6 Signs Your Body Needs a Change
LACK OF ENERGY or FATIGUE
STOMACH BLOATING/PAIN
IRRITABLE/MOODY
HEARTBURN/OTHER PHYSICAL CHANGES
BINGE EATING/ED HABITS
PLATEAU
LACK OF ENERGY or FATIGUE
I often hear the word unmotivated when I talk to my clients. We all wear many hats so you’re going to feel tired and there will be days where the last thing you want to do is put on your workout clothes to do a 20 minute workout in your home. These are normal human feelings. I’m not referring to the urge of hitting the snooze button once. I mean intensity of when you sleep through the snooze.
Prior to being diagnosed with UC, I would hear people talk about fatigue and I’d giggle inside thinking ‘get a grip, we’re all busy and tired…’
I now apologize to anyone who felt personally victimized by Raina.
When my body started to send signs that I needed to slow down and reduce my stress, it came in the form of fatigue first. The kind where you can’t get off the couch. Days go by and dinner was dry cereal out of the box. Borderline depression maybe, but I wasn’t sad. It didn’t feel like unmotivated, it felt like unable.
The change for me was implementing a routine that worked for ME. And only me. That was wake up call number one.
STOMACH BLOATING/PAIN
I’ve learned to listen to any sign of pain or discomfort. I see a lot of posts on social media normalizing bloat after eating and it drives me crazy. We accept the fact that our body has a painful and physical response when we eat something and we don’t take two seconds to think, ‘maybe my body didn’t like that…’
Did you know that your stomach can also bloat and have pain because of stress or anxiety? Right, it’s not always food related.
Give yourself a quick check.
Pain or bloat? What did I eat? Am I stressed or anxious?
Yes or no, note it and remember. Don’t forget that most of what you’ll learn about your body is through trial and error. Yeah, the universe likes us to learn through experience sometimes by forcing us to be present. My hope is that my Intentional Eating Course is a great tool to help you identify underlying issues.
IRRITABLE/MOODY
I needed to hear this once and I’m assuming at least one of you need to now. It’s okay to not be okay.
It’s okay to have days where you may snap or days where you really do snap. We are hormonal beings and if somethings off, you’ll feel that too.
A quick scan: are you hungry? Hanger has shown it’s ugly face a few times for me and I can recognize it immediately. I get a jitter, a laser focus almost kills anyone it comes in contact with when I’ve gone without eating for too long if I’m busy or running errands. If one things interrupts my laser focus, I’ll eat you alive on my way to get a steak.
Another quick scan: what have you done for YOU lately? We can become pulled in many directions with those hats we wear and it can cause use to lose the grip own our own self care. If you need to take a minute, do it. I often hide out in my bathroom with lights off for 3 minutes, just to close my eyes and focus on a few really deep breaths.
HEARTBURN/OTHER PHYSICAL CHANGES
A couple years after my diagnosis, I started to notice severe heartburn and acid reflux. I was the worst at night and I wouldn’t feel it until right before bed which as you can imagine, didn’t allow for the best sleep. It got so bad where one night, family had to call 911 because I felt like I couldn’t catch a breath and someone was sitting on my chest. I couldn’t take a breath.
It doesn’t have to be at this level to see it as a warning sign. A simple burn or discomfort in your chest or gut is a SIGN still.
There are natural remedies to this and ways to help it at night by sleeping at an angle and making sure you don’t eat late at night which I wasn’t very good at during this point in my life.
One night I was woken from my sleep by pain & I was rushed to the ER because I was shaking and vomiting after a burning and severe cramping in my gut. This turned out to be Gallstones. Again, many natural remedies can be found, including a cleaner diet and less stress.
I’m aware that these are things that not everyone will experience but I want you to be aware of them as it’s yet another signal for you to make some needed changes. I reflected on my gallstone episode and all I could do was shake my head. NO WONDER! I had spent the last several months prior eating everything I could to try to gain some weight as I was recovering from my surgeries. Burgers and wings and nachos and pizza… Yes, cleaner versions sometimes, but still caused a lot of damage. Your body isn’t made to process all of that. Let alone all of that inhaled in one week.
It was a signal for me to take a step back and reflect on the so called fuel going into my body.
BINGE EATING/ED HABITS
I struggled with eating disorders for a decade through my 20’s. I spent years following a “cheerio diet” as I called it and other years were spent watching out the window, chowing down on a heaping bowl of cereal, scurrying to finish before my husband to come home from work.
How many nights a week do you find yourself mindlessly hovering over the snack bowl in front of the latest Netflix series?
Through implementing different routines, trying a variety of plans, working with coaches I’ve allowed myself to really heal. But it took time.
I can now feel signals in my body or wiring in my brain being triggered during certain times of the day or in specific situations where I would then think, “shit, if I hadn’t have gone through this and learned that, I would have been set off into a binge easily.
I had to question WHY the urge to binge would come up when I was alone.
What was it about being alone that triggered this?
Was it boredom, mind wandering?
Starting negative thoughts and getting in my head with comparison?!
Feeling unwanted and thinking well maybe if I looked this way, things would be different…
I was programed, like most of you, to think that if I didn’t like the way I looked, well, cut back on some calories here and there and lose some weight.
THAT WILL MAKE YOU FEEL BETTER.
I had to question WHY I would look in the mirror and think RESTRICT when I needed to think GRATITUDE. Gratitude for what this body has been through from growth to children to illness, take a second to soak in what you've survived.
Maybe again, it's stress?
Anxiety?
So just notice.
Develop the intention to pay attention.
What is your body telling you with those urges and feelings?
PLATEAU
Since I’ve mentioned stress in every other area, I won’t stop now.
Often times a plateau can be a direct reflection of the energy we’re putting into our journey.
Stress often times leads to us skipping out on self care. Self care in the form of a workout, fueling your body the way you should, taking the time to read a book or sit in the bath when the kids are in bed.
Instead of seeing that we need to slow down, we get busy as a distraction, which in turn creates even more stress.
Meanwhile, your body is sitting there like, I’m just going to hold onto everything we’ve got because this chick is about to lose her shit.
Your body is holding on to every macronutrient it can because it knows your habit of restriction. It knows that you like to stop eating as a form of twisted self care, so it’s going to plateau for survival.
Or the opposite, your body is holding on to every macronutrient because there are so many coming in, your body is in store mode. Storing every macro because well, we skipped the workout again and calories in aren’t matching calories out.
Therefore, we plateau.
Listen, even just typing that is exhausting so I know how frustrated you are.
I know the feeling of stuck.
That feeling like there’s gotta be something I can do to feel better…
Well, there is. There are simple and quick choices you can make in EVERY one of these areas that will allow you to get a little bit of you back.
I'll share, there are hundreds of 'signs' you could find if you did the research. I share six that I've experienced and really lived. If you read all six of these points and found something in each area that you need to work on, don’t feel the need to tackle them all at once. Go back and remember the common word in all areas, STRESS.
Don’t stress yourself out even more by feeling the need to make a dramatic change. It's just about taking one small step at a time and being intentional about making time for what matters.
Not perfection, just choosing to pay attention in a different way.
