I’m grateful I was diagnosed with gastritis
Bold statement- I know. But I was thinking the other day that this is the healthiest I’ve felt in my entire life. Healthier than when I was a teenager with a fiery metabolism. Healthier than when I was a competitive powerlifter. Healthier than when I was a full-time personal trainer.
Not only do I eat well, but I enjoy it. I take pride in cooking beautiful, colorful, nourishing meals for myself. I enjoy the energy I feel when I don’t spend the weekends drinking and ordering greasy takeout at 2am (it was fun while it lasted). I love that I can walk, hike, and run long distances and feel energized doing it.
And maybe none of these things would have happened if I had never developed gastritis.
The Switch
What was once frustration is now gratitude. I used to wake up each morning, exhausted from the night before, as I couldn’t get comfortable in bed, trying to manage my nausea and that burning sensation in my stomach that just seemed to get worse whenever I lay down.
Of course, I wasn’t grateful in the early phases of my healing. But as things got easier, and as I slowly built a new life for myself (new habits, new schedule, new diet), I started to see a silver lining.
And eventually, the whole sky was blue again.
More in tune and more sensitive
That’s how I feel about my body. Sometimes I forget about the days pre-gastritis, when my stomach just felt bad and I usually just shrugged it off as nothing.
Now, any sensation from my throat to my…well, you know, sets me off and makes me wonder what’s wrong. I’m still working through this, but it’s gotten easier as I remind myself that some pain and discomfort can arise in digestion. It doesn’t mean I have to sound the alarm bells and start frantically googling my symptoms.
But on the other hand, I listen more carefully to how my body feels. If I start feeling full, I stop eating. If I’m hungry for more, I get a second serving. I want to write a separate post about this, but I struggled with binge eating since my early teens, off and on, until I was diagnosed with gastritis.
In some roundabout way, gastritis curbed my eating behaviors to make binging a non-issue for me. I haven’t binged or even wanted to binge in about 2 years, as long as I’ve been dealing with gastritis.
Furthermore, gastric cancer cases have been on the rise in people younger than 50. Getting yearly endoscopies to monitor your gastritis is a great way to get ahead of potential malignant developments.
Gratitude and healing
Research shows that people who experience an injury and then feel any strong negative emotions about it have longer recovery times and more overall pain and dysfunction.
I’ve found my mental outlook and GI symptoms both improve when I’m positive about this. For me, being positive isn’t just some hippie bullsh*t; it’s critical to my healing.
Early on in my healing (when I really didn’t feel any gratitude whatsoever), I began a 5-minute daily practice of meditation and expressing gratitude for my life and for my health. It was a practice of fake it ‘til you make it, and I do think it’s been working for me. Now, when I express gratitude, it’s not fake.
It took a lot of diligence and patience to get to where I am today (mostly better, eating mostly what I want, exercising again), but it was all worth it.
If you’re in the throes of your healing journey, you might be annoyed or frustrated to see someone say they’re grateful for this. #toxicpositivity But I do think there’s a lot of truth to prioritizing positivity for the sake of healing.