First-person account by Inder (about 30) describing onset of chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) during a high-stress university internship and competitive sports participation. He experienced progressive fatigue, brain fog, weight loss, and spent several years largely bedridden. Nutrition therapy partly helped; later Ashok Gupta’s program produced rapid gains—notably significant fatigue improvement within several weeks (≈4 weeks) allowing part-time work, and marked brain-fog recovery after several months enabling him to pursue a nutrition degree and later a masters in neuroscience.
Chapters
Hi, my name is Inder. I'm now about 30 and basically before I developed chronic fatigue syndrome, I was a very active, extremely active student. I was studying in high school, playing pretty much every sport you can think of, from rugby to hockey to cricket to squash and tennis and the gym as well on top of that. So I was extremely active, also very academic, very high achieving and extremely driven as well. So I was in my final year of university, I was actually doing an internship year, so I was working in the middle of, in the city, in London in finance, a very stressful internship. And at the same time I was also playing quite high level sport for sort of my area of the country. So, so effectively burning the candle in both ends. Extremely stressed, but also very unhappy at the same time and probably channeled that unhappiness into my work and into my sport and into my body. And looking back, I definitely overtrained and overdid it. And yeah, over the space of a few months I just noticed that my body started to slow down, started to experience more fatigue. I wasn't recovering as well. And the biggest symptom for me was brain fog. Actually really struggling with just being able to concentrate, read documents, even just be able to keep up in a meeting was extremely difficult. So, yeah, those were sort of the early, the early signs. And then yeah, one day developed flu like symptoms which I thought nothing of, obviously had flu. And then, yeah, over a couple weeks recovered from those acute symptoms. But then I was left with this debilitating fatigue and brain fog. And I'd also lost a lot of weight and yeah, just very, very, very exhausted and basically couldn't get out of bed. And yeah, really struggled immensely after that for probably at least three or four years actually. So I spent a few years in bed, my, my early 20s in bed. And then I met a nutritionist who helped me tremendously and definitely got me back on my feet. But I was still probably only about 56, 50, 60% better. And then he introduced me to Ashok's program and unsurprisingly, was an absolute game changer for me. I went from sort of working like a day and a half a week to kind of going back into full time. So I would say within several weeks I noticed a significant improvement in my fatigue. Definitely was a huge change for me. And, and then probably several months after that, my brain fog improved dramatically. And what's interesting to this day, when I get a flare up, often my brain is the first sign that I'm flaring up and it's quite it's almost miraculous actually. After literally doing a day of the program, my brain fog just, it just goes and it's like I've had a brain transplant almost. It's quite dramatic. The improvement is dramatic. So I'd say the first milestone that I noticed using after using the program was after several weeks my fatigue improved significantly and I was able to get a part time job. Actually I worked sort of as a a porter in hospital because I just wanted to get out and meet people and sort of re engage with with life and people. So actually within about four weeks of using the program I was able to I applied to hospital and ended up working at the hospital for a while. And then I'd say my second milestone was my brain fog improving and that was probably after several months. And then that was when I was able to apply for my nutrition degree and then later my masters in neuroscience.
