A lesson in listening to your body
For most of 2024, I haven’t been feeling like myself. I’ve started noticing some symptoms that I’ve never experienced before: extreme exhaustion, elevated heart rate, lightheadedness, shortness of breath during exercise and normal daily tasks, numbness in my hands and weight gain (although I don’t weigh myself, I can feel it). For months, these symptoms have been getting worse and I started to question if I was perimenopausal — unlikely at 36 but not impossible.
But in classic toxic fitness culture style, I started to blame myself. I thought: I must be overeating…too many carbs with my new sourdough hyper-fixation. I must be slacking with my cardio and I’m getting out of shape. How else do I explain why I can barely make it through my own Zumba class anymore? Each class had become such a struggle. I lost my energy, my flair, my connection with my students. I pulled others up to the front to join me for certain songs just so I could have a break to catch my breath. In my 14-year career of teaching fitness, this has never happened to me (outside of my pregnancies).
So, what did I do? I started forcing myself to do more cardio. I was struggling to go up stairs, so I forced myself to start doing the stairmaster at the gym. But as it turns out, I was doing exactly the OPPOSITE of what my body needed.
Eventually, I got to a point where I decided to get things checked out by my doctor. Somehow (probably during the transition into a new job), I forgot to get my annual physical last year. So it had been a while since I’ve seen my primary care doctor. I told him my symptoms and he ordered “the works” in labwork — all the normal stuff, plus thyroid and hormones.
As soon as I got the results, the answer was so clear: iron-deficiency anemia. You guys, my numbers were so low, my doctor asked if I wanted to do an infusion. Thankfully, my labs were perfectly normal in every other way — yay for no perimenopause yet! — so he said I was healthy enough to just start with iron supplements. Once I started doing more research on anemia, it put all the puzzle pieces together. One thing that probably wasn’t helping is my every-other-month blood donation. You would have thought I’d suspect something when I’ve been turned away from donating many times for my hemoglobin being too low, but nope.
My body was fighting for its life, just to sustain me, and I’m out here forcing myself to do MORE exercise as punishment. Why do we do this? Why do we immediately blame ourselves when changes happen in our bodies, instead of wondering if something is wrong or maybe it’s just a natural part of aging? The fitness industry has led us to believe that weight gain and fatigue are a result of laziness and that if we “just work harder,” things will get better.
Well, in my case, working harder was actually working against me. And it took almost passing out in a hot yoga class to wake me up and seek help.
I’m thankful that it wasn’t something worse, and that anemia does have a simple solution. I’ve been on iron pills for about a month now and I’m finally starting to feel like myself again. Slowly but surely, I’m coming back to life. Last week, one of my Zumba students came up to me after class and said: “You were on fire tonight. I knew something had to be going on with you, because you haven’t been yourself lately. But you’re BACK!”
This is such an important reminder that we can’t care for others if we don’t first care for ourselves. I can’t give my students my 100% if I’m not well. I can’t be there for my family like I need to if I’m too tired and weak to function. If something feels off in your body, go speak to your doctor. Don’t wait, don’t let things get worse. Trust your gut that something isn’t right and stop blaming yourself!
