Autoimmune Warrior

We’re 10 days into the New Year, and I wanted to check in with my fellow Autoimmune Warriors to see how your 2023 resolutions were going.

One of my New Year’s resolutions was to get back into doing yoga. I started doing yoga as a teenager, and then moved into doing more team sports like field hockey or doing other fitness classes like pilates and spinning. But I realized these past few months how much I missed doing yoga. I think it’s great not only as a form of exercise, but to help with stress relief as well. The problem is, I moved to a new neighborhood and wasn’t familiar with the local studios in my new hood.

The great thing about the New Year, is that if you have fitness and health related goals, that there are plenty of gyms, fitness centers, and health products doing promotions around this time to get your business. I ended up finding a local yoga studio on the MindBody app that was doing a promotion for only $10 for your first class.

It’s been ages since I went to a yoga class, and although there are similarities between yoga and pilates, which I had more experience with, it’s still not the same! Doing the class made me realize how important flexibility is in yoga; at one point, we were doing a stretch where everyone ended up in the splits…except me. But I was surprised by how flexible I was given that I hadn’t been to a yoga class in ages.

Other than getting back into yoga, another resolution of mine is to be more proactive about my health. In the busyness of life, it can be easy to slip with your healthcare routine. As an Autoimmune Warrior, you probably spend a lot more time than the average person when it comes to going to doctor’s appointments, ordering and picking up prescriptions, sorting and taking your medications, getting lab work done, preparing healthy meals, and more. It’s basically like having a part-time job, on top of all of the other work that you have to do!

In my case, this means making sure I make those appointments with my various specialists, ensure that I’m getting my lab work done on a quarterly basis, making any follow-up appointments if any abnormalities arise in my labwork, and ensuring that I’m always fully stocked on my meds. It also means ensuring that I get a good night’s sleep (at least 7 hours) and do daily exercise. I’m also putting more effort into making healthier meals, and using more fresh produce from our home garden.

The interesting thing about having an autoimmune disorder is that it’s chronic in nature, meaning that autoimmune symptoms are continuous and never-ending. So it’s not like a weight loss goal, where I can say, “I want to lose 20 pounds” and then I’ve achieved the goal once I’ve lost that amount of weight. In other words, there isn’t an exact ‘outcome’ that we can really strive towards or predict. This makes measuring your goal progress a little trickier.

However, I remind myself that it’s not always about achieving a specific outcome (i.e. lose 20 lbs) but more so about adopting an overall healthier lifestyle. Do you notice that the people with the greatest longevity in the world, who live in the so-called Blue Zones, don’t ever count calories or even own a scale? It’s their daily habits that contribute to their overall healthy lifestyle.

So cheers to 2023, and I hope that your New Year’s resolutions are going well so far and continue to progress as the year goes by. Let me know your goals (health-related or otherwise) in the comments below!