After a difficult year that resulted in the most stress I have ever experienced, my body started to rebel. I suppose if I am honest, I had existed with a great deal of chronic stress due to the challenges of parenting my two boys with a narcissistic ex-husband. I can’t remember a time when there wasn’t significant stress in my life. But in the last year, it grew exponentially. Not only did I lose one of my sons due to a very horrific unjust legal battle that really speaks to the current state of our culture, but I also had a very major surgery. The grief and loss as well as the physical trauma of surgery and recovery basically shut my body down. I will share more about both the surgery and the legal battle in future blog posts, but for now just know that the stress levels were through the roof. Just when I thought it couldn’t get any harder, I was laid off from my job. At the end of myself, I began to try to heal mentally and physically. Not surprisingly, it was not easy. In fact I quickly realized that this was going to be like nothing I had ever done before.
Stress was not a new thing for me. I had been managing chronic stress for years. I have had my fair share of trauma and challenge. I usually could go to my toolbox and get through it. But this time was different. My normal go-to strategies weren’t helping. My strategies included journaling daily, daily Bible reading, daily prayer, weight training, cardio, clean eating, daily weigh ins, and regular counseling sessions. If anything, I noticed I was getting worse. I had gained a lot of weight. Despite efforts to lose weight (extremely clean eating and exercise), the weight would not budge. I guess on the positive side, I wasn’t gaining any more, but I also wasn’t losing anything. It was one more disappointment to add to the long list of painful circumstances. I decided that maybe it was a medical issue, so I advocated for myself and had the doctor run all kinds of labs and tests. Everything came back normal. I couldn’t afford to go the functional medicine route with the impending job loss, so I had to use the resources that I had. Every doctor just said that I was getting old and needed to reduce stress. Well the stress wasn’t going anywhere. My circumstances weren’t changing anytime soon. But I wasn’t ready to throw in the towel and believe that this was my future. There had to be some way to move forward and for my body to recover.
I made some adjustments.
WORKOUTS
First I backed off the workouts. I started to realize that my normal workouts were putting too much stress on my already stressed out body. I backed off of everything and only did restorative work like yoga and walking. I did this for months. I am just now starting to add weight training back in, but I am watching my intensity and I am trying to make sure to include plenty of restorative work as well to balance it out.
DIET
I had been eating very clean and even completed an elimination diet to rule out food sensitivities. I had cut all alcohol. I decided to stick with clean eating but to make sure I was eating enough. I focused on increasing my protein intake and of course always having enough vegetables. I eased up on all the restrictions. The restrictions were stressful in and of themselves. I heard a podcast that got me thinking more about gut health beyond just cutting out certain foods. That never seemed to work well for me. It seemed to be more of a moving target than an actual solution. But this podcast talked about probiotics. It referenced a book called “Super Gut” by Dr. Davis. So I got the book. It talked about leveraging specific probiotics to heal the gut. So I started my new science experiments. I started making my own probiotic yogurt. I noticed quick improvement with my energy levels, digestion, and mood. I didn’t start losing weight yet, but there were noticeable differences. I decided this adjustment was worth keeping. I began to read more about fermented foods and started adding more including milk kefir, kefir soda, kombucha and fermented veggies. I could tell my body liked these things. I noticed that I began ever so slightly losing some weight. Not enough to be very obvious, but this was the first time there was any progress so I decided that was an indication that my body was calming down. Lastly, I learned more about glucose spikes and how leveling out glucose can make a dramatic impact on overall health. A friend gave me the book “Glucose Revolution” and I began implementing the hacks listed in the book. I think that was the catalyst to finally seeing some movement on the scale. The jury is still out on whether it will really get me to my goal, but it is looking promising.
COUNSELING
I had gone to a counselor for a few years and was with her during trauma of the last year, but I started to find that my sessions with her were more just me venting my circumstances. It wasn’t offering me anything new and I had people in my life that could do that with me. I am a trained counselor and she wasn’t really offering anything new. My oldest son had recently stopped working with his counselor and I started to see his counselor. My initial thought was that his counselor could help me navigate the challenges I was facing with my traumatized 16 year old who was recently diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder level 1. I quickly realized that this counselor had a skill set that was different from my training and he would help me to think about things in a different way. He was giving me assignments and was currently studying somatic therapy which has to do with dealing with our body’s nervous system response to stress. This all made sense to me because I was coming to these conclusions from personal experience, but he was able to point me to research that explained what I was learning. It is still a work in progress, and we are getting ready to work toward more trauma processing through brain spotting and other techniques, but for now I have already learned many new strategies and ways of thinking about my nervous system that have helped tremendously.
NERVOUS SYSTEM HEALING
Like I mentioned with counseling, I have learned a lot about my nervous system through all of this. Much of it I figured out from trial and error, but then I read a book that put everything I was experiencing into a framework that makes total sense. It is called “Healing Through the Vagus Nerve” by Amanda Armstrong. The premise is that the mind-body connection isn’t really a connection at all, it is one and the same. Meaning that our nervous system and our thoughts and feelings are the same thing. If our nervous system is activated or shut down, we can’t think our way out of that. Instead we have to make adjustments to calm our nervous system. Even with my background in psychology, this framework really explained a lot of things to me in such a simple way. It shifts how I think about anxiety and depression. It explained why in the thick of my stressful circumstances, I was getting worse instead of better when I implemented my normal coping strategies. This is going to be my ongoing focus and I look forward to sharing more about what I am learning.
SOCIAL INTERACTIONS
Early on I knew that I was going to need support to get through this painful time in my life. I certainly have had moments of shut down when I just couldn’t bring myself to be around people, but I have tried to push myself to maintain certain relationships that have proven to be restorative. We host a weekly home fellowship. These are people who know what is going on in our family and they can pray with us as we walk through this. They know and love Jesus and can encourage me in my faith. Additionally, I have an aunt and I have always been able to process my thoughts and feelings with her. I have some other friends who I have gotten together with through all of this and that can be helpful. I am more selective with who gets my time and energy though. I am not always up for sharing my experience, so I honor that. I am more intentional with who gets my time and energy these days. But for those that do, I am grateful that they encourage me, grieve with me and support me through these difficult times.
Healing is not easy. Healing is not fast. It can be frustrating at times. I am learning through the process that it isn’t about weight loss resistance. That is just a symptom of a taxed nervous system. The more I am learning, the more hope I have that someday my body and I will be more in sync. I will have a greater capacity to heal. My nervous system will calm down and my weight won’t always be like this. Healing is possible.