Making it Work: Exercising, Weight Management, and Autoimmune Disease

When people hear an expression such as ‘autoimmune disorder’ they almost instantly associate it with ‘a lifelong sentence’. Usually, doctors recommend traditional medical treatments that entail regularly ingesting pills and some form of a restrictive lifestyle. However, they typically cannot give you a solid ‘prescription’ for a healthy lifestyle after the diagnosis. People tend to give up too easily and embrace the restrictions, but the proliferation of diets and workout programs offer more flexible solutions. You can savor life to the fullest because a ‘lifelong sentence’ doesn’t mean that your life has ended.

How to exercise?

Chronic inflammation is the inescapable part of any autoimmune disease. It’s reasonable to assume that pushing your body further can only worsen the condition and promote inflammation to the point of a medical emergency. The opposite is true, however. Because exercising will help you keep the symptoms under control and maintain good health, it should become one of your top priorities. Here’s how to do it safely. 

Take it slow

The most important difference between exercising as a healthy person and one that suffers from autoimmune disease is that you have to take it slow. The first tenet is to be patient and don’t over-train. Inaugurating your body into training with a mild and deliberate difficulty curve will ensure that the inflammation doesn’t worsen.

Be in a controlled environment

If you plan to exercise regularly with an autoimmune disease, you should stay within the confines of a controlled environment. This is typically a gym where you can be under the supervision of a professional trainer who will be familiar with your diagnosis and who can follow your progress. In addition, sticking to the interior may be a good idea if your autoimmune disease includes allergies to pollen or other allergens found in nature.

Take up a discipline that involves stretching

Do you think yoga is easy? An inexperienced onlooker may think that there’s not all that much to it, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. Ancient disciplines such as yoga and tai chi can activate your entire body and serve as an exercise routine that calms your mind down. These types of exercises can help decrease the risk of intense inflammatory processes. Yoga is amazing for rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, and even type 1 diabetes. Yoga will have many positive effects on you and, at the very least, it certainly won’t worsen your condition. In other words, you should check it out anyway and enjoy its benefits!

How to diet?

The vegan route

For one, a plant-based diet - or the vegan route - is a good starting point, but it’s important to also eliminate “vegan junk food” such as processed pastries and snacks. By focusing on fruits, vegetables, and legumes you’ll be able to avoid inflammatory foods more easily and give your body the nutrients it needs.  However, if you cannot exactly exclude meat and dairy from your diet, you should go for organic products exclusively and try your hand at the following:

The AIP diet

You may want to try taking the initial steps of using the AIP diet (short for Autoimmune Protocol), which restricts the intake of carbohydrates, especially the processed type combined with sugar. This regime essentially suggests a useful elimination strategy. Potential food groups that may contribute to the overall inflammation are excluded from the diet and then slowly incorporated into the regime again. The idea is to uncover your intolerance to certain ingredients and adapt your diet according to how the body reacts.

Anti-inflammatory ingredients

If you are readapting your diet according to your autoimmune disease and your new workout habits, you can always fall back on a fairly reliable ‘life hack’ of introducing a plethora of anti-inflammatory ingredients. Some of the best, scientifically backed choices include fish oil, olive oil, leafy greens, tomatoes, and all kinds of berries. If you don’t plan to go out for the evening, you can go for garlic, turmeric, and ginger, which have been known for thousands of years for their anti-inflammatory properties. 

There are more options than you might anticipate, and you can play around with ingredients until you find exactly what fits your individual needs.

How to manage weight?

If you choose a low-carb diet by default to manage your condition, you may likely find it’s not that difficult to maintain a healthy weight. The problem arises if you lead a notably sedentary lifestyle, which brings us right back to the points we’ve covered about exercise.

All in all, you should increase the volume of power foods in your daily diet to manage the lack of complex carbs and sugars. These would otherwise keep you on the high end of the energy spectrum, but with terrible energy crashes after a few hours. To keep yourself leveled throughout the day, make sure to consume foods such as:

• avocado
• pineapple
• bananas
• figs
• apricots
• plums 

Even in small quantities, they will keep your hunger satiated and your autoimmune inflammatory processes in check.

Conclusion

If anyone dares to say that it will be easy - they are either selling you something or outright lying to you. Autoimmune diseases are frustrating at the very least, and often overwhelming. You can feel trapped in your own body, and you might feel tempted to relinquish control of your body to fate. But don’t give up, because there is a way. 

When circumstances appear to be at their worst, it’s usually a sign that you should hit harder. You can ‘forge’ your body into a formidable frame and boost your metabolism to fight the symptoms of your autoimmune disease. Today, in the age of fitness and passionate lifestyle improvements, nothing is impossible.

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