Weight Loss Means Something Different to Lipedema Women
It's not about looking "skinny."
Lipedema women are high-functioning despite our chronic illness. We are adaptable, tenacious, and courageous.
But, we have been through the wringer interacting with the medical and diet industry, telling us we must lose weight.
How often have we been told we need to lose weight to become “healthy” and deserving of medical care?
The medical industry has it wrong with us.
Regardless of the difficulty of losing weight through traditional diet and exercise, women with Lipedema are usually very healthy.
But we have a lot of mass and a high BMI. We are uncomfortable. Our legs hurt. We have limited mobility. We go to the doctor because of these problems. Many times it comes back around telling us to lose weight traditionally. So, we starve ourselves because we’re told we need to.
But, weight loss looks different for Lipedema women.
When my Lipedema progressed, I’d gained fifty pounds and felt like crap. Being told over and over I needed to lose weight, I knew there was something different about my body because, believe me, I tried! And I failed, over and over.
Everything happening in my body finally made sense when I learned I had Lipedema. Weight loss wasn’t my goal anymore. I stopped following restrictive diets and started to learn what I needed to do for my body in order to feel good again.
This is what I’ve learned so far about weight loss and Lipedema:
1. We still need to follow a diet plan, but not primarily for weight loss.
A diet for Lipedema is more focused on keeping our bodies from getting inflamed. Certain foods are inflammatory, and learning which foods help or hinder our inflammation helps with our overall health. Rather than restricting calories, we do better on anti-inflammatory (RAD, keto, etc.) diets. When we find a nutrition plan that works for our inflammation, we will find we can lose additional weight.
2. Exercise is to keep us mobile and strong, not necessarily to lower our BMI.
The focus of exercising for Lipedema women is to keep our functional mobility and our lymphatics moving, along with a ton of other health benefits. While some women thrive on intensive cardio, our bodies prefer more gentle, supportive exercises such as walking, swimming, biking, yoga, light weight lifting, and other restorative movement.
3. Keeping weight fluctuation down is more of a priority than “weight loss.”
Lipedema women can experience weight fluctuations throughout the day, depending on many different factors, such as food/fluid intake, body movement, stress, and hormonal changes.
I can weigh 5-8lbs more at the end of the day than I was at the beginning of the day. Trying to make sense of that before I was aware of Lipedema made me feel crazy.
Instead of measuring our weight to see if our calorie restriction has been effective (I’ll tell you right now, it hasn’t been), it’s more important to minimize our weight fluctuations to help slow the progression of our condition and reduce the risk of complications.
To measure ourselves by weight alone does us a disservice. The scale doesn’t show us anything other than we may have extra swelling and inflammation. The number on the scale is helpful, though, because we can see how certain things we do positively or negatively impact our weight fluctuation.
4. Our focus tends more towards keeping up our mobility and decreasing our pain.
With Lipedema, we have a very difficult time “losing weight.” Our bodies are different than the normal body. We have fat that is diseased and not able to shrink from calorie deprivation.
We also focus on losing mass through other methods, such as MLT, anti-inflammatory nutrition, supportive exercise, and even liposuction surgery.
Weight loss isn’t the same for us with Lipedema. Our weight loss is about decreasing our inflammation, increasing our lymphatic flow, and shifting our focus from obsessing about weight to supporting the health of our bodies to bring us greater happiness and well-being.
Take care, and have a great weekend!
Michelle
I’ve struggled to lose weight since I was teen. I’m not longer dieting for weight loss. I did manage to lose a lot of weight a few years ago but it resulted in a resurgence of my eating disorder so I stopped and gained it all back. It was also very restrictive and as much as I wanted the weight loss to be permanent I knew it wouldn’t be because would could eat like that forever. What I did gain from it was that I’m highly sensitive to refined foods. They make me ache badly.