Why am I so tired? Here are the reasons and what to do about it
Why am I so tired? Here are the reasons and what to do about it. Photo | Photosearch
What you need to know:
Sugar, and refined foods in general, are one of the main culprits when it comes to inflammation.
Sometimes, after a sleepless night with my kids, I can feel like a complete zombie for most of the day. Thankfully, I know that it’s nothing serious and this will soon all pass.
But what if this is what you feel after a good night’s rest? This was the story for Rose, a 29-year-old business executive. She felt so bad that she had convinced herself that she had HIV.
Rose has come to see me for a condition called uveitis, or inflammation of a part of the eye called the uvea. So what did that have to do with HIV? Well, uveitis can be caused by an auto-immune, of which HIV is one, hence Rose was worried (an auto-immune condition is one where the body attacks itself). She regularly had levels of a particular white blood cell checked (CD4 and CD8), and even though the numbers were well within range, she wasn’t convinced. Her face regularly felt tight, her lips would swell and she would even itch after a cold shower.
It was only when her condition began to improve with nutritional medicine, that she stopped being this worried woman clutching a bunch of lab test results.
So what did we do? As you might expect, I started by recommending three good meals a day. It was always going to be a losing battle if the body wasn’t being supplied with a healthy dose of nutrients every day (she used to have a hurried breakfast and then nothing til dinner). But there were to be certain compromises on Rose’s part, certain foods that I wanted her to avoid so as to help minimise the inflammation.
The first was sugar. Sugar, and refined foods in general, are one of the main culprits when it comes to inflammation. Ditto fried food. So both of those were out. So were wheat and dairy produce.
You see, if the uveitis was indeed autoimmune in origin, it was likely to be related to food sensitivity. I’m not saying that cutting out foods like breads, pasta, milk and cheese was easy for Rose, but even she knew was very necessary. She had been suffering from her condition for the last six years and had recently also been seeing “floaters” (a bit like dark spots in front of your eyes).
The difference in just four short weeks was amazing. Rose said that when she came into the clinic, she wanted to hug me! Her face was no longer tight and her lips wouldn’t swell. The floaters, which had previously been a daily occurrence, only appeared very rarely. And despite eating so much more, she was actually losing the tyre around her waist.
