PCOS and Weightloss

If you have PCOS, there is some point in your life you have had to manage your weight to lower symptoms. The never-ending argument of whether it causes weight gain or is caused by it is like the argument of the chicken and the egg. Which comes first? At what point do you grab on and want a change? Here is my PCOS story.

A familiar gut pain kicks in as I am talking to friends. Great bunch of girls, but not the ones I speak to every day, so I don’t tell them. I don’t want to be impolite, or inappropriate to the story or cut them off. I sit there nodding and trying to appear attentive, as I wait for the end of the story.

The metformin has kicked in.

The unexpected bout of bowel movement, making all my senses stand on end. I can think of nothing but going to the loo.

I first started Metformin when I was 17. Round about the time I got diagnosed with Dyslexia too. Both my body and my mind sort-off worked but also sort-off didn’t.

Polycystic Ovaries Syndrome is a common hormonal disorder affecting women of reproductive age.

I have it and it affects pretty much every aspect of my life.

PCOS can cause a wide range of physical and emotional symptoms, which can significantly impact the aspects of my everyday life. In this series of articles, we'll take a deep dive into the world of PCOS and explore what it's like for me to live with this condition.

Today, PCOS and weight loss.

My Understanding of PCOS and Weight Loss

PCOS is a condition that affects the ovaries and hormone levels in women. Women with PCOS typically have high levels of androgens (male hormones) in their bodies, which can cause a range of symptoms. Depending on the type of PCOS you have you may also have cysts around your ovaries. You may be insulin resistant, you may just have a few extra hairs on your chin and irregular periods.

Unfortunately, like most things new, PCOS seems to be on the sliding scale of a spectrum and each woman with PCOS, will have a different degree of symptoms, that probably piss them off at different degrees.

Irregular periods, excessive hair growth, acne, weight gain, infertility and an extra one from me, gut problems.

My symptoms were irregular periods, excessive hair growth, I have cysts around the ovaries, gut issues and weight issues.

I am a woman with PCOS that has Insulin resistance, and any medication targeting insulin resistance works well for me. Hence, metformin.

I have the typical, lower belly pouch, aching knees and tense body that comes along with PCOS. Fatigue, stress and anxiety are common and easily induced. My body is constantly tense and I am prone to chest infections.

I have high testosterone and an alpha attitude. My partner thinks they are linked.

But he also thinks I am part goat, and I will happily blame that on the PCOS too.

But here is the most prominent of my PCOS problems, weight gain.

The Weight Battle

Weight Gain, my battle with it has been for years. I will write about it all separately, but this one has potentially caused the most mental health issues of all. Being hairy was culturally accepted, we were all hairy, but weight – especially growing up, was not taken lightly.

The odd joke about being a ‘hairy little monster munch,’ I could to an extent cope with but my relationship with my body and food was fucked from as early as about 8 or 9 years old.

True to any family, my mother fed me and simultaneously told me I had to lose weight, yet her lack of knowledge as to how to lose weight overshadowed how. It was deduced to willpower on good days, and being a greedy kid on bad days.

She didn’t know how to help herself either, my mum never had the yo-yo diet culture, she would just call it eating less and eating more. But she did not have the knowledge to help herself or me. She did cook the only way she knew from her own mother. Carb-heavy dishes that were necessary for living in cold villages, that relied heavily on manual work.

Regionally, Turkish food is different around the whole country. But a common shared cultural trait is, summer is normally lighter dishes and known as ‘summery dishes,’ and the winter is heavy and carb-heavy. It also more common to have less or no meat during warmer months. Other than a garden barbeque, everyone had meat at a barbeque.

My mums, love language is ‘acts of duty’, so the best way to show us she cared was to feed us. She worried we were not eating right. Still, today, she calls me daily to make sure I have eaten.

All from a place of love.

Early Understanding of PCOS and Weight Gain

I took to dieting very well at the age of 14, it was the height of teenage magazines telling us how to lose weight. At 17, I lost 17 kgs. I cut out meat fully and stuck to a rigorous diet and alongside my first-ever prescription of Metformin, I lost it all in 3 months.

No exercise, no knowledge of protein or what metformin actually did.

I was by then reading books, articles and whatever was on the internet then. I drew graphs to understand it all better. There was next to nothing. I read studies and anything I could find, there just wasn’t enough out there and there was nothing about exercise.

I first went to the gym when I was 16 but saying that I did dance a lot. Every day in fact, in college as a part of my course. We had movement classes, dance classes, acting classes and Brazilian Capoeira.

The dancing had started at 14.

I moved, and I loved it but there was no link mentioned about the benefits. I just by chance enjoyed it.

By the age of 24, I had put it all back on. It was a gradual raise and it always started with a tense feeling, trouble sleeping, gut issues and achy knees. They are my signs, still today.

You can imagine the panic now when I have a bout of constipation. ‘Shit, fuck it is starting again.’ And instantly goes on to, ‘I’m going to be huge in 6-9 months. It is all over,’ all this as I dig out my larger and looser jeans from storage as, I have already given in.

The feeling of failing and being a failure because my body would not respond the way it should to food, sleep and sometimes exercise. Looking back, I think the sad bit was the comments I was taking in about my weight. I was taking in comments about being lazy and shit will power from people that would not see the amount of effort I was putting in.

I could not get it right. I used to give people the middle finger and crack on, but the negativity eventually wore me down. Having a string of crap boyfriends didn’t also help.

One of the loveliest lines I heard from one was, ‘I like skinny girls, so don’t complain if I look at them. If you don’t want me to, just lose weight.’ I then tried to lose weight. It didn’t occur to me till later that I can just sack off the boyfriend.

Oh, he was, an absolute knob.

Before I forget, there was the grabbing of my love handles (remember those?) and then saying, ‘oh these are back, are they?’

Full disclosure, they were never not there.

The Difference between Mental and Physical Health

But lack of self-esteem and looping in circles about having I body I did not understand meant, it was easier to believe that I was just failing to be skinny, and therefore in 2000’s terms, pretty.

Our perception of the female body weight, and what it 'should' be, has really changed, but on bad days that inner child in me still struggles to jump on that bandwagon. And I am someone that is very aware that my weight does not determine my value.

But how I feel does matter but being the overflow of the 90’s body culture, skinny, still at times, means prettier. In today’s day and age, we focus on Healthier, though at some point the narrative changed to skinny meaning healthy.

No, healthy is healthy, for me that is regular periods, a good night’s sleep and low and behold a healthy gut.

In terms of a healthy weight, I know what my healthy weight is, and where all the above work for me. My goal now is to stay there.

Over the last year, I lost 26kgs in total, but the weight difference now is 18kgs. Life happened in between and I needed a break.

The 'how' is for another article but no amount of weight loss can replace the mindset around feeling good. It was all linked to the way I saw it, and no amount of weight loss changed that. Actively working on my mindset did.

I felt great while losing all that weight, not just because I felt my appearance was going back to how I identified but because I was sleeping better, my gut worked better, I was not tense, and my periods were coming back.

The mindset of a woman with PCOS is a little to the left of anyone that wants to be healthy. Our battle is bigger, and repercussions hinder the outcome. It feels like sawing at a piece of wood and watching the block of wood get thicker as you are hacking away at it.

But I see it like this, imagine if you had not started sawing when you did, can you imagine what that could build up to?

It took me the better half of 3 years to find a healthier way that works for me. A balanced and manageable, and not in a way that affects my mental health.

My balance will not be the same as the next person, but a balance is the only way forward.