The Key to Living Healthy With Autoimmune Disease

What I am about to share with you is important for all people- but it’s a critical tool for folks who live with autoimmune disease.  

The most important lesson when living with autoimmune disease is this: you have to learn how to listen to your body’s cues. Because if you don’t and you push your body too far? That’s when a symptom flare-up happens.

Ok- let’s think about it this way. Your cell phone has a battery, right? And when the battery is full, the phone works quickly. You can surf the web, you can text with your friends, you can make long calls. Over time, that battery gets used up. And as the battery gets low, the phone starts to be less functional- it moves slowly and has glitches. Then you get the little notice saying “low battery”... so you rush around to try to plug it in so it can recharge. Sometimes you find the recharging station in time, and sometimes you are too late, and the phone shuts off. And even once you plug it in, it takes a bit to come back to life. And if you take it away too soon from the charging station, it will shut down again. 

Well, our bodies go through the same stages! You see, when we live with autoimmune disease, our bodies are extremely sensitive to stress. All kinds of stress, caused by all kinds of things. Things like weather changes, or too much walking, or dealing with an emotional situation, or sitting in traffic… any of these things can heighten our stress load and cause internal inflammation, which raises the change of activated autoimmune activity. 1, 2, 3

When the autoimmune activity is activated, our system goes into panic mode to try to calm it down. And if we can’t calm it down? Then our systems go into a flare-up, where our autoimmune symptoms are aggravated and “flare” like a distress signal. These symptoms can take such forms as exhaustion, fatigue, discomfort, pain, muscle aches, flu-like symptoms, gastrointestinal distress, rashes, migraines, insomnia, and much more. 

This is where it becomes essential to listen to our bodies. You see- we are just like that phone. In the beginning, we have the first warnings. When our battery starts to get a little low, we might feel the teeniest hint of symptoms. We feel tired at the end of the day, we have trouble sleeping, we have a minor headache. So what do we do?? Well, many of us just keep going. Maybe we pop some over the counter anti-inflammatory medicine to help dampen these symptoms so we can keep going on as normal with our lives. 

And as we continue to use up our battery without recharging it, our bodies start having more and more symptoms, and the symptoms increase in intensity. Our tired becomes exhausted. Our discomfort becomes pain. And soon, we have nothing left to do but sit down on the couch and stay there, sometimes for days or weeks, until these symptoms subside.

Our bodies have been trying to tell us all along that this was happening. When we push through, we are choosing to ignore our bodies messages, which cause us to shut down and rest until we can be restored enough to begin again. But what often happens, even at that point, is that we are so depleted that when we get moving again, we are only starting with a half battery life. So it;s more and more likely that this flare-up pattern will happen again and again. 

This is why the key to our health lies within listening to our bodies. If we can learn to listen to our bodies in those first whispers, those first indications, then we have a better chance of avoiding the flare-ups all together. 

Through exercise, Autoimmune Strong teaches you how to read the cues of your body. By practicing teeny tiny exercises, you begin to tune into what your body can and can’t do. You start to develop that brain and body connection that has been lost for so long. And your body begins to tell you what it needs. We need to stop thinking that we can “push through” the pain, exhaustion and stress, and learn to use those signals as a guide to helping us rest, recover, work and grow. To learn more about Autoimmune Strong and the exercises it provides (and to try the first 7 days for free) click here.