If it’s not nailed down…WTF?

Here’s what I ate today.

Today’s food choices, from upper right: multivitamin and calcium supplements x2; Swedish meatballs with sauce and cheddar cheese cubes; Sargento reduced fat cheddar cheese stick; Le Cochon d’Or honey ham slices; Trader Joe’s turkey jerky; barbecued boneless skinless chicken thigh with green beans and bacon; scrambled egg with diced ham and cheese; green beans with bacon.

I am starting to wonder if perhaps I am a mutant.

Now you’re wondering, what do you mean?  I mean, I feel like I could eat for DAYS.  Seriously.  Right now, if a food is not nailed down, I will freaking try to eat it.

I have not had this drive to eat post-op at all until now.  The last time I felt this ravenously hungry, I was pre-op and premenstrual.  Looking at my calendar, I see that I am smack dab in the middle of my cycle:

Note the hormonal insanity taking place around day 14-15…that’s where I’m at right now.  AND IT SUCKS.

I know that when my doctor removed the majority of my stomach, he removed the ghrelin-producing portion.  Quick lesson for those of you not playing along at home:  ghrelin is the main hormone involved in driving your feelings of hunger.  So the fact that the part of my stomach that once made this hormone is long gone should correspond to not feeling hungry, right?

Wrong. Sort of.  Most of the time, I’m NOT hungry.  I actually have forgotten to eat on the regular some days because I’m simply. Not. Hungry.

But this is not head hunger I’m feeling–it is true physical hunger.  Additionally, I take a PPI–proton pump inhibitor–to control acid production because overproduction of stomach acid can mimic hunger.  I’m not thirsty, because I drink a ton of water each day (between 13-14 cups daily).  So why the hell am I so hungry?

It’s gotta be the damn sex hormones.  It’s just gotta be.  Pre-op, when I approached the middle of my menstrual cycle, I would eat anything and everything, especially if it was carb-laden.  Now that there is little room for carby things, and carby things are not conducive to my weight loss journey at this point, I’m at a loss for how to treat this gnawing hunger I feel.

It makes me wonder if the hunger is simply related to the spike in LH and estrogen, or if maybe I am a leptin mutant.  Leptin is the hormone that works as an antagonist to ghrelin, and tells you when you have eaten enough.  I have often wondered if I am mutant for the leptin receptor–that I do not have any, or that the ones I have are faulty.  I totally need to be part of a research study.

I don’t know…maybe I should just chalk this hunger I have up to the damn sex hormones.  My calorie intake this week has increased slightly–I’m getting 800 calories minimum, and today I ate 938.  But I’ve also hit my step goal each day this week of 7500 steps so my activity has increased over last week.  But I don’t think it’s increased enough to warrant eating 900+ calories daily.  Of course, right now my endometrium is growing like crazy, so perhaps that’s another thing driving this damned hunger.

Maybe I should just feed it and be done with it.  Like right now, I SO WANT SOMETHING TO EAT because I feel empty.  But I’m about to go to bed for the night.  So I will just drink another cup of water before bed and be done with it.