The Healthy Change

The healthy change

Gaby Planchart

gaby.planchart01@gmail.com

            The positive messages and encouragement when you decide to do something new in your life are rewarding. The feedback received from my readers, friends, colleagues and family to the first article posted “Change: A constant in our lives”, gives me enthusiasm to keep writing about this topic. I would love to hear your comments and feedback on this and many other aspects related to our professional and personal lives. So I invite you to write me on my email gaby.planchart01@gmail.com.

            The need to achieve balance motivated this article, where I write about how to face the change in the physical aspect of my life. Health was one of my pending matters within this balance. My son and my mother were my logical motivations. The two decided to be healthy and fight against obesity. My son just took that decision when he was 10 years old. Tired of the typical teasing at his school, he took action on the issue. He began to eat less and exercise more. His will power, advice and feedback have been my inspiration, my support and my conscience, respectively. My mother, in her forties (his modern mathematics applies that the old 50s is the new 30s), began suffering from hyperthyroidism and diabetes type 2. Her love of life made ​​her focus on health. With the help of her endocrinologist and modern medicine, she established a healthy routine of diet and moderate activity; therefore, the results were very specific. Now she is fine and her energy is amazing in her mid-fifties (doing the calculations in modern mathematics is now eighty-odd years). Both got their own inspiration, realized the need for change, triggered to achieve and reached their desired new situation.

            We had talked in the previous article about the three stages of a change process. These stages are identifying the need for change, the change in motion and the new level in the planned change (Lewin / Schein). My process of identifying the need for change was long and quite illogical. For me obesity has been a tool to manage anxiety as a result of a highly challenging working environments and living in an increasingly unsafe and politically complicated Venezuela. Failure to properly manage anxiety has been affecting my health over time. I always boasted of being a happy and healthy fat girl. My emotional management was flawed because I was always using excuses. After I was 40 years old, obesity began to take its toll. My body began to show the typical signs of metabolic syndrome: high blood pressure, high cholesterol, dyspnea, rosacea, neck mini-warts, hyperinsulinism, joints pain, and finally endometriosis at an old age (according to my mom’s modern mathematics I am twenty-nine years old). This latter disease can be eliminated by means of hysterectomy or in other words removing the uterus and ovaries. This event was my great shock as I had to really internalize the need for change and was the plaintiff to manage change. Surgery is not my first option. This is the reason I had never opted for extreme weight-loss options such as bariatric surgery. Now, I was faced to opt for surgery to resolve endometriosis. Again it was not an option, it is a very invasive solution and carrying many risks because of my weight.

            Always the world of action handles different solutions. In my case, one of them was in my hands. If I decided to lose weight to hormonal imbalances that cause the disease, the endometriosis could be controlled. This is where I started a new healthy life since September 2012.