By Coach Dafne Alayon, PhD
What is health? How do you define it? Some might look at biological markers of health such as blood pressure, cholesterol, blood sugar management, heart rate, visceral fat. Others describe health as the ability to do work across a variety of tasks and time domains throughout one’s life. The intersection of these includes absence of illness while feeling vital and able to accomplish the tasks that make us feel fulfilled. If we approach these concretely, we can arrive at a simple way to increase health and reduce illness: eat well and in the appropriate quantities, sleep enough, exercise. So simple, so elegant! But life isn’t as simple.
I’ve never felt the complexities of the variables that contribute to health more than after I had children. Before having children, I had some issues to manage (mainly migraines) but was otherwise able to sleep enough, rest enough, work a ton, play a ton, eat well, and exercise regularly. I had my kids in my later 30’s and found that things changed in unpredictable ways that vastly impacted many of my areas of functioning. I was underslept and unable to rest when my body called for it. I also sustained pelvic floor injuries that I was too exhausted to even think of doing the 15 minutes a day rehab for at the end of the day. I was devastated that my body failed me and I couldn’t be a crossfitter anymore (at least not for a long time). My body was out of whack from 2 years of back to back pregnancies and 18 months of breastfeeding, migraines almost every day. I didn’t connect with my husband in the same physical ways as before. My body bore the wounds of babies, but also those wounds continued making themselves known to me in the form of discomfort, pain, disconnect. Should we name more? Vascular reflux, weird blood pressure stuff, strange aches and pains.
You might find that your health (as a woman) is intricately tied to answering questions like:
- Who am I without the movement I love?
- Why am I still not “balanced” after a year post breastfeeding?
- Are these somatic feelings part of psychological stress, a signal that I have a medical issue that needs to be addressed, or a normal progression of hormone change as a function of perimenopause?
- Why am I making my body bigger/more foreign to me?
- Why do I pee when I jump/sneeze/cough/laugh?
As women, we go through so many changes throughout life that it can be difficult to get a grasp of what we are feeling, where it is stemming from, and what to do about it. We experience peaks (and often don’t realize how great we feel until we are beyond them!), we go through loss (loss of pregnancies, loss of family, loss of friends, loss of identity, loss of dreams), we gain great loves and great relationships, we lose our hair, we lose control of some things. We wake up feeling different everyday. We get cramps, we feel good, we have shoulder pain, we wonder if it’s loss of estrogen rearing its head as frozen shoulder. We ask a doctor, our labs are normal. That’s just being a woman, I guess. We can develop profound sensitivity to the sensations and changes inside our bodies (often to the dismissal of “experts”), but we can also develop serious distancing and rejection of our bodies (being the ones who dismiss ourselves) in response to the hurts we have endured. Sometimes the disconnect we create with our bodies takes the form of overeating, other times it’s severing the connection between nervous system and body, not responding to hunger cues, cues of fatigue, loss of sex drive, loss of feeling. These all contribute to whether or not we can eat well and exercise enough!
The road to feeling whole and building health is clearly defined, but each of us has a different path to walk to get on that road. Our bloodwork is only one piece of the puzzle. To be able to truly learn about our needs and give ourselves the right things at the right time, we need help from experts who will look at our whole selves. Some of us need help identifying the ways we don’t give ourselves consistency (and exploring the why) before we can even think to begin nourishing ourselves in an attuned manner. Others of us need help connecting with our bodies in a safe way, slowly coming back to ourselves with an openness to the memories that may be elicited on the way (that was a huge piece that my pelvic floor therapist helped me with after my birth trauma–shout out to Dr. Joella Toro for her sensitivity and attunement!). We need time for awareness and healing to make room for the appropriate concrete interventions. But for all of us, knowing that health is made up of layers and layers of experience that deserves a place to be processed is key. The first step is lovingly taking account of things like: what season of life are you in right now? (and telling yourself that it’s OK), what your support system looks like, what your community support/lack of support looks like, what your relationship with your partner feels like, how do your current obstacles feel to you, what needs of yours are and aren’t being met? How are those variables affecting your ability to make sound choices for yourself? It’s not easy when our bodies are constantly changing, the holders of so much experience. But, with the right support, you can piece together your experience in a meaningful way to address the things you want to see change, and probably make friends for life along the way.
