Diet & Nutrition

(Excerpt from the book).

Joleen Kelleher, R.N., is director of the Light Institute for Health in Olga, Washington. This nonprofit organization teaches people how to make sustainable changes in habits that affect health. The institute focuses on changing habits of the mind, emotions, and physical body that prevent people from living life in harmony.

Nutrition is of utmost importance for anyone dealing with a chronic illness. Many care providers believe that nourishment of the physical self is as important as nourishment of the mental and spiritual body. When you see physical food as coming from nature, as alive and here to help produce harmony and the necessary nutrients for your body, your food becomes a reflection of how you nourish yourself spiritually. Our society does not reflect this. It has helped us move away from balance through advertising and fast-food restaurants. This has created a false belief that food is something other than nourishment, that we should eat it only as a social activity or because it tastes good.

Take the problem of lactose intolerance, for example. If you look at advertising, you see that you can buy a pill to take away your stomachache so that you can continue eating a particular dairy food. Many people are lactose intolerant, yet they take pills to mask the body's discomfort at having to process dairy foods. This illustrates how unconscious we are about the powerful nature of food. When we experience symptoms like feeling miserably overstuffed after a meal, that is the body telling us it is out of balance. It is not a meal the body can easily assimilate.

Awareness is critically important: awareness of the food we're taking in, of how that food is digested by the body, and of how the body feels after eating a particular food. Our bodies use food in two ways: for fuel and energy, and as the raw material the body uses to repair itself. When someone has a condition like CFS or FM, it is an indication that the body is very low on energy (on an internal "life force" level). I find that most people don't even have enough energy to digest their food.

One way that people with a chronic illness can heal is by increasing their internal energy. A bad diet will not help repair and heal the body. And the energy used for digesting that unhelpful diet is taken away from the energy the body needs for healing. One of the goals, then, is to prevent the energy the body needs for healing from being used up in digestion. We recommend two things to help fix this problem. One is fasting. Fasting frees up energy in your body so that it can help detoxify your system. That's one of the reasons why, at the end of a fast, people feel "lighter." They're actually feeling more energy, because energy has been freed and the body has been detoxified. The other solution is to simplify your diet, so that you're eating closer to nature and eating less processed food.

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Copyright (c) 1999 Mari Skelly and Andrea Helm. From Alternative Treatments for Fibromyalgia and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome: Insights from Practitioners and Patients. Published by Hunter House Inc., Publishers, Alameda CA; excerpted by arrangement with Hunter House. No part of this text may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without the written permission of the publisher.