radically accepting my flawed and dysfunctional body
I remember years ago, especially early on in the pandemic (2020/2021), I was still not diagnosed with my illnesses (Bechterew's disease and Crohn's disease). For a decade at least, I had dealt with a variety of symptoms, most of it around joints, my spine, and my digestive tract, and separately from those, also hormonal issues. Food was unpredictable and made me feel sick and caused me a lot of pain, and all the inflammation showed on my skin too:
Around that time, gut health information was really booming online (probably still is, but I keep away from that content now and I'm less online). The idea was that by cutting out certain stuff or mostly eating this or that diet or taking these supplements would regenerate your gut health and make all the symptoms go away - the joint pain, the sluggishness, the acid reflux, the rashes, the hormone imbalances, the allergies and intolerances, and so on.
If you see your body as a naturally wholesome and healthy body that is just temporarily imbalanced by some exposure and can be brought back into balance, these products and lifestyle changes are basically the magic pill. Just do this and avoid expensive pharmaceutical drugs with side effects!
I'm not trying to act like that can never happen; people have successfully reversed or lessened some illnesses and issues by eating differently, working out, losing weight or limiting their exposure to something. But for me, this approach just led to disordered eating habits and holding off on effective treatment in some things for a while.
The thing is, lots of people online peddling this stuff are in the business of snake oil. Buy their classes, their book, their supplements to finally be free from all these issues that doctor's can't or won't diagnose or only have evil medicines for that have side effects! Your body is good as is, it just needs a nudge in the right direction!
It puts so much responsibility on you. Yes, we should limit our exposure to pesticides, PFAS etc., but you go insane in the grocery store thinking:
"I can't buy this, it's not organic, can't buy this, it's wrapped in plastic, can't buy this, it's canned, can't buy this, it's high inflammatory/against FODMAP diet, can't buy this because it's too processed, can't buy this because it has so much sugar...".
Back then, every grocery store trip had me on the verge of a mental breakdown or actually breaking down. Everything felt contaminated, unsafe, or something my body couldn't tolerate. It felt impossible to "treat my body naturally" or bring it "back into balance".
Even when you do manage for a while, it significantly inhibits your ability to socialize with people because so much of it is about food: going out to eat together, attending festivities, being invited to dinner, being gifted food, traveling. A very restrictive diet can also cause deficiencies or starve you.
It's also a bottomless pit: If it doesn't work for you and you don't see results, they say you need to try harder, also cut out this and that, buy this other supplement, and now consider other areas of your life too. Aggressively filter all your water, move away from any kind of busy street to limit the exhaust fume exposure, have your home checked for mold, switch out all your synthetic dyed clothes for unbleached undyed linen, switch out all your cooking utensils and pans to the "non-toxic" varieties, check if you live near some kind of coal plant or electricity lines or so, and if you are in the really weird circles, you will hear about chemtrails and Electromagnetic Hypersensitivity and all that.
Yes, mold exposure and harmful substances in water are a problem, but I'm just saying: Doing all this next to everything else in life is a huge undertaking, mentally taxing, making people extremely paranoid and isolated, and bleeding them dry when it's often not even the issue. It's taking advantage of vulnerable people who either have no access to healthcare or aren't taken seriously or cannot afford the testing or medication required.
It's good when one simple change can genuinely help you - for example, I know what foods not to eat to avoid triggering acid reflux. I love it for you if you figured out that eating gluten was behind it all and are now happy and healthy.
But my body was never a naturally healthy and balanced one that got out of whack by some behavior or exposure, and even if it happened because of exposure in utero, or as a child, or just living in our modern environment nowadays, I can't undo or change that. My body, in its natural state, is not normal or healthy, and all that helps is proper medication. It's not temporary, this is just how my body functions. The baseline I was born with isn't the norm, and as experience showed, no amount of gut health stuff or limiting exposure or other lifestyle changes were going to change that.
All that helped was finally getting properly diagnosed and receiving treatment.
It was easy for me to accept treatment for the above issues because life had become unlivable with my intense flare ups and affected by daily ability to function all the time, and any possible side effect was worth the risk. I still don't regret any of it, and it works fine for me.
Where I struggled to seek and accept help was for my hormone issues, as they only affected me every other month or so and were easier to ignore otherwise. As I talked about in a different post, I received hormone therapy as early as 11 years old because my periods and hormone levels were not normal and I otherwise wouldn't have developed how I am expected to as a cis woman1. I needed T-blockers like cypro to have the puberty my body and mind needed2.
I stopped at 19 or 20 because I had started having issues with pain and spotting for a while and thought I could try and see whether after puberty, my situation had resolved and I'd naturally have the hormone levels I needed. It hadn't. So since then, I either took nothing, or tried reigning in my PCOS and endometriosis with things like Maca root powder. It did bring down my cycle days from 60-70 down to 30, but other issues still persisted. Lots of menstrual pain, flareups of my other issues, PMDD, and so on.
When I still went to therapy years ago, my therapist suggested getting antidepressants to take just for the phase between ovulation and period, so I'd stop feeling the awful effects of PMDD. I declined, because while I had been on antidepressants previously for a while and they helped, I also knew what it was like to start and stop them, and I didn't want to constantly put my body through that; plus, the scary side effects!
The same happened with hormone treatment. Even though I had spent years of my life on artificial hormones, I was scared to go back on it because I couldn't rule out that they had played a part in my depression back then (or at least amplified it). I was also scared of thrombosis, meningioma and other issues3. I thought it would just naturally fade away, or I could make without until menopause, or later: My treatment for my Bechterew's and Crohn's will finally bring my body into natural alignment!
At first, it looked like it; I suddenly experienced cycles like a normal person. On time, barely or no pain, very light bleeding. But it went back to how it was over months, even after switching from infliximab to adalimumab. So turns out, fighting the inflammation in my body didn't do anything to normalize my hormones.
I wrote something about accepting my natural menstrual cycle that retroactively is just a huge cope.
There it was again, the idea that there is a natural state a body can return to and that everyone's default state is automatically healthy, now warped into the idea that I was just naturally meant to have elevated androgens and all this, and that I should just accept how it is. The idea that natural is automatically good is such an easy fallacy to fall prey to, and natural also meant unmedicated to me. I tried to find so many reasons for why being so destroyed by my cycle every time was actually somehow a good thing or had any advantages.
There's no shortage of supposedly empowering and encouraging content online about this as well: People who present having a cycle as something magical and romanticizing it as living with the moon tides or living in tune with nature. Just be proud of it and feel like those TikTok witches brewing your own herbal solution and gulping it down with some pumpkin seed oil. Ugh!
Recently, I just grew tired of it all. The weeks of feeling sluggish, moody, forgetful and weak; my Crohn's and Bechterew's flaring up with it every time; feeling suicidal and calling in sick due to menstrual pain. 2-3 weeks until I felt normal again derailed good routines and fitness goals all the time, and it was hard to plan around such an irregular cycle. These times could fall on important dates at work or in my degree (exam season etc.) and jeopardize my reliability and skills. If I wanted to reach the goals I had set myself and would thrive in and feel the happiest in, I needed to address this. I owe myself that.
No one will ever notice your avoidable suffering and pat you on the back for enduring it when there is another way. You aren't impressing anyone with choosing "natural" over comfortable and happy. All people will see and remember are the times you seemed unhappy, uncomfortable, snappy or missed out on being even being there.
In that one post about accepting my cycle, I wasn't actually accepting it. I see now that to actually accept my sick body, it also means accepting treatment where possible. Everything else is not acceptance, it's just giving up and ignoring the issue.
So recently, I had my yearly checkup at the gynecologist and finally got help. I am very lucky to have a very attentive and knowledgeable gynecologist4, and we went through all the options with pros and cons, also in connection with my Crohn's that can affect absorption, and we settled on dienogest daily and skipping my period altogether. Independently of that, I finally accepted that my hair needs additional help as I am prone to telogen effluvium and androgenic alopecia, and if I am regrowing it now since cutting it off in October 2024 due to losing like half my hair back then, I need to do something. So I am trying out minoxidil on top of going back to scalp massages and all.
I know seeking medical help can be daunting, stressful, humiliating, costly, inaccessible, and scary. I almost cancelled that appointment about four times. But I hope it motivates you to seek help for the thing you put off or gave up on. You don't need to suffer, you don't need to self-sabotage or prove it to yourself, and you weren't "meant to be like this". If "natural remedies" or snake oil and obsessive rules don't work for you, allow yourself to accept proper help.
Reply via email
Published
This is also why I have very small hands and feet, and remained at an average size. I was expected to become 1,80m tall, now I am just 1,66m, with a EU shoe size of 36/37. I didn't change that much from that age in terms of size.↩
Yes, they do that for cis children, so stop clutching your pearls about trans children getting the same care!↩
This is unfortunately what happens when you work with medical data, particularly side effects and adverse events; you know way too much about some meds.↩
She's always been great, but it felt like in the year since we last saw each other, she went extra hard in researching how my illnesses can interact with my cycle before I showed up.↩