Just Try Harder

• Introduction
• Weight control
• Motivation to work
• Today
• Little differences
• Conclusion

I was a little waif as a young child. Extremely picky eater. Very difficult to feed anything other than a particular form of sausage. Finally after many difficult years for my mum dealing with my food related meltdowns, one year at Christmas at age 9 or so, I was too embarrassed in front of the larger family to make a fuss, and ate a whole Christmas dinner!

After that, puberty puppy fat hit me hard. I had a brief loss of weight at the end of puberty around age 15 or 16, otherwise I have since always had a body that will only ever grow outwards if left to its own devices. I do wonder whether my eating patterns as a child might have set my body up badly. This constant gain remains true for almost any diet I try to keep to, however active I try to be.

I say try to be. Whether gym or dancing or cycling or other activity, I can be having a great time until I hit what I think some cyclists call a bonk. Or a wall. Either way, suddenly I’m exhausted, irritable and hangry, and can only be brought back with something energy dense and probably unhealthy. This rather cancels out any calorie deficit from said exercise.

When I was about 23 I was diagnosed with PCOS, one of the symptoms (or causes, it’s hard to know) of which is insulin resistance. I was rather overweight and very unhappy at that point, and was put on Metformin, the medicine usually given to type 2 diabetics to treat their bodies which are extremely insulin resistant.

This worked well. Around the same time I got into swing dancing and became more active, and I was at a healthy weight a year or two later. I was by then down to taking a low, only once-daily dose, which was too much for my smaller body and led to gastro upset, so I stopped taking it.

Forward 10 years, I was living in Germany and my tendency to slowly gain weight had finally brought me back to the unhappy place. I tried to go the same route, get the same tests, assuming it would lead to a Metformin prescription again. Well, the German endocrinologist said I wasn’t prediabetic, I barely had any cysts on my ovaries (the UK GP had told me my ovaries were “riddled” back then), and they couldn’t see any reason to put me on medication.

Great, so all the old insecurities came back, like I’m just fat because I’m lazy. I started reading books like Good Calories, Bad Calories (also known as The Diet Delusion in the UK) by Gary Taubes, and The Big Fat Surprise by Nina Teicholz. People have a lot of opinions on books such as these - but they were very validating to my experience of living in my body, and convinced me I needed to try a low or no carb diet.

It did help, actually! It doesn’t really matter how sensitive you are to insulin, if you’re not taking in any sugars, in pure or carbohydrate format. It takes quite a lot of willpower, as it’s so hard to avoid carbohydrates. It also costs more money. Many staple meals become awkward. Despite this my husband and I got into the swing of it - we lived low carb for months, and I finally managed to lose weight.

The loss probably helped me get pregnant - and once I did, the low carb diet was thrown out the window. I didn’t think it was safe to stick to an unusual diet when growing a new person. I breastfed both that baby and the next, and as I was in one way or another packing lots of my energy into one or other new human for at least 4 years on the trot, I continued to eat “normally”.

Eventually the kids were weaned and onto real food, but we never made it back into the no carb life. There isn’t currently enough time, energy or creativity to go back to doing that - it’s so much easier when everyone in the family eats the same meals. We cook a lot from scratch, with fresh ingredients, lots of fibre, and few refined carbs or heavily processed foods. Our diet isn’t low carb, but it’s not unhealthy.

Welp, eventually I got back into that unhappy place with my body again. It came around after yet again having to buy clothes yet another size up, finding that I was struggling with things just because my body was continually getting bigger, and feeling less like it was “my” body.

Let me be clear: I believe people can be all shapes and sizes, and all of them are good and beautiful.

My personal issue has always been that my body will only ever slowly gain weight unless it experiences a big intervention. I never ‘settle’ into a size. I never have experienced this “set point” that some people say bodies have. I just steadily store energy away even when I’d dearly like to use it.

As well as feeling like my body was growing too far again, this time I was also feeling crushing lows of energy. One morning I went to my doctor and asked for a blood test, because I was so very very tired all the time. I don’t see this doctor any more, because he later waved me away with an “all normal!”, but when I looked at the sheet of results I saw a black box around the blood sugar level, which was at 62 milligrams per deciliter (mg/dL). Hypoglycemia is usually said to be 70 mg/dL or below.

I started pricking my finger and checking my levels with a blood sugar testing kit, like diabetics use. I would occasionally catch the same lows. Based on this I managed to get an appointment at the same endocrinologist clinic where I had been disappointed before - but this time it wasn’t just a feeling I was too fat, I was now struggling to even stay active and keep up with my kids, because I was so damned tired.

Thankfully the new endocrinologist believed me, validated my worries, and agreed to have me checked out. This isn’t a given - the whole run up to that appointment had made me so nervous, I was worried I would be turned away and just told to do better. I was also determined not to let that happen, so I had gone armed with all the relevant information, previous blood tests, and observations of my daily life.

Because of my BMI, she suggested I would be allowed a prescription to one of the GLP-1 medications - but as they dampen appetite, I worried that this could cause me more low sugar, low energy episodes, so I said no thank you. It’s also super expensive even if you do get it prescribed.

I went through a battery of tests including a long oral glucose test (OGT) - at the end of which I was indeed jittery with hypoglycemia. Afterwards I ate a sandwich and a banana and still it wasn’t enough to recover fully, and so went over the road to get a slice of cake too!

Turns out I am still not prediabetic, I’ve got a good A1C, and generally everything *is* normal apart from some elevated cholesterol - but I’m very mildly insulin resistant. Insulin resistance can mean the insulin response is delayed, which for me leads to postprandial (after meal) hypoglycemia (the “hangry” jitters), because it misses the first sugar spike cue and then overcompensates shortly afterwards, eventually pulling too much sugar out of my blood.

The endo wasn’t so convinced that Metformin could help, being that my insulin resistance was so mild, but allowed me to talk her round, and let me start taking it electively “off label”. It’s not very expensive, so it doesn’t really matter that it isn’t covered by my insurance for this purpose. Also nowadays there is an extended release variant, which is much less hard on the digestive system.

I’m pleased to report that I am doing well on this again, finally maintaining weight, even losing it slowly, and no longer suffering the deep and exhausting sugar lows.

(I’m still a working parent, so you know, but now I’m just normal-tired!)

The other major benefit is that now I’m finally back in control, I can stop kicking myself for failing to exercise enough without instantly eating back the energy I used in recovery, or failing to reduce my intake when I’m already so often tired and hungry.

While trying not to blow my own trumpet, I was a smart kid. Primary school was easy. I always felt a little different to the other kids, but I put that down to being an only child, being bilingual, and maybe to being a bit nerdy. Either way, I did well.

But I did start to slip as of age 12, or so.

Secondary school meant regular homework, meaning most nights there was something to be done. The first week or two it was all easy, and it was a novelty! But it didn’t take long before I realised a lot of it could be done the night before it was due in. I had one glorious week of no homework! And then it came back all at once, and of course now it was all urgent and stressful and due to be handed in the next day.

I started forgetting homework, putting bigger tasks off, settling down to do something at 9pm and realising I needed supplies or a trip to a library (yes, I’m old). I started lying to the teachers - my dog never ate my homework - but I frequently asked for another day, or did it sneakily under the desk in another lesson (and once got caught for that). I once pretended I’d left a folder of work in Sweden while on holiday (like I would have taken a folder of character studies from Lord of the Flies with me!).

Teachers generally had a good opinion of me anyway. What homework I did manage to do last minute was often good enough, and I was well behaved in class with decent test results.

Aged 16-18 during my A-Level courses was when the unraveling began. I had never really learned to study properly for an exam - I would cram just before it instead. I wouldn’t practice the higher level maths problems - I would struggle with the first few examples and give up. Calculus still makes me hiss, despite having been considered “gifted” at maths up to that point. We were trusted to practice at home to keep up with the class, and I just… couldn’t.

I did better with the Physics course, but I guess I found that more fun, so being engaged with it was easier.

I did fine overall but… not as well as I knew I could have. At this point I was forming a sense of self which has ever since brought me shame - what use is intelligence, if you don’t also show diligence? I was lacking discipline.

I made it into a decent university, and it went downhill from there. I did not manage at all well to separate out work time from social time, loved my new freedom to party with new friends, and really, really did not make time to practice the triple integral vector calculus (hissssss).

I had enrolled in an MEng degree course with four years of study plus a sandwich year in the middle, spent in an industrial placement. As I struggled to keep it together even during the placement year, I eventually decided I would do only three of the four study years, and instead graduate with a BEng.

My mum was still very proud of me.

Even so, this still brings me personal shame. But I also know that I averted a disaster by choosing to exit early. I don’t think I would have coped with producing a master’s thesis. It would have been a masterful crisis instead.

My career since has been varied. I have climbed up the bottom rungs of several career ladders, where after two to three years I would lose interest and motivation, and start looking to the next thing that might be ‘it’ for me. I have re-educated myself (at least) twice, to fit into different industries.

This time, I am in an industry and a job that I do actually enjoy. I find it meaningful and often even fun! And yet, the end of the honeymoon period has come for me anyway, and I have felt the distractions increase as the motivation decreases.

This time, I do not want to jump. I don’t want to reinvent myself. I like what and where I am. It is finally time to investigate what I have been suspecting for a couple of years already, but told myself to stop being silly about.

Do I have ADHD? Am I going to be yet another of those middle aged women looking for an excuse as to why life is so haaard? What will I get out of it anyway, do I want to take medication? Shouldn’t I just try harder?

That always seemed the right answer. Just do the homework. Don’t get distracted. Use your willpower. Just get on with it!

…So ran my internal monologue. And I would chastise myself for not managing to Just Try Harder. I’ve been ashamed of a lot of my past, of the things I should so easily have just got on with, and didn’t.

Well, I am tired of all the shame. I’m 42. Based on the longevity of my older relatives, I will live for at least another 42. I can’t keep kicking and shaming myself. If I find out I have ADHD, then maybe I can afford my past self and my current self some grace. So, this was a therapeutic act.

I’ve also begun to think of it like tech documentation, or an instruction manual. If I’ve been reading the Normies’ Life and Career manual all this time, but actually have a neurodivergent brain, it’s no wonder some things are not working as intended. I probably need to do some refactoring.

I opted for a privately paid assessment, as I really do not have the courage or force of will to get this done through the German state subsidised system. I would absolutely not be serious enough of a case to refer onwards, to take up the precious time of overloaded medical professionals.

Spreading the cost over the coming 42 years, the price certainly seemed worth it for a little peace of mind.

Welp, yes. After two long discussion sessions, lots of questionnaires, and having the assessor interview my mum - I do indeed have ADHD.

The assessor said I fulfill all the criteria, though in some categories only just. You don’t have to meet every category to be diagnosed. The way this was discussed, I’m possibly on the mild side of ADHD, while clearly affected by it in multiple ways. At one point she said “oh you’re clearly neurodivergent.” — which felt good, actually! Like I’ve found my way home.

An ASD screener done alongside also put me just over the minimum score for possibly being on the autistic spectrum. The assessor said if it’s correct, it’s likely too mild to go through the gnarly ASD assessment for. I agree. But maybe I can be considered AuDHD - certainly when I’ve read or watched AuDHD traits being described, I feel very seen.

I already feel more compassion for my past self. My current self is still screwing up at times, but I am already less mean to myself when I do, and so able to move on faster.

Aside from motivation, I very much relate to an ADHD tendency to suffer rejection sensitivity (taking criticism very personally, impostor syndrome, forever expecting to be told off for something, then reacting very badly when it does happen) and am starting to be able to recognise it as it happens.

This will be a work in progress, but it was so worth it. Just knowing is freeing.