Reducing The Inflammatory Load On Your Body

This week I hosted a FB live on Reducing The Inflammatory Load On Your Body. This was based on the talk I gave last year at the fourth Lipoedema Conference in Sydney.

Reducing The Inflammatory Load On Your Body
FB Group

General medicine doesn’t talk about how emotional and mental states affect inflammation and to me, these are as important as the physical influences.

Are you someone who is very strict with how you eat, only eating real food in moderate amounts? Exercising regularly? Getting enough sleep? Wearing your compression if you have lymphoedema or lipoedema? Doing all the right things and yet you still have pain?

Have you wondered what the missing key is?

How stressed are you? Think about it, right now. On a scale of 1-10, how stressed are you?

Does that level of stress ever change? How do you manage it?

My next question is a little curlier. How do you speak to yourself? You know that voice in your head running commentary all day? Is it a supportive voice or is it belittling you? Are you aware of how you speak to yourself?

Most people have an unconscious commentary going on in the background and usually it ain’t nice. They may look in the mirror and say things like:

You’re wearing that?
You’re so stupid
You can’t do that
You’re disgusting
Who do you think you are?

This is learnt behaviour from conditioning during childhood, school, work or even married life. These are comments they may have heard a long time ago and they have adopted them as their own, using them against themselves.

They are not even aware they are doing this, it’s so ingrained it’s just who they are.

Your body cannot tell the difference between real and perceived so each time you talk to yourself in a degrading way, your body experiences it exactly the same as if someone on the street had talked to you in that way.

Can you imagine what it would feel like if a stranger came up to you and said “you’re so stupid” and then walked away. Where in your body would you feel it? What would it feel like?

I know it would feel like being punched in the guts to me. I’d have a full on stress reaction.

That stress response causes cortisol to be released, a spike in cortisol causes a spike in inflammation and a spike in inflammation causes a spike in pain.

It’s this relentless cycle of stress/inflammation/pain and you can start to break that cycle by changing how you talk to yourself.

Sounds simple. And in reality, it is. But the application of changing how you talk to yourself takes time and patience.

This topic was the focus of my FB live this week. You can watch the whole thing by clicking on the video below.

I’ve created a FB group called Reducing The Inflammatory Load On Your Body to continue the discussion. You can join it by clicking here.

To work with me click here.