A lot has changed in my personal life since last month’s installment that has affected my exercise and weight-loss goals. I decided to be open about my experience in the hopes that it will help someone.
For the past 11 years, I have battled a chronic illness, rheumatoid arthritis. If you are like me (before I got the diagnosis), you are wondering how a person in her 20s got saddled with an “old person” disease. RA is an illness that can strike at any point in a person’s life and it has an auto-immune origin. Luckily, I have been blessed with great medical care, and the medication I take has helped me function so well that I have almost no symptoms. If I miss injecting my medicine for more than two weeks, however, my body knows it and shows me. My joints swell and throb all over my body, and I am debilitated and exhausted. Minute parts of my routine like getting dressed or opening doors are painful, sometimes impossible tasks. Add this to being a mother and trying to meet the needs of my children, and you see the difficulty.
Back in month two of my Jazzercising, I intentionally went off my medication. I did this because my husband and I hoped to conceive a baby. With my first two pregnancies, my RA symptoms went into remission during different points in the pregnancy. My desire to have one more beautiful spirit join our family outweighed the known discomfort coming my way.
For several weeks I was able to stay on track with my three days a week of Jazzercise. I felt minor discomfort, which subsided after exercise. I felt much less stiff and ready to tackle my day after class. But then a huge “snow-pocolypse” pummeled our area. The added cold and flip-flopping in the barometric pressure buried me in pain. I was ready to give in and go back on my medicine when I found out that I was pregnant.
I have tried continuing with Jazzercise class as much as possible without much success. As I said before, minute tasks like getting dressed take me a long time and are very painful. It was such a battle to just physically get myself to class on time that I gave up. I have kept watching my food intake and keeping a food diary. I have maintained the weight I lost, though I have stopped losing.
Thank you, dear reader, for your support in the wings of my endeavor. You have helped motivate me to keep going.
I am a little sad to say that I decided to put Jazzercise on hold. For the time being, I am going to continue my three-day routine of exercise. But I will be joining a water aerobics class for the rest of my pregnancy (or until my symptoms let up).
