Hello Every Body,

After slowly pacing myself through the whole first four months of the year, I am beginning to feel back to my typical level of functionality.

Because I live with ME/CFS and have for nearly 25 years, I am never surprised when I go through a long period of being weirdly sick, it's only surprising to see how it's going to show up. This time it was massive fatigue and then one cold after another cold after another. That is just how I have accepted my body works and I have long since stopped being mad about it. I still get plenty frustrated, but I never really feel "Why ME" about it anymore. 

Really, the question is more like "why NOT me?" Bad luck effects all kinds of people, hardship is part of the human condition, and bodies are gonna do what bodies are gonna do. We should really stop being surprised when we see evidence of the fact that bodies get sick, get old, get injured, and that eventually the end is the same for all of us.

But because we insist on being surprised at how bodies actually behave, we often make our self care choices from a place of fantasy and not reality. We choose our diet and exercise options because we want to be "right" or "good" and eating certain things or exercising with certain outcomes are how we attempt to do that. Those choices often have nothing to do with what is best for our actual bodies.

With my collection of health conditions, the advice that is often considered the soundest and safest for everyone is actually bad for me. Post Exertional Malaise means that my attempts to exercise will only exacerbate my symptoms. Gastroparesis means eating fresh vegetables could cause me pain and other unpleasantness. Exercise and fresh vegetables are considered the best advice there is, and yet for me in my specific conditions, it is a terrible strategy.

If you make your diet, exercise, and hygiene choices based on "shoulds," there is a better than good chance you're actually just obeying marketing spin. What food people SHOULD eat, or ways they SHOULD exercise, or ways they SHOULD keep clean are often decided by the people with something to sell. So even if you try with superhuman effort to do all the things you "should," there is no guarantee you're going to get anything good out of it.

Instead, if you make your choices based on the outcomes you get, especially the outcome of how it makes you FEEL, you will have much stronger chances of getting the results that will make YOUR life feel better, and not just keep you spinning on that shame spiral to hell blaming yourself for being unable to control nature.

This month we've been talking about the fourth Marrow of Body Loyalty - Self Care. We're digging in to the Body Loyalty plan this year, and we're starting with the Marrows - the purpose behind our efforts. Self Care is about managing your food, exercise, and hygiene needs in the way that your individual body and circumstances require. It is not the same thing as luxury, and it's certainly not the same thing as diet culture. Self Care is about asserting your human dignity and the right to have your physical needs met.

Every morning I make a TikTok based on what I'm thinking about for Body Loyalty. I've been treating it like my stand up open mic to figure out what people are responding to as I develop this philosophy. I'm sharing more of them on Instagram and YouTube now to spread those messages out to wherever the people are.

This month's most popular:

The last of the Marrows of Body Loyalty is Community Care. This is the aim of our social health care needs. Human Beings are social creatures, as inconvenient as that often is, and we require a community to survive. If we're going to enjoy this human experience at all, we have to address our loneliness.

We'll tackle that in May!