A Healthy Lifestyle with Chronic Pain - Healthy Eating

A Healthy Lifestyle with Chronic Pain – Healthy Eating 

A healthy lifestyle is important for everyone, but for those of us living with illnesses and chronic pain it is a major tool we can use to feel as best we can in our challenging lives. Exercising, planning healthy meals, shopping for and preparing them requires work, using energy we don’t have. All that activity can have a ripple effect increasing our pain, leaving many of us frustrated, feeling defeated and going back to grabbing foods that require little to no preparation. These “fast foods” are often filled with fats, carbohydrates, sugars and additives, as well as low in much needed nutrients, fiber and protein.

However, if we take smaller steps in the right direction, steps that are physically and emotionally possible for us, we can achieve the best health possible even living with the physical ailments and chronic pain we deal with every day! There are many things we just do not have control over, however, exercising as best we can, eating healthy, being as social as we can, as well as spending time practicing our faith are areas we do have control over. Not taking care of what we have control over can leave us feeling worse than we already do, leaving us weaker and feeling hopeless and helpless. We each need to seriously consider grabbing a hold of what we can and do the best we can with it to have the healthiest life possible in our circumstances! Please know I am not negating the fact that some of us are just starting this journey and are grieving horribly the many losses chronic pain brings us and do not have one care to exercise and eat right at the stage of grief your are in, please know all you can do is your best.

Previously

In a previous blog article, Making Attainable New Years Resolutions with Chronic Pain.  the many reasons exercising is beneficial was listed. We also looked at making SMART goals that were specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and timely in order to have a good goal in place to help us achieve what we want, looking at ways to make it "doable" for us with chronic pain. You can find free PDF templates here with directions to help plan out your goals.

We looked at the unrealistic goal I originally made for exercising: I will walk 2 miles a day. I figured I would get on my treadmill and walk off into eternal bliss of healthfulness! I planned on achieving this in 2-3 sessions throughout the day, considering one long stretch was not physically possible for me. As it turned out, while going through physical therapy multiple times, I hit a wall; doing more than 5 to 10 minutes on the treadmill resulted in me spending 3 to 4 days in bed afterwards in severe pain.