[AlaskaAngel]

Hi Tanya,

I am still traveling so have not been online recently. Thank you for your continuing support and encouragement.

I do believe that exercise itself is preventative. However, as a patient I find it very uncomfortable to see that the ongoing standard of care involves treatments that end up essentially significantly contributing to recurrence for many of us by way of weight gain that is essentially unavoidable over the long term.

In starting this thread my purpose has been to "be" the guinea pig, to see what it takes to reduce my BMI so that other patients who might be in similar circumstances have some genuine basis to go by in working on their own situation. So the problem here is more than just my own frustration. I'm one of the luckier patients. If I had the responsibilities of trying to raise kids or handle eldercare in addition to my own weight/breast cancer issues, or had to hold on in a job I disliked, or had other concurrent diseases to cope with, I wouldn't be able to put the time and effort into the exercise and diet that I have been doing.

I can't believe that the average breast cancer patient would be able to permanently exercise and diet to this degree day after day, month after month, year after year, with no hope of any weight loss. Yet that is what I/they would have to do.

So, what I think is really important about this thread is not whether I personally succeed with weight loss (as much as I would like to). The importance of this thread is to get a clearer understanding of just what is blocking weight loss for those like me, and how to deal with it successfully. Until we do, the treatments given under the standard of care will continue to foster recurrence due to weight gain. Diet and exercise can help, but again, mostly for people like me who happen to have lives that are not as complicated as the lives of average breast cancer patients.

I still suspect that patients like me are stuck in a no-win situation where we are not actually diabetics, but our physical condition is similar, and that we need some medication similar to that used by diabetics, perhaps even just at lower doses, to make progress.

At present I have run into a roadblock. It turns out that the endocrinologist I saw in the past, who has an excellent reputation, is no longer affiliated with the facility where I have been treated. To see that endocrinologist, a patient has to "register" and pay $100 in advance, without any definite appointment, with the actual patient visit being a completely separate additional charge for services.

I am discouraged and unsure where I am going to go with this. I am not sure I want to support a health care provider who works under such a policy. I already find it rather unprofessional that medical providers such as endocrinologists have been so slow to work on getting a better understanding of these aspects of metabolism on their own responsibility. After all, breast cancer is an endocrine disease.

AlaskaAngel