My battle for a healthy body

The first time I started noticing that something was wrong with my health I was 16. I had just spent Spring Break in Europe on a school trip and lost a bit of weight from all the walking around, eating amazing food, and the stress of travel. The next month I skipped my period and had severe menstrual cramps. I was not feeling well and my parents were concerned that I had appendicitis because I had such severe pain on my right side. So I went to our pediatrician and then went for an ultrasound. My appendix was fine but there were a couple of cysts on my right ovary, which the doctor said was normal. The next month everything is fine. Two years later I pinched a nerve in my back and lost mobility in my right leg for a few months. After some physical therapy to fix the problem, I was back to my old self but more cautious of what I did. Needless to say being an 18 year old who was used to being very active, a couple of months inactivity had led to some slight weight gain, 1o pounds. I didn't think it was that big a deal since I was around 125 pounds before the weight and am 5' 5". I then left for my freshman year of college. Biggest shock of my life! Everything was new and I was about 2,000 miles from home and friends. I was pretty active though since I didn't have a car and relied on the bus and my feet for transportation. But around Thanksgiving my periods stopped. The only explanation I had was that I was stressed and that was causing the problem. I wasn't sexually active so there was no possibility that I was pregnant either. The Spring semester started and my roommate and I decided to take a GE required class on human development together. When we got to the section on menopause, my roommate turned to me and said, "You have all these symptoms. Is it possible to go through menopause at 19?" And I did have all the symptoms: hot flashes, night sweats, depression, weight gain, no periods, etc. So when I went home that summer, I asked my mom to make an appointment with her gynecologist to see what was wrong. That appointment changed my life. I was diagnosed with Polycystic Ovary Syndrome (PCOS) and told my severe symptoms had been brought on by my weight gain over the past school year. The gyno told me I shouldn't eat so much and put me on a no carb diet. Needless to say, I was a bit offended by that statement because I had been hardly eating anything due to lack of appetite and still went from 130 to 168 pounds in 7 months. But I was a good patient and followed her diet when I got back to school. FOR THREE DAYS! When I almost blacked out during one of my lectures and had to go home, I made a PB and J sandwich on whole wheat bread and felt better. My body did not like this diet and was protesting. I did a bit of research but since it was 2000, there really wasn't a whole lot of information available on PCOS. In 2004, I stress fractured a vertebra in my lower back. I would like to say that I did it rock climbing but I didn't. I was in a squat position, sitting on a couch leaned over cleaning a vacuum. I felt a tickle in my nose and turned my head and sneezed. No big deal, right? Wrong. I went to stand up a few minutes later and couldn't straighten up. I was stuck in an L and had to have my roommate's boyfriend's roommate give me a ride home from work. I did a couple months of bed rest waiting for my back to heal, a few physical therapy sessions and was really careful. But all this had caused me to gain an additional 20 pounds. I was now up to 185 and couldn't stand to look at myself in the mirror. I started having more problems with my PCOS and by random found a Nurse Practitioner in my area who had specialized in bio-identical hormone therapy at UCLA. I went to see her and she ran a bunch of blood work. This was in December 2005. What she found out astonished me. I was severely nutrient deficient in all essential vitamin and minerals. She explained that I had the body of an obese women and the nutrient make-up of an anorexic. Basically, no matter how much healthy food I ate or the quantity my body was only absorbing sugars from the food I ate to stabilize the fact that my body was overproducing insulin. She had just attended a medical convention on endocrine disorders a few months before I had walked into her office and had learned a lot about PCOS. The next month the AMA was making PCOS an official endocrine disorder because of findings from a study done by the University of Chicago. PCOS wasn't caused by the ovaries it is caused because some gene has told the pancreas to produce insulin without paying attention to the true amount of sugars the body was ingesting. But it wasn't diabetes. Their suggested treatment, and the Nurse Practitioner's, was to put me on 1,000 mg of Glucophage (Metformin) a day plus a birth control pill in conjunction with a lot of supplements. And I did feel better, for about 2 years. In February 2009, I had an ovarian cyst rupture and was put on bed rest for 6 weeks because there was another cyst in danger of rupturing on the other ovary. I was unhappy, depressed, and defeated. I had been doing everything right. I was eating healthy, taking my meds, trying to exercise. One day I was super-bored and stuck in bed with my laptop. I was on Facebook reading up on what exciting things other people were doing and ran across something I hadn't seen before on a friend's profile. I emailed her to ask her a bit more and tell her my situation. She was a Beachbody coach and had a similar story before she made the call to order TurboJam. We talked back and forth for a few days. March 30, 2009, my order for Project: YOU Type 2 arrived and I haven't looked back. I lost 20 pounds in 2 months, which is something I had never done before. And I am feeling so much better! I am still a work in progress but know that this is a lifestyle choice not a fad for me. I am doing so much better overall and have even noticed that my hair has started to get thicker. (PCOS sufferers experience hair loss because there is too much androgen floating around in their systems.) I am so much happier and don't feel like this condition has beaten me anymore. I actually have some control over my body again. As long as I make the choice everyday to push PLAY and do the workout, I am doing good. If you made it to the end of this, good for you. Do you have something similar to share? I would love to hear about it and help in any way I can. Hope you are having a wonderful day!