Diet And Lifestyle To Heal From Chronic Fatigue

Hey everybody, Dr. Diane Uhler, your Lyme doc here, talking today about diet, lifestyle, things you can do to heal from chronic fatigue. And I love this question so much because anybody that's looking for this information online, what that tells me is that you are an action taker. And I find that people that take actions are the people that get well. Now the challenging thing about this question is it is not super crystallized clear. So it's a very common question I get asked is what is the best diet? What is my favorite diet out there? And everybody is searching for like the best diet for health or longevity or weight loss or healing from whatever disease process they have. And what I can tell you is as annoying as this is to hear because it would be very great if there was one particular diet that was exactly perfect for healing from chronic fatigue. It is just not that case. So what I like to do in my work is to teach you how to think and to teach you how to make decisions. That is why I have my online group program that you can find in the show notes is because I am an educator and a teacher and my biggest role, I feel like is to teach you how to determine for the uniqueness of you, what decisions to make for you in your life. So that's what we're going to talk about today. If you're interested in learning more about how to do this in your life on a deeper level, definitely look in the show notes to get information about my group online programs to support you more. With that to be able to ask me more questions to get more educated as to how to work your diet, your lifestyle, your supplements and your choices around the uniqueness of you. How to think about that, how to ask the questions, how to determine. But today, for the purpose of this video, we're talking about diet and lifestyle. And so I can tell you that most commonly one of the biggest things I find that helps people truly is diet and lifestyle. That is anti inflammatory. So typically what I recommend for many people is start with something like a low histamine diet. Low histamine diet is amazing dietary plan for people with chronic fatigue because it gets away a lot of things that are creating creating inflammation. It keeps things super healthy and wholesome. It's keeping your nutrient levels high and it's keeping your histamine levels low. Histamine is that molecule that a lot of people associate with allergies. So that molecule that you'll take an anti histamine for because it is stopping the histamine reaction. Histamine commonly causes Things like itchy eyes and runny nose. How it's related to chronic fatigue is oftentimes stopped. We can have higher histamine levels in our body and they don't always, it doesn't always lead to these histamine related symptoms. And we can still wind up having a lot of fatigue even though we don't have these histamine related symptoms. Right. So that's one of the big things when it comes to diet and to the lifestyle is that we want to say lower that inflammation and lower those histamine levels because that histamine is related to chronic fatigue. You if for some people. So basic diet. Now, how are we going to make that unique to you? So starting with that diet, also we want to consider things like lab testing for things like food sensitivities, which are different than food allergies. Food allergies are going to be allergies, they're going to be histamine related reactions. Meaning you eat a food, your body creates histamine, the same molecule we're talking about, and that's going to create this reaction that is called an allergy. Allergy is a reaction to something that involves the release of this molecule, histamine. The body can react to food in a lot of different ways. Histamine is only one of them. So we have another way the body can react to food called a sensitivity. A sensitivity is occurring when we react to food and our body releases histamine. I'm sorry. And our body reacts to the food but does not release histamine. So it's our body reacting to the food in a non histamine related way. And that is called a sensitivity. So we can test for that. And if you've gone to an allergist, they're just going to test you for surprise, an allergy. We actually want to make sure we get sensitivity tested as well. So again, the purpose of this is part of the diet for chronic fatigue is getting things out that you're reacting and sensitive to. Because if you're reacting and sensitive to them, that is actually a huge cause of chronic fatigue. And this is why it's like a super unique diet, diet from person to person. Because, you know, I've seen people, there's like diets out there called like autoimmune paleo. Autoimmune paleo is a great diet. A lot of people do really well on this. A lot of people, you know, do superbly on this. But it emphasizes a lot of vegetables like cauliflower and broccoli and these Kind of things. I've seen people react like crazy to those vegetables. Autoimmune Paleo takes nightshades out. So it gets rid of like eggplants and peppers and tomatoes. I've seen people do horrible on those. I've seen people do awesome on those. So that's what I'm saying. It's about getting the inflammatory foods out of your life. So a lot of these diets you read in the health Network online. Yeah, they're good diets. A lot of them are. There's some crap ones out there, but there's a lot of good ones. But it's about starting with something. And I typically see something like the histamine diet is a good place to start. Take foods out, see how you feel. Add foods back in. If you add foods back in. So the way you want to try this is you take foods out for 21 days and then you add after 21 days following a low histamine diet, then you add a new food once every three days. So if you took out, let's say you took out some sort of bean, right? Let's say you took out a bean on this, or even better from a histamine food, let's say you took out dairy. Because dairy is a no, no on histamine diet. So you want to add dairy back in. You would add dairy after those 21 days of being off. And then let's say you wanted to add another food in, like shellfish, right? So then after you add that dairy and you're like, oh, I actually respond okay to this. Now you know, dairy's not inflaming, you wait three days, then you add another histamine related food like shellfish. Easiest way, though is just to get tested. And so another thing I offer for you guys, another helpful thing you can do is, is you can use me to get your testing done. So join that be your own doctor. Join that group program you see in the, in the show links. You're going to get all of these links of how you get your test order direct to consumer. It's going to super empower you to take charge of your own health. But that's the biggest thing is diet wise, you got to get your, your diet just got to get the inflammatory foods out. Lifestyle wise, we got to maximize sleep. Obviously it's so common that people think they're sleeping super well and they're not. It's so common that when I use sleep tracking devices on my clients and they track their sleep, they're not getting into Deep sleep. So you want to use something like an apple watch or an aura ring to actually track your sleep so we can actually figure out how to, you know, how to manipulate things. So one of the biggest things I find for me personally or found for me personally is that when I track my sleep, is that light at all. Any light, like a little pinpoint from a TV light in a hotel room, like the little tiny green or blue light that will actually keep me up, that will prevent me from going to deep sleep. I won't notice it, but it will be tracked on my aura ring. It'll be tracked on my sleep tracking devices. And guess what? If you're not deep sleeping, here's there the easy reason for fatigue, right? So you want to figure out what is going on lifestyle wise. You want to track your sleep to make sure you're getting into that deep sleep sleep. And when you have a data tracking device, you can then get that information to say, okay, well, does eating late at night bother me? Does eating too early at night bother me? Is it the light? Is it dehydration? Is it protein before bed that helps the most? Is it carbs before bed that helps the most? Because you can read. It's like some people, well, you'll read online, it's like you need a protein snack before bed. Other people you'll read as like, oh, some sort of carbohydrate snack right before bed. There's, you can find data on both. So what's right, what's wrong? Both are right, Both are wrong. What we're looking for is what is right for you, what is wrong for you. Stay away from the wrongs, keep doing the rights, right? And we do that when we have these data tracking devices. So that's really important, you know. And then the other big lifestyle thing is making sure you are exercising because I know it's so hard when you're fatigued, but when you exercise and you get stronger, it actually gives you more energy long term. Your muscles work better, your cells work better, your mitochondria work better. So it can be really hard when we get in this vicious cycle where exercise helps to alleviate fatigue, but you're too fatigued to begin to exercise. So it's a mind over matter thing. And usually it's committing to like, okay, well if I'm really tired, I'm going to lift weights for five minutes, right? We get a little stronger, we lift weights for six minutes, right? And building yourself up starting at the very beginning. But it's a very basic lifestyle thing that I see many people with chronic fatigue avoid because they're just too tired to work out. But you can't get out of the vicious cycle unless you start working out. So those are some of the basics on where to start. Make sure you go check out my group program. We can get you in there. We can get some tests done. We can answer your questions. You can build your lifestyle, your diet plan, you can run it by me on our live Q&As. Make sure on the right track. I hope this has been helpful. Please don't keep me a secret. Please share this with your friends and family. We want to get this chronic fatigue world reduced. Right? This is so devastating. So thank you for your help. We'll see you next time.