Eat, Love, and Pray

Eat, love, and pray, that is how I get through each day.  While it may sound silly, these three actions have made living with psoriatic arthritis a little easier.

Eat

I have to be mindful of what I put in my body.  This goes far beyond avoiding foods that contain ingredients that I am allergic to or saying no to junk food.  The foods I eat play a role in my daily pain level.  Throughout the years I have been able to identify certain foods that trigger a flare or disrupt my digestive system.  Eliminating or reducing foods that increase inflammation has also helped.  This doesn’t mean that I never indulge, but when I do I remind myself that each bite comes with a price.

Love

For approximately 13 years, I hated my body.  I loathed the fact that it punished me with pain on a daily basis.  I despised how it continued to fail me.  The problem with hating my body was that I wasn’t doing anything to improve how it functioned or to lower my pain; instead, I fought back by pushing past its limits which resulted in more pain and downtime.  Once I learned to love my body it began to love me back.  I express my love with the food I eat, exercising, and allowing my body to rest when it demands it. In return, my body has gifted me with more productive hours and sometimes longer periods between flares.  Because I was no longer at war with my body, the anger that had filled my heart faded away.  Without all of that anger and disgust filling my heart and mind, I began loving my life despite living with pain. Some might say I gave up the fight, but I like to think of it as killing my enemy (the illness not my body) with kindness rather than continuing a bloody battle.

Pray

Unless a cure is found in my lifetime, it won’t matter how well I eat or how much love I show my body, I will always experience some level of pain.  Because of this, I pray daily for the strength to face each day’s challenges, for patience when my body misbehaves, and for guidance in my treatment choices.