It seriously pisses me off sometimes how awful the gut health blogosphere is. On the one hand, you have all the pharmaceutical shills with their fancy websites trying to keep you tied onto the conventional medicine train tracks, and on the other hand you have a bunch of people who are blogging to let off steam from the darkest pits of gut despair. With a sprinkling of fitness bloggers on top, or the folks who have 10-day detoxes that will somehow magically reverse 20 years of inflammation and dependence.
If you don’t find what you want, you do it yourself, right?
Here’s what I want to tell people:
- THERE IS HOPE even if your own guts are out to get you. Not everything is the end of the world (although I’ve been there too, trust me).
- Having a gut disease is not a glamourous thing and I can see why a lot of people don’t want their ~brand~ associated with diarrhea. Hashimoto’s is way more aesthetic.
- Don’t listen to the people who make it sound like you can have great gut health in 30 days. Maybe you can, if you have a light case. Or maybe you’re more like me and it took you a solid 3 years of searching before you figured out the root cause.
- There is no magic bullet, until there is one. No one thing will suddenly cause your life and your health to take a turn for the better. Getting to good health is a matter of doing the work, finding the diet and lifestyle that work best for your health, and then investigating the hell out of any other variables. This is the long game, not a get rich quick scheme.
- But that said, it is totally possible to live life on your own terms, even with an unpredictable gut. And it’s not fake hope. I fought hard to get to where I’m at, and I trust that my new habits will help my health to stick around.
Now I want to help you to learn the same lessons that I did, to hopefully make your journey a tiny bit easier. However, I can’t tell you what to do (only you can do that), I can only show you the path.
Having an autoimmune illness is like a neverending journey of self discovery. While it’s not my fault that I have this disease, it is my habits, my self-talk, my life, that have caused my disease to progress in the way that it has. That can be hard to accept. It is difficult to take ownership of a disease you never wanted in the first place.
But in that ownership, there is freedom.
You have the power to outsmart your own self. You have the power to reshape your habits and your life, to give your body the environment it needs to start healing.
The potential is already in you. Your body already has a tremendous capacity for healing. All you need to do is give it the environment—the lifestyle—that it needs to do its job.
Get out of your own way, and let healing begin.
PS. If you need a word of encouragement on your own healing journey, join my email newsletter.