Our New Year's Resolutions Are Crushing us

For so many of us, we start off each new year in the same way. Here’s what happens:

In the week between Christmas and New Years, we start feeling badly about our bodies. Our bodies hurt, we are in pain and exhausted. The holiday season is exhausting, we have over-eaten and over-drank, and we spent all our energy shopping for the perfect gifts (and shipping them, which is always the biggest hassle). The pressure of the holidays, combined with the shift into winter, is detrimental for so many people, especially those of us who live with autoimmune disease. 

The holidays are stressful and we don’t take care of ourselves… so by the time January comes we are exhausted, spent, depleted. And our brains begin to panic. We start feeling like we need to fix everything, and stat. We feel extra “lazy” “out of shape” and “disgusted with ourselves”, and we start making statements like “This is the year when I lose the weight” or “This is the year I get in shape”. We then go into overdrive trying to make this happen for ourselves, looking for quick results to feel better. We hit the gym, with the goal of working out more or we start a diet… and this always leads to crash, burn, flare-up. We feel worse rather than better. 

The media messaging capitalizes on this, selling us fitness equipment and gym memberships and diet programs up the wazoo, to make us feel like if we just worked harder, exercised more, we would look and feel differently. 

But instead what happens is that we go at it too hard, and we fizzle. 

You see, we are already depleted from the holidays. Our bodies are exhausted from the stress and busy-ness of the holidays, and what we really need is recovery. Our anxiety spikes when we are in depletion mode, which is where these negative self-criticisms come from in the first place. 

So when we push ourselves to exercise harder or to eat less food, and our bodies are already feeling depleted,  our bodies rebel. Our bodies are trying to say “enough!” Because we live with autoimmune disease- if we push ourselves too hard and ignore that voice telling us that recovery is needed, our bodies will end up taking over and ignite an autoimmune symptom flare-up. That means, our body triggers a flare-up that will force you to take the rest and recovery time it requires. 

Has this happened to you before? I bet it has. Here are my 3 tips for doing things differently, so that you can actually feel good about yourself in the new year. 

1. Recover first. Your body needs to replenish after the December rush. Take a few weeks to focus on sleep, healthy eating (think protein, fruit and veggies), and hydration. Don’t restrict on calories, just think instead about selecting foods that nourish you. Sugary sweets and carb cravings are a sign that your body is depleted, so if you take the time to rest, recover and eat healthy foods, your body’s sugar cravings will subside naturally.

2. Listen to your body. When these inner anxious thoughts happen, they tend to take over. They are hard to ignore. So don’t ignore them. Instead, use them as a cue. If these thoughts come up, pay attention. Take a breath and ask yourself- “What am I feeling right now?” I bet you’ll find that what you are feeling is something like overwhelm or exhaustion. Acknowledge that, and instead of trying to restrict your food or hit the gym when you are exhausted, ask yourself, how can I modify that in a way that is restorative?

3. Exercise Daily. I know I know, this whole blog is about not pushing yourself hard to exercise. But that doesn’t mean don’t do anything at all! Movement is essential for healthy living. But there is a happy medium between crushing it at the gym and doing nothing. So, think small. Start with some nourishing stretches and a few strengthening moves. Start with just a few minutes a day and see how that feels. No flare? Then great, you can add a little more to your routine.  (Want to exercise like this but don’t know where to start? Let Autoimmune Strong help!)

Think about January as a reset- but ease your way into it. The themes should be rest, recovery, rejuvenation! Let’s break this new year's resolution  cycle once and for all, and actually start the new year feeling good. Because let’s be honest, we are all ready to kick 2020 to the curb and ring in 2021 with excitement! 

The Importance of Proper Rest and Recovery Days When Living with Autoimmune Disease

Here at Autoimmune Strong, we believe in the importance of “training for everyday life”. The idea here is that we need to exercise and train our bodies for the physical demands of our day to day activities, just like an athlete would train for the physical demands of his or her job.

As a coach and personal trainer who specializes in working with people with autoimmune disease, I encourage folks to do a little bit of exercise each day, consistently throughout the week, so that we are able to increase our body’s strength, flexibility and mobility over time. The goal here is to gain strength, energy and physical capacity, so that the physical demands of running errands, playing with our kids or grandkids, or going for a walk doesn’t completely wipe us out. (If you want to know more about the concept of training for everyday life, you can learn more here)

When we think of strength training, we always think of the exercises. We think about what we need to do in order to get stronger. But in actuality, there are two components that are necessary for strength training: exercise and recovery. Exercise and recovery must go hand in hand in order for us to build the strength and energy that we need.

In the previous blog post, I talked about exercise. Here, I want to talk about rest and recovery. 

So many people think of resting as being lazy. As giving up. As not trying. This is a misperception, an incorrect notion. A body needing rest is not a weakness. It is an essential component of both exercise training and basic self-care.

In the same way that we need to exercise and train like an athlete to be able to handle the physical demands of life, we also need to take rest and recovery days, just like an athlete does. This is an important part of increasing strength and without rest and recovery, we completely deplete ourselves of energy, which ultimately lands us back on the couch with a flare… and nobody wants that. 

So, let’s go deeper into why we need to alternate our exercise days with rest and recovery days.

Think of the body like a machine- like a car for example. We have a certain amount of energy available to us, just like a car has in it’s gas tank. When we exercise or have a demanding day (either physically or mentally) our body uses up energy. Now, when you use up the gas in your gas tank, what do you do? You head to the gas station and refill. Yet we don’t often do this with our bodies. We often push our bodies day after day without replenishing the energy stores. Eventually we are going to end up with an empty tank, which is where the exhaustion, fatigue and flare-up comes in.  

The tricky thing with the human body is that we have something that a car does not- a back-up energy source. This makes it more difficult for us to tell if we have depleted our main energy source. Here’s what happens. We deplete our main stores of energy, and our body begins to send messages that it needs recovery time. These messages can look like exhaustion, sugar cravings, a bad mood, body aches, a headache, joint pain, and other such symptoms. Typically, these symptoms are slight and somewhat easy to ignore- and they also can trigger our backup energy source. If we keep ignoring those exhaustion signals and push through, we often experience “a second wind” which helps us power through the physical and emotional demands of the day. That second wind comes from adrenaline, and while it feels like energy (and often feels like a really good, productive, super-human kind of energy)- it’s actually a sign that we are so depleted that we will soon crash out. We only have a small amount of adrenaline reserves and once they are gone, that’s when the real flare sets in and we experience true exhaustion and other uncomfortable symptoms. 

So, factoring in rest and recovery days are very important- even if you think you don’t need them. We need to rest and recover BEFORE the situation gets desperate and our body calls upon adrenaline to come in for backup. 

This isn’t just important for restoring your energy levels, it’s also important for muscular recovery. Our muscle fibers break down during movement and that’s actually how they get strong- as they break down, they have to re-build, and as they re-build, they knit themselves together in a stronger, more durable way. If we don’t rest, then the body continues to break down without moving into it’s re-build state, which is not a good thing. Our rest days give our muscles the time to recover and re-build and create strength. 

Now- this is important point. A rest day doesn’t just mean taking a rest from your daily exercise routine. This means taking a true rest and recovery day, from all things demanding.

Jenessa, an Autoimmune Strong member, shared this on the members only Facebook page and I think it covers this topic nicely: 

Yesterday (day 7) was the kind of day I used to think of as a rest day, back when I started AIS:  a day when I didn’t do AIS exercises because I needed to do too many other physical things that day. I’ve realized that that isn’t really a rest day, since I’m not resting, I’m just busy! So today I’m going to take a real rest day.

A rest day is not a recovery day simply because you are not doing exercise. It actually needs to be a day when you slow down and give your body time to recover. 

This is especially true if we have had a very busy week- whether it’s busy with stressful things or happy things- the busy-ness still uses up energy that we need to restore. So, if there is something different about the week, like a birthday event or a work deadline or a trip of some kind- I do not recommend pushing forward, and I encourage you to take extra rest days until the big thing passes. Any event can cause stress- even happy ones! And so we want to manage your stress levels and keep the demands on your body in check until this event passes. 

Hopefully this helps give you extra insight into when and why we need extra rest days, and how to make that decision for yourself. There is no badge for busy-ness and pushing through, our job is to give our body what it needs so it can replenish and restore itself, so we can continue living the life we want. 

There are going to be some weeks where you need a little extra rest and recovery. I hope that this blog gives you permission to take those extra days when you need them and gives you the ability to give yourself some grace, love and understanding on those harder days. Rest days are self-love days, just like exercise days. They go together hand in hand. 

Autoimmune Strong is an online exercise program designed specifically FOR people living with chronic illness, BY a personal trainer who lives with multiple autoimmune diseases herself. Click here to learn more about Autoimmune Strong.

How To Find The Motivation to Exercise When You Live In Pain

Let’s talk about “motivation”. 

One of the things I hear often is “I want to exercise, and I have the best intention to exercise, but I just can’t find the motivation.” 

You see, the idea of “motivation” puts the responsibility on you. It puts a value judgement on you- you are “good” if you have motivation and “bad” if you don’t. So when we wake up and have no motivation to exercise, we criticize ourselves, and our inner monologue becomes very negative. 

I want to release you from this cycle of negativity and help you to reframe the way we think about “motivation”. 

There are many reasons that we lack motivation for exercise.

Our bodies are in pain, and the idea of exercise feels scary and overwhelming because we fear that exercise will actually cause more pain than we are already experiencing. For many, this fear is rooted in real life experiences, where this has actually happened in the past, where an exercise experience has triggered intense pain and flare up, so we are intensely nervous to try again. The lack of motivation happens when the brain says “We need to do this” and the body rebels, as an instinctive protective measure. The body is actually creating resistance (in the form of a lack of motivation) in order to protect you from harm. 

We may also be experiencing a lack of motivation to exercise because the chosen form of exercise is not the right fit. Certain forms of exercise are more likely to trigger exhaustion, pain and flare symptoms than others. Cardio- like running, swimming and even walking- can be really overwhelming for the system. HIIT exercises, popular in many online exercise programs, also can be too intense for the body's needs, triggering exhaustion, pain and flare symptoms. An hour long class might be too long and too hard for where your body is now. Picking an exercise that is too much for your body to handle will make you not able to stick to the habit consistently over the long term. 

And finally, we might be experiencing a lack of motivation to exercise because our body is already too drained from excess stress, exhaustion, flare symptoms. All of these internal and external stressors wear on the body, leaving us with limited leftover energy for exercise. (You can read more about it here) Our body knows that we have nothing left in the tank, and that any further depletion of energy would be dangerous, so it triggers a feeling of “no motivation” to protect you. 

You see, none of this is your fault. Your body simply needs time to recover, and recoup this feeling of energy, zest for life, and desire to motivate and exercise. Here are my tips on how to do that. 

1. Release yourself from the inner critic who blames you for not having the motivation to exercise. Give yourself permission to feel the resistance when it bubbles up, and ask yourself, what is this resistance trying to tell me? Exploring where this “lack of motivation” is coming from will give you deep insights into your body. 

2. Try moving your body in a gentle way. We need to pick exercises that give our body relief, where we can say “Ok, I can do this, no big deal.” If it feels like you aren’t really exercising? Then good! That means you can do it without triggering that fear and resistance! 

Do a little ab bracing, stretching or foam rolling, some balance practice, or simple ankle exercises. These exercises are gentle ways to dip your toes into movement that doesn’t trigger a flare. (Don’t know what these exercises are? Don’t worry, I can teach you!)

As you get accustomed to a little bit of exercise, you can slowly introduce more and more into your life. Your body will adapt over time, and will learn to desire the movements as a part of feeling good. The more you practice, the more normal it becomes, and motivation will then come naturally, and will be an organic and seamless part of your life. 

3. Acknowledge and trust that this is not a quick process. Through sales techniques like “6 Pack Abs in Weeks” our minds have been conditioned by the fitness industry to expect quick transformations. This is problematic, because when we don’t achieve these transformations, or have a lack of motivation in our journey to achieve these transformations, we get stuck in a cycle of negativity. It feels like it’s our fault for “failing”. But this couldn’t be further from the truth. It’s not us who have failed- instead, the expectations set by these promises have failed us. So we need to set different expectations, and break the journey down into bite-sized pieces to be able to get stronger without crushing ourselves. A little bit of simple exercise each day can make all the difference. 

4. Don’t go it alone. If you are feeling overwhelmed, not motivated, and resistant to exercise- don’t get lost in the cycle of negativity. Instead, reach out for help. I am here for you!

Autoimmune Strong is an exercise program designed to encourage these principles. So, if you are unsure on how to apply these principles to your life, come join us and we’ll show you how! Learn more by clicking here.