Chronic Fatigue — Get Your Energy Back!
But beware: skipping meals or eating too lightly for a lengthy period will make fatigue worse. Many women skip breakfast and have a salad every day at lunch in an effort to lose weight. But this starves the body and upsets their hormone balance. By late afternoon their blood sugar has dropped and they feel tired, so they turn to coffee, diet soda or a sugary snack. This delivers a jolt of energy for the moment, only leading them to crash later in the evening when they get home.
- Nutritional supplements. Living in high-stress mode also leads to nutritional deficiencies. If your body has been relying on emergency measures for a long time, basic metabolism suffers. Cells are unable to absorb nutrients in the normal way, even when you eat reasonably well,
so your body excretes essential amino acids, minerals and other micronutrients that it should be putting to good use. The end result is that you may think you’re well fed, but your cells are starving and can’t work efficiently.
One of the first things many women notice after a few weeks of taking our pharmaceutical-grade multivitamin and practicing better nutrition is that their energy returns, sometimes dramatically. This makes sense when you think of your cells as mini-powerhouses that churn out energy. Rich nutrition provides plentiful energy. In our go-go culture, even women who eat well may lack certain essential nutrients. For this reason, I recommend nutritional supplements to every patient, including essential fatty acids, calcium, and magnesium. Click here to see what Women to Women has to offer to enhance your health.
- Dehydration. Fluid loss is a very common and overlooked cause of mild fatigue. It sounds simple, and it is: dehydration occurs when output exceeds input, stressing all of your systems. The standard recommendation is at least four 8-oz glasses of water per day, double or triple that if you are active. Based on my experience, I encourage all women to drink at least eight glasses of pure, filtered water, herbal tea or extremely diluted, unsweetened juice per day.
That’s because a fluid loss of as little as 2% is enough to cause mental fuzziness and short-term memory loss. Sleepiness, muscle weakness, dizziness and headache set in if fluid levels drop below that. Coffee and soda don’t count because of their diuretic effect — that is, they lead to the loss of more fluid than they contribute. Many women don’t realize how dehydrated they are because they don’t feel thirsty, and let’s face it, we’re just so busy! But the thirst mechanism is not always reliable, and most of the time, if you are thirsty you are already dehydrated.
- Inactivity. The body needs both rest and movement. When it comes to fatigue — and you may find this counterintuitive — long periods of inactivity can actually make you more tired. Think of it as a kind of atrophy: use it or lose it. If you don’t get up and move, your energy-producing mechanisms weaken. Regular moderate physical exercise helps regulate your metabolism and tunes up your circadian rhythm by purging high levels of stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline and readying your tissues for rest. This leads to more restorative and rejuvenating sleep.
If you have tried some or all of the above tactics and your fatigue persists or worsens, it may well be time to delve deeper. The longer you have headed down the spiral, the more entrenched your fatigue may become.
Causes of moderate to severe fatigue
If your fatigue is worsening, interferes with your enjoyment of life, or becomes virtually disabling (and again, you have gotten the medical tests needed to rule out a secondary condition), it would be wise for you to work with a healthcare practitioner to peel away the next few layers. You will need to find someone you can talk openly with — on both the physical and emotional fronts — someone willing to examine a variety of causes.