How to Beat Chronic Illness Symptoms without Supplements
In the modern world, everyone is conditioned to seek resolution from outside of themselves. This is no different when dealing with a chronic illness. Most people are looking for the next supplement or medication that will control their symptoms. Though this seems like a valid approach, there is a problem. By doing this, they’re ignoring what is causing their chronic illness symptoms in the first place.
In this article, we will talk about all of the things that are within your control that can reduce chronic illness symptoms. we will cover three groups of triggers that are to blame for the majority of your chronic illness symptoms. Interested in learning more? Take a look below!
3 Hidden Causes of Chronic Illness Symptoms
What We Ingest – The Tricks Foods Play On Us
The most common irritants are dairy, gluten, egg, nuts, and artificial ingredients. The truth is, that countless foods and ingredients can trigger mast cells if the gut is compromised. In addition, it can be tricky at times to figure out which foods are causing the reactions, and which foods you reacting to just because you’re consuming other foods. One good example of this is meat. Many people with chronic illnesses consume meat and have a diet that is reduced in fiber. This may help initially, but eventually causes the person to have less tolerance to different plant-based foods. They then double down on the meat and other animal products, reducing the variance in all of their other plant-based foods. This is the common situation I see in people who have hyperimmune issues like histamine intolerance, or mast cell activation.
In addition to foods, you can also be reacting to supplements or medication you are taking. You may not have had any side effects when you initially started it, but over time your body became sensitive. I see this time and time again. Clients are taking supplements or prescriptions that they think are helping, but in fact, they are reacting to them.
To be able to identify the food triggers, you have to follow a plant-based elimination diet and be open to what you discover. The truth is most of the foods that are causing issues are the ones that are hard to get rid of. This can be a difficult discovery to make which throws you back into consuming these foods because you don’t want to believe this is true. Nonetheless, the reality is, if you eat something you are sensitive to, you make your leaky gut worse. Every time you do so, you aggravate your immune response which initiates symptoms. if you remove the food triggers, symptoms improve dramatically, and the gut lining repairs itself.
What We Inhale – Indoor Air Quality Really Matters
Toward the end of the article, I will give you an example of how important environmental irritants can be in the grand scheme of things. Most molds that create issues do so undercover. This means you cannot even see the mold, but it is producing mycotoxins that are harmful to health and a nuisance to the immune system.
These mycotoxins, cause the body to have systemic inflammatory reactions that seem to have no rhyme or reason. Once the body creates an immune sensitivity to a mycotoxin, it may be sensitive for several months to a few years after eliminating exposure. If the person stays in the environment where this irritant is present, they will continue to be sent into a flare that seems never-ending. Eventually, their immune system will react quicker and more aggressively to all forms of stress and symptoms will continue until the person is removed from the environment.
I cannot emphasize the importance of this enough. Though I give most of my weight to what people are eating, there are plenty of cases where environmental irritants are the primary problem. Unless this irritant is eliminated or greatly reduced via indoor air quality strategies, the person will remain in a chronic inflammatory state.
Some Form of Stress- Pushing Your Body Over the Edge
When the immune system is accustomed to being triggered by things it is eating or inhaling, everything else becomes a threat as well. This can be any form of stress that the body is under. Examples are perceived stress due to life events, physical stress on the body like exercise, sleep disruption which causes stress, etc.
Once the body is accustomed to being stressed, it takes very little to push it over the edge. This is why it is extremely important to identify these stressors and either change your lifestyle, or your stories surrounding them. If you are simply traumatized by so many things in your life and are having stress reactions that you can’t control, you’re just like I was. The one thing that made the biggest difference when I was in the situation was slow deep breathing. I know it may sound crazy, but it worked in ways that nothing else could. To learn more about this, read my article Slow Deep Breathing – Healing through Breathwork.
How this Approach Works for Chronic Illnesses
After reading the information above, you may still be skeptical. Hey, I don’t blame you! If you look into the actual studies though, it shows that mast cells are the main culprit behind chronic inflammation. If you figure out what is triggering these mast cells, you can stop the flares that generate the symptoms. If you don’t, then these cells continue to generate problems for you.
When people have chronic illnesses, their main problem is, they don’t understand why their symptoms are worse at times, and better at others. Understanding why the symptoms get worse is truly the key to getting better. If you don’t understand why you are flaring up, you will repeat the same action and then look for relief from supplements or medication. This is why investigating these three key areas of your life is so important. If you remove triggers from your diet, optimize your indoor air quality, and implement stress reduction practices, you will be set up for a sure recovery.
What I Learned from Working with Clients
In the first few years I was working with clients, I would favor supplement-heavy strategies for healing. This means I would try to figure out which supplements I could use to help the person reduce their symptoms right off the bat. Though I did provide some dietary advice, everyone wanted to know which supplement was going to be the one that would make the difference.
Finally, I got wiser and realized that the key was identifying what the person was doing that was aggravating their immune system. Since their own immune system was the main cause of their symptoms, we had to figure out what was making it go haywire. This led me to start having clients journal their food and symptoms. From there, it became easy to make the correlation as to whether it was something they put in their mouth, something they inhaled, or some form of stress that triggered the symptoms.
I believe so much in this approach that I no longer even recommend supplements until we go through a full identification of all triggers in the person’s diet, environment, and lifestyle. Then once we make some progress in some of these areas, we start to implement supplements to support the immune system. If we add supplements any time before this while the immune system is still being triggered, we are in essence, wasting our money and potentially making things worse.
FAQ- Hidden Causes of Chronic Illness Symptoms
Have you used this approach with various chronic illnesses?
Yes, I have used this approach myself and with my daughter. I have also used it with plenty of clients. It is in fact what makes me different from other practitioners who are attempting to help those with chronic illnesses. In my daughter’s case, she was so reactive that she couldn’t handle any supplements. This forced me to finally identify all the things in her diet and environment that were making things worse. In the end, I realized she had a severe hypersensitivity to mold mycotoxins. Once we removed her from that environment, she could tolerate the supplements and was symptom-free within several months. If I had never identified the underlying trigger, she would still be sick.
Can someone be fully healed just by removing the triggers?
It all depends on the person and situation. I have seen people improve anywhere from 50 to 80% or more just from removing their triggers. in addition, I have seen cases where people become symptom-free once their triggers are eliminated for a period of a couple months. If you don’t trigger the immune system, the mass cell population reduces, and they gradually become conditioned to secrete less histamine and inflammatory molecules. This allows your body to heal the inflammation and restore normalcy.
How do you make sure you are not eating any food that triggers you?
If you go through the elimination diet process, you will be light years ahead of everybody who doesn’t. The key is, you must start with foods that have the lowest allergy potential. Then you slowly move up to the next class of food and so on. If you do this process right, you will be able to identify which foods cause symptoms, and which ones do not. If you do not want to do the elimination diet, the truth is, you will never really know the extent of your reactions to various foods.
How can I find out if mold is triggering my chronic illness?
If I had suspicions of mold indoors, I would do a petri dish test that provoked mold spores into the air and collected them over eight hours. With this strategy, I would use a box fan to blow into all the corners and move the petri dish around. I would also not dust or clean 3 to 4 weeks prior and would sweep toward the petri dish, collecting dust on the plate from outside of the room. Let this sit for, five days or so and see what comes up. Another way to test indoor air quality is simply to go somewhere else for 10 days or so. As long as the new place is clean, you will see some relief of symptoms in terms of severity, and then when you return, things should get worse again.
How do you know this strategy works for chronic illnesses?
I have seen this work in situations that nothing else did. It helps me to approach every chronic illness with optimism, no matter what the differences are among them. If you figure out what is triggering the immune system, you can make changes that potentially can lessen your symptoms. Once you make enough of these changes and learn to listen to the body, you can gradually improve. If you want a detailed example of how this approach worked when nothing else could, refer to the case study following the FAQ section.
Why do you crave the foods you are sensitive to?
I believe it’s because you get an exaggerated dopamine response from the food because of the underlying immune sensitivity. No matter what the reason is, the most important part is realizing that when you begin to crave food, you are starting to have an intolerance to it. If you stop eating food right when the craving starts to come on, you will never let it get bad enough to cause significant problems. Pay extra attention to your self-control relating to various foods and if you’re having a problem controlling your intake of a food, give it a break.
Case Study of My Daughter- From Disabled to Thriving
I think my daughter’s health issues probably demonstrate the benefits of this approach more than anything else. Before I understood that mold was her primary trigger, I first examined her reactions to foods in her diet. This led me to remove meat and other histamine-rich foods. This helped with the behavior to some degree but we still had issues with severe eczema, where she was itching until she bled.
She also had seizures, neurological issues, eyes crossing, convulsing in her sleep, foods, sensitivities, developmental delays, a red face, and plenty of other symptoms. When I gave her the wrong foods, the symptoms would act up, but they wouldn’t disappear just not giving that specific food. I tried to give her supplements, but she reacted so negatively to them that I had to stop.
Finally, after six years of suffering, I followed my hunch that mold might be causing the issue. I had to remove her from traditional school because she would return a complete wreck. This made me think that maybe something in the building was making her sick. I followed down the rabbit hole and eventually did an extreme indoor mold test with petri dishes and box fans! Guess what showed up everyone? Black mold and plenty of other types of sketchy-looking molds.
Despite this test result, I was not fully convinced it was mold until we went on a vacation for eight days. Over that time she seemed to be doing so much better. Her eczema had pretty much cleared up and her food reactions were much better. When we returned, she went into, a severe asthma attack, and all symptoms returned within 5 days. This is when it became clear to me that mold or at least something in this place was setting her off.
Eventually, I found a place that was low in mold, and in a climate where we could spend more time outdoors. Within a couple of months, she could start to tolerate supplements again and was not having noticeable food sensitivity reactions. This reduction in symptom severity then allowed me to use the binders and gut stabilizers to improve her health. Within six months, she became symptom-free after over six years of suffering.
Find Cause of Symptom Flares or Suffer Consequences
I don’t mean to be blunt, but if you don’t figure out why you are flaring up, then your chances of beating chronic illness are slim. This forces you to always search for supplements to keep your symptoms under control. As I’m sure you know, these supplements only work for so long. Once your body develops tolerance, you flare up once again, because you are still triggering yourself unknowingly.
There is a lesson to be learned when battling a chronic illness, and it is not figuring out how to find the best pill to reduce symptoms. The lesson is learned in the changes you are forced to make in your life to become symptom-free. In the end, these changes make you a better person and that makes you grateful for the entire experience. This is when you truly become free, and the memory of the illness is now a good one. No longer is it something bad that happened in your life, it was in fact, your greatest blessing.
If you need help in determining your triggers, you can work with me to assist you in identifying them, making the necessary changes, and then — most importantly — developing the resolve to stick to the changes that allow you to feel better.
Happy healing everyone!
Matt Nedin, B.S.
Certified Holistic Nutritonist
EndSickness, Founder
Phone: (734) 846-8619
WhatsApp: +17348468619
Email: endsickness@gmail.com
