An Anxiety, Vegan, Irritable Bowel Life
Is My Health Expectation Consistent with My Life Inputs?
A few years ago, I had a 41-year-old female with chronic anxiety, bowels that are so irritable she finds herself running to urgent care multiple times per year, while declaring she “can’t lose weight” no matter what she does. Unfortunately, year after year she failed to recognize that her symptoms were a directly manifesting her lifestyle. A vegan lifestyle (mostly food in packages) was the only way for her, and she “knew” it was the healthiest diet for her.
She couldn’t do any other job because she had so much “freedom” with it and the money was good. She didn’t need to exercise because she was always up and moving during the day. She only has two cups of coffee per day and could drop if she wanted to, she just likes the taste.
Well, this past year I saw her for about the 10th time in the last 7 years and she had stopped drinking coffee, amazingly she had soooo much more energy. She joined a CrossFit gym at the request of her daughter and was shocked at how out of shape she was. And she finally started taking the iron and B12 I had recommended after her first blood draw because she was so depleted.
She said, “I don’t know what I was thinking, any time I would change anything in my life, I would do it for 1-2 days and think I don’t feel any different and quit.”
“I finally realized, how I live is not working.” She has not been to the urgent care in over 9 months, and she is not having panic attacks.
Often, we expect to enjoy life differently but fail to act on adjusting our daily food, fitness, and life decisions to line up for the different or better life we are expecting to experience.
Daily decisions create the tomorrow we are now living in.
We are living beings. Our structure from the deepest level is constantly being refurbished. There is no off switch, except death. The second we begin to be knitted together in our mother’s womb; we continue in this endless turnover and refining process until death.
Life experiences, food inputs, environmental irritants, activity, sleep, clothing, words spoken at us and around us all imprint into our cells a signal. Sometimes these signals are building us up and sometimes tearing us down. Many experiences early on in life we had no control over. But now that we are of age, we get to decide what inputs we are going to accept and which ones we are going to forgo.
Say we are anxious and tired. Well, Mountain Dew and In-N-Out inputs today are going make us more anxious and tired tomorrow. Feeling like life is overwhelming and that we are underperforming, so we hop on our phone and start scrolling. This input made life just that more difficult tomorrow.
Family is in town. I’m super busy, have a headache. I need a glass of wine and Advil. This input today is going to make tomorrow that much more difficult.
How we feel today. The stomach pain. The acid reflux. The eczema. The migraines. The low back pain. The panic. The wild blood sugar. All of it was seeded and watered yesterday. To overcome these health challenges requires we put in different information today, so that we can create a different health manifestation tomorrow.
Racing through today expecting our health in mind, body and spirit to magically be different, is standard American living but it is false hope.
We are lying to ourselves if we think we are going to be running around playing tennis, hiking, tossing are grandkids over our shoulder at Disneyland at 75, if we are living based off what we feel like in the moment. There is not a point where performing physical exertion is truly “fun,” adaptation is not “fun” but the fruit of it is everything we want in life. Reading a book to better understand our children vs watching TV or going on Pinterest is not “fun” but the reward of healthy children is priceless.
We have the time. We have the resources. If you are listening or reading this, you have the knowledge and support to make health accumulating decisions today that will open the door for health to manifest tomorrow.
In 24 hours tomorrow is showing up. A week is going to pass. A month, a year will be in our rearview, if we are still on planet earth.
Start with 1 push up today.
Meat and vegetables for dinner.
Dropping your phone in the drawer at 5pm.
Memorizing one Bible verse this week.
Calling up that person, you have been meaning to reach out to.
Health accumulation always starts with today! Then put it on repeat.