The face of fatigue
The 7 am alarm rings and you just can’t face getting out of bed – even though you went to bed at 10 pm! After a half-hour of self-negotiation, you force yourself up and into your morning routine feeling sluggish and wishing you could have slept longer.
A quick coffee starts to shake off the mental cobwebs and you force down a quick breakfast hoping that you can make it to lunch without crashing. You get into your work for the day but before long, you begin hunting for something to snack on. From experience, you suspect that whatever you snack on won’t do the trick and sure enough, you struggle to retain your focus for the next hour as fatigue takes over.
Guilt at not getting work done begins to fester, so you resolve to enjoy your large healthy lunch to propel you through the rest of the afternoon. Lunch sometimes sustains you for the rest of the workday, but today is part of an annoying new pattern where your energy soon crashes, leaving you feeling distracted, moody, and unproductive.
After struggling through the rest of work, feasting on dinner brings relief but you’re exhausted. You’ve learned to use a quick bedtime snack to help you sleep, but over time your sleep has become more interrupted and less restful.
How do I eat to restore energy?
For some people, this pattern of energy crashes throughout the day, along with sleep that is not feeling restful often continues for many months and years. At some point, they may begin to search for answers with their family doctor, but their blood work appears normal and they are told that they are not sick. As the fatigue and uncontrollable brain fog gets worse, they become desperate to find a solution and wish that somebody could give them some solutions to their energy problems.
If you can relate to all or part of this scenario, and it has carried on for a year or longer, you have likely considered different ways of eating to control the crashes. In my experience this is the most effective strategy, as what we eat has the greatest impact on our health.
Luckily over the past ten years, there has been a lot of new research that has shed light on how interconnected our bodily systems are, and that by focusing on the gut, we can bring health to the whole body and restore energy. It turns out that our gut lining is incredibly sensitive, and foods that we take for granted as healthy could be causing damage to the lining. Research also shows that our gut is home to billions of microbes, creating what is now known as our “microbiome”. The food that we eat provides fuel to microbes in our gut, which in turn influences how we create energy for our body.
Our food, along with stress and other environmental influences are responsible for shaping and controlling the balance of our microbes. If upset, this balance within our microbiome becomes dissonant and our body can suffer. When in harmony, our microbiome is well fed, which translates into more energy.
Continued research is also shedding light on how individual or personal the reactions are between our food and microbes, and it also reveals that each of us has a unique collection of microbes in widely varying amounts much like a fingerprint. What we eat is constantly adjusting the number of microbes along with their relationship to each other. Each of us may rely on an entirely different set of foods from another person, and these optimal relationships within our microbiome change over time (and often quite quickly). This can make it difficult to know where to begin, and to track what may or may not be working for us on any given day.
Despite the complexity that the microbiome presents, we can make some general distinctions between what may be surprisingly healthy, and what may be quietly doing harm, before figuring out the personal nuances.
Do you wish you had less fatigue in your life? Along with more energy for work, more desire for play? Do you feel ready to take the next step in learning about your healthy and harmful foods?
You can learn about which foods may be contributing to fatigue and which foods will be beneficial to your energy levels by registering for my free Healing Digestion eBook. Not only will you learn why certain foods are hurting your gut and robbing your energy, but you will learn which foods can help heal, as well as how to shop for those foods.
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