Exercise and How It Cures Us
The time frame between when I injured my brain and when I began to heal it was roughly 16 months. That was the longest, most brutal 16 months of my life. Of anyone’s life, that I can possibly imagine. And if you think I’m being uncaring or hyperbolic, imagine spending sixteen straight months in a panic attack that didn’t end, constantly in fight or flight, constantly terrified. Every waking hour of the day, actively terrified. This wasn’t like pregnancy contractions that ebbed and flowed. I didn’t get a chance to rest.
I was just terrified. For almost a year and a half. Yeah, I’m pretty sure I almost died of a heart attack. I’m amazed I didn’t.
Once I stumbled back into a Christian church and God was able to find me and pull me out, a few things slowly began to happen simultaneously.
Another voice began to speak inside of my head that quieted all the other voices and pushed them back.
A wellspring of hope began to flow inside of me, that maybe this wasn’t just my new, permanent state of being, that maybe it would end.
I began to look at my diet and what I was eating, and I started to make positive changes. IE, eating low sugar yogurt instead of regular, using honey as sweetener instead of sugar, etc.
I began researching mental health cures other than pills. Exercise was one that kept popping up at the top of the list.
Me being me, well, I’ve spent most of my life behind a desk for work, so it’s not like I made a living lifting things very often. There were a few exceptions, my first real job was lifeguarding and I swam on my breaks, there was my brief military service before I got injured in Basic Training and chaptered out, and there was when I worked at the specialty French bakery for most of a year when I got married to my sweetheart in 2019, etc. But needless to say, I didn’t spend most of my adult life moving, to my own detriment.
Some of you know what my husband looks like, but for those of you who don’t, he’s basically a walking Adonis. I do not exaggerate. His physical form is what a man (and their wives, let’s be real here) get to enjoy when that man spends fifteen straight years throwing kicks from age 3 to 18, and THEN joins the Army and learns new ways to fight like groundfighting/Greco wrestling. He said he was strong but lean when he went into the Army and then he put on 15-20 lbs of muscle in the first year. His abs are visible and countable at nearly 40, he can leg press over 800 lbs, and he likes to put me on his shoulders and do squats with me. And now he spends his days carrying heavy things and working with his arms above his head. My husband is one of the most mentally sound human beings alive. He’s calm in crisis, he thinks clearly, he is neither depressed nor anxious, and he fears nothing.
His shoulders should be studied by future generations.
But I digress. The point of this post is not to drool over my husband to the point of replacing my keyboard due to water damage.
Get it together, Holly. Okay. Do tell, what is the point?
Exercise, m’lads and ladies. Exercise. Exercise makes you healthy.
I mean, it’s not like this is something people don’t know. We know that diet and exercise are the two primary ways to keep yourself healthy. We know this. Everyone knows this. In modern society, a lot of us just don’t do it, and it’s little wonder that the rise of antidepressants and anti-anxiety drugs has perfectly correlated with the rise of obesity. One causes the other, or the other causes the one, it doesn’t matter. They go hand in hand. But 100 years ago, we were lifting hay bales daily, hammering on an anvil, gardening our own food, pulling weeds, and lifting 5-9 children for playtime daily, and that has been replaced with screens, to our detriment.
Pills have been the front-line treatment for mental health concerns for decades, but new research is showing that there’s a much better option for us- movement!. A smart doctor whose work I follow named Dr. Nicholas Fabiano recently released a study proving that schizophrenia could be managed/mitigated with exercise overseen by a qualified physician. Of course, my brain has been fixed for at least a year now, but his study proves what I learned a couple of years ago from other doctors- that sweatin’ to the oldies helps you GET to your oldies if you have any type of mental health concern.
Dr. Fabiano is not the only healthcare provider who has realized this connection. A few more examples below:
For me, it all started with Taekwondo, my husband’s preferred art form. (Yes, much like Bruce Lee, my husband studied many forms of art and expression, and decided that kicking people in the head was the best one). My beloved husband who saw me through the worst sixteen months of my existence suggested that maybe if I was feeling scared, that learning to feel powerful would only help me.
And he was right.
I took Taekwondo for over a year. I breezed from white belt, to yellow, purple, orange, green, and then split green/blue. I learned to kick people in the head. I learned self-defense techniques to throw anyone who ever grabbed my wrist. I put on sparring gear and started sparring with other students. I was really good at it.
And then, I started other forms of exercise. My husband and I went to the gym together and I began lifting weights. I started doing calisthenics at home on my floor, situps and pushups. I was feeling pretty strong, and bonus, my rear end began to get muscle in interesting places for the first time in my life. I’m telling you, kicking did this for me. (Moms, I’m looking at you. If you feel like you can’t fix the downstairs after childbirth, you need Taekwondo. I used to pee when I sneezed too hard. I don’t anymore. Real talk from one who knows. No, I have neither shame nor filters.)
So then comes a funny story- my younger sister, whom I am incredibly proud of, got her personal training certificate and now teaches aerobics classes at a combo pilates/ballet studio called Barre 3. She’s the peppy lady with the headset and spandex who can do cardio for 45 minutes and talk/encourage through it. How, I do not know. It’s insanely impressive. Anyway, she invited me to come up and go to one of her classes. Which I did.
And I couldn’t walk for two days afterwards. I tell you what, ow.
I was so impressed by her class- and to find out that she leads like six of these classes a week? The woman is positively magical.
Scrolling through YouTube, I found a series of Barre 3 classes recorded and put up by a woman in Massachusetts. She has four different 30 minute classes available, and that became my new routine, because I am telling you, you can think you’re in shape all you want, but until your own younger sister has kicked your rear with aerobics, you have no idea how out of shape you actually are. And people who are thin aren’t automatically in shape, for the record. You need muscle mass, people!
For the past year, I have done Barre 3 classes and pilates in my living room 2-3x per week. I have extremely strong legs now and my knees no longer hurt (they did for 20 years!!!!). I am appx 5’9 and 140ish pounds on any given day. But most important of all, exercise has helped me rewire my brain to the point of curing my mental health problems alongside my dietary changes- no more processed food, no more cheap food, only organic vegetables, and only things like honey, coconut sugar or monkfruit for sweeteners.
In a generation of sweeping Ozempic users who would much rather inject themselves with a questionable substance daily rather than just cut the McDonald’s and go for a walk, dare to defy the social norms. Once again, you deserve it, people.
You deserve to be as healthy, happy, and carefree as I am.
Next week- modern revelations about cancer and cancer treatments. Prep your foil hat again, we’re going deep.
