Hi Plum
I've just spent the last couple of hours reading your exercise diary. And i've found it quite inspiring. I was diagnosed with ME (Or CFS as my arrogant Neurologist felt the need to correct me with) a couple of months ago and since then i've been looking into various exercise options. Prior to becoming ill i was an avid race walker and runner and all that has gone. I've been off work for the last 4 months. My job is full time and i live a 70 mile round trip away and i think the reality is setting in that i'm probably not going to be able to return to work full time in the near future. It's so sad and so frustrating - i'm finding my lifestyle change very hard to deal with.
However i've taken some comfort from reading this and knowing that if i can find the right balance i'll be able to enjoy exercise again. Any advice you can give me on good exercise options would be gratefully appreciated.
Thanks x
I'm glad if it's helped you! I don't know why doctors have to be so unhelpful sometimes. I must admit I haven't been to my doctor very often in the last few years as there is usually nothing they can do to help me and I wind up feeling bad about myself afterwards.
It is funny (not funny 'haha' though, lol) how many people who have CFS/ME after being very active before. I found much the same; that it made things very frustrating and hard to cope with sometimes. The most important thing I have learned is that it's a very difficult balance to strike between being kind to yourself (ie it's ok that right now you can't do everything you'd like to, it's unfair but that's the situation) and flipping over into 'well there's no point in even trying'. What you don't want to do is try to force yourself to be well. I think one of the reasons I have been unwell for so long is because after I recovered from my initial virus I immediately went back to work full time and started back at the gym in order to build myself up again (or so I thought). This definitely did not do me any favours.
What has worked for me, which may help others (I hope!):
- whatever exercise you do must be realistic for your current condition. it's no good saying 'I want to walk 5000 steps per day' if you can only walk 500 without feeling rubbish. sometimes all I could do was gentle stretching on the floor, or yoga especially for chronic fatigue (there's a great DVD and book on this subject available on Amazon by Fiona Agomar, which has variations for lying down, sitting in a chair or standing up so you can do as much or as little as you can). if you go backwards or don't progress, don't let yourself dwell on it. you are still doing amazing things for your health by doing the best you can.
- the best 'gadget' I have bought for my health is a fitbit. this or any similar device (I now want an UP by Jawbone, lol) can really help with pacing. You can relate how you're feeling to how active you've been and how well you're sleeping, and it gives you good indication of when you should just rest and not exercise - if you've had a busy day the day before or not slept well, for instance.
- make sure you eat enough food to fuel your exercise! people without this condition can have quite a drastic deficit but we can't. our bodies have enough to cope with without trying to recover from exercise on rock-bottom calories. when I was feeling my best I was eating a 15% deficit and eating all my exercise calories back.
- look into supplements. the suggestions in 'from fatigued to fantastic' helped me tremendously although I don't recommend buying the branded range named after the book. especially d-ribose can help with energy and things like vegEPA help with inflammation and soreness.
- allow plenty of recovery time. I was only doing kettlebells twice a week at my peak as I needed to be completely free from any aches before doing them again.
- avoid cardio! For me this also includes the more cardio-intensive kettlebell exercises. Yoga and pilates (and yogalates, heh) are great as they provide flexibility and strength without creating an inflammatory response in the body (which you definitely want to avoid). The kettlebell and bodyweight exercises I'm doing now are mostly core strength ones and as you'll have seen I am doing them veeery slowly so as not to get puffed. Sometimes it's hard to go that slow but it does seem to work. For instance, the routine I've been doing this week spreads 6 exercises over 10 minutes, I rest 10 minutes, and then repeat.
- core strength - for some reason, having a strong core seems to make everything easier. now I can walk without getting so much back pain, so I walk more, as one example.
- start slow; only increase your effort slowly once you've stabilised in your current routine. I started with 4lb kettlebell weights and finished at 6kg at my peak but this was not a fast process! And sometimes I had to drop back to lower weights. Right now, I'm still struggling to get to grips with an increase in my working hours so I've not been able to do as much as I'd like. But again, whatever you can do within your limits will be better than doing nothing.
- be flexible and kind to yourself. I know I've said it before, but if on Tuesday you really wanted to do kettlebells but are only up to 'lying on the floor' yoga, then do the yoga and don't beat yourself up about it. stressing will not help your health at all and indeed will probably be detrimental.
Good grief, I've waffled on a bit, and most of this is general guidelines from my own experience and not specific suggestions - sorry about that! I hope you are able to sort something out with your employer as they are required by law to consider whether they can make any reasonable adjustments to allow you to carry on in your job. I was lucky that mine let me work part-time and also from home if I needed to. I think that staying in work really helped me not fall into a complete funk about the whole thing (although I still have my days, lol).
