Hey, Sue,
I'm probably writing this as much for myself as for you. It helps to remember that things do take time in living beings, nothing is immediate. Say, you're completely changing the frequency and contents of your meals: of course that's going to have a huge effect at all sorts of levels and is going to pretty much wreck whatever balance you used to have including your intestinal flora, the way your different tissues use and store energy, your mood, your menstrual cycle, your sleep patterns. And everything affects everything else. So you should expect utter chaos for a while, before the dust settles. And you have to be consistent regardless of the chaos, and pay attention so as to notice what things start slowly to change, hey, slowly to improve.
But the keyword is slowly and that's not really easy to reconcile with the fear and anxiety of things not being as we would like them to, and/or as they used to (dammit).
We're getting older, and heck one day we'll die. Nothing stays the same. But right now we're pretty good, we can still go places, run upstairs, finish the laundry, tell jokes, roll our eyes at the kids and even meet new and kind people who actually *get it* about chronic pain.
If one's going to be sick, it is really a sweet deal to be sick in this era: there is medical care and supplements and if one would ever needs them, there are blessed opiates.
Yeah, probably getting way ahead of myself
What I wanted to say was: give yourself a little break with your waistline, you're fighting a bigger monster here and is not easy and you should pat yourself in the back for trying.
Be patient, keep strong, breathe
As I said above, telling you is probably just an excuse to get it written so I can read it...