Why People With Cancer Have Weight Loss?

Today, I would like to describe my experience as a cancer patient, how it affected my weight, and why people with cancer experience similar conditions. Concisely, I thought I would go ahead and discuss my weight a little bit. At the time I was diagnosed with cancer, I probably weighed 130 pounds. My normal weight is around 120-125 pounds, depending on how much I’m working out.

I was also breastfeeding during that time, so my weight was a little bit higher than it normally was. I might have actually been almost 140 pounds. After I had the surgery, my weight went down really fast. I like to joke and say that it was the best weight loss plan ever because I did lose it quite quickly, but in all seriousness, having cancer and the surgery in my mouth made it very difficult for me to maintain my body weight. If you have cancer in any location of the body, that is one thing a lot of individuals struggle with.

Even though I didn’t have chemo, I was sick and constantly throwing up. It seemed like I had chemo but I didn’t. So, after the surgery, I lost twenty pounds just like that and my digestive system wasn’t working properly. My body was not sucking up nutrients, and a lot of your energy is spent trying to keep yourself alive and trying to heal, so that’s why nutrition and maintaining stress is so unbelievably important. You want your body to be able to focus everything on healing yourself. You don’t want to have an extra burden on trying to digest anything.

Once I figured all this out, my foods were very simple and very easily digested, but then I kept losing weight and then I was just hovering around a hundred pounds for several years. I didn’t weigh myself all the time, but I remember I was like 103 pounds, so now which is seven years later I weigh like 136-137 pounds and which is kind of a little high for me. What I’m comfortable with but once I hit the sixth-year mark, my body was starting to really be able to process the food and my body was able to suck up the nutrients a lot better.

So, it took me a while to repair and I had a ton of stomach but right now, I would say like this past year that is 6-7 years, I was so excited to be able to eat food that tastes good because for the first part it was very basic, very bland, then before cancer, I was just a control freak about my weight. So, I had a lot of eating disorder so then I starved myself before that and so I limited myself on taking good food too.

So, I kind of went a little bit crazy a little bit overboard this past year and I was like “hmm tastes so good” but I still had to watch it because if I go too overboard then my health starts suffering and so now, I feel like I got that out of my system because I don’t want to get sick again from eating too much junk. So now, I’m just dialing that back in and trying to get balance not restricting myself so much like I did before but just eating healthy diets and in finding that balance that I feel good about.

Right now, I kind of need to work out a little bit more and just get back in shape, just a little bit so but otherwise, everything’s going really well there’s still a few things that I have trouble digesting. So, if you have any kind of surgery and you have cancer and now, I can’t of course write about having chemo or anything like that, but I can still deal with nausea as well for years and so nutrition becomes an extremely important part of getting your body back to good health. Anyways, so he said I was probably towards about 130-140 pounds around the time that I was diagnosed and I was a breast feeding at the time and had already breastfed my older son. You know, like to hang on to some extra weight because you need to produce the milk and then I dropped 20 pounds maybe in a month or two.

Then, I gradually kept losing weight and then gradually maybe about the 5th year, gradually I got better and better but I would say like this past year from year six to year seven, my body is finally able to hold on to those nutrients maybe a little too much now. And so, I’m able to digest and get those nutrients out of the food I eat finally. Thanks for taking your time to read my weight-loss experience due to cancer, which is pretty much similar for all cancer patients. Feel free to check out our article on why do people vomit.