Yes, you read that correctly. I beat chronic fatigue, autoimmune illness, and Lyme disease by choosing not to specifically treat any one of them. Instead, I implemented a nutrient-dense diet with herbal remedies that nourished my cells and healed my gut.
After years of struggling and failing to get well with traditional medical advice and treatments, I was at my wits end. I started to feel defeated, like I was doomed to be sick until I died. Adding to my stress was the fact that I could never truly pinpoint what was wrong. Yes, I had autoimmune issues, chronic fatigue syndrome, and exposure to Lyme disease, but all of these problems overlapped, and I never truly knew what was actually causing my symptoms. Testing for Lyme, chronic fatigue, and many autoimmune conditions is notoriously unreliable. All I knew for certain was that I was acutely ill and getting sicker each year. And without knowing what precisely was wrong, I felt helpless to get better.
That’s when the universe led me to Dr. Terry Wahl’s and her TedX talk about using food as medicine. Dr. Wahls discussed how she reversed primary progressive MS using food alone. Her approach intrigued me. She asserted that by properly nourishing your cells, your body could heal itself. That made sense. It was a simple and scientific approach that I could wrap my head around. For the first time in a long time, I found myself hopeful that I could regain my health and my life.
With the knowledge I gained from Dr. Wahls, I refocused my energy on two objectives: (1) properly fueling my cells and (2) following a gut-healing diet. At each and every meal, I asked myself, what do my cells and gut need? Is this meal going to help me or hurt me? If any item on my plate was not a benefit to my health, I did not eat it. I then added in various herbal protocols aimed at keeping my gut inhospitable to infection or an overgrowth of “bad bugs.”
I stuck to this new way of eating for many months, and eventually found myself able to get out of bed, and even to the grocery store on my own. The intense brain-fog and systemic joint pains I’d suffered for years substantially began to improve. Wow, what a feeling after spending years bedridden! Over time, I was able to add in light exercise, such as lifting hand-weights and walking up and down my stairs at home. Exercise soon became a very large piece of my recovery, as it helped me to repair the damage that chronic illness had done to my mitochondria. Mitochondria are your cells’ source of power, and inactivity and illness damages them. Exercise slowly but surely helps the body to create new mitochondria, restoring your energy with each work out.
There is a lot more to my recovery story. Too much, in fact, to write in a single blog post. My journey with chronic illness and each of the steps I took to get well is outlined in detail in my new book, The Healer Within – My Recovery From Chronic Lyme, CFS, and Autoimmune Disease, now available on Amazon. My book provides an 8-step plan for regaining your health and regaining your life.
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