My Absolute Obedience To My Body's Needs

I consider myself very spiritual. I used to almost completely ignore my physical needs, fatigue, pain, illness, etc., but, after paying a sky-high price for my ignorance, I become almost completely obedient to my physical part of myself, when to eat, sleep, rest, I act like a soldier following orders of general. Of course, this change took many years!

I wonder how many people really know how much we owe to our great physical conditions for our "noble" spirits. Most people take it for granted that we have some superior mental dignity which can exist independently from our physical existence, not aware of, or admit, that without our physical support, our spiritual beings could simply fall apart.

Of course, we saw many cases that one could be physically broken but still hold spirit high, but, based on my personally observation/experience, hardly anyone can sustain long term physical torture, either imposed on them by others human beings, or by illnesses. As matter of fact, I even think, arguably, that our high spirit after all, is nothing more than an "appearance" of something completely physical.

For quite a while, my physical condition has been soaring up, and the spiritual side of myself is also reviving. Though overall I am still a little more than 80% of myself, I know that I am on the right track - at least for myself: no longer hold my spiritual desires above my physical needs. Mind succumb to body, because health is everything, indeed!

Modern Myth - Mental Unwellness as the Cause of Physical Unwellness

Health (Photo credit: 401K)

It seems to be many people's belief that mental wellness plays big role in our physical health, even functions as a cause of many physical illnesses. I doubt it. I do believe that our mental wellness play big role in the overall quality of our lives, but not necessarily (a big role) the physical part of it.

Studies show that many people who have mental problems such as depression or anxiety also have physical problems. This result seems to be very convincing about how mental wellness affect physical condition, but for me, it doesn't. I agree it does show the connection - our mental and physical parts of lives closely connect to each others, but, I do not see it shows mental condition IS THE CAUSE and physical illness IS THE CONSEQUENCE. For me, a reversed procedure is much more convincing - that very often mental unwellness is the consequence of our bad physical condition.

By my limited knowledge, the reasons that many people believe mental unwellenss is a cause of our physical health are: 1, modern psychology brought the importance of mental condition to our concern (which is good); 2, many studies show the connections between mental and physical health; 3, the "faith" to modern medicine (in other words, when doctors cannot diagnose a self-claimed physical illness, they blame to patients' mental conditions). But for me, none of these reasons show precisely that mental illness is the CAUSE of our physical illness - modern psychology just stressed the importance of our mental health, it does not necessarily make it as the cause of everything; the connection between mental and physical condition does not prove mental condition is the cause of latter (as I pointed out above), and doctors' failure on diagnosing physical diseases also cannot be a proof of patients' mental problems (rather, it is a proof of the ignorance of many so call "experts:). But why people still easily believe on our mental power? I am not entirely sure, and that's why I call it "modern myth".

One of examples of how people hold such belief is how doctors treat patients with unknown chronic illnesses. Whenever they failed diagnose some diseases by their knowledge and expensive equipment - which they (doctors and many people) believe as "omnipotent" on humans' physical function, they would confidently ask patients: "are you in depression?" And in most case, these patients are unfortunately in depression, at lease when they are very ill. But important fact is, their depression usually is caused by their physical condition, not the another way around:
"we should not confuse the fact that the vast majority of fatigue patients are depressed BECAUSE OF CHRONIC ILLNESS, not chronic ill because of they are depressed. this is a very important distinction and one that most doctors fail to draw... to treat depression as causing the whole illness is wrong" (i would add "is not only wrong but dangerous". ---Edward Conley, author of "america exhausted"

Of course, Conley was addressing those patients with physical chronic illness only. He did not say that all depressions are caused by chronic physical illness. I agree that there are also plenty of depressions are caused by mental issues, not physical ones. All I am trying to express here is, while our mental condition does affect our physical condition to some degree, it is not "scientific" nor "reasonable" to stretch this "some degree" to an exaggerated extent, like many people believe. I personally believe, that compare with our physical condition, mental condition is "secondary" in our overall life quality. This "belief" is based on a simple fact: our physical condition IS THE FOUNDATION of our whole life being. For those who believe our spiritual condition is more important, I would suggest that it is because sometime, or some of us, our physical condition allow us to be "spiritual", and we probably just take it for granted.

Again, I do agree that mental wellness is important to the overall quality of our lives (because it does affect our happiness tremendously), but not as crucial to our physical body function. Just imagining a person who is chronically tortured by physical pain, can he/she by so call "positive"? He/she might be tough enough to hold hope, certainly cannot be happy and cheerful all the time. On the contrary, I have seen plenty of people who have sever depression but still in decent (some are in excellent) physical health. For me, this is enough to show the dominance of our physical condition to our life existence.

And we all know, if our physical body died, we don't even have so call mental health exist, unless, of course, if you believe we have soul, which continues to act "positively" in heaven.

2010 - my body's victory over my mind

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It's the third day of new year, I got to write something here! I like to put it in brief: The best thing I had in past year is: my stomach was finally liberated from the dictatorship of my mind!

After I was "forced" by my stomach to change my diet back to my "normal" - that means to follow my stomach, NOT so much to follow my mind - which was "armed" with "modern scientific nutriology", I finally stepped out of my worst 2 years' (2009-2010) energy struggle - I am able to do lots of things each day.

Also, I stopped worrying about gaining weight. This stress-free state of mind let my body finally had freedom to "speak out loudly" to my once "despotic brain" about what it wanted! Prior to this point, I always "carefully" and "wisely" chose foods that were "nutritious but less fattening", or the foods that "yeast candida' wouldn't like, or the foods would kill yeast candidas, etc. The consequence was serious - the more purposely I chose foods, the less energy I had and the more sick I was!

Of course, I only speak for myself. I learned that everybody has different health problems with different causes, so everybody does have (and should have) different solution on diet.

For this reason, I doubt that modern medicine could have some good ideas to cope with Chronic fatigue - if it continues standing firmly on its foundation: semiological and mechanical approach toward human. I even doubt that the new discovery of XMRV could do much good about CFS/ME, because it is still a theory/discovery that based on semiological view - and CFS is just NOT about symptoms but our body's inner harmony.

Still, I am not anywhere near my best health condition yet. I am still in the need of much rest and good diet. I don't know how long it will take to make myself in a completely good health but I do see the light.

Meanwhile I will just focus on my each day and each meal.

"Right" or " wrong" nutrition - who decides?

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I have been feeling better little by little each day for couple of weeks, by feeding myself with "right" foods that my stomach demanded. Actually all these "right foods" such as "white rice", "white wheat", milk and red meat, were all "wrong foods" by my understanding during all these recent several years.

For long time, I purposely cut off white flour and white rice in order to control my weight. Not only that, by candida diet theory sugar and white flour are both "the best friends" of yeast candida so they need to be eliminated completely from daily menu. However, after suffering my recent relapse, my stomach demanded me to eat white flour and white rice, otherwise I would get into serious trouble. And as matter of fact, I have been feeling better and better by listening to my stomach.

There are so many nutrition recommendations out there. So many researches by experts tell people what to eat and what not to. While I understand that many of these tips or theories were "scientifically" studied, I am still not completely convinced their efficiency, rather, I am quite convinced that "right" nutrition is really a "depend on each individual" business - especially for unknown chronic illness patients. In many cases, I think patients would feel better if they chose to listen to their own body instead of doctors.

I have never done any food allergy test, nor I understand what exactly the symptoms of food allergy are. Of course, just because I never had such experience doesn't mean other people don't have it. However, I have read a book written by some chronic patient telling story about his food allergy test: it ended like basically he was allergy to most types of food!

I thought I had "put my health on my own hands" since long time ago. I trusted doctors before, but they have convinced me that they had no clues about me at all. So I learned to take care of myself by reading informations online, from books or sharing others' experience. I have been also keeping an open mind in experimenting many different treatments/regimens by myself. Now, looking back, I "seem" to be able to get an idea of what's really going on with me: I have not really "put my health on my own hands". If my previous years of chronic problems were caused by my years of bad life style, my recent couple of years' problems mostly were caused by my "ruthless" "anti - Chinese traditional" experiment on diet. Basically, I ignored what my stomach wanted, forced my body to listen to my mind. Now, my body is launching her finally retaliation - forced me to eat what she needs!

More and more, I believe that the complexity of human body is beyond Newton's mechanics, and dealing with such a complexity with limited semeiological treatments, or, "scientifically" designing a few of certain "healthy" diet structures for all people is not only NOT ENOUGH but NOT RIGHT, and even DANGEROUS. I also start to believe that recovering from chronic illness is actually a personal business - each person has her/his own causes and treatments. Of course, knowledge from experts can help us understand our body function in general, but, if we admit that our body is more complicated than what our mind has already understood, we do need to respect it by yielding our mind to our body.

So again, "listen to our body". We, ourselves are the only one who have direct contact with our own body, and our body never stops giving us clues to save ourselves, if we could only listen to it!

What do I regret about my life?

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At this middle age I recall the part of life I have lived, I would say that I regret nothing but exercise!

I had a typical Chinese mindset that tends to separate physical part from mental part of our life. Many Chinese people seem to believe that a strong physical bodybuild represents lower intelligence (of course this is not stately recognized notion but I believe it was implied in many aspects of Chinese culture). Not that Chinese people don't want to be physically healthy, but lots of them just don't care much about exercises and sports. I believe I unconsciously hold this idea through my early years of life. That's why I was never into exercise, even though I desperately needed it since I was a teenager (my health was already bad during my early teen).

Now, under chronic condition, I realized that my physical being played a dominate role in my everyday life - it affects my life plans, short term goals, my relationships, my mood, and eventually my intelligence.

Had I known the importance of physical health, I would've exercised everyday! But good thing is that I am still in my middle age, my life still have many years to come. So I made my mind: when my condition gets normal, I will exercise literally -

EVERYDAY!

Listen to you body!

I was told to "listen to your body" ages ago but never really did good job on it. Or, I just don't know how. Of course, it should not be very hard to do, but when you had so many problems going on inside your body, and so many "can't eat this" or "can't do that", you would get lost sometime.
I had been strictly sticked on to candida diet for over 4 months since this March. I felt great during first 2 months but later, all my old symptoms came back. After about 2 months struggling, I suspected that I suffered from lacking nutrients. I did a comprehensive blood tests trying to find out what I missed. But the blood tests didn't support my "hypothesis", they suggested just opposite --- that I should get rid of lots of things, as if I had too much nutrients intake.
After being totally perplexed for a while, I decided that I should listen to my body instead of trying to understand the complex blood tests. So I started eating normal again --- not only fishes and vegs, but some meat, and lots of fruits (many type of fruites are forbidden foods in candida diet because of the suger they contain). And the result of this action was ecouraging --- I immediately felt better! Starting from these couple of days, I went even further: I started take some suger --- the number one product that should be cut out in candida diet (it's also a product I had been strictly avoided for years!). I put a little organic brown suger in milk and whole wheat pancake. Guess what? They taste wonderful! At night before I sleep I also ate something (include some milk with suger) and it helped my sleep (for years I used to eat nothing within 2 or 3 hours before I sleep)!

For years I tried so hard to follow my mind --- to understand everything logically and plan things carefully, but now, my body demands me to listen to her: she overpowers my mind!
So I am going to eat whatever I feel like.

P.S.
While I am ecouraging myself to eat normal, I am not saying that "candida diet" is not good. I still believe this diet and at certain point, it is crucial for the health. For me, it works when I am over-weight. Now, after several months diet my weight dropped (I understand this as a sign of massive dying out of candida yeasts) and my body is in need of somethings else that candida diet cannot offer. So switching back to normal but healthy diet is definitely the right thing to do.

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