Food, Inglorious Food - Part II

Note: If you missed it, Part I of this post is here.

Laid out as simply as possible, here's what I'm trying to accomplish in eating as healthy a diet as I can:

1. Maintain my weight.


2. Manage my cholesterol.


3. Within reason, avoid anything that might somehow trigger a future breast cancer.

Because these goals get progressively more complex, I'm going to tackle just one per post. To begin:

1. Maintain my weight.
   
   Up until my second course of chemo last year, my weight had been stable since college. (This is the one positive side effect of being a picky eater, I guess—automatic calorie control.)
   
   It's common to lose or gain weight during chemo, and although I had no net gain (or loss) back in 2001, this time I added about 15 pounds.
   
   To compound things, I also have hypothyroidism, which makes it easy to gain (and harder to lose) weight.
   
   And having my ovaries taken out last summer plunged me into immediate menopause, which—bonus!—also makes it easy to gain weight.
   
   I've dropped 12 of those 15 new pounds, so I do feel mostly like my old self again, and lots of my old clothes are back in rotation, but I want to be sure not to backslide.
   
   In part that's because I just feel right at my typical weight.
   
   But it's also because staying at a healthy weight (aka avoiding obesity) is one of the few proactive things I can do to reduce my risk of a future breast cancer.
   
   Now, exercise is a big part of weight management, as well as another good breast-cancer-prevention strategy, but that's a whole other subject—to which you can bet I will return.