Not quite ready for Part II

Apres les efforts de hier et aujourd'hui, je n'ai pas le courage de poster quelque chose de trop long ce soir, par contre j'ai ajouter un slideshow de l'evolution de mon Cushing's a travers des photos. Pour ceux d'entre vous qui me connaisse depuis longtemps vous n'avais peut etre pas besoin d'etre rappele a quel point cette maladie a affecte mon physique (et par consequence le mental). Et pour ceux qui me connaisse seulement depuis que je suis en surpoids, vous serez surpris de voir comme j'ete mince avant!

I had a pretty eventful day today and I'm feeling very tired so I won't be posting anything of substance tonight. I will detail today's events in tomorrow's big blog post, the second part to my Cushing's journey because it ties in well with the whole "theme".

 However tonight I have added a new "gadget" to my blog, a slideshow of some photos of me. You can see them in the right side column of the blog.

As you can see they depict me and the evolution of the Cushing's is quite dramatic and obvious. I think especially for those of you who have only known me during certain periods of my life e.g. since I've been overweight, you might be surprised to see how slim I was before!
I went from being an average sized teenager to a severely overweight woman and that has had a profound effect on my self-esteem and body image....


But I'm working on it! After months of waiting, I finally reached the top of the list and have now started my individual CBT sessions. In case you've forgotten or didn't read the post "The Journey to Cushing's Syndrome", I was referred to the Eating Disorders clinic because I developed a binge eating disorder alongside my Cushing's. But it's actually not as black and white because Cushing's increases appetite, slows down metabolism and also affect the signals of satiety which is how your stomach tells your brain that you are full and should stop eating. Therefore some of my binges may have been hormone driven...

Nevertheless there is no question that I have been using food as a way of coping and this is really not good. So I now receive weekly sessions when the therapist and I work on controlling my eating habits but more importantly identifying and challenging the negative automatic thoughts which trigger me to binge. Though I am actually happy to report that since things have been going so well lately and I've been in a very positive mood I've not had many "episodes"! I'm still suffering from the occasional mood swing but I've become very good at identifying when I'm feeling low because of my hormones or when it's me. Basically if my mood changes very quickly without me having thought or experienced anything negative then I know it's the Cushing's so I just take a deep breath, count to 10, remind myself that it's temporary and it usually goes away... So what's interesting about all of this is that normally after my surgery, my metabolism and all the hormone affected issues should be resolved. I'm really looking forward to being able to then focus on challenging these negative thoughts and hopefully learning to not be so critical and negative of myself!