Energy is Life; Fatigue is No Life

If you have a fatigue problem, you know it.

The Misery Package

Often physical fatigue combines with mental sluggishness. Brain fog, poor concentration, and memory problems at the same time you have no energy can make up a misery package.

Physical and mental fatigue combined can be a knockout blow to your life.

You get two choices:

1. Push through the fatigue to live your life as best you can. Although this is admirable, the stress of pushing yourself can lead to additional health problems.
2. Reduce your activity level to what you feel you can do. Pacing yourself sounds like a sensible solution, except that in most cases, your energy will continue to drop, and you’ll do less and less. Living with reduced output and accomplishment can lead to depression, apathy, and a poor quality of life.

Causes of Fatigue

Fatigue has physical causes, but only a few of these are medically treatable.

Fatigue can come from many different sources:

• Thyroid: This is a hormone gland that controls your metabolism, your heart (your primary source of energy), and your brain. So, a thyroid malfunction can slow your metabolism, cause fatigue from heart stress, and create severe brain fog. Often this won’t show on a blood test.
• Adrenals: These glands create a hormone called cortisol. Cortisol controls your blood sugar and blood pressure, digestion, and whether you feel hungry. It manages your sleep, your ability to tolerate physical activity, and your ability to cope with stress. Are you sluggish in the morning? Do you crash in the afternoons? Do you have high energy at midnight? Cortisol can be the culprit in all of these.
• Sleep problems can cause fatigue and brain fog. If you try to solve your sleep problem with drugs, you’ll still get no actual sleep. The drugs will knock you out into what looks like sleep, while your sleep deficiency continues, and drug dependency increases.
• Heart stress can cause debilitating fatigue. In some cases, you will be diagnosed and treated with drugs, surgeries, or pacemakers. But the fatigue, though improved, can persist. In other cases, your heart stress may not show up on labs or tests—but your fatigue will continue.
• Medications often have fatigue as a side effect. Culprits are blood pressure meds, anti-depressant and anti-anxiety meds, steroids, and antihistamines. Solution: get healthy enough to get off your meds!
• Mental problems can suck the life out of you, creating lethargy and fatigue. Depression, anxiety, eating disorders, drug or alcohol abuse, and grief all can create fatigue.
• Deficiencies of all kinds can create fatigue. Vitamin B12, vitamin D, folic acid, and iron deficiencies can all cause fatigue.
• Infectious diseases can cause short-term fatigue, as anyone who’s had the flu can attest. However, some infections (such as Covid) can be long-term or even lifetime. CMV (cytomegalovirus), Lyme disease, EBV (Epstein-Barr virus) can cause long-term—even decades—of fatigue.
• Chronic diseases often have fatigue as one of many symptoms. Diabetes, kidney disease, liver disease, and anemia can all cause fatigue and brain fog.

The Fatigue Siren Song

The number of people with fatigue problems is undoubtedly staggering. Once you have fatigue, you often can’t recover from it because the fatigue can entrap you into perpetuating itself.

Fatigue often prevents you from fixing your fatigue problem.

It takes action and energy to resolve your fatigue problem, but you may be too tired to do anything about it. If you reduce your activity level to match your available energy, your activity will continually reduce as your fatigue increases until there is little left of your life.

In Greek mythology, the Sirens (monsters who looked like beautiful women) sang to the sailors and lured them onto the rocks to their death. In real life, fatigue can lure you into a similar fate.

There is an Answer to Fatigue

There are three things you must know to be successful at ending your lack of energy and getting your life back the way you want it to be:

1. DECIDE: You have to overcome the “Fatigue Siren Song” and decide to do what you must to end your fatigue. If you decide that you will handle the fatigue, and you aren’t slowing down until you do, then your chances of success get very high.
2. REALIZE: Conventional health care can rarely help you with chronic fatigue. Medical doctors aren’t taught the knowledge and techniques to handle most causes of fatigue effectively. You’re going to have to find a holistic doctor.
3. UNDERSTAND: Just because there’s no medical treatment available for most causes of fatigue, this doesn’t mean that there’s no hope. Your body can heal almost all of the causes of fatigue listed above.

Your body has a fantastic ability to heal itself. Just because there is no effective cure for your condition doesn’t mean that your body couldn’t—with some assistance—heal the problem.

Find Out More

You should find out if you could recover from your fatigue (or other “unsolvable” health condition). What would your life look like if this happened?

Find the underlying causes behind your fatigue. THIS IS A FREE ANALYSIS.

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Dr. Melodie Billiot

Atherosclerosis– Is Your LDL Sticky?

Ronald Grisanti D.C., D.A.B.C.O., DACBN, MS, CFMP

Atherosclerosis is the thickening or hardening of the arteries caused by a buildup of plaque in the inner lining of an artery.

For as long as I remember, most people, including myself, have been told that LDL cholesterol is the bad villain of plaque build-up and HDL cholesterol is the good guy.

Of course, with this hypothesis, it would make perfect sense that the higher your LDL cholesterol, the greater the chance of getting atherosclerosis.

However, there is much more to the story and my hope today is to share a different angle that will shed some light on the real issues with LDL cholesterol and its nemesis called atherosclerosis.

The Significant Role of LDL in Our Bodies

Cholesterol isn’t inherently bad. In fact, it’s the building block for creating healthy cells. It also helps your body make testosterone and estrogen. Without LDL, these and many other steroid hormones wouldn’t be made effectively

Contrary to what we have been told, LDL cholesterol also has another good side: its ability to fight infections.

LDL plays a valuable and important role in the body’s response to an assault by infectious invaders. When bacteria invade our body, they release a cell wall component known as endotoxin. What is critically important and something we will dig in deeper in this article is that endotoxins are super inflammatory and can strongly trigger the immune system.

But research has shown that your friend LDL cholesterol is around to bind up this toxin preventing things from getting out of hand.

In a study using mice it was discovered that increased levels of LDL cholesterol were eight times more resistant to endotoxins. This showed a significant decrease in overall mortality when injected with gram-negative bacteria. On the other hand, rats with the lowest LDL cholesterol had an increased rate of mortality and levels of inflammation when injected with endotoxin.

Now, if you are like me, I would be asking, what about humans?

Is there evidence that higher levels of LDL cholesterol are protective against infections in humans? In fact, many studies are proving that higher levels of LDL cholesterol are protective as we age. This is more likely due to the positive impact on the immune system.

The answer is that LDL itself is not harmful, but in certain situations, it can be involved in responding to injury and inflammation. This, of course, makes LDL look like more of a firefighter than simply a criminal causing atherosclerosis.

So the question that we must ask ourselves is: Is there something more sinister behind the scenes that are actually driving heart disease (atherosclerosis)?

As I have discussed in a prior article, the real issue is insulin sensitivity and the stickiness factor.

In people who are insulin sensitive, rising LDL levels do not correlate with increased rates of heart disease. On the other hand, the higher the LDL, the greater opportunity for plaque formation in those who are insulin resistant. Remember it is not all about elevated levels of LDL but the more important villain of insulin resistance.

What will make our head spin is the fact that higher levels of LDL in the blood do not consistently correlate with the progression of atherosclerosis in the absence of insulin resistance.

LDL Stickiness is the Real Issue

Here is the important takeaway from this important article. LDL under certain circumstances (which I will mention in a minute) can get stuck within the arterial wall. So it is not the size or amount of LDL particles moving into the arteries that is important but rather if it sticks to the wall of the artery that determines whether or not it contributes to atherosclerosis.

Here is a good analogy:

If you were to throw a tennis ball at a wall unless the tennis ball and the wall were coated in velcro, the tennis ball would not stick. So to bring it back to reality, unless the LDL particle and arterial wall (the intimal space) were sticky, it does not matter how many LDL particles we have floating around in our arteries. The LDL “balls” only get stuck to the arterial wall when they are coated in what we will call “molecular velcro.” LDL is simply not enough of a problem alone to initiate plaque build-up. The takeaway is: it has to get stuck in the arterial wall to initiate the process of atherosclerosis.

Now the magic question

What in the world determines how sticky the LDL particle and the intimal space are?

There is now growing evidence during states of insulin resistance and inflammation that both the LDL particle and the arterial wall get coated in “molecular velcro” making everything more sticky, increasing atherosclerosis progression.

You may now be asking: really, how common is insulin resistance?

Would you believe that a massive 88 percent of the American population has some degree of metabolic syndrome (insulin resistance)?

So to conclude: 

In the absence of insulin resistance and inflammation, higher levels of LDL cholesterol are probably protective because of their roles in the immune response.