A tale about health, both mental and physical…
For years, I listened to every medical professional I met tell me that I’d feel much better if I lost weight. Over the last six months, as you know if you’ve been following along, I’ve finally been following their advice. I’ve been following the very broadly defined advice of “eat less, move more.” In my case, that equated to about 30 minutes of pretty mild exercise – walking or time on the stationary bike – and a pretty fanatical devotion to tracking calories. Since July, I’ve been consistently losing right around 1% of my body weight every week.
Even as I’ve closed in on my initial goal of losing 80 pounds, I can’t say I felt better. Sure, I was a bit more flexible and found that taking the stairs wasn’t hell on my knees, but I felt increasingly awful. In fact, the more I lost, the worse I felt – physically and mentally.
For the last six weeks, I felt like someone who was definitely not me. My head was in a constant fog, I was struggling to regulate my emotions, and was spending most days in a constant basket of worry and anxiety about everything and nothing. Even my blood pressure, which has been wonderfully controlled for months started to creep up past the “elevated” level towards hypertension. My primary care doctor preliminarily identified the problem as anxiety stemming from my cardiac health scare in June and July. He gave be a very small prescription for Xanax in hopes that would get me over the hump for the worse of the anxiety. I took it, but didn’t notice any difference at all.
Last week, after a very tough weekend, I finally made an appointment with a behavioral health professional – a therapist – convinced that there had to be something going wrong with my head. My big beautiful brain has always been what I consider the natural gift I got – it certainly wasn’t athletic ability or good looks. Something messing with my brain has always been my nightmare scenario.
In any case, the therapist I consulted with gave a preliminary diagnosis of generalized anxiety disorder and instructed me to get back with my general practitioner to discuss options for going on anti-depression medication. I wasn’t thrilled, but honestly by this point was pretty desperate to get some relief and get my thinking back under control. Fortunately, I was able to get an appointment the next morning to talk with my doctor.
We met for almost 45 minutes Friday morning while I described all my symptoms and he asked some probing and uncomfortable questions. A few in office blood tests later, we had ruled out a lot of physical possibilities and we’re closing in on saying yes, my brain was sick… or at least we were until I mentioned how disappointed I was with my weight loss as it seemed the more weight I lost the worse I felt.
That sentence seemed to hit the doc like someone throwing a light switch. After consulting my chart again and reviewing the bloodwork results, he noted that “You’re still taking metformin…” He went on to explain that in some case, dramatic weight loss can actually send diabetes into a form of “remission,” meaning that it was entirely possible that we were treating for a disease that was no longer trying to kill me on a cellular level. Even though my home testing had never caught any evidence of classically low blood sugar, he speculated that the medication was, in fact, causing my system to mimic the body’s natural response to low blood sugar – releasing stress hormones among other things. It’s possible, he seemed to think, that I was experiencing a form of pseudo-hypoglycemia rather than a true mental health problem. He instructed me to immediately stop taking the metformin and see if that resolved the issues over the next week or so.
Today is my 3rd full day of not taking meds for diabetes in a very long time. I’m keeping a pretty close eye on my numbers, but my head is definitely clearer and I’m feeling much more like myself. I don’t want to call it a comeback just yet, but I’d dearly like to believe the answer to two months of increasingly feeling off kilter is as simple as not taking four little white pills.
That’s a long way of saying that I have a new appreciation for just how important it is to be your own most forceful health advocate. To our collective detriment there’s still a stigma attached to seeking mental health treatment. There shouldn’t be. The brain is just another organ capable of misfunctioning. Getting help for it is no more problematic than seeking out a cardiologist for heart troubles. Without taking to a therapist, it’s hard to say how long I’d have just stayed mired down in a bad place. If you don’t take anything else from this screed, take this as encouragement that if you need help or need to talk to someone, go do it.
Anyone who thinks less of you for it can fuck directly off.
Feel free to tell them I said it.
