How To Heal Chronic Illness With These 3 Pillars
In this solo Q&A episode, Dr. Paul Anderson answers a viewer’s question about practical, at‑home strategies for managing chronic illnesses such as long COVID, post‑infectious syndromes, and cancer survivorship. He frames the discussion around three foundational “pillars” that act as the house’s foundation: food, muscle, and brain. Food pillar – Emphasizes a daily fasting window of 12‑14 hours, adequate water intake during the fast, and careful macronutrient balance to avoid excess insulin spikes and inflammatory fats. He advises choosing low‑toxicity foods: filtered water, organic produce (especially the EWG’s “Dirty Dozen”), and low‑contaminant animal proteins (line‑caught fish, locally raised meat). He also mentions using the insulin index, glycemic load, and avoiding processed carbs and oxidized fats. Muscle pillar – Highlights the anti‑inflammatory and metabolic benefits of activating large muscle groups, even with simple activities like standing, walking, or stair climbing. He recommends a graded, baby‑step approach for those who are fatigued, gradually increasing intensity to avoid setbacks. The goal is to shift metabolism from sedentary fat storage toward muscle‑driven energy use, supporting mitochondrial health. Brain pillar – Focuses on internal self‑talk and external information diet. Positive, empowered mindset, stress‑management techniques (talk therapy, mindfulness, meditation, prayer) and limiting “neurological toxicity” from doom‑scrolling, sensational news, and toxic relationships are presented as essential for a balanced physiologic stress response. He stresses that these three pillars are synergistic: a cleaner diet reduces inflammatory signals that make movement harder; regular muscle activation improves metabolic health, easing brain stress; and a healthier brain makes it easier to maintain good food and exercise habits. While these lifestyle foundations are powerful on their own, Dr. Anderson notes they should complement, not replace, integrative medical care when needed. He also mentions optional deeper assessments—food‑sensitivity testing, toxin panels, and bio‑impedance scales—to fine‑tune the approach. The episode ends with a call to subscribe, visit his website (dranow.com), and engage with the community for further questions.
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And sometimes it's easy to forget that the base of healing we are in control of. We have, you know, total empowerment and agency over what we can do. Now, I want to be really clear in saying that while we have control over these things— Hey everybody, it's Dr. Andersen, and I want to thank you all for listening. Thanks for growing the podcast and the YouTube community. We'll be getting into another question and answer today that we got as a comment on one of the platforms. I can't remember which one. But it was a really great comment, and I thought I would sort of bounce back a few ideas. This had to do with what do we do when we're trying to do as much in and of what we can do ourselves at home or with our lifestyle in treating chronic illnesses, especially in this age of long COVID and other post-infectious illnesses and diseases. And what I found is something, a way of thinking about this that applies across a lot of chronic problems, whether it's cancer survivors or people trying to maintain who are healing from a chronic illness, people trying to come out of something like long COVID or another post-infectious illness, or even an infectious illness that's going on for a long time. And so on this channel, we a lot of times talk about interventional things and, you know, treatments that are either natural or medications or all sorts of other stuff. And sometimes it's easy to forget that the base of healing we are in control of. We have, you know, total empowerment and agency over what we can do. Now, I want to be really clear in saying that while we have control over these things, sometimes other things are required. So we still want to do these things we're going to talk about in this segment answering the question, but also we want to remember that If we're really sick or we're not getting better very quickly, we do want to work with somebody in the integrative community to work on the things that would help us on top of what we can do. But here's the other side of that coin, and that is that when we think about what we can do in and of ourselves with lifestyle and diet changes and things like that, and then we look at if I'm going to have to use resources to see a provider or get some therapy or do something else outside of what I can do for myself, What's gonna make that investment of the other provider and the therapies and everything else make the most financial sense, make the most economic sense? Well, it's actually doing these things you can do for yourself, even if they don't feel like they're changing things. These are core bedrock kind of things you can do and start at any place you're at, regardless of your health, that will improve all the other treatments you're doing. And sometimes we need a little bit of both. So what are those areas and what are ways to think about it that would be maybe easy to hold onto? Well, for teaching medical students and then later teaching doctors and teaching, you know, even in the public realm like this, what I have found personally is simple things to remember for myself are always better. So if you think of all the other things that you're doing for your health, that might be all natural things, it might be a mixture of some medications and things, or just medications, or some outside therapies, or a bunch of practitioners, or one practitioner. Think of that like a house with, you know, the walls and the roof, right? What makes a house more stable and last longer? It's actually going to be the foundation underneath. So, these things that we can do for ourselves are part of the foundation underneath, and they fall into 3 really big bricks, if you want to think of it that way, or blocks. And those 3 blocks are food, muscle, and brain. And so, obviously, It's more than 3 words, but that's an easy way to remember the things that we kind of have control over. Now, food is one of those things where you think, okay, you know, that's my diet, et cetera. And that certainly is true, but food can be a way in for things that poison our body. It can also be a vehicle for being either pro-inflammatory and slowing healing down or anti-inflammatory and speeding healing up. So food has a whole Yeah. And there's a bunch of criteria and factors around it. The first thing really is the timing of eating. And so with, with anybody, uh, pretty much in the world of chronic illness, what we try and have them do is have a break in eating during the 24-hour period. And you can start with this, you know, at 8, 9, 10 hours. You're going to be asleep for a lot of that time. And we try to get people to shoot for 12 to 13 hours a day, which is basically stop eating after dinner and you know, figure out when your first meal is, 12, 13, 14 hours later. Now, the thing about that is, obviously, all of this is just my experience. It's not specific medical advice for anybody. So, you got to work that out with your healthcare provider, what's safe. But generally, what people forget, because I've done this a lot with myself and a lot of others, is most of the symptoms that come from that time where you're resting your body and you're not eating, Which will help with recharging and healing up your cells. Most of that time, the side effects that might come, like gnawing pain in the stomach, dizziness, all sorts of other stuff, are really due to not drinking enough water. So we have people— it's not nothing by mouth, it's just water by mouth, okay, during that time. And that really is helpful because it triggers a whole bunch of things. The first thing is when your body has that time where it's shut off and there's no new nutrients coming in, you have a time where your cells then will actually go into a repair and restore mode. So that's a big part of that. So timing is a big thing around food. The next thing is really, you know, the quantities of food that you're going to eat. Now that's different for everybody, and it has to do a lot with the, you know, macronutrient levels of, you know, how much fat and protein and carbohydrate are you getting. So the quantities become important because we can kind of push ourselves into excesses of, you know, caloric intake and some other stuff. Talk about with too much quantity. But also the balance is important because we have, you know, proteins, carbohydrates, and fats, but also within our food that we eat, we have micronutrients such as vitamins, minerals, amino acids, fatty acids, and then a whole bunch of things from the plant kingdom, basically, where we get, you know, polyphenols and other flavonoids, other types of things that come from the plants. So that's another big area that we wanna look at with regard to food. That's where the good stuff comes in. The next thing is not letting the arrangement of the macronutrients create more inflammation. So what are the big areas that we trigger inflammation that usually comes from either the fat types we eat or the carbohydrates? And so, for example, for most people, one of the inflammatory parts of carbohydrate intake is often the stimulation or the irregularity of insulin being pumped out. Insulin's very pro-inflammatory when we have more than we need. It's easy to do that, especially with modern North American diets. So for example, if I'm getting, you know, most of my carbohydrates from, you know, dark greens and high-fiber vegetables, I'm gonna have a different amount of insulin stimulation than I will if I'm getting most of my carbohydrates from simple things such as processed grains and other processed-type foods. So a lot of it Again, we don't want the diet to inadvertently bring in inflammation. So insulin triggering, and you can look up online with the magical internet, either the glycemic index and/or the insulin index, which is a little bit better. It tells you how likely to trigger excess insulin a food is, the insulin index. So that's a big thing. But what about the fats? Well, fats mostly trigger inflammation, not so much— Uh, by interacting with something like insulin, although they do a little bit, but more what kind of fats are they? Are we taking in fats that are oxidized, that have a lot of oxidation potential? And if so, is that going in at a level that we can actually burn up today or use, you know, for good purposes? Or again, just like the insulin stimulation, do we have too many? So you have to look at that. And this is the kind of thing, these macro things with fats, carbohydrates, protein, you really want to work With a provider who's used to that, but also matches it to what you need personally. So that's really important as well. So the other thing about food I said is, in addition just to the macros maybe triggering less inflammation or more inflammation, the other thing that happens with food is it's a big gateway— food and drink— for toxins in our life. Well, toxins, obviously we all have them. We live in a toxic world. But if we can do things to not bring more of them in and create more trouble, that would be wonderful. Wonderful, wouldn't it? Well, that's the idea with trying to eat the low toxicity food and drink. Having things like water that's been filtered to remove as many toxins as possible, and whether that's you buy it and bring that in for cooking and drinking, or you have a filtration system, super important. The next thing is, even though there are limits to how good and clean all food types can be, when it comes to, say, vegetable products, You really want as much as you can to have organic produce. It's still not toxin-free, but it's less toxins than non-organic produce. One thing people ask is, you know, that's really expensive. And I know, 'cause I buy it for a number of people in my family. One thing you can do is go to the Environmental Working Group, EWG, Environmental Working Group. And they have the Dirty Dozen, which has got a little, a few more now, but it's called the Dirty Dozen. he does, and it's a list of things that are the most toxic. And if you put your money into those things for, you know, as organic as you can get, it will reduce your overall toxic intake. They also have something called the Clean 15, which are things that you might be able to get away with going either non-organic or organic either way. When it comes to meat and flesh foods, that becomes a little bit of a chore because again, Animals, just like we do, bioconcentrate the food that they eat and also the toxins that are in the food. So again, there's no place that's non-toxic in the entire world. So what we want to do is limit the amount of toxicity and get the healthiest animal product if we eat that. So we look at things like, you know, salmon from the Pacific that's line-caught, Halibut from the Pacific that's line-caught. You can look up other, you know, low-toxin fish sources. Generally, we don't want to be focusing on things that are from farmed sources because there's a number of issues with farmed sources of fish. When it comes to land animals, whether it's poultry or beef, pork, any of those things, if you do eat them, There's a couple of ways to access higher quality, lower toxin meats. One is getting to know local ranchers, farmers who can provide you with that. Sometimes if you're not in a position to buy, say, a portion of an animal or, you know, buy enough to freeze or something like that, your local farm community can get you some pretty clean sources either through your local food co-op or directly from them. And they'll take care of all of the butchering and all All of that stuff that goes on. So just look into those things if you can. So food is a big thing and it encompasses a whole bunch. Next is the concept of muscle. Muscle has to do with the way we treat our whole body, but it really comes from the idea that there is this dichotomy in the body. The body's always about balance, pluses and minuses. And so with muscle, just like with food, we can either use our body in a way that will create more healing, send more Triggers chemically out into the body to deal with the inflammatory processes and the healing process and all that. Or we can do things with our body that may engender more inflammation and trigger more long-term illness, et cetera. When it comes to inflammatory processes, the best healing comes the more we work the bigger muscles in our body. And the nice thing is you don't even have to join a gym or do anything. If you're part of a gym, great. You're probably already doing it. But just standing up is enough to start to activate your big muscles. You got your leg muscles, the biggest muscles in your body, and you've got your core muscles that hold you up, moving your body around. Then you move out to your arms, etc. Well, why does that do that? Activating your muscles actually sends signals out to your body chemically that, that say, uh, we're going to burn up extra You know, of the food substrates. We're gonna level out the, you know, insulin regularity, those sort of things, all good things. And it tends to trigger a couple of things, one being healing signals and the other being long-term anti-inflammatory signals. It also helps you with repair and restoration of important cell parts like your mitochondria, where the energy comes from. Now, when you've been sick or if you're recovering, what you'll find in most cases is you can't do as much physical muscle activity as you did before or when you were not sick. The important part is giving yourself a break and starting where you are and then adding intensity to what you do slowly over time. You'll find if you go a couple of weeks and you're kind of taking baby steps and you overdo it, your body will let you know. Now, that doesn't mean to stop; that means to go and take a step back, a little baby step back, and just kind of keep on that till your body gets used to When you've been chronically ill, you're recovering from cancer, post-COVID, whatever, those baby steps may be very small in the beginning, but they will start to build and you'll start to get your energy back. You'll start to get your tolerance of exercise back. Well, with muscle, what's the opposite? You know, there's always this yin and yang of plus and minus in the body. Opposite of using your muscles is actually fat metabolism, which has to do with being more sedentary. It has to do with eating more calories than the body can adequately utilize. used during the day, but it's also involved in what we talked about with food, which is excess insulin triggering. So a high insulinogenic diet is very pro-inflammatory. So fat addition tends to raise the amount of chemistry in the body that triggers pro-inflammatory activities, things we don't want for healing. And so again, that's why the food part's so important, but what opposes fat metabolism? It's moving our body. You might say, Well, gee, you know, I've in the last ten years I've been real chronically. I've gained all this weight, so I've got all this fat mass. Do I just have to lose the fat mass first? No. Obviously, over time, the goal would be to have more muscle mass and less fat mass. But just start where you are. You get the muscles working every day, even if that's just standing up more times every day, walking around your living room, going up and down your stairs, whatever you can do. Once you get the muscles working. Slowly, they will push out the activity and the inflammatory signaling and triggers from the fat mass. So, again, we want that balance where we're challenging the body to get the muscle mass working and the fat mass goes down. Pillar brick part of the foundation is called brain. Now, obviously, we all— well, if we don't have a brain, we're not alive, so it must be something there. But when it comes to brain, what we're really thinking about here in maintaining and healing from chronic illness, healing after cancer, helping our other therapies work better, what we're really thinking about with brain is kind of a two-way street. One is, is the information going from us personally into our brain appropriate and helpful? And we can be our own medicine or our own poison, just Just like lots of other things can be. So if it is positive and if we're having a good relationship, and that doesn't mean you ignore your problems, but it means you're empowered, it means you're on top of the situation. And just like with exercise, that can be a lot of baby steps to get there. But the idea is if we have a reasonable and a good relationship to the stressors in our life and the stimulation in our life and everything, and are to ourself is more positive and helpful than negative, that will help us on the area of our body-mind connection, sending the right signals out, etc. The other— so that's the internal discussion. The other is the external input, and that is media, things that we listen to, things that we watch, things we read. That are the people that we know, people we talk to, people we let into our life, people we let speak into our life, and everything External. So just like we live in a toxic world and we can't get away from toxins and we have to minimize it, we also live in a toxic, you know, world environment. And we can be informed, for example, without watching the news all day long. It's easy to get into it, or doom scrolling, or, you know, all of those things. So we have to really put ourselves kind of on a diet where we stay, you know, connected to what and who we need to, but also we minimize the influence of excessive amounts of, you know, just neurological toxicity, emotional toxicity. And the same thing happens with friends, family, the other people who are around. We sometimes have toxic people in our lives we can't really cut out of our life, but we can limit. We can put on a sort of a mental-emotional diet of how much we interact with that person. And the sicker we are, the more we need to do that. Because you have to protect yourself from what's being spoken into you. Other things about the brain part, which would be mind-body, and like I say, us talking to ourselves and the world and everything else talking to us, is ways to deal with those stressors so we have a better relationship to stress and we have a more balanced physiologic response to our stressors. Those things can come in the form of Talk therapy, whether that's talking to friends or talking to professionals. Mindfulness practices, and people play those out in many different ways. So whatever works for you. Some people like to meditate. Some people like to do a different type of approach with mindfulness practices. You can look both those up online. Some people have a spiritual prayer practice or mindfulness spiritual practice. Again, whatever works for you is the most important thing to do because it's got to resonate with you and who you are. The other thing that you find is that all three of these areas, whether it's food, muscle, or brain, are synergistic with one another in the positives and the negatives. So the more inflammatory and toxic my diet is, for example, and the more I'm overeating, the more signals that are inflammatory that go out to my body, and they actually can make me not want to say move my body. So then my body shifts more into the fat metabolism side of things where again, I'm more inflammatory and all of that is perceived by the body as a giant physiologic stress. And so you're stressing your brain and your system even more. So the brain side of things has a harder time dealing with it. Also, if we're doing the positive side of things and we're getting our diet in line and, and these things all feel weird if you're changing them, but eventually they do work out. Diet's doing better, we're moving our muscles. Regardless of how much fat you have, move your muscles every day, get them working. The brain part is easier to deal with as well. And then there's things I would say, you know, just the very next layer there, which can be important too, but not for everybody. So I don't always put them into the mix. But if you have, for example, the food toxicity input sort of things, being a Assessed for food sensitivity or food allergy can be very useful for some folks who aren't getting very far, even though they change their diet in a positive direction. Being assessed for toxicity levels, whether it's mycotoxins, chemical toxins, metal toxins, you know. So we see kind of maybe we got more going on there than you know than we thought, right? Being assessed for you know our body mass. So body. Body mass is sort of a muddy way to look at, you know, size because you have 2 people, same weight, same body mass index, but one has a lot more muscle mass than the other, right? So BMI is a start, but then you can do bioimpedance. They sell fairly cheap home, you know, scales that do bioimpedance, and it basically tells you, are you improving or not on your muscle-to-fat mass balance? So things like that can be very useful. And I mentioned those things sort of as an outer shell because, well, checking for toxicity or food sensitivity, food allergy, you know, other things like that, bioimpedance, those are really great to sort of put a cherry on top. Just doing the most you can with food, muscle, and brain are really the core. And they feel really weird when you start to change them. They're hard to do. Your body will fight you back because it doesn't know why suddenly you're moving your body more, you're eating different, or, you know, you're thinking different. It gets better over time. You're gonna get better. It's gonna work better. And then as the body makes that shift, which can take weeks to months for some people and sometimes a bit longer depending on how long you've been sick, then all of that is like a true foundation that then takes care of everything else you're doing, whether it's natural or Western medicine or some mixture of both. And maybe there's you know outside therapeutics you're doing and talk therapy and. Interventional things, whatever you're doing in that house above of your healthcare is going to be shored up. It's going to work better the longer you work on these big 3 things: food, muscle, and brain. Well, I'm Dr. Paul Anderson for Medicine and Health with Dr. Paul Anderson. It's been my pleasure speaking to you and answering this question, which I think came from YouTube, but I can't remember who sent the question in. Please do all the things, subscribe, whatever platform you like. The YouTube community is growing if you're seeing it on there. If you're on a pod burner, you know Apple Play or any of the others, we're on all of those. Medicine and Health with Dr. Paul Anderson. Like, share, subscribe, do notifications, and and give us comments. Give me comments about you know what would you like to see? What questions would you like answered, etc.? Really really important for us. So thank you very much. If you want one hub website beyond the YouTube channel to check out, please go to dranow.com, dranow.com, and that has links whether you're going. For audio types of feeds or my newsletter or other things that I do, my professional website, or even the YouTube channel. Thank you again. Really glad someone asked that question and I hope this gets a little bit deeper into it. Thanks a lot.
