Looking back, I would say my entire life has been a journey in the pursuit of health. I believe this is probably true for all of us. The journey for some can be a struggle to survive. I was stuck in survival mode for a long time, and now I am glad to say I’m thriving. But I’ll be the first to admit it’s been a work in progress, and still is. The struggles and successes with my own health have been a progression.
When I was early in my quest to find out what my mysterious illness was, I made many mistakes in trying to get better.
I first became a master herbalist, because I like God given treatments. I was just sure that was going to be how I got cured.
I tried all the things they taught me, using herbs to cure this ill and that. But it just didn’t work that way. Not only did the symptoms come back but I ended up with more. Please let me explain, because I now know for sure that herbs can be great at helping to heal you.
Some great herbs that I tried were things like Ashwaganda, Bacopa, Eleuthero (Siberian ginseng), Holy basil, Rhodiola, Schizandra berry, and Licorice root. All great healing herbs. I took the Bacopa the most because it had less side effects and did help me be calmer and my brain work better. I still use Licorice root extract. But I wasn’t getting well.
Then I went to school to become a Functional Diagnostic Nutrition Practitioner, another wholistic, natural therapy discipline. This was different. This discipline taught me to test don’t guess.
So, I started doing functional lab tests on myself. The first one I did was a Biohealth labs hormone test. This is where I found out why I couldn’t sleep at night and was exhausted when I got up in the morning. This test told me I was in exhaustion phase. I was not making enough cortisol at the right time.
So I started studying things to fix my circadian rhythm. One thing I found was that adaptogens, like the above herbs, lower cortisol. They have tested many of them extensively. They lower cortisol. Now I knew one reason why my cortisol was low.
Without enough cortisol at the right times you have symptoms like – extreme weakness, fatigue, mental confusion, dizziness, a loss of appetite, low blood sugar, low blood pressure (especially upon rising from a lying down position). I’m sure there are more since they don’t even know yet what all cortisol does for you.
I couldn’t believe it, I was making myself worse by taking supplements and herbs based on a pill for an ill mentality.
So I started looking up different symptoms and found that many so called ‘diseases’ shared many of the same symptoms. There seemed to be some diseases that these symptoms more prevalent than those, but there seemed to be only so many ways a body could tell you there was a problem. So this meant I could not base my treatment on a pill for an ill.
That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do all you can naturally to heal. It just means you should eat right, give yourself rest when you need it, exercise at the amount and type for you, keep your stress levels low, and supplement only what you’ve tested for to give your body the things it needs to heal. It was fearfully and wonderfully made. So just give it what it needs.
So the moral of my story is to take care of yourself and test don’t guess at what is the root cause of your symptoms.
If you have been dealing with a mysterious illness and want to regain your strength and energy so you can live a purposeful life again, click here to get “Could my mysterious illness be from mold?
