As featured in M.E. Essential magazine, Issue 153, After Winter 2020

For those suffering from CFS, there is one overriding question that underlies all the other questions: “Will I ever get better?”

When I first was diagnosed with M.E., I gave healing my all those first couple of years. I set off on my own to sift through a sea of snake oil pedaled by so-called experts, and relentlessly lived and breathed this singular focus of mine at the expense of virtually everything else. I quit my job, my marriage ended, and my savings dwindled to nothing because in my tiny yet mighty self-preservation bubble this healing mission of mine was the only thing that would fit.

Nothing fancy or special happening here, just your standard-issue basic bitch M.E. Just a body made of lead and everyone telling me that no one ever gets better from this.

Lie Number One.

Fast forward some years later. Not a single day passed that didn’t feel like a struggle to endure. Chronic fatigue syndrome (how I typically refer to M.E.) had hijacked my life. With my belief in recovery long since gone, I just couldn’t fight anymore. Not only were the additional demands of life pushing back with a ferocity that could no longer be ignored, but waking up each and every single day to head back to the frontlines of this healing battle was just too exhausting to keep up long-term.

So, as many of us do, I switched my focus from how to survive the rest of my life to how to survive the rest of the day. Who was I to recover anyway when no one else did? I would never get better, so best get on with the business of simply living in the prison that is CFS.

Lie Number Two.

Of course I had not given up all hope. But my struggles with CFS had me firmly convinced that the path to healing was so unbelievably complicated that it would take nothing short of a miracle doled out by some external Ph.D. level healer to determine the cure. Because after all, we’re told there’s a specific drug, surgery, treatment, supplement, or unique combination of all of the above that will remedy virtually every disease, right? We’re told that each therapy is tailored specifically for each ailment, like the lone magical key capable of unlocking our health and happiness for us once again. And how do we determine the components of this allusive healing cure? Get more tests! When you’re sick, no matter what the question is, more tests is always the answer. We’re told we have to identify the 17 different imbalances in our bodies and then devise a specific treatment that will tackle each and every one of them individually. And that if there isn’t a singular and unique remedy, that this somehow invalidates the very disease that we have.

Lie Number Three.

And here is perhaps where my story veers off of the beaten path a bit. After years of suffering and accepting the lies, I found a way to stop listening to them and decide (once again) that I was going to regain my health. But this time – because I wasn’t listening to the lies – my treatment was going to be virtually free and the only expert involved would be me. I would once again put myself back into that healing bubble, but this time the only instructions for my healing came from within. I was the expert, and the messages my body gave me were the test results.

From all the information and experimentation I’d experienced and accumulated over the years, I devised for myself a fairly simple yet rigorous healing plan focused on four areas that I detail in my recovery memoir Finding Freedom: Escaping From the Prison of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome: nutrition, exercise, emotional well-being, and overall body healing support. Before long it was undeniable – my healing plan was actually working and I was getting better.

Don’t get me wrong – it wasn’t an unbroken linear progression from sickness to health. As I explain there it was an iterative process, and as the months passed I learned to fail fast and adjust my plan accordingly. In time, I figured out that when it came to nutrition, intermittent fasting combined with a whole-food plant-based diet naturally rich in probiotics from fermented foods was the best path to health for me. And a specific approach towards exercise, although an incredibly tricky beast to master, also eventually fell into place and became a crucial part of my recovery. Once I adopted a brand new mindset, an unconventional approach that focused on strength training instead of cardio, and developed an independent exercise regimen (that for a long time was only one or two minutes per day) — I ended up with some spectacular results.

My steadfast mental health support system including social support, meditation, journaling, negativity releasers and happiness boosters ensured that I remained mentally strong. And I supported my body’s own healing mechanisms by ensuring I got good-quality sleep, taking daily cold showers, getting frequent exposure to sunshine, and even going for massages.

And what a different experience from my first serious go around at trying to get well. Instead of feeling like I was flailing in the water while trying to learn to swim, this time I plowed ahead with each confident stroke clearly getting me closer and closer to my goal. And as I explain in my book, “knowing and seeing that what I was doing was definitively working made the quest of trying to hold onto hope become effortless – because hope is always present when your confidence in your success is rock solid. I didn’t even have to search for motivation. Being on the path to really starting to fully live again made me unstoppable.”

I didn’t know it at the time, but I’d created a program for myself for healing from M.E. that falls under an emerging mainstream practice called lifestyle medicine. Our bodies, as it turns out, often have a remarkable capacity to begin healing, and much more quickly than we had once believed.  And after about eighteen months of dedication to these fairly simple yet fastidious lifestyle changes, I did in fact 100% recover from CFS.

The lies were just that: lies.

I am not a doctor or a scientist of any kind, so I can’t say for certain if my recipe for health will work for anyone else. And I definitely don’t advocate leaving doctors out of the equation. But since I’d had years of doctors’ visits and tests to no avail, by the end even the doctors were throwing their hands up and admitting they had little left to offer me. I took what knowledge and wisdom they had to offer and used what I could from this to guide me on my path back to health.

And not just back to health, but quite honestly to a point where I am living a life that is even healthier than the life I was living before CFS struck. The truths I learned on the way to finding freedom were that healing from M.E. is most definitely possible and that the remedies we seek, although certainly not easy, might be much simpler than we think. And although I am hesitant about giving others false hope, I know that for me the false hopelessness I’d internalized for years was far more destructive than any false hope could ever have been.

It took some massive changes and a serious commitment to healing, but putting in the work to get to where I am now seems like a bargain compared to a life consumed by M.E. I went from being lost in a pit of despair and suffering to a life filled with surfing and hiking and running and SCUBA diving and even finding new love. And sharing my story through my book is a beautiful part of how I’m now emotionally healing and trying to give some meaning to all that I’ve been through. The only way I can live with all the suffering that I see so many others still enduring because of this retched illness is to take as many of those people as I can by the hand and see if we can’t just figure this thing out together.