The One Where We Talk Real Numbers

This post is brought to you by ROCKETMAN (go watch it now!), gin kombuchas, our FAQ post if you want to know what’s up, and our Cincy zoo animal masks…...the best purchase we’ve made all year. Welcome to our story! Today we’re talking about weight loss. If that’s not your thing, great! Join us next week - we’ll be discussing acupuncture and Office gifs galore.

What gets measured, gets managed. Peter Drucker. Now obvi there are many many many good and wonderful things in life that can’t be valued, priced, itemized, or calculated. I have lots of health goals that can’t really be tracked in helpful units. (Unless there’s a weird unit measurement for intangible things like my faith life or happiness or mental energy??? And I suppose the main observable goal 'unit' for my fertility project will end up spitting up on me for a real year of my real life, so there's that.) 

Weight is different.

Weight can be tracked in helpful units. Weight can be measured, quantified, lost, and gained.

Weight can also be watched, obsessed-over, vilified, rationalized, ignored, belittled, or vanquished. 

Why tho? I mean. Why is weight important? Your bikini body is your body, man, and it’s obviously possible to be curvaceous, awesome, and very healthy - or slender and very unhealthy. For fertility, strictly speaking, what does the research say about best-case-scenarios and worst-case-scenarios and goals and whatnot? 

Glad you asked. Let’s delve into that today. 

Weight and Fertility: Related? 

Short answer: Yep. According to womenshealth.gov, being over- or under-weight will impact your chances of getting or staying pregnant. There are a few reasons for this, but we’ll just talk about one rn - estrogen: 

• If you’ve got excess fat, you probably have too much estrogen scurrying around your system. Fat cells make estrogen, so this makes sense. Having too much estrogen messes with fertility-friendly hormones (fact: a lot of birth control methods are estrogen-based). This makes getting pregnant super hard. 
  • A lot of typical fertility disorders like PCOS are caused or exacerbated by estrogen dominance. 
• Conversely, if you’re dramatically underweight, you might not have enough estrogen...which your body needs for fertility reasons, too. 

Ultimately: Estrogen. It's complicated!

So, if we’re just talking about our hormonal profiles for a sec, it makes sense that getting in a place where you don’t have more estrogen-secreting fat cells than you need would increase your chances of pregnancy. 

Being overweight can also mess with your insulin and blood sugar - not good for fertility - and it’s been shown that being overweight can also lead to poor birth outcomes and adverse effects for your future kids. Also ungreat. But, like, this probably wasn’t super a surprise. 

[PUTS ON GROWTH-MINDSET HELMET] So, obvious Q: is there any benefit to losing weight in order to improve preconception health or chances of conception? 

Weight loss and fertility: related? 

Short answer again: yep. For whatever reason, causal or correlative or coincidental, losing weight (if it’s healthy to do so) does seem to help with fertility. Sometimes the info seems pretty clickbaity. But the stories and studies are there. 

We probably have all seen this in action, too, right? I’ve watched friends+personal heroes of mine get told they were never gonna have a kid. I’ve watched them buckle down, face the music, and lose some weight. I’ve watched them develop healthy habits, find new favorite foods, be all-around badass….and I’ve watched them cuddle their newborns and tell the camera that it was hard, but it was worth it. 

Okay so. What does a good weight goal look like….fertility-wise? 

This is where it gets tricky, because the answer is pretty much ‘it depends’, and I bet you saw that coming from a billion miles away. 

Every woman is different. More specifically, each of our bodies is different. Two women can step on the scale, see precisely the same number, and have wildly differing body comp and hormonal profiles. Our weight is also affected, sometimes to an unalterable degree, by conditions we have, very necessary medications we take, and our genetics. 

Most of the articles and research I’m looking at just talk about getting to a ‘healthy weight’ as measured by BMI. This is easily calculable based on your height - here’s a calculator. However, this measurement is often seen as outdated, non-inclusive, and ultimately not super helpful. Basically, BMI doesn’t take into account your specific body type as well as more nuanced health info. For example, athletes who have a ton of muscle mass often have ‘unhealthy’ BMIs, because muscle weighs more than fat. 

Let’s be real for a sec: I am not an athlete. My BMI likely does at least indicate where my ratios are at and where they should go. 

JD and I have the same hair.......which is the only rationale I'm gonna cite to keep using Scrubs stills, tbh.

Granted. Many of the studies I’m seeing are looking at women with BMIs greater than mine. A lot of the studies also talk about how when the women observed lost weight, fertility-friendly goals like ‘resuming ovulation’ happened. And I’m already ovulating like clockwork. 

But! Going back to estrogen and your overall hormonal profile for a sec: I think it’s safe to say that something is standing in the way of my getting pregnant. Working with my growing team of doctors may shed some light on a specific condition I have, but so far, my diagnosis is ‘unexplained’ - which, to me, means that it’s probably something subtle. Like a hormonal imbalance.

(Assuming the problem is me. We’re still figuring out how to get Ted tested. More on that later.) 

We’ve long thought that I might have undiagnosed thyroid issues or PCOS. Working to get rid of excess fat and, therefore, a probably-related estrogen dominance is my current best goal. (I’ll be running this past my growing team of doctors and will be super open to taking their advice.) The metric I’ll be looking at most, then, is my body fat percentage. I bought a fancy ($20) scale that spits out a million stats and metrics in a synced app when you step on it….including a semi-detailed breakdown of your body’s fat levels. 

Pretty much every morning as I watch my scale app sync.

Speaking of, fat can also be broken down into two general categories: Subcutaneous, and visceral. A brief search notes that visceral fat’s the one that most experts find concerning for health reasons. A further brief search tells me that I seem to be within okay numbers on that front, though………….so, I think I’m just going to stick to the overall percentage to track progress. 

(Side note: Is it just me, or does this Mayo Clinic article have its advice backwards??? Unhelpful much????) 

Where I am now:

Honesty hour: When I started this post, I didn’t think that a lot of the fat loss guidelines applied to me. My husband (and my sisters, and my friends) point out every time that I bring this topic up that I’m not overweight. I look relatively slim. I still fit in the same jeans, year after year. 

Here’s the thing. TECHNICALLY, like, according to the CDC’s posted stats, I am overweight. (Very technically; my BMI is over the line by a couple tenths.) 

The resemblance is uncanny.

After a sec (or...a week) of being sad about this sobering fact, it occurred to me that I’m actually pretty excited about this. 

Even if it’s a technicality, the fact that I may be in that category of women for whom ‘losing weight may actually help your conception chances’ is a HUGE incentive. So, I’m choosing to believe it. Not in an ‘oh my gosh, I’m so sad, I’m overweight’ kinda way. In an ‘I have an opportunity+motivation, here, to do a cool thing’ kinda way.

Put another way: There’s an argument that women who weigh a normal, healthy amount shouldn’t lose a drastic amount of weight, because, like, then they’d be underweight, and that’s not great, either. (And equally bad for fertility, as it happens.) Very simply put, I am not in this category. If I lose 5-15% of my body weight, a loss percentage often cited in fertility weight loss studies, I will not be in a scary-underweight place, as long as I do it safely and sensibly. 

Put another another way: Looking back, I’ve been very slowly putting on weight, in a non-linear, wobbly fashion, for the last, say, two years. This overlaps significantly with the time that we’ve been trying to grow our family. If I can just shift my body from being in a weight gain place to a weight loss place, even for just a few pounds, that’ll be a really different hormonal+metabolic backdrop for our procreative attempts. 

Anyway. It’s another goal to concentrate on besides babymaking, and it’s one that I can actually kinda control or at least influence. SO. ARE YA READY KIDS?!?! (aye aye, captain!)

Because here….we….go. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xSLlZh9yelk

This is exactly not what I was thinking of when I wrote that, but here we are.

Let’s talk strategy. 

After 28 years in this weird body of mine, I’ve learned a few things. Here’s a brief primer: 

• Ice cream bloats me and makes me break out. 
• Alcohol messes with my sleep. 
• Caffeine increases my anxiety and gives me super-fun intrusive thoughts. 
• Some forms of dairy make my skin weirdly itch? Which makes it hard to fall asleep? 
• After I eat my favorite meal of ‘a hunk of bread and a bowl of olive oil’, I immediately lose all energy to do anything at all. 
• I know that any new diet/fitness regimen takes about 5-10 days for me to start feeling good or seeing any effects. 
• I know that it is very very very hard for me to lose weight while I’m in my luteal phase, between ovulation and menstruation. 

Something else I know: I like to pair not-fun, hard-work challenges (like weight loss) with self-care challenges, home organization challenges, and other things that are easier, more fun, and show more instant success. I think these types of things rely heavily on positive feedback - which is why the first ten days or so of any health challenge I undertake are super difficult, and after that it gets a lot easier. 

So, for this self-care, weight-loss, whatever-this-is journey, here’s my starting strategy: 

Initially, I’m not going to follow a specific ‘plan’ per se. For my diet. Initially. This will very probably change. Here’s why: Earlier this year, I did three months with no alcohol, no gluten, no dairy, and low sugar. I was soooooo proud of myself, and I noticed a lot of non-scale victories. 

I also gained weight, which was very not my goal. And...surprising. As someone who’d previously had more than the occasional drink and enjoyed bread-baskets (...at home) on the reg, I’d been SURE that one month dramatically reducing these treats would have some effect in the weight category. 

I was wrong. Three times over. And this would be one thing if I were in a place where gaining weight made sense - if I was actually pregnant, or if I’d been underweight. I wasn’t. Instead, I went from being a healthy weight to being technically overweight. 

(Yeah, I started a business, and yep, COVID, and there are a jillion rationales and reasons-why. I still wasn’t happy that, for all of my efforts, the scale wasn’t working with me.) 

My current theory is that I had (and have) a loooooot of hormonal healing to do and junk to detox from my kidneys and etc and etc and those processes took precedence over burning fat? And stress, too, sure. And maybe I overate, or something, Idk. Anyway, here we go again! 

SO. I think I’m inclined to go into this more with a focus on what I’m doing than what I’m giving up. I plan on very simply super-emphasizing fiber in the form of fruits and veg (which can help with getting rid of estrogen), upping my activity (Yoga with Adriene, and getting back into running) and drinking ridiculous amounts of water. 

Initially, anyway. If it’s very clear that this laissez-faire attitude isn’t doing wonders for me, I’ll experiment until something clicks. 

Let’s talk stats and numbers. 

I’m going to break a promise I made back in our FAQ’s: I’m going to post my actual stats. 

Even if nobody cares about what my numbers are or what they become, there’s something about making it public, reference-able info that’s...going to make me more inclined to follow through. (I’ve already watched that happen with sun walks and cold showers, two things which I would have sworn I’d never do regularly.) 

I’ll put my stats - which I do intend to update weekly - in a clearly marked section at the end of each upcoming PWB post. Unless there’s something cool to note, I’ll probably keep commentary to a minimum. If numbers aren’t your thing, it’ll be super easy to ignore, I promise. 

To make this fun and annoying, I’m not going with inches and pounds for my stats. (I might make an exception later if I see progress and wanna do a ‘what worked’ type of post.) 

I’ve been weighing myself in kilograms for years already, because - even though I’ve been doing it for years, and even though my brain knows what the conversion factor between a pound and a kilo is - when I step on the scale and see a number in kg, I don’t have the emotional connection to it that I know I would if I saw the lb equivalent. It helps me focus more on the numbers and how I feel, and less on guilt. It’s been helpful, and I highly recommend it. 

Anyway, for PWB, we’re measuring in angstroms and slugs. I’ll let my personal engineering expert explain what those measurements are usually used for: 

Hey hey, let's talk about units. Angstroms are occasionally used to express light wavelengths and atomic distances. We will be reporting colossal quantities of angstroms. Slugs have been used to describe force (or mass or weight), and they are not used as much as they should be. We're going to be reporting weight in just a few slugs. This has been brought to you by the Technically Correct Department.

this has been a tedtalk.

Baseline+background: Remember that 3-month stint I low-key bragged about earlier where I ate so well? Yeah, over the last month, I took a break from that…………...so. I’m also expecting my cycle to restart any day now, and I’m always at my v heaviest right before my period shows up. So. Hopefully, this really is about the highest we’ll see these numbers get: 

• Weight: 4.93 S 
• Body fat %: 29.2%
• Chest: 9.9e+9 angstroms
• Right arm: 2.8e+9 angstroms
• Left arm: 2.8e+9 angstroms
• Waist: 7.9e+9 angstroms
• Hips: 10.4e+9 angstroms
• Right thigh (3″ down): 6.1e+9 angstroms
• Left thigh (3″ down): 6.1e+9 angstroms

(Angstrom numbers have all been rounded......because angstroms are teensy.)

As far as goals go, losing that fabled 5-15% of my body weight would put me at about 4.19 S, and I’d like to target a body fat % of more like 24%, based on this chart. As far as the measurements go, I’d specifically like to see most of those numbers go down…..except for maybe arms? Because if I’m ever able to really do a big-girl pushup, I’ll probably also have insane guns, LOL I actually have zero upper body strength, it’s really quite sad. 

(Obviously if you’re interested in what my numbers are in easier-to-understand units, that info is just a web search away. Tbh if I were following someone’s weight loss journey, I probably would be interested, but I’m also trying to be sensitive to people who aren’t interested at all. You do you!)

My metabolic age is also, according to my fancy scale, 29…..??? (I’m 28) Interesting. Women’s metabolisms naturally slow in the second half of their cycle and speed up in the first, so, I’m wondering if - once my cycle gets back to the first half - my ‘metabolic age’ will drop to meet me where I’m at. Or maybe if I exercise a little more than just the occasional sun walks and yoga…..ALTHOUGH. Let’s be real. I’m also super happy that the scale wasn’t like ‘your metabolic age is 74 LOL’...being only a year off, for baseline, I mean, I could be madder about that. 

Anyway. Thanks for reading along! 

NEXT WEEK, we’re going to talk about acupuncture again. Acupuncture 102? Idk. First impressions, what it’s like thus far, and results I’ve seen (yep, it’s only been a few weeks, and I’m already seeing stuff whattt!) 

AFTER THAT, join us for Napro 102 - a post I’m v v v looking forward to haha. I meet with my Napro for the first time this Tuesday, and I’m alternately extremely skeptical and very hopeful. Tune in for massive disillusionment OR renewed strategy, new data, and possible tentative optimism? (sUcH dRaMa) 

We’re also taking advantage of these last few summer weeks to do some ~safe, scheduled, strategized, and socially-distanced~ travelling to see family and friends YAY so! we’re still gonna target noon on Sundays for updates, but if a post comes out a bit later, don’t worry, we’re still alive and kicking (and probably frantically typing). Stay safe and sane out there!