The Surprising Truth of Skinny Weight Loss

from your small neighbour

People come in all sorts of shapes and weights.

My body is in a small frame that’s 1.47 metres tall.

My optimum weight is 44 kilograms or 6.9 stones.

Recently my Doctor said that I was slightly underweight, at 38 kg.

While larger people may be trying to lose weight, I am trying to gain weight.

According to the B.M.I. or Body Mass Index, I need to be just over 40 kg to fall within the lower range of a healthy weight for my age and frame.

On the flip side, my stomach is now trim and terrific. Before I went on my new eating regime, I used the tape measure.

My tummy was on the cusp of getting too big for a healthy waistline, even for a small frame. The problem is now that it may be too skinny.

In June this year I decided to stop eating foods high in saturated fats, to bring my cholesterol down.

An absence of daily or weekly ice-cream, biscuits, chocolates, cakes, and fried breakfasts on the weekend, led to my weight loss.

I never knew that a fourteen percent weight loss of an already small body, would lead to all sorts of weird things.

The immediate effect was feeling dizzy when I got up in the mornings, so I had to lean on the wall to steady myself. My blood pressure must have dropped.

Luckily this only lasted a couple of weeks. Next was not being able to move around as quickly as before.

My weight wasn’t enough to propel me around.

Besides feeling weak, an unexpected positive side-effect is that my new shoes fit better. My new moccasin style shoes fit like a dream, no longer being too tight and scraping my ankles.

Even my feet have shed weight.

Extremely on the down-side, sitting on a hard chair or on an uneven surface can be painful.

Who would have thought that a certain amount of padding on one’s derrière was needed to sit?

However, I did discover that when sitting, I tend to lean to the right or favour my right side.

I never realised that before, and now I am obliged to balance that out, because not only has my waist-line decreased but my behind has also.

At least my weight drop has given me the nod to be aware of my balance and gain a better posture.

On the down-side, my fingers which are already thin, get thinner as the day progresses.

I have to really watch that I don’t lose my beautiful new citrine ring.

The serious and unexpected side of my weight loss is the effect upon my medication.

Since 2014 I have been on warfarin, an anti-coagulant, for a mechanical heart valve. The effect of my weight loss has been to slow down metabolism of this drug.

I am now measuring the effects weekly, in order to tweak my daily dose.

So, along with my LDLs (the “bad” cholesterol) reducing to 2.5 there have been other impacts of being a small, slim person and losing 14 percent of body weight.

I am not a good cook, and tend to eat half a sandwich for lunch at work, three days a week; and have two average sized or small meals a day four days a week at home.

Who would have thought that a person who loves sweets would one day not want them? Now I am interested in pasta and carbohydrates, but hardly even eat these.

My exercise regime has gone out the window. I engage in physical activity at work three days a week, and now never feel like exercising when I’m at home.

Besides this, I am dismayed that I have to stop drinking wine while balancing my INR which is a measure of the effects of warfarin.

My INR (International Normalised Ratio) has been all over the place, from low to high. It may be a tiny bit of wine that I drank along with my diminished mass that contributed to the higher numbers!

In March this year I had to take a seven day course of strong antibiotics, Nexium HP 7, and I was so scared that this would mess with my INR or cause side-effects.

In fact my INR went down. Some say that it can take months for the stomach to recover from antibiotics, and I stopped eating sugary foods while on the Nexium and just after.

An allergy to crustaceans revived itself at Christmas 2018 and untested and unknown to me, my INR had gone up, meaning increased bleeding risk.

In January I was hospitalised for five horrific days after a fix of a stomach ulcer, as I had to be stabilised again on warfarin.

So no prawns, ice-cream, chocolate or wine; the things that I love the most.

Instead, I need a strategy to put on healthy weight.

If I turn sideways, I disappear. A ray of Sunshine.

2019 is the year of me being a “Feather-weight”. When I’m going down-hill or down a slope, I go flying. I can’t stop it.

The momentum of what is me and gravity pull me fast. I like it.

It’s like skating or almost floating. If I had wings, I could fly.