Stress and How Doing Everything Right Made Me Sick…
I got bone achingly ill for two days this week and I’m still not 100%.
I feel weak, fatigued, water logged and pretty irritable. I know what you’re thinking and, no, I’m not on my period. Good on you for recognizing those symptoms though.
Three weeks out from a competition is a pretty inconvenient time to get sick. This is the ‘every second counts’ time, or at least it feels that way, and being bed ridden without the ability to stand was overwhelmingly frustrating.
Before I could take a moment and use my brain to assess my condition, I had called up coach in a panic. What do I do? Is resting even an option at this point? Yes, one hundred percent! Coach told me to not worry about moving. He said to eat as needed (without over doing it) and to focus on rest and hydration. Like what any normal person should do when their sick. Duh, Melissa. He also reminded me, though, that this is a common occurrence for athletes during prep and not to be alarmed.
I’m glad he made a point to mention that last tidbit. I consider myself a healthy person. I eat clean, I exercise, I take care of myself as best I know how and, as a result, I rarely get sick. If I do catch a little cold it lasts for 24 hours tops. But, boy was this one SO much worse. I was out of commission in a way that was totally unfamiliar to me. In my mind there were two potential culprits for the severity of my ailments 1) I just so happened to catch a particularly nasty bug. Possible, but unlikely. Or 2) my newly adopted ‘athlete’ lifestyle had officially put me in a stressful catabolic state and I was now experiencing my body’s lack of a properly functioning immune system response. Bingo.
A funny coincidence is that I’m currently several chapters into a book called Why Zebra’s Don’t Get Ulcers. The author, Robert Sapolsky, is, in my eyes, a proper genius. I have a full-blown nerd crush on his mind. I specify that my crush is on his mind because the man is by no means a looker, but man can he think. Anyway, ogling aside, the premise of the book is the human predicament of stress and how modern society has managed to contort what was once (and still is under certain circumstances) an evolutionary advantage into what is now, in many ways, the demise of a species’ mental and physical well being.
Evolutionarily, the only reason we ever had for exercising beyond any ‘normal’ level of activity is if we were either really hungry or trying not to be the losing end of someone else being really hungry. As Sapolsky puts it:
‘Everything in physiology follows the rule that too much can be as bad as too little. There are optimal points of allostatic balance. For example, while a moderate amount of exercise generally increases bone mass, thirty-year-old athletes who run 40 to 50 miles a week can wind up with decalcified bones, decreased bone mass, increased risk of stress fractures and scoliosis (sideways curvature of the spine) — their skeletons look like those of seventy-year-olds. To put exercise in perspective, imagine this: sit with a group of hunter-gatherers from the African grasslands and explain to them that in our world we have so much food and so much free time that some of us run 26 miles in a day, simply for the sheer pleasure of it. They are likely to say, “Are you crazy? That’s stressful.” Throughout hominid history, if you’re running 26 miles in a day, you’re either very intent on eating someone or someone’s very intent on eating you.’
So, I’m not a marathon runner, but I think it’s safe to say that the same sentiment applies to competitive athletes in general. No extreme lifestyle is a healthy one. It doesn’t matter if you’re extreme with something as good for you as exercise. Like Sapolsky said, running 26 miles was never good for you only necessary if you’re running from a lion. Similarly, me increasing volume in the gym on top of an increase in NEAT (Non-exercise activity thermogenesis), all while decreasing calorie consumption, is most definitely not good for me. I’m pushing my body harder and giving it less fuel to use to repair the damage. Not good. Necessary for the desired outcome, sure. But not good.
I think this is an important thing to note as a bodybuilder or as any athlete. People will say, “Oh you look so good, what’s the secret? How do I look like that?” And the answer right now is pretty bleak. I’m not in a sustainable phase of this competition prep. My body is not stoked that I’m eating less and working harder. Maybe I look good, but the stress required to look this way is simply not sustainable. In terms of lifestyle, there’s no secret to doing what I’m doing to look how I look. This is temporary. I will soon go back to how I looked before because even rock hard abs aren’t worth a body that can’t fend for itself in this world.
Spoiler alert:
For those of you who are wondering what the heck is up with the the title of Sapolsky’s book and who have yet to infer why the fuck zebras don’t get ulcers, I got you:
‘If you are a Zebra running for your life or a lion sprinting for your meal, your body’s physiological response mechanisms are superbly adapted for dealing with such short term physical emergencies. For the vast majority of beasts on this planet, stress is about short term crisis, after which it’s either over with or you’re over with. When we sit around and worry about stressful things we turn on the same physiological responses– but they are potentially a disaster when provoked chronically. A large body of evidence suggests that stress related diseases [ulcers etc.] emerge, predominantly, out of the fact that we so often activate a physiological system that has evolved for responding to acute physical emergencies, but we turn it on for months on end… Zebras and lions may see trouble coming, but they can’t get stressed about events far in the future.’
https://www.amazon.com/Why-Zebras-Dont-Ulcers-Third/dp/0805073698
