Ep. 204, Stacy's Physical and Mental RecoveryIn this episode, Stacy opens up about her struggles since her back injury last year from lifting a bag of concrete in a garden and how she is doing now. Real talk about depression, medical intervention and managing a huge life change.
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If you enjoy the show, please review it in iTunes!The Paleo View (TPV), Episode 204: Stacy's Physical and Mental Recovery
What happens to your life when you have a bad injury that changes your life? Stacy had really built her life around strength training. She gave talks, made friends, got a lot of benefits from it. She went from entering a competition she had a great shot at winning to not lifting for a year.Her quality of life was severely affected. At first she tried to cope by focusing on getting to relax, but after prolonged time away from the gym, it became quite depressing to see her friends getting better and her being unable to participate.Everyone who knew Stacy understood how much Strongman had become a part of her identity. And then the fact she couldn't do it anymore was crushing.Luckily, her injury is treatable. It can be treated with physical therapy and other medical intervention or, as a last resort, surgery. But there are some complementary interventions as well. Back injuries are difficult to heal because they don't take up nutrients the same way other body parts do. There is no blood flow.She'll be doing physical therapy to correct muscle imbalance and relieve pressure on disc.Sarah looked into nutrient deficiencies related to back issues and what supplements could possibly assist.Because disc get all nutrients from diffusion, you have to be very nutrient sufficient.Discs are made with very hard collagen on the outside and gooey center.Sarah recommends the Type 2 collagen from Vital Proteins because Type 2 is what makes up the disc.She also recommends Glucosamine and Chondroitin supplements.Also, Vitamin D deficiency is related to disc injury as well.Less well supported is Vitamin C and Zinc and Fish oil for pain management.Originally, she tried to find things to increase blood flow, but realized that wasn't possible.One of the side effects of this huge injury and life change was serious depression. Not only the loss of her sport, but she also was upset with herself, blaming herself for being lazy and making it up to be worse than it was.She was also very irritable and angry because of her chronic pain. He desire to binge eat returned as well.She started seeing a psychiatrist to deal with her issues. She went on an SSRI to help with her mood and binge eating.The diagnosis led to a lot of self loathing and feelings of failure. She cried for many days and didn't get it filled right away.She ended up deciding to take medication because she wanted her quality of life back, she deserved it and the people in her life deserved it, too.Returning from the doctor and confronting those feelings led her to do searches on paleo and depression. She found a worrying article (and frankly irresponsible article) by Chris Kresser about the "dark side" of antidepressants.She was doing all the things that should help restore her and they weren't working! If you've done everything and still not feeling well, then you deserve a great quality of life and shouldn't feel guilty about taking a pill!Going on the medication made her get her quality of life back! She now feels great!If you're going through something, don't feel like a failure if you have to go on medication. YOU ARE NOT A FAILURE! YOU JUST NEED A LITTLE HELP!The Paleo View always talks about how you should combine both the best of nutritional and lifestyle changes with the best of modern medicine. This definitely includes mental health as well.In paleo, there's often a bias against medicine and doctors because people come to it out of frustration. But medicine absolutely has its place, if you use it in balance.Sarah feels that now "old" Stacy's back lately.We hope that if you listen to this show, you use it as a catalyst to try to help yourself and the people in your life that seem to be a little not themselves.Stacy finally feels like she's in a good place and she can recognize that not lifting in a year isn't the worst thing that could have happened.Thank you for listening!Outro (47:07)Support us by shopping through links on our sidebars, please!
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