The body is a garden, pt. 1

We only have so much control, and we can't cheat death

TW: body image, disordered eating

I hadn’t felt at home in my body in years. It was slower than it used to be, it ached in new ways, and nearly every photo of myself was a rude confrontation with a reality I didn’t recognize. I fell into a dark eddy of confusion: my body was changing in ways that felt out of my control, and my politics demanded that I accept and even love it despite the alienation I felt. I spent several months in treatment for disordered eating and practiced intuitive eating with my dietitian, a process that involved me allowing myself to eat whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted. After a while, the controlling voice in my head quieted down and let me live for a few months. But the discomfort in my body didn’t disappear. I didn’t know how else to put it — it felt like something was wrong. I experienced crippling fatigue on a daily basis, I had insomnia, anxiety, and depression, my inflamed scalp psoriasis was spreading to other parts of my body, and I was experiencing menstrual bleeding for months on end.

I went in for my annual physical with a long list of questions for my PCP about colon cancer, cortisol, and hormones. My TikTok algorithm had gotten to me and I was convinced I was sick in multiple mysterious ways. My PA kindly implied that I was spending too much time on TikTok, but also suggested a basic metabolic panel as a first step. She handed me my blood work order and I left it on my counter for two months.

In the early summer, I finally got it together and made it to the lab for my blood test. I got the results the morning of my partner’s grad school graduation; a call from my PCP’s office informing me that my fasting blood glucose was elevated, as was my A1C, which made me pre-diabetic. I hung up and chuckled because I was relieved to know that they had pinpointed something to explain at least part of what was going on, but then the flood of questions: What is pre-diabetes? How close am I to diabetes? How long has it been like this? Did I do this to myself?

Am I bad?

The shame and fear were the loudest voices in my head. I have an incredibly strong family history of type 2 diabetes on both sides of my family, but knowing that I’m genetically predisposed to a disease doesn’t make it feel any less bad, especially when our culture assigns morality to it; type 1 is the kind kids have, type 2 is the kind you give yourself.

We moved states a week after I got the call, so I didn’t have time to talk to my PCP about treatment plans or next steps. I spent the next couple weeks on the prediabetes subreddit reading about the drastic steps people have taken to reverse their prediabetes. When it came up with strangers, they would often look at me and say “you just need to lose 10-15 pounds and you’ll be fine.”

I’ll admit there was even a sick part of myself that was relieved to re-adopt many of the diet rules I’d learned growing up. It had been so hard to fight them my whole adult life and now I had a legitimate reason to reintroduce them. I cut out most carbs and processed sugars. I have a huge sweet tooth and I love candy, so it was difficult at first. The first couple weeks I dreamed about cakes and ice creams and Cheez-Its every night. I was so hungry. I started to become afraid of any carbs, even the ones in apples and carrots.

I lost weight quickly and felt relieved when I started to fit into clothes I’d said goodbye to the year before. My friends looked at me with concern, knowing my history with disordered eating but trying not to overstep boundaries and say too much. I made an appointment with a naturopathic doctor because I didn’t want to just go on metformin immediately. I wanted to see if there was anything I could do holistically to improve the situation.

The naturopath put me on an absurd cocktail of daily supplements that takes me 10 minutes to take each morning because I’m terrible at pills. I took them every day, and continued the diet. I established new routines and stopped feeling so hungry all the time. I worked out like usual, but found that I couldn’t be as ambitious in my lifting because I simply didn’t have enough fuel in my body.

I went in for a new blood test about six weeks after I got my first results, and my fasting glucose came back at a normal level. I’m not out of the woods yet; I’ll need to see my A1C in another month or so to know if I’ve officially reversed the prediabetes, but it’s a good sign.

Because my friends and loved ones begged me to do so, I had another appointment with the intuitive eating dietitian I worked with last year, and we spent most of the session talking not about my body or my eating habits, but about my brain. Specifically: what happens if I do everything “right” and still develop type 2 diabetes?

It’s possible. It’s maybe even likely, given my family history. And it’s a reality I don’t want to confront or accept in any way because it subverts my expectation that I can control my body, and therefore my life (and maybe the universe and also cheat death??). That’s been the most difficult lesson I’ve had to learn in this process, over and over again.

I have this idea that the body is a garden. You can plant certain seeds in a garden plot and expect them to grow a certain way. You can feed those plants with fertilizer and sun and water, or you can neglect them. If you feed them a certain way, you can expect that they’ll generally turn out a certain way.

The same is true of the body. Generally you will not feel good if you don’t sleep, eat a balanced diet, drink water, and exercise. You might even develop health conditions or disease because of it. But doing all of these things doesn’t mean you will protect yourself forever. The healthiest-seeming person in the world could have a cancerous tumor developing just under the skin.

Last summer, I let my garden go wild because I was traveling for several months. I didn’t water it, didn’t weed it, and didn’t plant anything new. But by August, the bed was filled with cherry tomatoes, a lush sage bush, and several cucumbers I hadn’t planted. I was reminded how chaotic nature is. To quote Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park: life, uh, finds a way.

A garden plot is a square of nature cultivated by humans in an attempt to make it do something. We can give it things we think will help and generally it will yield what we expect. But it’s still wild. The cucumber seeds we plant might turn out to be zucchinis. Aphids could take over your tomato plants. The weather could be unexpectedly hot and dry and wreak havoc on your basil. Shit happens.

The body is also wild. As much as we want to believe we have mastered our bodies, that we can control what they do based on what we put into them, they will always be ultimately ungovernable. “The body is a garden” has become a mantra for me that I repeat to myself when I start to get frustrated that my blood glucose is spiking from a food I eat all the time, or when I sleep poorly, or when a cold lingers in my chest for days. It’s a reminder to let go a little bit and accept that as much as I want control, I have very little.