April Spring Stressors Bring May Mental Health Awareness

Written by: Krista Clarke, Graduate Student/Dietetic Intern Appalachian State University Class of 2022

May is Mental Health Awareness month, and we’re here to acknowledge ALL types of mental health, no matter where you may be in your journey. Mental health awareness finally seems to be gaining the attention it deserves, but there is still so much stigma around mental health, its manifestations, who “should” receive treatment, and so much more. So, let’s break it down. Have you ever found yourself saying “but my issues aren’t that bad” or “it’s not that serious so I don’t need help from a professional” or something similar? The truth is, pain is pain. No matter how you got there, there is nothing wrong in asking for help or needing someone to provide guidance to navigate the chaos, no matter how “small” it may seem. Because let’s be real, life can be SO hard at times for anyone!

Why is there so much stigma and how can you navigate it?

Well, stigma exists for many reasons. Maybe someone grew up in a household where they were told to control or hide their emotions. Maybe mental health was an off-limits topic or perceived as a weakness. Maybe when you think of mental health you even picture a specific type of person: a specific race and/or socioeconomic status, a specific gender and/or sexual orientation, a specific age group, or maybe even specific mental health conditions or traumatic experiences that may be perceived as more serious than others.

Believe it or not, all of the above scenarios can actually be trauma in itself! Being in pain and wanting help but thinking you don’t deserve it, is trauma. Neglecting and repressing feelings or certain memories based on preconceived beliefs of weakness, being told your feelings are invalid, etc. is trauma. I promise, all of your feelings are valid and you deserve help no matter where you believe you fall on the mental health spectrum. In fact, acknowledging pain and seeking help takes a lot of strength. Whether you’re going through a breakup, grieving a loss, trying to move on from a traumatic incident, or going through a difficult time in life in general, you deserve mental health help.

Why is it important to receive help?

In order to be the person we envision, whether it be as an individual, as a partner or parent, a friend, a leader, we all need to refill our own cup before we can do anything at our best potential. If your cup continues to empty without being refilled, you will eventually have nowhere to take from. This empty cup may feel like heaviness, soreness, fatigue, brain fog, feelings of chaos, and so much more. Unresolved trauma and/or repressed feelings can also be stored physically in your body. Let’s explore this in more detail. The concept that feelings, emotions, memories, etc. are simply solved through talking and/or only impact your mental health is outdated. These actually impact your physical body as well. Mental health plays a major role in the way your nervous system responds to perceived threats (and life in general), and vice versa.

Mental health manifestations can be reflected in the nervous system and body in a plethora of ways, and are experienced differently by everyone. Some manifestations include: brain fog, mental/emotional fatigue, physical fatigue, sleep disturbances, anxiety, depression, pain and tightness in the body (yes, this can be due to mental health manifestations rather than the traditional belief that pain/tightness is only due to physical illness, injury, etc.), obsessive thoughts, feelings of chaos, mood swings, hormonal imbalances, going into fight or flight mode easily and/or often, going into “zombie” mode or feeling numb, lack of interest in activities you typically enjoy, stress, digestive upset (your gut and brain are connected via the gut-brain axis and can impact one another), feelings of hopelessness, extreme highs with extreme lows, and others. The bottom line is that there are all sorts of ways mental health can manifest in your body, and that’s part of why navigating mental health can be so difficult. This is also why, no matter the root cause, it’s so important to seek help and support in your journey! Our bodies are so complex and unique, and they’ll go to great lengths to protect us and keep us alive, but being in survival mode is not a supportive place to be for prolonged periods of time. In fact, it can cause a lot of harm in the long run.

As you can see, mental health has whole-body impacts in a variety of ways. Everyone is unique and has different manifestations, and that’s part of what makes us human! You don’t have to fit into a certain mold and you definitely shouldn’t feel shame in seeking support. Your body is your home and all of your experiences are valid. You deserve to be met with compassion through a lens without judgment.

If you’re interested in learning more about mental health and trauma and the way these manifestations present themselves in your physical body, I highly recommend reading the book “The Body Keeps the Score” by Bessel van der Kolk. This knowledge and awareness can be
utterly life-changing!

SURVIVING VALENTINE’S DAY DURING EARLY RECOVERY

This Valentine’s Day, we share a post via New Method Wellness. These words are truly a worthwhile read!

With love,

Nutritious Thoughts

“It’s a little annoying when stores start putting up Valentine’s Day decorations before it’s even January. Well, February is here already, and now the countdown has begun toward that lovely – or dreaded – Hallmark holiday. Relationship experts and addiction professionals warn about love during the first year of recovery, but when “love is in the air” and all around you, it’s hard to block it out of your mind, especially around this time of year! As you scroll through your Facebook feeds and Instagram pics, you can’t help but wonder, how would a little love hurt anyone?
WHAT’S BETTER THAN LOVE AFTER RECOVERY?
If you are in recovery, your best bet is to make sobriety the top priority on your list rather than finding love. That can be pretty hard to do when every store you walk into is full of reminders that you are single, but rest assured, you won’t regret sticking to the discipline of sobriety for the following reasons:
• Focusing on your sobriety will, in the long run, lead to healthier relationships overall, not just in the romantic domain, but also in all aspects of life
• You increase your chances of success at any endeavor if you stick with the treatment plan that you and your substance abuse counselor developed together
• You reduce your chances of relapsing by avoiding romantic distractions
• You avoid the pitfall of unhealthy relationships. If you get involved with someone during your early stages of recovery, you get addicted to the “high” of falling in love rather than falling in love with the person
• You get to exercise responsibility by not entangling others in an emotional rollercoaster while you sort out your own emotions and discover who you are.
WHAT SHOULD YOU DO INSTEAD OF FINDING A NEW RELATIONSHIP?
Do what makes you happy. Fill your schedule with activities that excite you. Here are some ideas you might want to try:
• Sign up for a dance class. Tired of salsa? Try swing dancing and bring a friend with you who will be supportive of your recovery.
• Get into photography and soak in the beauty around you. Form a new habit by creating an album of memories and people you never want to forget. Appreciate beauty in all its forms wherever you go.
• Go horseback riding. Aside from letting you bond with your favorite animal, horseback riding offers you nontraditional benefits of a physical workout. It helps strengthen your muscles and improve your cardiovascular health.
• Like water? Try water sports like surfing and paddle boarding. Not only are they great for physical exercise but they’re also excellent ways to enhance your mood and reduce anxiety.
DO NOT ISOLATE YOURSELF ON VALENTINE’S DAY
It’s a well-known fact that those who have a history of addiction tend to isolate themselves, irrespective of the type of addiction they have. Case studies have shown that social isolation largely contributes to higher rates of drug use, and the maladaptive patterns developed during substance abuse negatively affect one’s existing relationships.

Reach out to a loved one. Reach out to your recovery community. Stay connected this Valentine’s Day!

Repost: the HAES® files: How We Can Reframe Gaining Weight as an Act of Self-Care

BY HEALTH AT EVERY SIZE® BLOG

by McKenna Schueler

In this ASDAH blog post, McKenna Schueler offers a compassionate framing of weight gain to combat harmful cultural messaging that glorifies weight loss while vilifying weight gain as a ‘problem’ to be fixed. Within, McKenna proposes that allowing your body to gain weight can, in many cases, be protective and serve as an act of self-care and body kindness. 

Most people nowadays have some level of awareness of what it means to pursue or engage in some form of ‘self-care’. Unfortunately, this concept which was initially rooted in self-compassion has in recent years been commodified.

That is, if you look to magazines or social media influencers to figure out what self-care is, you’ll find the concept often linked to products and services promoted as one-size-fits-all cures for any number of mental and physical ailments. If you buy this cream, or that subscription box – there’s your self-care.

This proposed requisite of having to buy a product or service to take care of your physical or mental well-being is problematic, to say the least. And it also bleeds into the aesthetic values of diet culture, which glorifies pursuits of shaping, surveilling, and shrinking the body.

Thus, it has become in vogue to find creative ways to pursue weight loss under the guise of #selfcare.

In this way, self-care begins to resemble something closer to bodily harm than body kindness. As a result of whom this media messaging typically targets, this commodified picture of self-care disproportionately reaches women; and by way of medical and institutional bias, has its most nefarious effects on women of color, food insecure populations, disabled folx, and trans folx whose bodies exist beyond the bounds of what has traditionally been conceived of as the “picture of health.”

What isn’t often broached in discussions of self-care, however, is where weight gain can fit. As a young, cisgender woman with a decade-long history of disordered eating patterns, I have had the challenging – yet, perhaps ultimately rewarding – experience of unlearning and relearning what it means to treat my body and general self with kindness.

As a result of having an eating disorder and living in contemporary American society, I’ve had a considerable amount of time to be both drawn into the alluring conception of body-shaping and shrinking as the ultimate #wellnesshack – and fight against it.

As most people who are drawn to Health At Every Size® principles are probably aware, there are many harms and health risks that can occur as a result of disordered eating. People of all sizes who engage in severe patterns of disordered eating or weight-cycling are at risk for facing both medical and psychological consequences. These risks are not limited to people who are classified by the problematic BMI calculation as “underweight.”

Weight gain is commonly framed within media and by bias-holding medical professionals as a “problem to be fixed.” But what about when weight gain is protective, and the choices leading up to them acts of self-nurture? Additionally, why must weight gain (for any reason) be moralized at all? All bodies shift and change with time; it is simply our realities as embodied creatures.

In this post specifically, I will be focusing on weight gain that occurs in response to nourishing and caring for your body after a time of caloric restriction or scarcity. Among people with and without clinical eating disorders alike, it is common for weight gain to occur as a natural response to weight suppression or recent weight loss.

Weight suppression refers to the phenomenon of your weight being below your biological set-point and can happen as a result of:

  • having inadequate access to enough food
  • chronic dieting
  • eating disorders
  • medical conditions

Side effects of medications, or significant experiences of stress or sickness, can also cause weight loss in some instances – much to the body’s chagrin.

Within the context of eating disorder recovery, weight gain can be more complex than one’s reaction to seeing a higher number on the scale. Many people (with and without eating disorders) tie weight loss or a smaller body to their identity, their sense of safety, or their value as a person. Learning to re-nourish the body in eating disorder recovery can also be physically uncomfortable, or even painful at times as a result of how the body reacts to increasing or regulating food intake.

The challenges of accepting and embracing weight gain are even more significant for people who occupy a fat body, due to the compounding pressure of messaging coming out of diet culture, biases held by treatment providers, and size discrimination. I recognize that as a person with thin privilege, I am protected from many of these compounding forces of oppression.

Then there are our friends, our family, or whomever we encounter this way or that who take the time to bemoan recent bodily changes. They have also been fed messages about what is “healthy” or “unhealthy,” or how to treat a body that is not pictured as the totally achievable health ideal.

When I propose the idea of reframing weight gain as self-care, I am not proposing that this physical change is the most important part of the body kindness process. When I talked to someone about this angle recently, they said to me: Yes, weight gain can be important for eating disorder recovery [and arguably for many people without an eating disorder], but what else does this mean?

As I understand, what accepting weight gain as a form of body kindness really means is:

  • listening to and accepting your body’s needs
  • challenging the ways we are conditioned to critique our bodies and instances of weight gain
  • challenging fatphobia’s white supremacist, ableist, and xenophobic roots
  • embracing the HAES® principle of eating for well-being, and rejecting healthism

Often lost in the continual onslaught of complaints about weight gain are how it can often come as a result of properly nourishing ourselves following sickness, stress, or inadequate access to food.

Not every instance of weight gain is something that someone is actively pursuing, and it may be unexpected. But when we become so fixated on feeding into diet culture’s vilification of weight gain, we neglect how nurturing, and how tender an act it can be to adequately feed our bodies and let them change as they may, if and when we have the resources to do so.

For people who are recovering from an eating disorder or years of dieting, this can be particularly special. It’s not easy to ignore and challenge the mainstream obsession with weight loss or ‘fixing’ our bodies. But is is an act of kindness to ourselves.

The Take-Home Message

Nourishing ourselves doesn’t have to be careful, pretty, gentle, or always even grounded in mindfulness.

Reaching for whatever it is you have available – be it an apple, candy bar, or your favorite food – and feeding yourself sends a message to your body that I am taking care of you, you deserve nourishment, and that will never change no matter how you change or grow.

So, if you would like, I invite you to frame any past, recent, or future weight gain as self-care. I’m right here with you. 


McKenna Schueler (She/Her) is a freelance/contract writer with a Bachelors of Arts degree in English and a minor in psychology. McKenna was first introduced to Health at Every Size® and the body liberation movement through the works of fat activists and radical feminist voices online. She hopes to further her education in public health and use her knowledge to help increase federal, state, and community support for inclusive and culturally-competent mental health treatment interventions that respect patient agency. In the meantime, she strives to offer words of compassion and understanding for those who can come away from her writing feeling better informed and/or comforted.

Seasonal Self Care

Autumn is transitional.  The light reflects a bit differently on the trees at dusk, some schedules speed up while others slow down, and we prepare for the holiday season ahead.  Seasonal shifts can be a challenging time to maintain self care. In fact, for many of us, the ways in which we care for ourselves shift with the season.  Nights are longer, temperatures drop, the air becomes filled with family-focused activities, and so on.  Do you struggle with maintaining self care regimens as summer transitions to fall?  Read on for some key points to taking the seasonal shift head on and taking the pressure off of yourself when it comes to self care!

Sometimes Simple Works Best

Self care doesn’t have to be “all or nothing”.  Setting realistic expectations for yourself during more chaotic times is essential to prevent self care from feeling like a chore.  Simple self care this season might look like going to bed 30 minutes earlier, just like daylight does!  It could also be remembering to turn the crock pot on before leaving the house.  These things can (and should) matter just as much as carving out time on a sunny morning to run or booking that weekend getaway. 

Set and Keep Boundaries

Repeat after us, “You do not have to accept every invite you receive.”  Autumn is filled with fun activities and gatherings of all kinds!  While this time of year typically has something for everyone, this doesn’t mean that you have to do all the somethings at the expense of your own peace. If going to that bonfire on Friday night feels like too much, trust your gut…it’s probably too much…AND, you are empowered to say “no” to attending!

Look After Your Body

Yay, fall!  Not so “yay”  is cold and flu season.  Practice taking care of your physical body this season.  Get that flu shot, put lotion on that dry skin, stay hydrated.

Mind Your Mental Health

It’s SAD (seasonal affective disorder) season. If you feel you struggle more with your mental health this time of year, ramping up your mental health care game might need to be in the cards for you. “What more could I do?”, you ask? Here are some ideas:

  • Reach out for support – friends, family, clinicians
  • Begin a daily mindfulness practice – journaling, breathing, coloring, etc.
  • Self help – don’t knock the self help section of the book store…it’s a goldmine.

 

Wishing you all a wonderful fall season! Happy October!

 

Is Laughter Really The Best Medicine?

This past month, the Nutritious Thoughts team participated in Laughter Yoga.  Yep, you read that correctly!  Never having heard of this form of self-care, we were greatly intrigued and wanted to learn more about the potential benefits of this practice.  Happiness Coach Jennifer Parr (make sure to check out her services here!) gave us an incredible introduction to Laughter Yoga and how giggling can promote overall well-being!

Laughter Life Hack – written by Jennifer Parr

Laughing for just 15 minutes can literally save your life. 1 in 2 Americans struggle to stay happy and the majority of us are seeking solutions to escape the overwhelming stress so many of us face on a daily basis that can be felt in the form of anxiety, irritability, fatigue, digestive problems, and headaches.

One of the fastest and most immediate ways to reduce stress and rewire neural pathways in the brain to get immediate and noticeable change is laughter. Laughter is now recognized as a legitimate, scientifically validated form of preventative medicine.

Physiologically, stress and laughter are complete opposites. If you are laughing, it is physically impossible to also experience stress in that moment. When you experience stress, it negatively effects the functioning and health of your body including an increased heartbeat, rise in blood pressure, and constriction of blood vessels. However, when laughing, your heartbeat slows, blood pressure naturally decreases, and blood vessels are no longer constricted.

The health benefits of laughter are endless.

Laughter Benefits:

Decreases Stress Hormones.
Counteracts Symptoms of Depression.
Relaxes Muscles, and Simulates Circulation.
Improves Memory, Creativity and Problem Solving Skills.
Increases Energy Levels.
Strengthens Immune System.
Improves Digestive System.
Elevates Self Esteem.
Reduce or Prevent Symptoms of Allergies, Asthma, Arthritis, and Cancer.
Quiets the Mind.
Better Sleep.
Release of Feel Good Endorphins.
Emotional Balance and Joy.
Improves Overall Health.l

How can you get MORE laughter in your life? You are 30 times more likely to laugh in the company of others (vs. laughing on your own). One of the most fun and effective ways to guarantee regular laughter while in the company of a supportive community is to take a Laughter Yoga class. It is necessary to laugh for at least 15 minutes to receive the full health benefits of laughter. Laughter Yoga will guarantee that you get at least 15 minutes of Laughter (and in most cases much more) so you can experience immediate and noticeable health benefits.

WHAT IS LAUGHTER YOGA?

Laughter yoga combines yogic breathing techniques, guided laughter exercises and a unique form of meditation. No mat or yoga experience is needed or required.

Class Includes:

·       Light Stretching

·       Yogic Breathing Techniques.

·       Laughter Exercises and Movement.

·       Low impact cardiovascular workout for any fitness level.

·       Laughter Meditation.

What To Expect In A Laughter Yoga Session?

Play and joy are basic human needs, even for adults, and necessary for living a happy and balanced life. This class supports participants in meeting such essential needs and can bring lasting joy when practiced regularly through a variety of guided group and partner exercises. Learn how to laugh without having to rely on humor, jokes or comedy!

What Will You Experience After Laughter Yoga?

Immediately following a laughter yoga session, you will understand the value of laughter as a form of low impact cardiovascular exercise. Many participants have reported decreased anxiety, stress, tension, and worry immediately after the first class as well as increased energy and relaxation.

You will learn how to change your mood within minutes through the exercises. Practicing regularly will help create a more positive attitude and positive coping mechanisms for difficult life situations. Participants will also learn techniques for releasing built up negative emotions. Many participants also report that they feel more connected and comfortable with other participants in class and it can often help in forming friendships.

If you are interested in experiencing a Laughter Yoga class, we will be offering regular classes at Nutritious Thoughts led by Jennifer Parr. Her website is www.jennparr.com.

“Always laugh when you can, it is cheap medicine.” – Lord Byron

 

Locations

31 College Place, Suite 200
Asheville, NC 28801

1612 Asheville Hwy, Suite 1 & 3
Hendersonville, NC 28791

140 Appalachian Street, Suites EE & FF
Boone, NC 28607

 

Contact Us

Phone: (828) 333-0096
Fax: (828) 505-8772
Email: info@nutritious-thoughts.com

Nutritious Thoughts' locations have accessible office spaces.

Notice of Privacy Practices

 

Who We Are

We provide support around Eating Concerns, Embodiment, Nutrition for Substance Use Recovery, Nutrition for Mental Health, Nutrition for Competitive & Recreational Athletes, Chronic Health Concerns, and Gestational, & Hormonal & Reproductive Nutrition.