I'm an instructional designer and gardener based in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Free moments find me in my garden or the forest, hugging trees and all that jazz.
I’m guessing a lot of folks out there are having a hard time recuperating from COVID, chronic stress, burnout, and the accumulated fatigue of years of coping through a pandemic. Maybe you feel like you’ve been resting a lot, but you don’t seem to be able to recover that last bit of your energy from the “before times.” Or maybe you were already burned out then!
I’ve just released my new course Self-Care for Restoration, where I teach concrete techniques for moving from total rest into active recovery without falling into a cycle of overdoing-and-crashing. Here’s a sample video, aimed right at all you go-getters who are at a loss when people tell you to “slow down” and “just rest”!
Launch special – I’m offering the course as a name-your-price offering starting at just $5.
I’m starting to dip my toe into herbalism, and to practice, I’d like to share a custom herbal blend with the first 5 people to request on on this form:
My nascent specialty is herbal syrup kits. I send you a mix of dried herbs; you boil them and add honey (and sometimes lemon juice) at home. This gives you a strong, tasty syrup that you can take by the spoonful or blend into hot water or tea for sipping. What I love about them is they have no alcohol and, since they will keep in the fridge for a couple weeks, they are more convenient to use. And did I mention –>TASTY<–!
You can fill out basic information on the form about what you’d like, and I may contact you to get more details. Some ideas include:
I’m excited to announce that I will be sharing my new course, Self-Care for Restoration, as a name-your-price series beginning this week!
If you’ve had a viral illness or a prolonged bout of stress, it’s not unexpected to feel tired. But ongoing, crushing fatigue could be a sign of a more serious condition. We’re told to “rest a lot” and “don’t push yourself,” but figuring out how to care for yourself, and then following through, can feel like just another chore competing for your limited energy. This course will help you understand why rest is so important after illness or stress, how this bout of fatigue might be different from normal tiredness, how to measure your physical and mental energy expenditures, and how to pace yourself for complete recovery.
This self-paced online course may be right for you if you:
Are exhausted from months or years of chronic stress
Have mostly recovered from Covid and still don’t feel back to your usual levels of energy
Have a pattern of overdoing it, then crashing
Are trying to “take it easy” but can’t seem to get fully rested
Aren’t really sick anymore…but haven’t really gotten well
This course has practical advice for giving your body the space it needs to recover and will guide you to build a recuperation program that suits your unique needs. The program has three phases:
Radical rest
Active recovery
Reconditioning
In each phase, I quickly sum up the physiology of what’s happening in your body during that phase, the #1 thing to focus on in each phase, and practical tips for helping yourself progress to the next phase of restoration. Then I share activity recommendations and a physical practice video and go into more detail on the how-and-why behind my recommendations, if you have the interest and energy to explore deeper. I’ve even developed a week of deeply nourishing menus to reduce the work of feeding yourself well at this time!
There is no timeline for recovery – instead, I help you learn to follow your body’s cues for what it needs. Chances are, if you are experiencing the symptoms above, the old rules about what your body needs don’t apply right now. I’ll teach you what body signals you need to pay attention to, how to track them qualitatively and quantitatively, and how to know when it’s safe to increase your activity.
Because I feel strongly that this course material needs to be out in the world and accessible to as many people as possible, I am offering it on a pay-what-you-will basis – including “free.”
Ok – I’ll start off with the old standby: it depends. So let’s refine the question further: Is intermittent fasting and/or keto safe for people with adrenal fatigue, long Covid, thyroid malfunction, and other forms of autonomic dysregulation?
I’m going to argue “no, it is not.” I have both personal experience and science to back me up on this.
When I was recovering from post-viral fatigue, I made (very brief) attempts at both of these approaches to eating. It was a disaster. Both left me in a crashed-out, shaky, weak, fumbling pile within 24 hours. I know it can be hard to adjust to these programs, but this wasn’t simple discomfort. This was my body screaming toward physical collapse in a very obvious and profound way – and it all righted itself immediately on getting some carbs in my body.
So I started looking into why this might be. I dug through scads of pages, and it boils down to:
When your body is having a hard time self-regulating adrenaline, cortisol, and other stress-related hormones, low blood sugar is perceived as another stressor.
In addition, the particular kind of stress it exerts demands more of exactly the parts of your endocrine system that are most fried just now. Specifically, cortisol is released to increase blood sugar – and producing cortisol is super hard on your body when you have these conditions.
The first step to recovering from stress or illnesses that have thrown your endocrine system out of whack is to stop stressing out your endocrine system. Seemingly innocent things – like missing a meal – can have an outsized impact on your system. So I suggest:
Eat regularly, and avoid getting too hungry between meals. For many months, I had to get up in the middle of the night to eat. (Meatballs were great for this.)
Eat foods that will keep your blood sugar stable – lots of protein, fat, and fiber and a moderate amount of complex carbs. You don’t want a ton of sugar and refined flour, but you also don’t want to avoid carbs completely.
Add a pinch of salt to your water, and drink lots of it. Salty broth is another great option.
Keep your exercise below your aerobic threshold as much as possible – a maximum heart rate of about 120 is a good rule of thumb for most middle-aged adults. More on this in a future post.
Cooked fruit is a tasty and healthy winter treat. It’s basically a winter smoothie – minus the shock of cold that your stomach really doesn’t need this time of year. You get all the vitamins, fiber, and pectin in a much easier-to-digest format than raw fruit. I especially love this one during the gray days of winter – the bright lemon flavor wakes up my tastebuds!
Ingredients:
About 5 medium-sized apples
One organic Meyer lemon
About 2″ of fresh ginger root
Optional: a cup or two of frozen or canned blueberries
2-4 Tbl maple syrup
Method:
Peel, core, and chop the apples.
Wash the lemon well, because you are going to eat the peel. Cut into quarters, then slice each quarter thinly. Discard any seeds.
Scrub or peel the ginger and dice small.
Add apples, lemon, and ginger (and blueberries, if using) to a pan and simmer until the apples have cooked down to a thick applesauce consistency and the lemon and ginger are cooked through.
Add maple syrup to your taste. The finished product will be delightfully tart but shouldn’t be painfully acidic.
Notes:
Use a variety of apples for best results. It’s ideal to have some cooking apples, like McIntosh, and some firmer apples, like Galas so you get both the smooth, saucy texture and some firmer bites of apple. But it’ll be good no matter what – and this is a great recipe to use up apples that have gone soft or wrinkly!
Organic is especially important if you are eating the peel; they spray citrus with a really scary cocktail of chemicals. If you don’t have a Meyer lemon, a regular lemon will do.
Blueberries add great color and a hit of anthocyanins – this is a great way to use frozen blueberries if the idea of a frozen smoothie in the winter makes you cringe!
