What is it? How do we diagnose chronic fatigue? How do we tackle it?

• Are you tired and cranky, snapping at the kids?
• Too tired, ‘touchy’, or sore to be intimate with your partner
• Do you lie awake in pain struggling to get back to sleep?
• Do you feel anxious and nervy?
• You may lack concentration, focus, and forget the simple things
• You find yourself falling asleep at your desk mid afternoon, then hanging on a cuppa to keep going
• You wake up stiff, sore, and lethargic
• Are you burdened by out of control sugar cravings, energy swings and weight gain?

Chronic fatigue is a complex complaint. A lot of my clients have been to many doctors and alternative practitioners, and left frustrated because they do not have the answers.

It is not just a matter of popping a pill, what we need to do is get to the root cause of why your body’s energy factory is shutting down.

 

The first place we need to start is your diet

My favourite saying is, ‘If you don’t put it in your mouth, it ‘ain’t’ there’.

What I mean is you need to make sure that you have a balanced diet, adequate amounts of protein, carbohydrates and good fats, plus vitamins and minerals to provide the nutrients that you need for the energy factory to run; for our brains to function.

Once you have the diet sorted, we need to make sure that you can digest properly in your stomach, have adequate digestive enzymes to absorb the nutrients from your food in the small intestine and utilize those nutrients the way you need to.

To investigate where your energy factory is breaking down in the mitochondria in the cell, we can do specialised testing. For instance, do you have a block to utilizing carbohydrates or fats for energy? Once the breakdown point is identified, we can give you specific nutrients to kick that system along and get your energy back into gear.

Poor cellular energy has unwanted spin offs

Every cell in the body needs energy to function, whether it be you brain to think, or your liver to detoxify medicines, alcohol, caffeine, or environmental pollutants. Hence many chronic fatigue sufferers struggle with brain fog, they cannot think or concentrate and just don’t have the motivation to get up and go.

When the liver struggles it is like having a clogged filter in your car.

The car just does not run well, it may splutter and cough. You feel sluggish and are not running on all cylinders.

When your resources are stretched, available nutrients are triaged to organs for immediate survival. Clarity of thought and brain neurotransmitters, muscle energy, bone health and DNA repair suffer.

As a functional medicine practitioner, I can check how your brain neurotransmitters are holding up. Then prescribe therapeutic dosages of nutrients to directly get the brain switched on so you can feel alive and alert, “Yay, I can think again!”

If you want to know more, come to my FREE Webinar

The Gut Connection

Once we have sorted your diet and primary digestion in the stomach, next we need to check how well you are absorbing nutrients from your diet in the small intestine. Do you have enough digestive enzymes to breakdown and absorb food or bile from the liver and gall bladder to absorb fats?

Sometimes you can have gut bugs creep up from your bowel into the small intestine and have a condition called SIBO, small intestinal bacterial overgrowth. You may have wind, a ‘girgly’ stomach, pain, or bloat.

25% of the population do not have the enzymes to digest some types of sugars called FODMAPS. These sugars ferment in your small intestine creating gas and bloating. At the same time, it effects absorption of nutrients from your food and therefore your energy. The good news is, monitoring what you eat can make a huge difference.

Further down the line in the large bowel you may be harbouring parasites, an overgrowth of Candida or bad bugs. These will eat your resources, drain your body of the nutrients that you need for energy, and configure your brain to crave sugars. This is called gut dysbiosis.

You may be constipated, swing between constipation and diarrhoea, or just be lose all the time. Check out the shape, colour, and frequency of your stool because one thing you can be sure of is you will be asked.

Let’s clean up the gut, your waste disposal system

How do we clean our insides?

The first thing to do is get tested. There is no point guessing. We need to know exactly what we are dealing with to set up a targeted treatment program, clear unwanted freeloaders and repair your gut lining for better absorption and prevention of further invasion of the bad bugs.

Though not perfect, the technology for testing has improved a lot in the past 12 months. A single day stool test can tell us if your bowel is inflamed, the lining has been breached, or whether you are harbouring a parasite, undesirable bacteria, worms, or candida.

Healing the gut and digestion can ensure that what you eat goes through to our energy and we can feel so much better.

How does stress effect your energy?

I talked about how stress impacts our immunity in my previous blogs 

Physical and emotional stress stimulate the stress hormone cortisol.

Cortisol is a hormone that breaks down muscle to make sugar in the liver at times of stress when we need a surge of fuel to run or fight. Unfortunately, nowadays insidious stress does not switch off. We can get so caught up with stress that it just goes out of control and because we are not running from the tiger, the excess sugars released at times of stress are deposited on the belly as fat.

High sugar swings with high carb foods have a similar effect. A sugar low follows a sugar high stimulating more cortisol to breakdown muscle to make sugar in the liver and restore balance. Too many sugar swings with highs and lows will drain your energy.

Too much stress cortisol eats your gut lining

Too much cortisol eats away your protective mucosal layer on your gut lining leaving you susceptible to further infection, inflammation, pain, and fatigue.

When stress persists for long periods of time your gut lining breaks down and becomes ‘leaky’ allowing larger food particles and pathogens to invade your body causing inflammation.

Your ability to keep producing high levels of cortisol in the adrenal gland drops away leading to what we call adrenal fatigue. Cortisol levels then drop.

You might say, well isn’t that good, lowering the stress hormone? The problem is, we need a level of cortisol to energise the body, get out of bed in the morning, and function throughout the day. We just don’t want too much. I have seen many crashes after pushing for too long.

With a lack of sleep the body does not repair and recover, the brain does not drain toxins. Energy is not restored. You can keep soldiering on for a while with cortisol but that eventually runs out then a crash is eminent.

What about your liver?

Now, your liver. If your liver is not functioning well, you may be harbouring toxins that you cannot clear. You may feel sick and malaise, sluggish and not able to get going. As the medical detective, we need to check out whether your liver is functioning well enough.

For instance, do you have a fatty liver or a blockage to one of six detoxification pathways in phase 2 liver clearance. Do you have adequate vitamins and amino acids to run both phase 1 and 2 liver detoxification? Do you have a block to manufacturing our body’s most powerful protective antioxidant, glutathione?

Environmental exposure

There may be environmental toxins that you are exposed to, and you’re not even aware. Glyphosate from Roundup, pesticides on fruits and vegetables, organophosphates, or hormone disrupters.

Carpets, new paint work or furniture give off chemicals that you may not have the ability to detox.

A common issue that I see, particularly up where I live in northern New South Wales, is damp and mould. And if there is something hiding in your house, perhaps in the walls, it may be just a ridiculously small area but can still make you sick, tired and drained of energy.

Viral Load

Chronic fatigue has been known to start with a virus.

It may be the herpes virus, or perhaps you had an obscure viral attack at some stage some years ago, and your body has not cleared that viral load.

Nowadays we have transfer factors that transfer the immunity to you enabling you to fight and rid your body of viruses.

In Conclusion

Chronic fatigue is indeed multi factorial, and it takes a discerning practitioner willing to delve deep to find the root cause of your fatigue to achieve resolution. The list of chronic fatigue triggers discussed here is not exhaustive, there are several issues we may need to explore further to get to your why.

 

---

If you want to know more come to my Free Webinar

Avail yourself of my FREE 20 minute chat either by phone or online

Please send me a message on the contact page and I will get back to you

---