The new fad in my demographic seems to be a quest for wellness. I could get into how things such as culture and income affect people's ability to be included in this movement, but that's for another day. I have developed my own quite personal relationship with wellness practices.
In college, I found yoga. I had tried and failed to meditate regularly, but yoga seemed the perfect mix of exercise and scheduled meditation time, plus I could pretend I was socializing by walking to yoga class with friends, without even having to interact with them once we got there. As I've mentioned in other posts, however, yoga was my undoing in many ways. My once-tight muscles, which had been holding my floppy joints together, were stretched out for the first time in my life, and my joints were never quite the same again. Even before I realized this, I would find that I didn't have the same experience as my peers; yoga for me was at times nauseating, dizzying, and sometimes incredibly painful in my shoulders and low back. When shavasana hurts, you know something's not right.
Similarly, I made an effort as an adult to eat well. Foods like kale, quinoa, and tofu were all the rage and supposedly healthy, so I ate as much as I could. I even bought a juicer and would make intense morning juice with beets, carrots, kale, cucumbers... basically whatever nutrient-dense veggies were in my fridge. By this point I didn't even care how it tasted -- I wanted this elusive "wellness" so badly, I was willing to forego personal taste to get it.
Yet again, for me wellness trends did not actually result in feeling well. The curries I made with kale, quinoa, tofu, and my friends' favorite health miracle, turmeric, left me bloated and gassy, and left me with crippling cramps the next day. The veggie juice gave me the runs.
It was a difficult adjustment to start eating the foods I now know to keep me healthy: pretty much chicken and starch. I eat tons of the recently stigmatized gluten. I tolerate white bread better than whole wheat, and white rice better than brown, red, or black. I go through bags of potato chips like nobody's business. If someone sees me eating without knowing anything about me, they probably think I am totally ignorant or uncaring about my body.
My struggle for wellness goes deeper than juice fads or trendy yoga classes that make me hurt. My day to day life is a constant battle between the two.
Do I spend time with friends, relax, have a blast, and nurture my social/emotional wellness? If so, I can expect it to take a significant hit on my health. Do I exercise hard enough to release endorphins and decrease cortisol (stress hormone)? Probably not worth the influx of inflammation it'll spread throughout my body. Sometimes it feels like every evening plan is a choice between what will make me feel happy, sane, relaxed, or fulfilled vs. what will make my body function on a cellular level.
Because I'm at a stage of discovery where I'm trying desperately to break cycles and tease out which foods/activities can keep me feeling healthy, I tend to lean on that side of the scale. Yet at the same time, mental health is an integral part of my overall health. If I feel overly stressed, anxious, or depressed, my cells will loudly protest. So, trying too hard to be healthy can actually backfire and make me even less healthy....
I found myself feeling trapped in this conundrum a few months ago. I wanted so badly to be able to control how I felt, to force my body to feel healthy. I found this article that gave me some perspective and, surprisingly, hope. Despite having a completely different disease, I strongly identified with everything she described. Her opening is poetic and accurate, that she "got sick the way Hemingway says you go broke: 'gradually and then suddenly.'” I couldn't have said it better myself. She describes the pain, the fear, the confusion. She perfectly pinpointed the hopelessness I felt and somehow it gave me hope to know someone out there had the exact same despair. But she hadn't given in. In fact, it's stories like this one that drove me to start a blog. I wanted more to be out there in the world for when people like me need to know we're not alone.
My main takeaway was finding ways to still find that joy and freedom and wellness, even when it directly conflicts with your health. Her subtitle, "I had an autoimmune disease. Then the disease had me." warns against letting the daily struggle for this elusive health take over your life. She learns to accept that perfection is just not going to happen, no matter how hard you try, and that you don't want to become a "health-obsessed narcissist." It's like a butterfly -- you can try to get one to land on you, but odds are it will only be for a brief moment whether you're trying or not, and trying too hard may chase it away further. So you may as well enjoy your day while you wait for it to land.
So, while I do still adhere to a ridiculous diet, and I spend most evenings by myself, resting, I splurge as much as feels reasonable. I hang out with friends enough to keep up relationships. I eat the occasional cookie. And boy does it taste good.