that keeps you to eating lots of fruits and veggies. At first I was nervous that I might get...er, stopped up, if you will! I can't normally eat too much cheese and with this, I eat a ton. That, combined with the fact that I can't really eat any typically fiberous foods (I used to eat Fiber One bars a lot, as well as Mini Wheats and a lot of other fiber-full foods). So...to be frank, I think things are pretty good in the digestive department! I was sure to taper up on pills and usually try to be close to home (or a hotel room, as I was traveling a lot for work recently) when I go up a dose, but really, it's not too bad.

And as for what the diet targets, I obviously don't say it as well as my doctor, so HERE is a link to his site...if you click on the "download PDF" link, you can read a TON of information about it. But the long and short of it seems to be that he suspects some amount of insulin resistance in any patient with PCOS. He said it's rare to even test anymore because he just assumes that we have it to some extent. Because of that, he says that bread, pasta, and all of the other "off limits" things basically turn immediately into glucose in our systems. This (I think) causes an increase in many male hormones and doesn't allow for enough of the female hormones that we need. This doesn't allow our follies to develop like they should, so like I mentioned last time, drugs like Follist.im will, indeed, make the follies bigger but they won't be of the quality that they should be.

So far, I am feeling pretty good about things! I have found a few "tricks" for my own chocolate-and-sweet-obsessed mind. I use some add-in packets for water that make me feel like I'm having a treat, I eat a lot of Trader Joe's organic trail mix with nuts and cranberries, I am loving apples with natural (no artificial sugar added) peanut butter becaus it feels like a sweet treat. Surprisingly, eating out isn't too bad either. We're working on fixing more fish...but that's harder to do when you live in Indiana! If you have any other questions, do not hesitate to ask!

OMG, we feel like we may have wasted the past year and a half with our old doc. BUT we aren't going to look back or regret. After all, there is no guarantee that the new guy will be a miracle worker.

Here is what we learned (may be of interest to those with PCOS):

• Dr. J says that he hasn't used Clomid for over 6 years. He doesn't feel like it's reliable enough and he seems to think it is a waste of money. (We did MANY months of Clomid!)
• He also didn't agree with the use of Follisti.m (for me...because of the PCOS). His view is that it produces nice big follies (which definitely was the case for me), but that they are basically useless. Essentially, big in size but not good in quality. This makes sense since we always had such great looking follies (size-wise)...always producing 3 or more...yet never even an ounce of success.

Soooooooooooooooo....what are we doing? Not moving into IVF right away, which we're excited about! Instead, we are going to "pretend" that I have insulin-resistance, though we don't know for sure if that's true. So, he prescribed a form of glucophage called Glumetza. Plus, Dr. J is a big proponent of a low amylose diet, so I have started that. What is it, you ask? Well...here are the basic guidelines for it:

1. Avoid all simple sugars such as candy, sodas, cakes, pies, ice cream, etc. (Basically, everything that I love!) These are almost pure forms of glucose.
2. Avoid vegetables that grown underground (hello...potatoes!!??!), bananas, and foods enriched with maltodextrins or corn syrup.
3. Avoid wheat, rice, rye, barley, and oats.
4. Eat a minimum of 3 servings each of above-ground vegetables and fruits daily.
5. Eat at least 6 ounces of protein every day.

Sounds like a TON of fun, huh?!!? Especially for a girl who craaaaves pasta, bread and ice cream. And chocolate. Yeah...I thought I was going to absolutely die. But, guess what? It's not all that bad! Seriously.

The good news is that this diet, combined with the meds, typically results in 1.5 lbs. of weight loss per week and up to 10 pounds a month! I can already attest to this, as I am 5 days in and have lost 5 pounds already!

For the sake of not having a mile long post, I will write more about the diet another time. But for now, we're doing this for 3 months. At that time, we will see what my cysts look like (hopefully they have reduced in number) and he said that he would not be surprised if we don't need any other treatments, but if we do, we'll discuss our options at that time. I am so excited!!!

I completed day 12 of the s.hred last night (have missed 2 days in there). It's still addicting, though the second circuit is tough, so I feel like I'm not doing it quite as well as I should be. But I weighed in today and was down about 2 pounds! It's not 10, which is where I "should" be if I was going to lose 20 in the 30 days, but I'll take it!

I really wanted to be down 10 pounds before my RE appointment next week. I don't think it's going to happen. The thing is, I need to buckle down on what I'm eating. I definitely had 5 little snack-sized Snick.ers bars last night. Umm...oops! Today, I'm on track.

Coffee, 90-calorie bar for breakfast
Pasta salad, banana for lunch

I can do this!!