Apologizing to my body
Undoing decades of damage
In the order of priorities, I have to say my body was waaaaay down the list for most of my adult life. And the more my body endured - years of losing sleep raising young children, working a demanding job that required more than 40 hours a week, weekends spent on the road and on the sidelines cheering on my kids in travel sports - the more I believed my body was truly resilient. Like the old Timex watch slogan, my body could “take a licking and keep on ticking.”
I believed a few other things, too…
Sleeping just 5 hours a night meant I was working hard.
French fries count as a vegetable.
Performing under pressure time after time is what gets you promoted.
Everyone has a mid-afternoon slump. That’s what caffeine and chocolate are for, right?
Until I hit 40, and my body started whispering to me. But this wasn’t a good time to change my lifestyle. And then I hit my 50s, and my body had no choice but to scream at me. Thankfully, not so loud as a serious health event or diagnosis, but I now know I was closer to that outcome than I ever want to be.
I had gained 50 pounds in the past 21 years.
I was diagnosed with anxiety and panic disorder.
My thyroid wasn’t functioning.
I suddenly had high blood pressure.
I had no energy and zero motivation to exercise.
How did I get here? How was this energetic, enthusiastic soul now occupying this body that just wanted to curl up on the couch and stay there? Every time I saw myself in a photo or the mirror, I saw a stranger.
I started asking myself, ‘Could it be true that lifestyle actually matters? More importantly, was it possible for me to change?’ I ruminated on this for a few years while making a few random efforts at exercising more or doing short cleanses - all to short term success.
Fast forward to today, and I’ve spent the last 3 years learning how lifestyle affects our bodies.
Food is information, it’s medicine, and the right foods are needed to power our bodies.
Motion is lotion.
Sleep is when our bodies repair and recharge.
Sugar can be just as addictive as cocaine, lighting up the same reward center in our brains.
Living on the edge with chronic stress isn’t what our bodies were designed to endure, and it affects so many aspects of our health.
And the more I learn, the more I realize how much I truly asked of my body for all those years.
I asked it to perform without fuel, propping it up with caffeine and sugar instead.
I never gave my body a chance to recover with deep sleep.
I allowed stress to build up in my body, not giving it an outlet.
I ate so much sugar and found it impossible to limit my consumption.
I let my gut microbiome become so imbalanced that it affected my mental health.
And the list goes on…
So, to my body, I’m sorry.
I believed you were so resilient, but I only believed that because it meant that I could do whatever I wanted and not what you needed.
Now that I better understand what you need, I’m paying attention and being more conscious about what I eat, don’t eat, and do. And in return, you are healing and enabling me to live a life that more closely resembles what I’ve always wanted.
The takeaways:
The good news is that the body is forgiving. Healing can happen, and as you show your body love, it will return that love in the form of energy, focus, and vitality.
Lifestyle changes are hard, but you don’t have to do it all at once. Small steps are still progress. Get a quick win and then take on a new challenge. Soon, you’ll have several steps behind you, and you’ll start feeling the results.
If you want to learn more:
At the neurobiological level, the neural substrates of sugar and sweet reward appear to be more robust than those of cocaine. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23719144/