So I started this blog and then never posted anything LOL. Reason being, the day after I started it, I went on vacation and completely unplugged from life for a bit. I had a really awesome and relaxing week, but it was still chock full of lessons on this healing journey.
The first one came with diet, and a lot of old patterns and feelings around food, eating, working out, and body image erupted as a result. Without getting too much into my food history, since I was 6-years-old, I have had a disordered relationship with food and my body. I was mildly overweight as a child and my mother, who had her own struggles with her weight and body image, imprinted her beliefs upon me rather quickly. I remember being on Weight Watchers as young as second grade. When I hit puberty, I really leaned out naturally, and for the first time in my life, people were starting to say how skinny I was. This ignited a long affair of disordered eating, food restriction, “healthy” diets, and extreme exercise.
These disordered eating patterns lasted well into my twenties and were only exacerbated by doing Crossfit and counting macros, or competing in Olympic Weightlifting, which by its nature is a weight-controlled sport. It was very easy to hide my disordered eating tendencies and extreme working out by the fact that I was a very active and competitive athlete. From basketball to rowing to Crossifit, running marathons, and competing in Weightlifting, physical fitness and “eating healthy” was always important to me. And don’t get me wrong, along the way I learned soooooo many good things about what it is to be healthy, about reading food labels, portion sizes, macros and micros, etc, etc. But it got to a point where food, eating, and burning calories was ALWAYS on my mind.
Fast forward to today, I have healed a lot of this disordered eating and overexercising, but I knew that when I started this new “diet” (aka just eliminating dairy and gluten for a few months) there were still some hooks from my past still in me. And a lot of this came up for me on vacation!
A lot of fear has actually come up for me around being super restrictive with my diet because I fear that if I become a “Food nazi” (as my family used to call me), I will slip back into my old patterns of highly restrictive and obsessive eating patterns. I am still battling internally the “restrict everything” vs. the “YOLO” mindsets. Unfortunately, for my skin, the YOLO mindset won out the first night of vacation, where I was treated to an INSANE steakhouse dinner, where I very knowingly ate gluten and paid for it later that night at 3am when I woke up incessantly scratching my hands. Lesson learned: gluten is likely a trigger.
But this heavy meal then lit a spark in me the next day, kind of out of nowhere: I need to work out and burn off that meal.
I can’t tell you the last time I had that feeling. So, I got up the next morning, went outside and did a workout by the pool and then jumped in the pool and started swimming laps for exercise. But, this soon turned into one of the most fun experiences I’ve had with myself in a really long time! As I was swimming, I started to remember the first summer we got a pool and how I spent ALL summer in the water just simply playing with friends and how active I was for the sake of being active, not for exercise. And as I remembered this, I started doing this. I swam just to have fun, I jumped in and out of the pool, I held my breath for as long as I could, or would test myself to see how far I could swim on one breath. And I did this for two hours!
During these two hours, I was reminded of a few important things:
I was reminded that I DO NOT need to punish my body for the food I eat. Exercise is NOT punishment. Playing is just as important AND as effective as structured exercise is and I need to make more time for it. That food is fuel for my body to do so many amazing things, and it is okay right now for me to be restricting certain things. It does not mean I will revert back to my old tendencies.
The rest of my vacation I did not formally “work out” at all. Instead, we rode bikes, we walked the dog, we played on the beach, and did some more swimming. I was constantly able to move my body like I did as a kid, and that was so freeing!
And to my surprise, after my one gluten-induced flare-up, my skin was SO MUCH BETTER than it has been in months! I was so shocked. I kept showing my boyfriend my hands and he said, “this is the best your hands have looked the entire time we’ve dated!” This was shocking because I was barely following my diet (I was still consuming dairy each day), I wasn’t meditating, dry brushing, sauna-ing, doing lymphatic drainage, or taking any supplements. And the inflammation reduction, the itching, cracking, swelling, etc was reduced from a 9 to a 2-3. It really just goes to show how critical it is for me to continue to live in a way that reduces my daily stress.
As soon as I came home and entered back into “real life” the itching and cracking started up once more! I know it is completely unrealistic to live a vacation-style life all the time and I have to be honest, I am worried about what will happen when I have to go back to work in a week. But until then, I am going to try to keep fostering a low-stress atmosphere for myself as I continue on this journey!