What your body wants you to know

Wouldn’t it be nice if your body could just talk and tell you what it wants, rather than feeling like we have to guess all the time?

Wouldn’t it be nice if it shouted at us and demanded our attention the way our mind seems to do all day long?

What if I told you your body does ‘speak’ just not through words. The body doesn’t ‘tell’ you what it wants – it will only ever show you. 

That aching back you feel every morning might be your body trying to tell you that it doesn’t like the way you sit in your office chair all day, everyday.

The acne that’s still popping up on your face even though you’re nearly forty is your body screaming at you that your liver isn’t coping with the toxic load of food, chemicals and stress that you keep asking it to process.

Your bloated tummy is your body trying to say ‘hey maybe that food isn’t the best type you could be eating’.

The way you struggle to open your eyes each morning even though you had a good nights sleep might be your body saying ‘I’m not coping with all this stress you have me under.”

That excess weight you can’t seem to shake no matter how little you eat or how much you move, might be your body saying that it is starving for the nutrition it needs.

Shall I go on?

It’s interesting that we look at all of these things that happen to our bodies and think that our ‘body is failing us’ instead of our body being this amazing thing that we ask every day to do too many things it actually wasn’t designed to do.

It wasn’t designed to digest food full of chemicals and additives rather than the nutrients it needs.

It wasn’t designed to cope with constant stress and anxiety. (It actually can’t tell the difference between the stress of a tiger about to eat you and too many pressures at work and physically the same process goes on in the body. Your body gets you ready to run or fight, even if you’re just sitting on the couch thinking about work tomorrow).

It wasn’t designed to sit all day long nor was it designed to do hours of intense exercise.

It wasn’t designed to stay up into the early hours of the morning. (Our hormones are meant to rise and fall with sunlight to help us get the restful sleep we need to restore everything for the next day.)

I have to admit though, for so long I wasn’t listening to my body at all. I simply assumed that it would do all of the things that I demanded of it all day everyday.

In high school and into my early twenties I regularly asked my body to function on very little nutrition. I’d jumped onto the ‘low fat’ train like everyone else because at that time ‘fat’ was the last thing anyone wanted to be. It makes me a little sad to think now how much time I wasted worrying about something so small and irrelevant.  It makes me sad to think how much my size determined how I felt about myself and how I lived every day. Like I wouldn’t do social things to go out if I felt ‘fat’ and I definitely held myself back in lots of areas because I thought a ‘big girl’ like me wouldn’t be able to succeed. Oh the irony of looking back and realising the way I thought I looked and the way I actually was were two verrrry different things.

During that time I pushed and pushed and pushed. I worked three jobs at uni. I stayed up late and got up early. I said yes to everything. I remember the crash and burn during uni being the worst. I’d literally drive my body into the ground and then wonder why I’d get so sick.

I did eventually get a lot better at looking after myself than those uni days. I started respecting my body for what it could DO rather than what it looked like through pregnancy.  And I had another little ‘wake up’ moment about a year after having Eamon and realised I probably needed to look after myself a bit better then with peanut butter sandwiches and feeling stressing about everything.

But even up until recently there have been lots of things that I kinda know aren’t great, but I didn’t really understand how much it was affecting me, until it wasn’t.

You don’t know what you don’t know, I guess. Or you don’t know how crap you’re actually feeling until you don’t feel that way anymore.

Up until about three months ago I didn’t realise how much my coffee addiction was actually hurting me rather than helping.

I thought I’d been eating pretty well, but if I was being really honest, too often I went with the quick easy option, rather than the most nutritious one.

I certainly wasn’t pushing my body like I did in my uni days, but I still wasn’t as kind as I could have been.

I was trading productivity for health.

I was always looking for how to do more in less time and accepting feeling constantly tired as a result.

I was getting caught up in stress and the anxiety rather than making sure I made time to deal with this daily through the practices I KNOW work and that I teach others – silence, stillness, meditation, movement, journalling…. (we teach what we need to learn right?)

I’d been passing too much of how I was feeling as ‘I’m a Mum of two little boys, one of which doesn’t sleep great who runs her own business, it’s no wonder I feel like this’.

When the reality was … I am a Mum of two little boys, who runs her own business, who DOESN’T prioritise her health over everything else.

So what changed?

Let’s just say fertility problems are an excellent way to wake up to yourself.

It’s hard to keep telling yourself that it’s all ok, when it’s clearly not ok. The wheels are falling off somewhere and it took me losing three babies to start looking for where. Even typing this makes me feel like a crazy person.  Like WHY didn’t I start looking into any of this after the first loss? Or even the second?

Whatever the reason, I’m glad I finally did.

After the third loss, I started looking for ways to heal. Physically, emotionally, mentally and spiritually.

Someone put me onto a great Naturopath and I knew from the first minute that she was the right person for me when she said the words ‘you know we might find that there is nothing physically wrong with you, it could just be emotional.’  

That first session I walked away with the most foul sludge to bring my incredibly overworked and stressed nervous system down, down, down. I’ve literally been shotting this brown stuff twice a day because it’s so disgusting.

But it worked. 

I started being able to actually hit that deep sleep that I didn’t realise I’d been missing for so long.

I felt like I could breathe again.

It was like my brain was finally working again and wanted to know more.

Which led me down the path of reading more and more about hormones and diet and how they work together.

It made me want to know how to actually support my body to FEEL it’s best. Not to look better or be skinnier, which is the only reason I ever changed anything previously.  (The irony of this is that my body actually looks better now that I don’t even care about that part)

I had a new-found deep respect for what my body does and wanted to actually make it as healthy as it could be.

I stopped moving so fast and actually listened to what my body wanted me to know.

And it feels BLOODY good.

Your body wants you to know some things… are you