My wife hated the way she looked. After we had our second child, she started struggling with new symptoms she’d never experienced before.
Instead of losing the baby weight, she was gaining more. To me, she was still perfect, as beautiful as she ever was.
One day as she was walking up the stairs, I told her, “You know what? You’re beautiful!”
It was something I’d always done, remarked on her beauty whenever she caught my eye. She’d always laugh it off and say, “Oh, you’re supposed to say that.”
But this time was different. She didn’t laugh. She turned around and said, “Well I don’t feel beautiful.”
It crushed me to hear that. I was heartbroken that she didn’t see herself the way I did. When I looked at her, I saw an amazing woman, the mother of my children, someone who I believed could do anything.
But that’s not what she saw when she looked in the mirror. That’s not what she felt as her clothes stopped fitting. That’s not what entered her mind as the body she’d always had transformed into something she didn’t recognize.
We were pretty healthy people. I was a personal trainer, working on my master’s degree in exercise physiology, which meant I knew about metabolism, nutrition, and weight control.
But the things that had always worked for her, the methods that worked with many of my clients, weren’t working for her now. We couldn’t figure out why. That just left her more frustrated.
One of the things that stood in her way was her appetite. One day at dinner, as I was finishing up my first plate of food, getting ready to clean my plate, my wife sat down beside me, carrying her fourth plate.
She looked over at me and said, “Ugh. I hate you. You can eat a plate of food and actually feel satisfied.”
For her, it wasn’t like that. She would eat and eat and eat. Her stomach would feel like it was about to explode, but she just could not stop eating. She was miserable.
She wasn’t happy with the way she looked. Even worse, she didn’t like the way she felt.
She was unbearably exhausted. At first, we thought it was just postpartum hormones. Who isn’t tired after they have a baby?
But this was more. There were days when she couldn’t muster the energy to get out of bed. To make matters worse, she was dealing with debilitating periods, cramping and feeling miserable. For ten days out of the month, she could barely move.
I’d come home from work and she would be lying on the couch with the baby, handing our oldest crackers while they watched TV. I’d greet them and say, “How was your day?”
She’d stare at me and say, “This is it. This was our day.”
I could see the pain in her eyes. She wanted to be active and present, to take the kids out to the park or for fun outings, but she physically could not get up and do it.
She was losing herself. She wasn’t the mom she wanted to be, she wasn’t the person she’d always been, and she didn’t have the body she wanted.
It was heartbreaking. I just wanted her to feel better.
It took us a few months to find out that there was a source of all of her issues. But even once we found out what was causing her struggles, we weren’t anywhere close to out of the woods. Our journey with PCOS was just beginning.
More on that tomorrow. For today, I want to hear from you. Are you battling symptoms that are keeping you from living the life you want? Have you had that same feeling my wife had of not feeling beautiful? Are you searching for something that can help you target your PCOS symptoms?
That is what you will find at fatextractionmethod.com. Check it out now to begin your journey!
Thanks,
John