My story

I have always been overweight my whole life. I have tried many times to loose weight but something always come up and I stop. Also all my life I have suffered from horrible headaches from the time I can remember. I also has sever neck and back pains, weakness in my arms, legs, hands, and feet. I also have always had problems with my eyes, pressure behind them, they twitch, I have double vision too, and in the last year I have lost 40% of my eye sight.

Now how does all of that link to my weight loss and my Chiari. Just a little insight here. In 2007 I started doing exerciser with a Richard Simmons Sweating to the Oldies 3. I did this every night for 11/2 hours. I was making real progress, within 6 months I had lost 45 lbs. At this same time my mom had been dx with pancreatic cancer and my youngest son was very ill, but I digress. The workouts seemed to help me deal with all the stress I was put under. Then one day my vhs tape broke. I looked every where to try to replace it, I even tried different ones but the didn't get me motivated at all. So I decided to take up walking. I started out slow but soon increased to 6 miles a day.

One day I was taking my sister to the airport but we didn't get very far. There was a big truck stopped in front of us so I stopped, the next thing I knew he was slamming into the front on my car. The hood was almost up to the windshield. After that, that's when I noticed some of my things I had dealt with as a child and teenager were increasingly getting much worse.

Now every time I would go for a walk I would just fall for no reason what so ever. No matter how short my walk was I would fall. My headaches( at that time we thought migraines), the tingling and numbness in my limbs kept getting worse. It got hard to hold my head up. Sleep really doesn't happen for me much, and I could go on forever. I went to my doctor who thought I was crazy and told me to seek hypnosis. Let's just say I didn't go back to him for many years. Finally an appointment with my GYN, he asked how things were and I broke out in tears. He said with my symptoms he felt I had MS. He sent me to a neurologist. He ordered a MRI and there it was a 7 mm chiari malformation. But he doesn't feel that's waht's causing all my issues so I am getting a second opinion hopefully soon.

 In the mean time I want to push myself into some weight loss. I started this because my sister wants me in her wedding the end of July and I want to loose a few pounds to look better in the dress I need to wear. Then there is the person in my head wanting to loose at least 80lbs. With having Chiari sometimes it makes it almost impossible to do anything on some days. I fully intend on pushing myself as long as I don't totally hurt myself.

So I started this 30 day crunch challenge 15 days ago. Let me it hasn't been easy at all! There has been a few days I wanted to throw the towel in and say screw it! I intend to use this blog to not only to motivate me, but to share my story of how I am doing with the struggles of having chiari malformation 1. I would like to raise awareness for this disease while I am at it.

  Here is the challenge, I am at day 15, I did my 95 crunches and I did 20 minutes on my stationary bike.

I hope I keep some of you interested and motivate you to trying this too. I will not lie this is one of the hardest things I have done in along time( well maybe sometimes it's very hard just to get out of bed).