Mom...perhaps she's starting to listen??!

This past year my mom has been told by our family doctor that 1) her iron levels are pretty high, and 2) she has a fatty liver.  This freaked her out a bit, though initially she didn't do much about it.  She continued drinking her diet sodas and munching on junk food like cookies and such.

Now that she's seen my weight edging downward again (I hit a plateau for the last few months, which I wasn't trying too hard to get past), she's become interested in hearing about what I'm eating and where I bought the jeans that look so good on me.  LOL

I told Mom about Big Fat Fiasco and she said she'd like to see it (!).  She has started re-reading her Atkins book and has learned more about what foods to eat and what fats are healthier.  Last week we watched BFF together.  She wanted to come back yesterday so we could do more research on the computer about the fatty liver and iron, and I printed off a bunch of pages for her to read.

One piece of advice was to get some of the iron-rich blood out of the system by donating a few units of blood on a regular basis.  Mom isn't keen on donating blood, though I'm still working on that.  (She was willing to do it when I offered to go with her, but she ended up getting rejected at the clinic because of her age; they needed her doctor's blessing before she could donate.  She had psyched herself up to do it so she was pissed!)

Advice with regard to the fatty liver was to lose weight. See, Mom's had problems with her weight for a bunch of years, but mostly she's had problems with her BRAIN.  She is bi-polar and has been on (the wrong doses of) meds for a looooong time.  She used to complain that these meds made her overeat and that's why she got fat.  Roughly two years ago she decided that the meds were poison and promptly stopped taking them.  Fast forward past a couple years of hell (for her AND for those around her) and the doctors FINALLY got her dosage right.  When she was ill anything you said would go in one ear and out the other.  It's taken a long time, but I've finally got my mom back (YES!!) and she's willing to LEARN new things.  Shit, I never thought I'd see the day.

Mom's been on the Atkins diet before and lost about 85 lbs.  TWICE.  She wants to lose more and has been asking what kinds of meats are good (grass-fed, organic, hormone-free, etc.), where to buy them, and what oils are okay to use for cooking.  She even wanted to come to our house for NYE because "you put out HEALTHY food that's not going make my weigh scale go up."

I think we're getting somewhere here...