...DEFEAT Chronic Fatigue Syndrome: ...............................................................You don't have to live with it
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ME/CFS Nutrition - Avoid Junk

8/20/2013

2 Comments

 
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Ever since we were kids, we’ve been told by nutritionists to eat healthy food.  The various pyramids and food groups have come and gone but the message has been the same.  And there’s really no mystery to it.  Eat healthy food.  When I was struggling with ME/CFS, I paid attention to everything I ate once I understood the need to feed my recovering dis-eased body.  
 
Our biggest road block to following this simple adage is discipline.  In our consumer driven economy, there’s a mega agricultural and food business that wants us to consume a lot of unhealthy cheap stuff that’s profitable.  And they have the market control to make it easy for us to acquire and eat their stuff and harder to get something different.  So the first challenge is to PLAN to eat healthy food.  This may sound simplistic but if I’m hungry and there isn’t anything healthy to eat, I go for the shelf with the packaged food.  And sometimes, even when I have healthy food in the house, I don’t feel like preparing it.  Make a salad?  Sometimes I’m just too tired.  So as simple as it sounds to eat healthy food, we have to work at it.  And when you’re struggling with ME/CFS, every ounce of energy is precious.  So you need to decide to allocate some of your limited supply of energy toward providing your body with the healthy food it needs to generate even more energy.  Once you look at it that way, it’s a cliché of win-win.

So what’s healthy food? This is a personal decision in terms of what you know to be true about your metabolism.  In today’s
culture, many people are vegetarian or vegan.  Some observe various restrictions in their diets that have made a huge difference in their health – gluten free, sugar free, etc. Whether you need to be more or less restrictive can be a matter of experimentation or
testing.

But whatever you do, as you work your way back to health, be sure to only put positive, healthy food into your system.  Don’t eat negative food – like soda and copious sweets - that your body will have to spend precious energy clearing and processing. Plan to eat healthy food.  What are your strategies for eating healthy? What works for you?  Please COMMENT on this blog or Send in your thoughts and I’ll post them with your permission.  You can use the Contact Form or send an
email to Martha at DefeatCFS dot net.  And Guest Blogs are most welcome!

Look for a weekly posting on Tuesdays.  And consider being part of the conversation.

Be Well Again,

Martha


 

2 Comments
Tim Boland
8/25/2013 07:34:36 am

In my life, I’ve had two versions of CFS. One came in the 90s after a great deal of stress over a divorce. I remember going to the doctor and he said he thought I had ‘chronic fatigue’ but didn’t add the word syndrome, which was a blessing for me as I tend to obsess. I told him I was tired of being tired and being able to do so little but he said that well, some people just have to learn to live with feeling that way.

My immediate reaction, which I didn’t share fully with him, is ‘to hell with that’. I didn’t like his words and his suggestion I just accept it as it was. I started taking a number of healthy supplements for daily vitamins and minerals, which I still do to this day. And I had an intuitive feeling that I should avoid sugar, whether in breakfast cereal or ice cream.

I noticed after a little while that even if I had sugar in the form of sweetened with juices, as in some kinds of jellies, I just didn’t feel as well the next day. I got to the point where I would take my daughters for ice cream cones and just wouldn’t have one, feeling good was more important.

It took at least a year or two for me to start feeling more normal, and I never did resume the very hectic pace of life. I used to think ‘well, I’m about 95% better’ and the extra 5% of possible activity just added up to doing things faster or more frantically.

During that time, I had revised my diet with more healthy things and very little packaged foods. I’m sure it made for a much better feeling for me. I tend to eat pretty much the same things for breakfast, lunch and dinner, with variations of the kind of lean meat I’ll have for dinner. So it’s become more automatic and my body seems to like the consistency, though I know that’s not for everyone.

I really did recover for several years and only after starting to backslide on the amount of stress in my life and a couple of unwise choices did I became ill again. Some might say this was inevitable, that CFS never really leaves and recurrences will happen. But that’s not my sense of it at all, I could feel in my body that I needed to take better care. Only when I allowed truly excessive amounts of stress to persist and making a few very bad choices did I become ill again. So slowly I’m becoming better and having much more appreciation for self care.

Kind of a long one :) Thank you Martha!

Reply
Martha
8/30/2013 04:21:36 pm

Never too long Tim! We appreciate your willingness to share your experience and hard earned lessons.

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    After struggling with CFS for four years I am fortunate now to be fully well and making choices about how I want to live my healthy life.  One choice is to be an active part of the CFS community and to offer one voice from the fully recoverd to the dialogue.  I'm glad you're here!   For more about me, here's my Bio.

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