It’s Hard To Love Your Body When You Don’t Trust It
As a personal trainer and health educator for people living with autoimmune disease and chronic illness, I talk to countless people who are struggling to redefine their body after their diagnosis. I have come to realize that one of the many side effects of autoimmune disease have nothing to do with the actual disease. Instead, these side effects have so much to do with our body image, our self-confidence, and our self-love.
A woman I spoke with recently described it best:
“I often feel betrayed by my body. I have so many hopes and dreams and things I want to accomplish, but I feel I can’t even hope and dream anymore, because I am no longer sure what my body can and cannot do. I have lost all predictability in my body, which means I have such disappointments when trying to plan for the rest of my life.”
This resonated with me so deeply because I realized in that moment that it’s hard to love your body when you don’t trust it to serve and support you. This causes a severe domino effect in our lives. For example, how many times have I said “yes” to a commitment, like meeting up with a friend, or taking on an extra work project, and then when it came time to actually fulfill that commitment, I was too tired, too exhausted, too depleted, and I had to bail and cancel at the last minute? Not only did I feel terrible in my body, but on top of that, I felt terrible because of all of the people I disappointed in the aftermath. It’s a crappy feeling for sure.
Often times, when talking about these moments, we talk about it as a negative thing- “I tried to do x, but I couldn’t. My body failed me.” We learn from these moments to stop saying yes to things, because we don’t ever know when our body will “fail” us again.And when we stop saying yes, we also stop being social, feeling confident, having fun. It becomes a downward spiral.
So here I want to offer you a different perspective. What if your body really didn’t “fail” you at all? What if this is all about miscommunication between you and your body?
I know, this sounds crazy. But hear me out. Your body has been struggling for long before you felt symptoms, most likely. Think about how long that is, that your body has been carrying the weight of the disease you live with? Our bodies speak through pain and exhaustion and other kinds of symptoms. But as humans, our brains and our bodies don’t always work together as a team. Our body says, “Hmmm, I am feeling a little tired today” and our brain says “But I have work to do and a house to clean and kids to take care of! Body, wake UP! You can’t be tired!!!!” And we push through. We push our bodies to do more. And that pushing, day after day and week after week, it compounds, until our bodies shut down as a drastic measure.
The reason we can’t trust our bodies and we feel betrayed by our bodies is that we aren’t working WITH our bodies. Instead, we are so often telling our bodies what to do. And when they fight back and say enough is enough, we get frustrated.
Now, here’s where the tricky part comes in. HOW do we get our bodies and our brains to work in sync with each other?
The solution is not simply to do less and rest more. Because that doesn’t help solve the problem. We want to live our lives comfortably, not hide away at home.
The solution is that we need to practice the art of brain to body communication. This requires being conscious, being awake and aware of our actions and our bodies reactions. Not just the immediate reactions, but the long term reactions too. And the best way to do this? We need to practice in a controlled environment.
That’s where exercise comes in. Exercise mimics real life movement. So, to practice brain to body communication, take these three steps:
Pick an exercise and do it for a short period of time.
Evaluate how you feel immediately afterwards.
Evaluate how you feel at longer intervals afterwards- an hour, at the end of the day, and how you feel the next day.
If you have pain, swelling, rashes, exhaustion- ANYTHING out of the ordinary- then perhaps that exercise was too much and you need to pull back in intensity, duration, or frequency.
Why does this work? Well, first, by doing this, we begin to open up the awareness of the body. When we pay attention to how our body feels, what works and doesn’t work with exercise, we begin to activate that brain to body connection, which then will carry on into everyday life. Second, by figuring out where our exercise tolerance capacity is, we find our exercise sweet spot, where we can move our body without pain. Over time, we can then build upon that, as our body adapts to the movements we can begin to handle more and more. And as we gain strength through exercise, we begin to trust our bodies again, and feel more confident in them. And finally, as we practice this, we begin to be aware of patterns of what works and doesn’t work, which allows us to be more predictable in our daily activities.
(It’s important to take your total amount of stress into account here too. If you are having a reaction from a little bit of exercise, but your day yesterday was crazy stressful and out of the ordinary, then the reaction probably wasn’t from the exercise, it was from the stress of the other stuff. Exercise doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Your life’s total stress combined is what leads to the possibility of a flare. You can read more about that here.)
So… my hope for you is that you can release yourself from the negative cycle of feeling mad, sad, betrayed and failed by your body. If you work WITH your body and practice true communication between body and brain, then you can build confidence about when to say yes to things, when you can push a little harder, and when you must say no. You can gain predictability in your life.
A shining example of this is Autoimmune Strong member Pam, who shared how her exercise routine has helped her get back into the basic everyday routines she had been missing for years.
“When I started practicing Autoimmune Strong exercises in January, I couldn't be in the car longer than 30 min without pain. Let alone do a big grocery shop day. And butt pain!! Oh my gosh. Legs and butt were so painful from inactivity. We now take hours long drive, just to get out of house. I read or do crafts and enjoy it without pain or spasms. I even have been swimming and playing backgammon with my grandkids!”
Bottom Line: with a little work and focus, you CAN reclaim your body… so you can live the life you want.
Not ready to do this on your own and want some help? That’s what we teach in Autoimmune Strong! Let me show you step by step how to put this into practice. Click here to get started.