Photo by Stefano Gabryel on Unsplash
Last year, I stopped going to the gym. I had been going around two to three times a week. I had a personal trainer, who set me different strength exercises and increasing weight goals. On paper, I was doing everything I should have been.
Just before stopping, I got a blood test. Generally my health was good, but my cholesterol was particularly high. Most notably, my HDLs (the ‘good’ cholesterol) was quite a lot lower than they should have been.
If conventional wisdom were to be followed, my health should have gotten worse. I was no longer exercising, I stopped paying too much attention to diet and I returned to a very sedentary lifestyle.
When I got a blood test around a month ago, I asked to check my cholesterol again. The results were stark. I had a rather large improvement. My HDLs had sizeably increased, whilst the LDLs (bad cholesterol) had also dropped. Other markers such as my CRP which measures inflammation also dropped from 2.2 to 1.0.
The reason for this change I believe was that I have finally been addressing long-term, in-built stress. Trying to push my way through this hole was only digging me further into health issues. When I stopped exercising, I ended up having a large crash. I ended up resting a whole lot. It was some of the most miserable months of my life. But it was also what my body needed.
I’ll admit that I write this with a level of bitterness. It has been frustrating that I have had to essentially figure this out on my own. The advice around me has consistently pointed me in the wrong direction. Doctors tried giving me antidepressents, which only served to numb sensation rather than improve things. Therapy felt like I was paying for the privilege of explaining to a white person the complex nature of migration, racism, autism and other areas.
My personal trainer didn’t really understand burnout. He got so caught up in increasing the weights and improving form that he forgot that my original aim was to improve my health by losing weight. People around me, meanwhile have suggested that I just move around more, or try and eat healthier to kick my health back into gear.
The first place where I saw burnout written in a more open way was in ayurveda. I remember reading Prakriti: Your Ayurvedic Constitution which talked far more openly about energy depletion. My energies were things to be balanced. The solution depended on the person’s constitution, not what worked for the majority of people.
What I’ve found particularly striking is how much people seem to have a cult-like belief in the conventional wisdom’s we get taught. When someone with authority tells us that exercise = good, eating more = bad, we take this as gospel.
In reality, the best thing I could have done was to take a break from exercising and stop worrying about what I was eating. The sad reality is that I learnt to ignore my body telling me this, because everyone around me was saying that this was wrong.
Now, with the benefit of hindsight, I understand why. My body is so genetically and physically different to the people I live around in Brussels that following norms around health and wellbeing can be fraught with risk. If I’m not careful, I will be told things that may be actively bad for my health.
I’m not anti-science, nor anti-western. But I am anti-oversimplification. In our attempts to constantly streamline and simplify, we have lost the essence of seeing diverse realities.
Studies that are supposedly unanimous turn out to be based upon group-think, tested on a homogeneous population. In the worst case scenario, such as on MSG, we see big powerful lobbies creating studies to actively discredit ethnic foods for financial reasons.
So if I can give any conclusion, it is this. Neither blindly follow, nor be a blind skeptic. Be wary of results that aren’t really working, but also be wary of conspiracy theories or alternatives that are too good to be true.
Ultimately, we only get one life. We might as well live it by doing what is best for us.