Let Your Body Do the Talking

Sometimes the things we learn about our bodies, about nutrition and about exercise make sense, but they don’t always ring true. For instance, it would make sense that when we are less active, we should need less fuel so we should be less hungry. But if you are like me, a few quiet moments somehow signals snacking time. It also makes sense that when we aren’t exercising our bodies, our moods become negative because we don’t produce those endorphines but sometimes when I’m down in the dumps, I just can’t seem to muster the energy to get moving.
This past week, I’ve been able to observe a body working in the natural way - the way it works before we retrain oursevles to behave in ways that aren’t good for us. My 10-year-old son had double foot surgery. What was a minor procedure as far as invasiveness and pain has been quite the ordeal in recovery. In order to keep both feet perfectly still to allow for correct healing, he has knee-high casts on both legs - at the same time. The problem is not that he doesn’t feel well. He actually feels perfectly fine. He’s just not mobile since he can’t bear weight on his feet for two weeks.
Thus began a serious attempt at various distractions, and as you can imagine, he has enjoyed more than the normal allotment of screen time including TV shows, video games and playing on the computer. It sounds like a kid’s favorite dream - unlimited time doing exactly what he wants without mom nagging at him to go outside and get some fresh air. But a strange thing happened after about the second day. By bedtime, although he was feeling perfectly well, he was a total grouch. Even though he hadn’t moved from the couch more than a few times to go to the bathroom, he was exhausted. It hit home to me that the natural reaction of the body was taking over and protesting the lack of activity. He wasn’t getting the fresh air he was used to, the blood wasn’t flowing as much as usual and it was taking a toll on his psyche more than anything. And the more he sat on the couch, the more he protested leaving the house even though he wasn’t enjoying himself. He said he “just wasn’t up to it”. It took an Act of Mom to get him out of the house for a short trip to do errands and once he was outside in a different environment, he was a different kid. Suddenly he couldn’t wait to have a friend over and to run to the store with me.
Another interesting thing I’ve observed is that his appetite has been next to nil. This makes sense from the standpoint that he’s not burning as many calories so he doesn’t need to take as many in, but that’s certainly not how I’ve trained myself to react when I have down time. In the few instances where I “encouraged” to eat past the point he was feeling full, he began to feel kind of sick. Many of us have trained ourselves to just keep on eating until we hit that “way-to-full” feeling.
It was refreshing to see that a body reacts the way it should when you leave it alone. Before we learn all those harmful lessons about indulging our bad mood with a little extra TV or “treating” oursevles when we feel down and “medicating” our feelings with food, our bodies will actually signal us when we need to get moving or need to eat or even when we need to stop eating. We just have to listen to the message.

by Jennifer O

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