Do you experience regular headaches? Do you need caffeine to get going in the morning? Do you crave sweets? Do you have PMS and cramps during your period? Do you often have gas and bloating after meals? Do you have trouble falling asleep or staying asleep through the night?
These are just a few of the common symptoms people experience that are often considered “normal” because so many people experience them. It’s like the difference between the “normal” and “optimal” reference ranges on your lab tests – normal doesn’t equal truly healthy.
Just because something is common, doesn’t make it normal. Headaches are not normal. PMS and painful periods is not normal. Feeling tired after meals is not normal.
“MOST PEOPLE DON’T KNOW how poorly they feel until they feel better. In fact, most of us don’t recognize that fatigue, digestive problems, aches and pains, allergies, headaches, and more aren’t just annoying symptoms. They are early clues to impending diseases that can disable and kill us.”
– Dr. Mark Hyman (1)
Your body is always striving to heal and to function at its best, despite all the hurdles we through at it that make its job much harder.
Listening to your body is one of the best metrics of health. If you have chronic pain, or chronic low energy – the solution is not just to take some ibuprofen or Advil and drink coffee to get through your day.
Masking symptoms is like clipping the cable for the emergency light in your car – you aren’t annoyed by the constant beeping sound anymore, but over time your car may suddenly break down since you didn’t address the root cause of the emergency light beeping.
I ended up at the doctor back in 2010 after one month of constant congestion and throat clearing and was told it was just allergies and given some allergy medicine. That is the type of “quick fix trap” you want to watch out for. Fortunately, I had started my health coach training at the same time and was learning about dairy and how it can be very mucus forming in the body and also contribute to inflammation and acne. So, instead of continuing the allergies meds I cut out dairy, and POOF the chronic congestion and throat clearing was gone! If I hadn’t dug deep I would have been ignoring something that was causing inflammation in my body. Now I do eat certain types of dairy sometimes, but it was whey protein shakes that were the tipping point for me I believe. That’s a topic for another blog post.
Listen to your body and don’t ignore it’s messages!
To help you do this, I recommend keeping a Food/Mood/Poop Journal for at least 5 days. This is something I have all my clients do before we start working together and I have them do it again after we make some diet and lifestyle modifications so they become really self-aware.
If you’d like the template that I use, just send me an email (larissa@larissapopp.com) and I’ll send it your way with more guidance on what signs and symptoms to take note of.
But sometimes we don’t realize we have brain fog until its gone and we get to experience what it feels like to be really focused and productive at work.
Or we don’t realize just how low our energy is until we resolve mitochondrial dysfunction and get to experience what normal mitochondria function actually feels like!
This is why relying on symptoms alone, isn’t enough, we also need to use testing, which I’ll talk about next.
References:
1. 7 Keys to Ultrawellness, by Dr. Mark Hyman
