Beat Fatigue
“I am so tired” is a complaint I hear every day in my medical practice. It seems as if everybody is suffering with some degree of fatigue. Are you unable to complete tasks, make it to the gym on a regular basis, or find time for your family and spouse?
Maybe your symptoms are a bit more vague, like feeling weary, cloudy thinking (brain fog) and poor attention. Could it be that your work has slipped a little, or a planned project or trip just seems to be more trouble than it is worth?
What is going on?
Maybe your symptoms are a bit more vague, like feeling weary, cloudy thinking (brain fog) and poor attention. Could it be that your work has slipped a little, or a planned project or trip just seems to be more trouble than it is worth?
What is going on?
In many cases, conventional medical doctors find themselves poorly equipped to figure out what is contributing to this constellation of symptoms. Fatigue is thought to be difficult to measure; there are no radiographic studies that show the growth of a “fatigue.” There is no single blood test that shows that somebody has caught a “fatigue.”
In a medical system that is based in symptoms that are treated pharmacologically, there is no “anti-fatigue” medication available to your doctor.
As fatigue advances, you may be given a label. Lacking the tools to measure and manage a state of fatigue, many doctors assign a diagnosis of last resort. Have you been told that you have “chronic fatigue syndrome?” If you have symptoms with a degree of symmetrical muscle pain, you may be told that you have “fibromyalgia.”
Have you been told that there is no solution? Have you been told that it is “all in your head?” Is your label depression?
You may be reading this post because you know that there is another way. Your doctor’s vacant expression does not need to be the end of your hope.
You just need to learn how to ask some different questions to get the problem resolved.
Beat your fatigue by looking at body systems
To begin to feel better, you will first need to have the right nutrition. Your body needs nutrition, and it just won’t run well without it. Nutritional states can be measured, and managed.
We first need the basics, water and air. If you are gulping down anything other that water on a regular basis, this could be the most simple, initial step required to begin to feel better.
How about breathing? We can only live for about six minutes without oxygen, our singular, most important nutrient. Sometimes the best first step is to become aware of your breath.
Most of us breathe shallowly. This holds up our body’s ability to drive our cell’s machinery with oxygen, and to exhale our primary toxic byproduct, carbon dioxide (CO2). As CO2 builds up, we retain more acid in our body. This makes us tired, achy.
The next thing to consider is our intake of our macronutrients. Proteins, carbohydrates and fats all need to be in balance. Are you living on carbs? Replacing high levels of carbohydrates with healthy fats and proteins is an excellent first step to feeling better.
What about your vitamin stores, or essential minerals like magnesium or zinc? You could be low in Omega three fats, the “fish oil” fats. As we fall out of balance with these cellular essentials, our systems falter. All of these nutrients can be measured, considered in the whole picture, and managed.
Balance your energy, beat your fatigue
If you feel like you are feeling slow, it may be time to think about balanced energy.
All of our biology revolves around the availability of energy. Long before the days of 24-hour Walmarts and McDonalds, the human animal needed to find food when the “getting was good”, and tuck it away for a rainy day. We couldn’t be assured that the next meal would be around the corner. We developed metabolic contingency plans.
Thyroid function, insulin, and the stress hormone cortisol work together to keep us alive. These hormones allow us to regulate our body temperature (thyroid), and to either store away energy (insulin), or burn our stores (cortisol).
No tigers in the forest, and plenty of food around? This is the time for our body to secrete insulin, which allows for growth, storage of energy, and reproduction.
Are there a pride of tigers, cell phones, screaming bosses or crying children? Here cortisol comes into play, raising our blood pressure, blood sugar and alertness.
Thyroid, a hormone with all 10 trillion of our cells patiently waiting for the message, sets our metabolism. When times are good, we move, produce, and reproduce. This is all driven by normal thyroid secretion. But when the stressors are on, it’s time to hunker down and survive. Thyroid sets the tone.
Fatigue is primarily an imbalance of the body’s energy stores. Think, measure and manage your body’s energetics, you will begin to feel better.
When in doubt, start with the gut
Our gut is an unique organ; a 30-foot tube that snakes through our body. Along the way, we digest and absorb our nutrients, monitor the outside world through our immune system, and eliminate our wastes. Make sure that you are fostering dynamic digestion.
When I was in medical school, the view of the gut was pretty basic. We were taught that the gut absorbed food, housed a bunch of bacteria, and was responsible for some vitamin production, namely vitamins B12 and K. In just the last two decades, the times have changed, and so too has our view of the gut.
If you are tired, slow, anxious, or inflamed, look to the gut. We are learning the the 100 trillion bacteria (the microbiome) that live within us are more than just passive passengers. They can influence our moods, nutritional status, hormones and toxic load.
Digestion and our microbiome are just a small part of the gut picture. We need to start looking at the gut not just as a digestive organ, but as a crucial barrier between our body and the environment.
A King’s guards protect his castle. Our immune cells protect the castle of our body. There is no shortage of microbes that would like to get at the nutrients that we are carrying around inside of us. It makes sense to station our immune cells at our borders.
The primary border between us and the world is not our skin, but our gut. Some two-thirds of our immune cells are stationed just below the gut lining. Our immune systems respond to an invader with inflammation. Inflammation causes fatigue.
If you are feeling low, tired, inflamed or achy, look to the gut. Be sure to consider the role that food sensitivities, nutritional absorption and our gut microbiome play in our health.
Make sure that your digestive system is dynamic and working for you. Modify the gut, fire up your energy, and supercharge your life.
To feel better, keep your body running clean
Let’s face it. We live in a world full of toxins. We all require targeted detox.
We are exposed to toxic air, dirty water, and contaminated foods. Some toxins are self-imposed, such as cigarettes and alcohol. Even the medications that we take have toxic side effects.
A toxin is a substance that works against the normal, healthy workings of our biology. The breakdown is pretty simple. Something works to keep us well, and to allow our biology to function well, or it doesn’t.
The secret is in maintaining a good balance with the body. Know that water, in excessive amounts, can act like a toxin. Out of balance, even “healthy” substances like oxygen and water can make us tired and run down.
We are surprisingly well-equipped to rid our body of toxic substances. We can target our interventions to keep ahead of the curve.
First we need to minimize our exposure to toxins. This is a good first step. As we clean up our foods and beverages, and decrease our medication use, we have a chance to get ahead of our detox curve.
Phase I and Phase II detoxification pathways are built into our biology to take substances that don’t belong in our bodies, and to clear them out. Many natural substances, primarily organic molecules found in health foods, drive these capabilities. Are you foods artificially flavored, colored or sweetened? By eliminating these artificial substances, and moving to real food, we can stimulate these healthy detox pathways.
We also need to eliminate the toxins from the body. Be sure to breathe, sweat, pee and to move your bowels.
The formula for targeted detox is simple. Decrease exposure to toxic substances, keep the metabolic pathways lubed with clean food and drink, and move the substances from the body. These are simple steps, but steps guaranteed to make you feel better.
Balance your hormones to get in the groove
Hormones are essential to life, essential for our survival as a species. Correct hormones allow us to socialize, engage and reproduce.
By definition, hormones are molecules that are made in one part of the body, typically a tissue or a gland, which then relay a chemical message to another part of the body. They are messenger molecules, plain and simple, and tell a distant cell how to read its DNA.
Balance of the reproductive hormones is crucial to our well-being and sexual health. When it comes to sexuality, hormone balance is the end of the metabolic line. If we are tired, stressed, starving or just unwell, our biology knows not to put too much energy into our reproductive processes.
Keeping us alive takes center stage to making love and babies.
If you are tired, and feel that your libido, appearance, and interpersonal magnetism is lacking, it may be that your body has assigned “second fiddle” priority to your sex hormones.
In some cases hormone replacement can balance out these symptoms. But if your sex hormones are off, the first step to feel better is to ask the question of priorities. Are you stressed, overworked, underslept or frazzled? Your body is emphasizing survival, and not growth and reproduction.
Ready to reignite sexuality? First look to the other aspects of your biology that we have already discussed. When your sex hormones are working well, you are beating fatigue.
Stop inflammation, and put out the fire
Our body requires inflammation to stay alive. The redness, warmth, pus and pain that we feel as a cut heals is the byproduct of a mini-battle against something that has broached our barriers. We should be intermittently mounting an inflammatory response, and when the threat has passed, tamping it down.
Inflammation should be a dynamic response, one which waxes and wanes as a threat to our health comes and goes.
In cases of chronic infection, chronic injury, dangerous exposures or autoimmunity, our immune system stays on hyperdrive. The pain, aching, warmth and discomfort of inflammation doesn’t abate.
Over time this response melts down our body. It wears away our health, organs, muscles and reserve. It wears us down, and makes us tired.
Be sure to measure inflammation, find the source, and put out the fire.
Putting it all together to feel great again
If you are tired, feeling low and de-energized, there is hope.
The secret is that there is not a single pill, potion or pomade that will in, and of itself, cure your fatigue. The body is too complex. There is rarely a single intervention that will make you well. There are too many working parts.
To really get well, we need to tap into each of these categories to bring the body to a state of total health. Some individuals will require only a few interventions, needing to address only a few of the systems. Others will have to make changes across a broad swath of body systems. They may need some extra time, and may require a bit more money, focus and energy to get well.
But you can get better.
You will beat fatigue.
What's Next?
Read about The Difference between Functional, Complementary, Holistic and Natural Medicine
Learn more about how you can benefit from Functional Medicine by visiting our blog
In a medical system that is based in symptoms that are treated pharmacologically, there is no “anti-fatigue” medication available to your doctor.
As fatigue advances, you may be given a label. Lacking the tools to measure and manage a state of fatigue, many doctors assign a diagnosis of last resort. Have you been told that you have “chronic fatigue syndrome?” If you have symptoms with a degree of symmetrical muscle pain, you may be told that you have “fibromyalgia.”
Have you been told that there is no solution? Have you been told that it is “all in your head?” Is your label depression?
You may be reading this post because you know that there is another way. Your doctor’s vacant expression does not need to be the end of your hope.
You just need to learn how to ask some different questions to get the problem resolved.
Beat your fatigue by looking at body systems
To begin to feel better, you will first need to have the right nutrition. Your body needs nutrition, and it just won’t run well without it. Nutritional states can be measured, and managed.
We first need the basics, water and air. If you are gulping down anything other that water on a regular basis, this could be the most simple, initial step required to begin to feel better.
How about breathing? We can only live for about six minutes without oxygen, our singular, most important nutrient. Sometimes the best first step is to become aware of your breath.
Most of us breathe shallowly. This holds up our body’s ability to drive our cell’s machinery with oxygen, and to exhale our primary toxic byproduct, carbon dioxide (CO2). As CO2 builds up, we retain more acid in our body. This makes us tired, achy.
The next thing to consider is our intake of our macronutrients. Proteins, carbohydrates and fats all need to be in balance. Are you living on carbs? Replacing high levels of carbohydrates with healthy fats and proteins is an excellent first step to feeling better.
What about your vitamin stores, or essential minerals like magnesium or zinc? You could be low in Omega three fats, the “fish oil” fats. As we fall out of balance with these cellular essentials, our systems falter. All of these nutrients can be measured, considered in the whole picture, and managed.
Balance your energy, beat your fatigue
If you feel like you are feeling slow, it may be time to think about balanced energy.
All of our biology revolves around the availability of energy. Long before the days of 24-hour Walmarts and McDonalds, the human animal needed to find food when the “getting was good”, and tuck it away for a rainy day. We couldn’t be assured that the next meal would be around the corner. We developed metabolic contingency plans.
Thyroid function, insulin, and the stress hormone cortisol work together to keep us alive. These hormones allow us to regulate our body temperature (thyroid), and to either store away energy (insulin), or burn our stores (cortisol).
No tigers in the forest, and plenty of food around? This is the time for our body to secrete insulin, which allows for growth, storage of energy, and reproduction.
Are there a pride of tigers, cell phones, screaming bosses or crying children? Here cortisol comes into play, raising our blood pressure, blood sugar and alertness.
Thyroid, a hormone with all 10 trillion of our cells patiently waiting for the message, sets our metabolism. When times are good, we move, produce, and reproduce. This is all driven by normal thyroid secretion. But when the stressors are on, it’s time to hunker down and survive. Thyroid sets the tone.
Fatigue is primarily an imbalance of the body’s energy stores. Think, measure and manage your body’s energetics, you will begin to feel better.
When in doubt, start with the gut
Our gut is an unique organ; a 30-foot tube that snakes through our body. Along the way, we digest and absorb our nutrients, monitor the outside world through our immune system, and eliminate our wastes. Make sure that you are fostering dynamic digestion.
When I was in medical school, the view of the gut was pretty basic. We were taught that the gut absorbed food, housed a bunch of bacteria, and was responsible for some vitamin production, namely vitamins B12 and K. In just the last two decades, the times have changed, and so too has our view of the gut.
If you are tired, slow, anxious, or inflamed, look to the gut. We are learning the the 100 trillion bacteria (the microbiome) that live within us are more than just passive passengers. They can influence our moods, nutritional status, hormones and toxic load.
Digestion and our microbiome are just a small part of the gut picture. We need to start looking at the gut not just as a digestive organ, but as a crucial barrier between our body and the environment.
A King’s guards protect his castle. Our immune cells protect the castle of our body. There is no shortage of microbes that would like to get at the nutrients that we are carrying around inside of us. It makes sense to station our immune cells at our borders.
The primary border between us and the world is not our skin, but our gut. Some two-thirds of our immune cells are stationed just below the gut lining. Our immune systems respond to an invader with inflammation. Inflammation causes fatigue.
If you are feeling low, tired, inflamed or achy, look to the gut. Be sure to consider the role that food sensitivities, nutritional absorption and our gut microbiome play in our health.
Make sure that your digestive system is dynamic and working for you. Modify the gut, fire up your energy, and supercharge your life.
To feel better, keep your body running clean
Let’s face it. We live in a world full of toxins. We all require targeted detox.
We are exposed to toxic air, dirty water, and contaminated foods. Some toxins are self-imposed, such as cigarettes and alcohol. Even the medications that we take have toxic side effects.
A toxin is a substance that works against the normal, healthy workings of our biology. The breakdown is pretty simple. Something works to keep us well, and to allow our biology to function well, or it doesn’t.
The secret is in maintaining a good balance with the body. Know that water, in excessive amounts, can act like a toxin. Out of balance, even “healthy” substances like oxygen and water can make us tired and run down.
We are surprisingly well-equipped to rid our body of toxic substances. We can target our interventions to keep ahead of the curve.
First we need to minimize our exposure to toxins. This is a good first step. As we clean up our foods and beverages, and decrease our medication use, we have a chance to get ahead of our detox curve.
Phase I and Phase II detoxification pathways are built into our biology to take substances that don’t belong in our bodies, and to clear them out. Many natural substances, primarily organic molecules found in health foods, drive these capabilities. Are you foods artificially flavored, colored or sweetened? By eliminating these artificial substances, and moving to real food, we can stimulate these healthy detox pathways.
We also need to eliminate the toxins from the body. Be sure to breathe, sweat, pee and to move your bowels.
The formula for targeted detox is simple. Decrease exposure to toxic substances, keep the metabolic pathways lubed with clean food and drink, and move the substances from the body. These are simple steps, but steps guaranteed to make you feel better.
Balance your hormones to get in the groove
Hormones are essential to life, essential for our survival as a species. Correct hormones allow us to socialize, engage and reproduce.
By definition, hormones are molecules that are made in one part of the body, typically a tissue or a gland, which then relay a chemical message to another part of the body. They are messenger molecules, plain and simple, and tell a distant cell how to read its DNA.
Balance of the reproductive hormones is crucial to our well-being and sexual health. When it comes to sexuality, hormone balance is the end of the metabolic line. If we are tired, stressed, starving or just unwell, our biology knows not to put too much energy into our reproductive processes.
Keeping us alive takes center stage to making love and babies.
If you are tired, and feel that your libido, appearance, and interpersonal magnetism is lacking, it may be that your body has assigned “second fiddle” priority to your sex hormones.
In some cases hormone replacement can balance out these symptoms. But if your sex hormones are off, the first step to feel better is to ask the question of priorities. Are you stressed, overworked, underslept or frazzled? Your body is emphasizing survival, and not growth and reproduction.
Ready to reignite sexuality? First look to the other aspects of your biology that we have already discussed. When your sex hormones are working well, you are beating fatigue.
Stop inflammation, and put out the fire
Our body requires inflammation to stay alive. The redness, warmth, pus and pain that we feel as a cut heals is the byproduct of a mini-battle against something that has broached our barriers. We should be intermittently mounting an inflammatory response, and when the threat has passed, tamping it down.
Inflammation should be a dynamic response, one which waxes and wanes as a threat to our health comes and goes.
In cases of chronic infection, chronic injury, dangerous exposures or autoimmunity, our immune system stays on hyperdrive. The pain, aching, warmth and discomfort of inflammation doesn’t abate.
Over time this response melts down our body. It wears away our health, organs, muscles and reserve. It wears us down, and makes us tired.
Be sure to measure inflammation, find the source, and put out the fire.
Putting it all together to feel great again
If you are tired, feeling low and de-energized, there is hope.
The secret is that there is not a single pill, potion or pomade that will in, and of itself, cure your fatigue. The body is too complex. There is rarely a single intervention that will make you well. There are too many working parts.
To really get well, we need to tap into each of these categories to bring the body to a state of total health. Some individuals will require only a few interventions, needing to address only a few of the systems. Others will have to make changes across a broad swath of body systems. They may need some extra time, and may require a bit more money, focus and energy to get well.
But you can get better.
You will beat fatigue.
What's Next?
Read about The Difference between Functional, Complementary, Holistic and Natural Medicine
Learn more about how you can benefit from Functional Medicine by visiting our blog