As a free introduction to my “love your body” course, “The Best Weigh,” I created a “wellness quiz” you can take to get personalized suggestions for feeling even better in your body.
The way I see it is that first of all, healthcare in my country – where many of you readers live – sucks. It’s expensive, it’s hard for many people to get, and even if you do have it, Western medicine tends to suck. Some folks have awesome, excellent, supportive doctors who are aware of powerful alternative treatments that most patients don’t get offered as an option. Yay for some folks!
But if you’re like me, your doctor takes an “It’s probably not a problem” approach to any health questions you might have, reluctant to order expensive tests, to encourage self-diagnosis, to look at problems that there are no easy answers for or that they personally don’t know anything about, or to do anything about anything if you seem to be more or less okay in general.
Then there are the fatphobic doctors. I’ve had one myself; she gave me medication that we both knew would cause my weight to redistribute around the middle – because she said so! – and then, ages and ages into it, poked my belly, professed to be concerned that it was convex instead of concave, and tried to back herself up by pointing at my weight on the BMI chart – at a spot for people much much shorter than I – and pointing out that it was labeled there as something like “borderline obese”. Isn’t doctoring supposed to involve critical thinking?
More troubling, to me, is the fact that many of us are so used to our everyday aches and pains, tiredness, digestive problems, headaches, or brain fog, that we don’t even think there is anything to be done about them. They become our standard for normal health – and sap our energy for making any changes.
I have my own story about that, but I’ll share that as we go along. The nutshell here is that the quiz has a ton of statements, you click the box next to each one that is true for you, and then you put in your email address and hit submit. And then I review it and (within about 48 hours) let you know if it suggests you have any problems – which are mostly nutritional – like brain chemistry imbalances, hypoglycemia, yeast overgrowth, adrenal exhaustion, thyroid problems – and, most importantly, what simple steps you can take to regain balance, joy, and energy.
I had a blast with it. Some of the things it turned up were obvious to me, like that my stressful day job – at the unemployment department! – is messing up my adrenals again. It also revealed what I had hoped, which was that my brain chemistry (amino acids) were out of balance – which I very much wanted to hear, because I felt like I was going a little crazy at work and I wanted there to be something simple I could do to smooth that out. I already do tons of personal work in 12-step programs, and yet suddenly things seemed to be going downhill. To me, that means that there’s something biological in the works.
What surprised me a little was both how out of balance I was, and that I had low thyroid function. That was something I had looked at a little bit in the past, and sort of toyed with doing something about – and then dropped it when the first thing I half-heartedly tried didn’t work. And yet it seemed so obvious this time. The first follow-up test for it is to take your temperature three days in a row and see if it is low – but my body temperature is ALWAYS lower than normal. Oho!
I’ve been taking l-tyrosine for it, plus now an over-the-counter thyroid support pill, and it is helping me have much more energy at work. That’s just in the past couple of days; I can’t wait to see what the long-term benefits are like. I’m adding in GABA (another amino acid) as a stress preventative or stress support. I think it prevents me from going into that adrenalized place where I start judging and getting huffy and buying into negative thoughts and enter a downward spiral of tension. But I will tell you all more as it develops! In the meantime… check out that quiz!
