Wouldn’t it be fantastic if chronic fatigue could be fixed with one lifestyle change, one dietary change, or one supplement? However, as anyone with chronic fatigue has discovered, there is no one solution.
The treatment for chronic fatigue needs to be holistic. Optimising your lifestyle is the secret sauce for boosting energy.
Factors that must be addressed are:
- Do you eat at the right times of the day?
- Is your meal correctly balanced?
- Do you sleep enough?
- Do you sleep at the right time?
- Do you do the right type of exercise?
- Do you practice stress management?
- Do you support your body with the right supplements and herbs?
Optimise these, and your body will start producing energy again. Get them wrong, and you’ll drain your energy reserves.
However, for each individual, the emphasis applied to each factor differs slightly depending on your unique circumstances.
Prioritising Sleep and Consistent Routines for Energy Restoration
Sleep is an underrated medicine because it has profound healing qualities, but not all sleep is equal. The first sleep factor to optimise is the amount of sleep you get. It must be more than 7 hours a night because countless studies have revealed less than this suppresses hormone production, suppresses the immune system, and impairs metabolism.
Optimally, you want to aim for 8 to 9 hours of sleep at night.
The second sleep factor you need to optimise is when you sleep. Because your body is synced to the night/day cycle, the best time to get your 8 to 9 hours of sleep is between 9 pm and 7 am. This allows you to get your sleep when it’s dark and prevents light from disturbing your sleep. It also aligns you with natural hormone rhythms.
Even if you still get 8 to 9 hours, sleeping outside of these hours won’t have the same restorative effect on your body.
People with chronic fatigue don’t usually have any trouble sleeping, but they do often have dysfunctional sleeping patterns. Because they are chronically tired, they may sleep during the daytime, which interferes with their sleep ability. Implementing good sleep hygiene is essential to realigning your sleep patterns.
Sleep hygiene tips:
- Develop a wind-down routine for the 1hr before bed
- Avoid caffeine after midday
- Switch off from stimulating activities
- No exercise
- No social media scrolling
- No work or reading work-related emails
- Have a warm shower or bath
- Tune into your body’s needs
- Go to bed when you notice the first signs of drowsiness
- Don’t eat or drink too close to bedtime
- Avoid alcohol
- Reduce blue light exposure
- Don’t use any technology, or if you do, turn on the blue light filter
- Make your house dim
- Use red/orange coloured lamps
- Make sure your bedroom is set up for sleep
- Darken your room or use an eye-mask
- Make your room cool
- Don’t bring phones, tablets or laptops into your bedroom
- Don’t watch TV in bed
- Make the bedroom solely for sleeping
Dietary Adjustments for Optimal Energy and Symptom Management
The food you eat has a direct effect on your energy levels. So, choosing foods to maximise and sustain your energy is critical when you have chronic fatigue. You want foods that will fuel you for hours rather than for minutes. However, when you feel constantly tired, it is easy to succumb to foods that give you an immediate, albeit short-lived, energy boost.
What to Eat Less of
For chronic fatigue sufferers, these are the worst foods for you:
- Refined sugar and especially high fructose corn syrup
- Sugary processed foods like lollies, candy, chocolate, cookies
- Sugary drinks like soft drinks, soda and sports drinks
- White flour products like bread, pastries, breakfast cereals, pasta
- White rice, rice noodles
What to Eat More of
The foods to eat are nutrient-dense, unprocessed wholefoods because these provide energy plus essential nutrients like vitamins, minerals, proteins and fats. Eat more of:
- Fresh fruits and vegetables
- Whole, unrefined carbohydrates like brown rice, quinoa, sweet potato, potato, dark rye sourdough bread and legumes (beans and lentils)
- Free-range beef, lamb, pork, eggs, chicken and turkey. Wild-caught fish and seafood
- Healthy fats from raw nuts, raw seeds, avocados, extra virgin olive oil and butter from grass-fed cows
- Hydration is also critical because your body is 70% water, and dehydration makes you tired. So drink 3 to 4 litres of filtered water daily. Sports drinks and bottled
- fruit juice are best avoided and don’t count towards your water intake.
Incorporating Exercise and Mindful Movement for Well-being
Exercise and chronic fatigue present a challenging conundrum. While regular exercise is universally promoted for its immense health benefits, including improving energy levels, people with chronic fatigue often experience post-exercise malaise.
This is a situation where even minimal physical exertion leads to a worsening of fatigue. I have seen this in patients when they try to do too much, and I have experienced it myself during my recovery from long-COVID.
Exercise intolerance creates a complex situation in which the usual exercise advice may not only be unhelpful but also potentially detrimental to recovery.
Consequently, exercise routines need to be tailored and monitored. Balancing activity and rest and employing the right type of exercise is crucial to prevent fatigue from worsening.
The type of exercise I have found to be most beneficial is Zone 2 exercise. In this zone, you exercise at a steady, moderate level (60-70% of your maximum heart rate) for a set period of time. Exercising in this zone specifically targets your mitochondria and improves their energy output, so your energy output increases over time.
Zone 2 exercise is very low-stress on the body, which makes it ideal for chronic fatigue. It can be incorporated into low-impact activities such as walking, swimming, and cycling.
Yoga is another form of exercise that is well suited to chronic fatigue recovery. This is because yoga can be adjusted to move the body without initiating undue exertion. Yoga also has the additional benefit of being a mindfulness practice, which can double as a stress management practice.
Embracing Stress Management and Mindfulness Techniques
Meditation may not be the first activity you think of to fix chronic fatigue, but it can be immensely beneficial. This is because, at some level, stress was a catalyst for your development of chronic fatigue.
So, meditation is a wonderful tool for easing internalised stress and rebalancing the stress response. Two people I follow and whose meditation techniques I use are Dr Joe Dispenza and Eckhart Tolle.
Breathwork is another fantastic tool for easing stress and boosting energy production. When you breathe in deeply and then exhale slowly, it initiates a relaxation response. A simple breathwork technique I give to patients is the 4-7-8 technique. Here’s how it works –
- Lay flat on the floor if possible, but you can do this sitting upright, too
- Breathe in for a count of 4.
- Hold for a count of 7
- Breathe out for a count of 8
- Repeat for 5 to 10 minutes
Managing stress is one of the most critical interventions for chronic fatigue recovery because stress hormones such as cortisol prevent healing. However, emotional and psychological stresses aren’t the only ones you need to manage. Stress also comes from exercising too hard, skipping meals, deliberate fasting, lack of sleep, viruses and leaky gut.
But these stresses can be easily managed by exercising appropriately (zone 2 and yoga), eating three meals and snacks to keep blood glucose balanced, eating unprocessed wholefood meals with quality protein, healthy fat and unrefined carbs, consuming some kind of fermented food daily and getting 8–9 hours of sleep at the right time.
Supplementation and Natural Therapies in Energy Management
Your body creates energy from the foods you eat; your primary fuels are carbohydrates and fats. But to burn fats and carbs, your cells need specific nutrients, the most important being.
- Vitamins B1, B2, B3, B5 as you can’t burn carbs without these
- Vitamin B12 brings fuel into the energy-making cycle
- Magnesium is critical for both carb and fat-burning
- Coenzyme Q10 (CoQ10) facilitates the final step of energy production from fats and carbs
In chronic fatigue, the need for these nutrients is often dramatically increased. This is because chronic fatigue sufferers have what’s called mitochondrial dysfunction. Your mitochondria are the little energy-making factories within your cells. If these become damaged by an infection like COVID or glandular fever, medications like chemotherapy or statins, or excessive stress, then your energy production drops off.
So, to repair your mitochondria, you need to give them the nutrients they need. To determine the specific nutrients you need and how much of them you need, you need to do testing. The best test to check mitochondrial function is a metabolomics test.
Adapting Daily Routines and Work-Life for Sustainable Energy Use
One of the big secrets to beating chronic fatigue is learning how to manage your energy throughout the day. A common trap people fall into is trying to do too much and depleting their energy reserves. When you have chronic fatigue, you must be conscious of how you spend your energy. A fantastic technique to help you with this is the Energy Pyramid.
The Energy Pyramid
The energy pyramid illustrates how energy is allocated within the body, prioritizing vital functions like breathing and circulation over less critical activities. For someone with chronic fatigue, the energy available for daily activities is markedly reduced as basic physiological functions quickly deplete the body’s resources.
This results in a smaller “energy budget,” making it difficult for you to perform tasks others might find easy. Understanding this pyramid helps you manage your energy more effectively, focusing on essential tasks and pacing yourself to prevent exacerbating your symptoms.
Applying this technique means working with your family, friends and employer to create routines that support your energy reserves so that you can participate in life.
Take Charge Against Fatigue
Recovery from chronic fatigue is possible, and the treatments outlined here are your blueprint to get there. Implementing these strategies will optimise how you eat, exercise, and sleep, thus boosting your energy and improving your life.
However, implementing these on your own can be a daunting task. But this is where we are here to help you. We are the quality of life experts and can guide you in successfully implementing the changes you need to make.
Plus, we are experts in mitochondrial repair. We can test your mitochondria and create a personalised natural treatment plan to boost your energy levels.
To get our help, call us at 02 9524 2471 or book an initial consultation online.
