How Can I Feel Really Good in My Body While Living with an Autoimmune Disorder?
So you’re dealing with chronic health or autoimmune issues.
Maybe you’ve gotten used to feeling low-key crappy as your baseline most of the time. Maybe you have some chronic pain. Maybe you have digestive issues that keep you feeling unsettled. Maybe your sleep isn’t great.
Maybe you have low-level background anxiety about your health. Maybe you feel like you’re running from an empty tank a lot of the time.
And maybe, over time, you start to feel worse and worse. You’re trying to get ahead of it, but you’re getting further and further under it.
I know this game. I have lived with an autoimmune disorder for nearly a decade.
I’ve been through a lot during that time, bouncing from one health crisis to another.
I woke up with headaches every.single.day.
I dealt with constant, chronic pain -- sometimes more pronounced and burning; other times more like super-tight contracted, stiff muscles; still other times, feeling inflammation throughout my organs.
My nervous system was like a runaway train, with my heart racing while I was at rest. I would jolt awake from a dead sleep with a gasp.
I had difficult digestive issues, including an entire summer of burning pain in my abdomen with no appetite, during which I nearly wasted away.
I had scary cardiac symptoms which landed me in the ER a couple of times, and followed up with a cardiologist for another year.
I had weight gain due to the chronic inflammation in my system.
I also became a magnet for mosquitoes and would sunburn very easily, neither of which were the case before.
Over the years, I’ve tried so many things, some
Different ways of eating.
Parasite cleanses.
Frequency devices.
Red light therapy.
Autonomic nervous system healing protocols and vagus nerve-stimulating devices.
All manner of herbs and supplements.
So many tests.
Various practitioners of various ilks, ranging from ‘functional medicine’ practitioners to muscle-testing.
Research rabbit-holes.
Trying to outsmart my doctors.
Taking horrible advice from dodgy supplement-pushers that very nearly killed me (see the scary cardiac symptoms, above!).
My quest to feel better became a desperate obsession. Both my illness and my attempts to curb it were spiralling increasingly out of control, as I looked further and further outward for solutions, while feeling worse, on a downhill trajectory.
Oh yeah… did I mention that I’m also a healing professional?
I’ve been a Certified Holistic Health Coach since 2007. I’m a Certified Classical Homeopath. I’ve also been a Licensed Massage Therapist, and have studied herbalism, nutrition, and a myriad of other healing modalities.
By New Year’s Day of 2021, I’d had it. I’d had enough of the bullshit. Enough of feeling crappy. Enough of being the one not to heal when I was able to help other people get such great results. Enough of having so much knowledge and expertise and not being able to apply it to myself. Enough of spiralling out of control.
“No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.” ~Albert Einstein
I’m not exactly sure what was responsible for this shift. But here’s what I knew:
I needed to go all-in on my healing, in a way that wasn’t simply indulging my shiny-new-object syndrome and research rabbit-hole tendencies.
I needed to be radically honest with myself, in a way that I hadn’t been before, about any secondary benefits that I was getting from feeling crappy, or other subconscious gremlins that may have been sabotaging my efforts.
I needed to get 100% of myself on board with actually getting results and not just spinning my wheels.
With this new resolve, along with my hard-earned lessons, both personal and professional, not only did I shed nearly all of the symptoms that previously plagued me, within a few months of committing to myself on this level, but I’ve unlocked powerful practices that activate mechanisms that help me to feel really good in my body, every day.
How did I do this, you ask?
I’ve mostly followed these three principles:
Remove everything that causes inflammation and interferes with your body’s self-healing mechanisms;
Add in practices that activate your body’s survival response mechanisms;
Make time every day for radical self-love.
Healing is Removing
“Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” ~Antoine de Saint-Exupery
By far the biggest game-changer for me has been to eliminate things that cause inflammation and that interfere with the healing and repair process.
By simply removing things, you can accomplish so much healing. Without the constant irritation, poking, prodding, and nagging that a noxious (to you) element can cause, your body and being can relax and focus its energy on repair, and on making you feel good. I mean, the first step to healing from a splinter is to get the damn splinter out, right?! It can be a bit less straightforward to navigate when it comes to other things, like food, relationships, or lifestyle habits, but investing energy into figuring this out for yourself is highly worthwhile.
This is a highly individual process; what is removed could look like different things for different people. For me, personally, I had to go really deep into removing to make the headway that I needed to shift out of my feeling-crappy-maintenance-mode and start to reverse direction into feeling-damn-good. This has mostly been in the arena of food, but it extends to things like alcohol, stressful circumstances, and unhealthy patterns of relating.
With respect to food, I have tried many different ways of eating over the years, including Paleo, the Autoimmune Paleo Protocol, and the Wahls Protocol, but I didn’t get significant results from any of those. When I would see others getting great results from these protocols, I would feel like I was broken, or too far-gone. I figured that diet on its own was not going to be enough to elicit healing for me — but the truth was, I simply hadn’t gone deep enough into removing.
I know well that it can be really hard to give things up, especially if those things bring us pleasure. Attachment runs deep. We turn to foods for comfort, or out of habit. For myself, though, nothing tastes as good as healthy feels. While I have moments of missing some of the things that I have removed, they are by far outweighed by the benefits that I’ve experienced from removing them.
The thing that got amazing results for me — which may not be what gets results for you, as we all need to figure out what works for us — was to remove plants from my diet, almost completely. (Well, except for coffee, of course. I mean, come on!)
Now, I’ve always been a planty person. I was vegetarian throughout most of my teenage and college years. I’ve trained as an herbalist, studied plant spirit medicine, and even owned my own herbal product line at one point. Being planty was part of my identity.
If you’d told me ten years ago that I would be living in a reality where plants were not only verboten to me, but that I’d be thriving for it, you’d have properly blown my mind.
From removing plants, I’ve gained so much. There are countless others with autoimmunity who have experienced similar benefits. But everyone is on their own journey. I’ve seen as many people heal from eating only fruit as I’ve seen heal from eating only meat. So there is no one “right” way to do it. If you’re struggling with autoimmunity or other chronic issues and haven’t gotten good results with what you’ve been doing, I’d invite you to go deeper into simplifying, removing, and finding a way of eating that offers your body the opportunity to heal itself — bearing in mind that this may change over time.
While I’m sure some may argue that this way of eating is overly restrictive and punitive, let me tell you some of the secondary benefits that have arisen for me. I have the pleasure of simplicity that results from my options being limited. When it comes time to prepare a meal at home, I don’t have to reinvent the wheel. When we go out to a restaurant, I usually have one or two choices from the menu items. This way of eating saves me a lot of decision fatigue. My menu choices are as varied as Steve Jobs’ wardrobe.
I also have the pleasure of satiety. Most of the foods that I do consume are rich and satisfying, with an emphasis on animal fats for healing the gut lining. Fatty meats, cultured dairy, egg yolks, broth, butter, and honey are all in my regimen, along with fermented vegetable juices (and the occasional unsweetened, 100% cacao chocolate chips for a decadent treat).
This way of eating has had the effect of, quite literally, giving me a brand-new body. People that I haven’t seen in a while tell me that I have aged backwards. I’ve shed a lot of excess weight, and have had the pleasure of buying myself new clothes to accommodate my new figure. I feel more freedom in my body: greater ease of movement, more incentive to exercise, and the near-absence of previously regular symptoms that ranged from uncomfortable and annoying to downright scary. All of this compounds together to make me feel more fun, playful, and sexy. All good stuff in my book!
Use the Force
"Natural forces within us are the true healers of disease." ~Hippocrates
The second aspect of my approach has been to add in practices that stimulate the body’s healing responses. The design of our bodies was forged under conditions of scarcity and exposure to the elements. Our body has powerful mechanisms that allow us to not only survive, but thrive under certain amounts of adverse conditions.
The economist Nassim Nicholas Taleb is famous for his musings on randomness and volatility. In Antifragile, he discusses this phenomenon:
“Diabetes and many similar modern ailments seem to be associated with a lack of randomness in feeding and the absence of the stressor of occasional starvation…. Too much regular food is bad for you, and depriving humans of the stressor of hunger may make them live less than their full potential; so all hormesis seems to be doing is reestablishing the natural dosage for food and hunger in humans. In other words, hormesis* is the norm, and its absence is what hurts us."
How fascinating is it that our modern conditions of abundance and comfort are actually an impediment to our health?
With fasting, exposure to the elements, and creating conditions of oxygen deprivation, once you make it through the initial discomfort, you’ll find much pleasure on the other side. Your body responds to the “stress” with a flood of feel-good hormones that improve your mood, reduce inflammation, initiate regeneration and repair, and clear out damaged cells. You start to feel more alive. This includes practices such as breathwork, cold thermogenesis, fasting, and sauna.
Exercise is also considered a hormetic stress, and while I enjoy movement in low doses, I’m not one to go running or lift weights. (The force is strong in this one — the force of inertia, that is!) Yet, movement is life, and I feel at my best when I am fluid and supple in my body.
For even deeper hormetic healing, consider working with a practitioner such as a homeopath or acupuncturist. Both of these modalities stimulate the adaptive response of the body to initiate global healing.
Pleasure and Self-Love as an Antidote to Autoimmunity
“Pleasure is the first good. It is the beginning of every choice and every aversion. It is the absence of pain in the body and of troubles in the soul.” ~Epicurus
“Pleasure is an essential nutrient that you need, each and every day, to become and remain healthy”. ~ Dr. Christiane Northrup
The third aspect is to dedicate time for self-care, pleasure, and rest, every single day. I mean this. When you’re dealing with an autoimmune disorder, your body is attacking its own tissues. There is a self-destructive process happening. You are essentially at war with yourself. Therefore, it is imperative to lavish yourself in self-loving as an antidote to this process. Be gorgeous to yourself. Romance yourself with daily detox baths, self-pleasure, active enjoyment. Become your own best lover. Seek out what you want, get in touch with your desires, and find ways of providing them for yourself.
Healing can feel so restrictive and spartan, especially on a path like the one I’m on. That’s another reason why adding in this hedonic element felt like a crucial step. Healing should be delightful. Making things enjoyable is a life skill that I’ve embraced as part of my healing path, and has extended to other arenas of my life. I desire for it to become a way of being for me.
We all know the impact of prolonged stress on any health condition. We aren’t meant to stay in fight-or-flight for any significant length of time. Healing simply cannot happen in a sympathetic nervous system state. That’s why intentionally introducing pleasure practices as an intervention can be so effective, since it induces a parasympathetic state. Thus, experiencing pleasure is inherently healing -- as long as what you’re experiencing doesn’t interfere with your self-healing mechanisms.
If you’re struggling with an autoimmune disorder, I invite you to adopt these strategies and see if you, too, can feel amazing in your body.
* Hormesis is an adaptive response of cells and/or organisms to a moderate stress.