Ditch Your Diet and Heal Interstitial Cystitis
If you want to heal interstitial cystitis using a mind-body approach, then this blog post is for you! If you’ve read any of my previous blog posts, or joined the Kindness Community for some help around healing, then you might already know the basic steps in the mind-body healing process. I’ll review them here for you:
- Ask yourself what you are feeling emotionally throughout the day any time you feel afraid or upset by symptoms. Allow yourself a few minutes to feel any emotions related to the symptoms themselves, then focus on other stressors in your life. What ELSE is stressing you out, besides the symptoms? What was going on today before you started worrying about symptoms? The non-pain-related stressors are the real issues that need to be dealt with, faced, and felt. It’s the mind’s tendency to suppress emotion and avoid feeling around the “real stuff” that causes a mind-body syndrome to perpetuate.
- Give yourself some space to journal about your life and whatever is stressful, besides the pain syndrome. Start your sentences with, “I feel _________ about….” Allow yourself that expressive space and you’ll find yourself healing very quickly!
- Relax your nervous system whenever you can so that you’re not living in constant fight-or-flight mode. Using long, slow exhales, music, relaxation techniques, or guided meditations can be very helpful for this. Become aware of when you are in a fight-or-flight reaction so that you can learn how to shift your body out of that activated state and into a rest and digest response. The fight-or-flight response is very connected to the bladder and will cause you to have frequency and urgency around urination.
If you have these basic steps in place, you’ll be on the road to healing in no time.
These are the steps I used to heal interstitial cystitis and have shared with so many clients. They are based around Dr. John Sarno’s work, which was a pivotal piece of my own healing. Dr. Sarno has taught hundreds of people how to heal by implementing emotional awareness and the understanding that the mind and body are intimately connected.
However, there is also one other very important connection to make if you suffer from frequent urination or urgency. You must look at your relationship with food and dieting. This is something that is often overlooked or simply unknown to many people who struggle with urinary symptoms or IC. (I prefer to call interstitial cystitis by it’s real name – Mind-Body Syndrome, or Tension Myositis Syndrome – but for the sake of clarity, I’m referring to it as IC here in this blog post.)
Many of my clients who have IC have a history of dieting, diet-mentality, or patterns of food-restriction and binge eating. Dieting is the quickest way to cause stress on the body, which then turns on its fight-or-flight response. Every time you go on a diet, you might as well be telling your body, “There’s a bear chasing you 24/7, AND it’s a famine on top of that!”
Diets are extremely hard on the metabolism, and a metabolism that isn’t working optimally will start to show signs of damage through symptoms like low body temperature, frequent urination, and fatigue. Trying to fit our bodies into the cultural media beauty standard creates a great deal of mental stress, but it also causes true metabolic stress on the body.
If you want to heal IC, it’s time to allow yourself to eat normally.
I happen to know what this looks like, as I’m married to a man who has never been on a diet in his life. He has no food hang-ups and simply eats like nature intended. What is this mysterious thing called normal eating? It looks like this: You eat when you’re hungry. You let your body know that food is abundant by feeding it regularly throughout the day. You look for food that would satisfy your body and soul, and know that pleasure is a valid part of the eating process. You enjoy every meal, and you also enjoy desserts. Sometimes, you eat too much, or for comfort, or out of sheer enjoyment. A lot of the time you just eat the amount your body is requesting. You allow all food to be equal, with no good/bad labels. You don’t make yourself wrong for eating too much, eating for an emotional reason or anything else. You don’t put any food rules on yourself.
One of the biggest things I’ve learned as a recovering dieter is that anytime I have a strange eating pattern showing up in my life, I have a secret food rule hidden somewhere in my head. Once I find it and drop it, then I’m able to approach food with normalcy and relaxation. This allows my body to enjoy my meals while in a rest and digest state. This means I’m able to let my metabolism regain its normal rhythms.
IC is actually asking you to heal something much deeper than a single symptom. It’s asking you to heal your relationship with your body, food, and culture. The number one thing you can do to get out of the dieting trap is to embrace your body’s natural shape, qualities, and size, right now. Embracing the diversity of the human body and its various lovely shapes and sizes is of utmost importance.
Those of us who are on the Mind-Body Syndrome/TMS track are already bucking the cultural trends around health and well-being. We’re ignoring a large chunk of the cultural messages around our health and bodies in order to create health. Why not also ignore the cultural imperative to be stick-thin? Let’s go full-on contrarian!
Let your body be the size it wants to be when you eat regularly, enjoy your food, and have fun, rest and relaxation in your life. Watch your metabolism return to health and your bladder calm down as you do so. Pay attention to your emotions so that you can get out of the symptom-obsession trap. Any time your mind wants to think about symptoms or why you need to go on a diet, you know that something emotional wants to emerge from under those very compelling decoys. Look for what is really bothering you in your life, beyond your body size or symptom. That is the key to emotional, physical, and mental health.