Catherine Meeks was overweight and out of shape. Her joints were often so stiff, a walk that would take the average person five minutes took her half an hour.
She was afraid she was on her way to being a wheelchair user.
Meeks, 64, who has suffered from rheumatoid arthritis since she was in her 40s, had a choice to make when she was diagnosed in the early 1990s.
She could take prescription medications with potentially harsh side effects, or embark on a diet and fitness routine to combat her aching, inflamed joints.
She opted to get moving, to eat right.
"My legs were so stiff and so painful," she says. "I was highly motivated to try to find a way out of that."
Meeks, a retired college professor who lives in Macon, Georgia, joined a gym and began walking laps in its pool. Striding weightless in the water, she says, made it "more possible to get through the day."
What's more, during the past couple of decades, she has shed about 100 pounds.
"I never had much of a history of exercise until I was diagnosed. The thing that came out the most was how important it was to do exercise. When I'm in the water, my legs feel so good," she says. "The focus was not so much about losing weight as it was changing my lifestyle, and in the process of changing my lifestyle, I lost a lot of weight."
Three or four days each week, she sloshes through the pool for about an hour. She does stretching exercises as well. But Meeks has found that, for her, altering her eating habits also has worked wonders. She became a vegetarian. She researched herbal therapies and began using them.
She began combating her sweet tooth, too, eating sweet potatoes plain instead of mixing in sugar. She put dried fruit in cookies instead of baking them with sugar.
"I have retrained my taste buds to an amazing point now. ... I've gotten to where I don't have food cravings and I don't eat nearly as much as I used to eat, and I feel so much better," Meeks says.
"I eat completely different from the way I used to eat. I eat a lot of raw food, I make fresh juice practically every day. ... The dietary part is just inescapable. You have to do something about your diet."
Having found pain relief the natural way, Meeks says she won't backslide into her sedentary, overeating ways.
"Even if people don't have arthritis, they really don't have a choice about exercise. ... There's no shortcut, there is absolutely no shortcut," she says. "It requires a bunch of commitment and it's not easy. I'm not wanting to paint myself as a saint here. ... I've really struggled with a lot of this, and I do get tired of it. There are days when I wish I could just not do it and be fine, but if I (don't exercise), then two or three days later I don't feel too good."
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