[AlaskaAngel]

Gerri,

I'm delighted with both everyone's posts and your success. Weight loss for the overweight helps in so many ways. I also want to say that the exercise itself is still important in avoiding recurrence.

I am 7 years out from chemo, rads, and some tamoxifen and am NED, and I've had plenty of time to work at this, but have not been as spectacularly successful. In 7 years I have lost 15 of the 25 pounds I had gained. I read your comment, "After treatment ended I started adding more fruits and vegetables to my diet. I thought I was doing a pretty good job of eating a healthy diet but my weight kept slowly climbing." That is what it has been like for me.

Last fall 2 others from this site joined me in keeping a 2-week record of everything we ate and what exercise we did. We each were free to decide what diet to follow and what exercise to do. I want to share what I learned from that, because it was so surprising to me.

In addition, I contacted my cancer center and with the cooperation of the nutritionist there, I provided my 2-week diary to him and had a personal visit with him after the 2 weeks were up.

In that 2 weeks I stayed strictly on a healthy diet of roughly 1,000 calories a day. I also exercised every single day for 30 minutes by jumping rope. At the end I hadn't lost any weight. It was very discouraging.

The conference with the nutritionist was tough on BOTH of us. I feel sorry for the guy. Basically the advice was that I was not eating enough calories for my system to burn what little I was eating, and in my particular situation he advised me to start eating breakfast to get the burning going early in the day, to eat more carbs than I'd been eating, and to eat most of my calories for breakfast and lunch, and less at dinner time. But the kicker for me was that because of the additional 300 calories I would be eating, he said it likely would be necessary for me to exercise a full hour every day 7 days a week, instead of the 30 minutes a day of jumping rope. As much as I don't want to spend that much of my time doing exercise, I would guess he is probably right. I've made the recommended dietary changes but haven't added more exercise, and I have not lost any weight, and have gained a bit during the winter with less exercise.

As I posted in an earlier thread about dieting and menopause, the recommendation for a person who is truly menopausal and had no weight problem prior to doing treatment is to permanently reduce caloric intake by between 200 and 500 calories a day (depending on how big you are). That is a LOT of calories to permanently wipe out of your daily diet. Especially when medical providers don't explain any of this to us.

I think the diets "work" better for those who are younger and may not be entirely menopausal even if they aren't having periods, but I don't really know. I say this because I am very puzzled that your diet worked as well as it did without much exercise.

Anyway, thanks for posting about this topic, because it not only may encourage others to continue to work at it but because every little bit we do apparently does actually help in avoiding recurrence.

AlaskaAngel