How wellness and chronic illness are related

If you’re dealing with chronic poor health, you’ve probably come to think of wellness as out of reach. Why? Because you’ve tried the things that so many people swear are necessary… a specific diet, exercise, enough sleep, optimism, vitamins. None of it has helped very much.

What happens when you’re on a restricted diet and getting even more food sensitivities? What about when you exercise and pay for it over the next few days? Or, when you go to bed at a decent time but you can’t sleep well? I’m a believer in dietary supplements but sometimes we use them as a band-aid. Diet is important but I talk to people all the time who are eating clean and still getting worse. Exercise is important but I regularly talk to people who get sicker when they exercise. So, what can you do? 

I am here to tell you that there comes a time in a chronic illness when diet and lifestyle alone are not enough for your body to recover and become well again. 

In an acute illness you often treat the infection directly. The focus with a chronic illness needs to be addressing the conditions within the body. The relationship between chronic illness and wellness is like a seesaw. Improving your wellness will decrease your chronic illness, and vice versa. Think of your health as a result of your “ecosystem.” With a chronic illness, you need to be changing your ecosystem at the most fundamental level.

Here’s a good example. When someone meets with me for help with chronic fatigue, there’s rarely anything that’s shown up on a lab test. They actually look pretty healthy on paper. I’ve never even met with someone who has had abnormal results on adrenal tests. But as we talk, it’s clear that there’s something not working right… brain fog, post-exertion malaise and poor recovery. If you go to a health food store, you might walk out with an “energy” supplement, and that’s almost certainly not what you need. These energy supplements don’t create energy; they move it around and not necessarily to the place you need it. The cause of your fatigue could be systemic inflammation, poor digestion, microbiome problems (often candida), poor sleep quality, and on. Addressing the fatigue at the foundational level - what’s wrong in your ecosystem - is most likely to help you regain and retain your energy. 

The wonderful thing about foundational herbalism is that it simplifies the process of selecting the herbs which are most likely to help you. We also often find that the issues we need to address are not complicated, even when they are causing debilitating effects.

Wellness is the path to healing chronic illness. Wellness doesn’t come from taking a pill. It comes from making foundational changes in the body, which is most efficiently and effectively - not to mention affordably - done with herbs.