Living with it
Dry brushing, wraps, ice baths: what is worth doing
A triage of everything that circulates in lipedema videos, sorted into three piles: worth doing, harmless if you enjoy it, and actively bad for this tissue.
Daily life
Living with it
Flying and long journeys with lipedema
Four hours of immobility in a low-pressure cabin is a bad combination for any legs, and a worse one for these. Most of the fix happens before you board.
Mind and body
Getting dressed when your top and bottom are different sizes
Not a styling article. A practical one about a genuine daily problem that most women with this condition spend real time and money on.
Food and inflammation
Salt, water and why drinking less makes swelling worse
Half of this is intuitive and half of it is exactly backwards, which is why so many women are doing one of the two things that helps and one that does not.
Food and inflammation
Anti-inflammatory eating, from our own kitchen
Most anti-inflammatory advice assumes a supermarket you do not shop in. The good news is that the traditional kitchen here is already most of the way there.
Mind and body
Explaining lipedema to people who keep commenting
You should not have to justify your own body to people who love you. You will probably have to anyway, so here are the words, at three different lengths.
Mind and body
The part of lipedema nobody treats
It is not a soft topic bolted on to a medical library. Elevated depression and anxiety are in the clinical guidelines for this condition, and so is an instruction to clinicians about how to speak to you.
Living with it
Lymphatic self-massage at home, step by step
Professional drainage is not available weekly to most women in this region. A self-administered version is, and done correctly it is a genuine part of managing the pain.
Living with it
Exercise with lipedema: what to do, and what to skip
Movement in compression carries the strongest recommendation grade in the clinical guideline for this condition — stronger than diet, stronger than drainage. Here is the programme, with dosage.
Living with it
How to actually get compression garments on
Nobody tells you this part. A correctly prescribed garment that lives in a drawer because you cannot get it on is doing nothing at all, and the fix is technique rather than willpower.
Living with it
Wearing compression when it is 45 degrees outside
The cruel arithmetic of this condition in our climate: heat dilates vessels and worsens swelling, so summer is when you need compression most and can bear it least. There are real answers, and "just push through" is not one of them.