Dear One,
Have you ever been handed a new food plan? A savvy food plan, just for you, promising exactly what you were searching for? Designed to perfectly align with your unique systems biology? To correct nutrient deficiencies and beautifully address your problems like only food can? (Maybe this plan was even endorsed by a favorite NYTimes best-selling author!)
You take it with you, tail…
The other day I saw a client who came to me for help with persistent fatigue, anxiety, sleep problems, and trouble losing weight.
As a shy teenager, life was already hard. Then I asked him to do more hard things. Like change his diet, letting go of comfort foods he loved but were directly linked to how he felt. Like getting more sleep, giving up precious time at night when he felt his best and…
“Keep a green bough in your heart, and a singing bird will come.”
-Lao Tzu
I love this gorgeous quote, and as a bird lover, it blasts my heart right open.
I’m reminded to keep my heart open (the green bough), inviting something magical to cross my path, calling me to see it.
But it’s hard sometimes to have an open heart, isn’t it? It’s a challenge to stay in gratitude and appreciation for…
“We don’t know how to measure what we care about, so we care about what we measure.”
-Richard Tapia
Whoa. That’s powerhouse! And from the mouth of a mathematician!
I think he captures how uncomfortable we are with the uncertainty of our lives (what we care about), so we cling to what we think we know. Isn’t that part of what we get from measuring things? A feeling of certainty? Even if we…
I love the idea of the law of attraction.
You’ve heard of it, right?
The “law” of nature that (purportedly) says, “think it, feel it, celebrate it, take action toward it, and it will come.” That we create our reality. That we can manifest our dreams.
Saying those words fills me with hope. They make me feel I can control my outcomes. Direct my life.
And we can to some extent, right? We know this…
I have a problem with nice.
Do you know what I mean?
Those people who tell you what they think you want to hear? How your hair always looks great (even when you know it doesn’t), or how your food is always the most delicious they’ve ever had (even the peanut butter and jelly sandwich), or what you’ve written is awesome (when you know it’s crap).
I don’t need that. In fact, I hate that.
See, I…
I struck a resonant chord with my discussion about asking for help last week. Thank you so much for speaking up about your troubles and insights—you can be sure there are a whole bunch of others feeling exactly the same way but choose to stay quiet. We have so much to learn from one another!
What did I learn from you?
There’s a whole other angle to the help story that often gets us…
A breakthrough approach to chronic fatigue and chronic fatigue syndrome recovery is the revolutionary science of Functional Medicine (FM). In FM, we focus on the individual and the unique circumstances of their illness rather than a generic diagnosis and statistical averages.
Rather than treat a diagnosis with a…
Does asking for help make you squirm?
Yah, me too.
Why’s that?
I remember a time when I would NOT ask for help. Not ever. I thought I had to do it all myself. You know, pull myself up by the bootstraps, be tough and self-sufficient. Thinking I’d be a bother to others in asking for help or show some inherent flaw in my character, or weakness in my know-how.
Geeze, what crazy silly stories those…
We all have a healing story, don’t we?
Fatigue and chronic illness are stories.
Recovery and failure and pain are stories.
They may be stories someone else wrote and handed to us. Or perhaps they’re stories we created ourselves to wrap our minds around fatigue and suffering and disappointment.
This is how it is. This is how it will be. This is my truth. This will…
If we didn’t get stuck, we’d all be healed, wouldn’t we?
Low energy, chronic illness, burnout, depression—you name it. We don’t ask for it. We don’t want it. And for many of us, we know exactly what to do. How many times have we started out on those changes that we know are absolutely perfect for us?
So, why don’t we? Why don’t we just…
Just look at us! We’ve come so far! The pieces of our savvy, personal self-care plans crafted so brilliantly just for us—by us—are coming together.
But, wait… many of us have been here before. How come we can’t make our genius plans work? Why can’t we get through the starting gates or pass the finish line?
That’s right—we’re stuck.
Why, with all our…
We’re so intent on our healing, yet we find ourselves stuck … Again! What is wrong with us?
There’s nothing wrong with us. We’re doing our best, right? We’re giving it our all. We’re just stuck in a tenacious story that won’t let us go.
We’re stuck in a disempowering story, like those we discussed in the [previous article]—stories about our power, our worth,…
Look at those words again. And again. Let them sink in. We. Must. Feel.
How do you feel as you read them, think them, say them?
Numb? Indifferent? Super-charged? Emotional?
Whatever you feel—honestly feel—is one-hundred percent okay. We have complicated relationships with our feelings. We shame and blame ourselves for having them even though they’re here to…
It starts like this, doesn’t it? We feel the terrible sting of disappointment because things are not turning out as we hoped. Our expectations are not met. A door slams in our face and we feel devastated. Or, in spite of working really, really hard, our savvy plan seems to go nowhere.
Then what?
You know where I’m going here,…
“This food plan isn’t working for me.”
“This treatment has done absolutely nothing.”
“I thought I’d be feeling better by now. This is a failure.”
Do these “failures” sound familiar?
Healing can be so hard. And can take so long.
What if you’re working hard? To recover your energy and wellbeing? To get your life back? And you still struggle?
Have you failed? Is your healing strategy a…
Energy nutrition is absolutely essential to heal chronic fatigue no matter what the underlying causes.
Your grandma was right after all: “You are what you eat.” Literally.
The constituents of our food—each individual protein, fat, carbohydrate, and molecule we ingest—become our proteins, fats, carbohydrates, and the molecules that run…