Shownotes Anxiety and other mood disorders often go hand and hand with chronic fatigue. It is not uncommon for those experiencing chronic fatigue to also struggle with their mental health. Here we discuss the most important considerations to improve quality of life as you navigate your mood alongside other chronic illness symptoms.  Useful links: Website: http://annamarsh.co.uk/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/anna_marsh_nutrition/ Apply for 1-1 Support: https://annamarsh.co.uk/1-1/

Shownotes Experiencing and recovering from Chronic Illness requires the capacity to change and adapt. We need to learn new habits around how we eat, how we sleep, the routines we keep, the boundaries we set and everything in between. Change, even for someone in good health, is never a walk in the park and many people are prone to procrastination, self sabotage, getting complacent and going round in circles. In this episode Anna helps you to understand these behaviours on a nervous system level, how they relate to the process of change and most importantly, how to overcome them. Useful links: Website: http://annamarsh.co.uk/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/anna_marsh_nutrition/ Apply for 1-1 Support: https://annamarsh.co.uk/1-1/ Join Nurturing Resilience: https://annamarsh.co.uk/nurturing-resilience-special/

Shownotes In this episode we answer questions from you, the listeners! We cover a variety of topics including tips for managing recovery when your financial resources are limited, possible causes of unexplained leg pain, how to manage work related stress and build one’s capacity and tolerance, how to manage flares and knowing when you can start saying yes!  Useful links: Website: http://annamarsh.co.uk/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/anna_marsh_nutrition/ Apply for 1-1 Support: https://annamarsh.co.uk/1-1/

Shownotes In 2016 and recently divorced, Samira was diagnosed with triple negative breast cancer, over 6 years she experienced the medical trauma of having cancer, not once, but twice. She started and ended a business, was a single parent, moved countries, had covid twice and ended up absolutely exhausted. Samira shares her experience of moving towards better health where she discovered the power of “less is more” and somatic healing.  Useful links: Website: http://annamarsh.co.uk/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/anna_marsh_nutrition/ Apply for 1-1 Support: https://annamarsh.co.uk/1-1/

Shownotes It is probably no surprise that when it comes to chronic and complex illness, you don’t just wake up one day and feel better. Instead, progress happens in fits and starts and sometimes cannot even be noticed on a weekly or monthly basis. In this episode Anna talks about four ways we can track progress in our fatigue recovery.  Useful links: Website: http://annamarsh.co.uk/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/anna_marsh_nutrition/ Apply for 1-1 Support: https://annamarsh.co.uk/1-1/

Shownotes Beverley’s fatigue journey started with a bit of anaemia and glandular fever and ended with a car accident, domestic abuse, a divorce, autoimmunity, relocating and starting over. Despite a laundry list of physical, mental and emotional challenges, Beverley was able to keep following her heart to live her dream lifestyle in her “happy place” on the South Coast. She joins us on the show to share her story, lessons learned and how pilates was part of her healing journey.  Useful Links: Mindfulness Pilates Website: www.mindfulnesspilates.com Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/beverley_densham/

Anna revisits the topic of blood sugar, this time talking more specifically about those experiencing low blood sugar and hypoglycemic events.

Anna shares some updates from her recent trip to South Africa & a discussion about how to approach the New Year if you have a chronic illness.

The festive season can be a challenging time for so many reasons; more triggers, complex family dynamics, more commitments, late nights and increased food and drink. If you feel overwhelmed about the upcoming festivities this episode is for you. I cover four of the most important things to consider as you support your body through this time and navigate the festive season alongside your healing journey. I also give a little seasonal update and some personal shares.

Lorrie is a Holistic Wellness Coach who was able to heal herself after ME/CFS kept her housebound and bed bound for 8 years. However, in 2020, she experienced Long Covid but was able to use all the tools from her previous experience to recover again! She created the Relief & Transformation: Managin g Long Covid and ME/CFS full 8 week online course and Membership Program. She is passionate about helping others who are struggling with their health, to overcome their healing challenges by addressing pathogens. Please enjoy this conversation with Lorrie.

Proper thyroid screening is important to rule thyroid imbalances in or out on your fatigue and health recovery journey. In this episode Anna discussed what proper screening entails and why you might have thyroid symptoms, even if your thyroid markers are normal. This opens up a deeper discussion about thyroid autoimmunity and why thyroid replacement therapy alone is not enough to support the symptoms associated. Anna offers additional diet and lifestyle suggestions for Hashimoto’s but some of the concepts can be applied to any autoimmune condition so still worth a listen.

Not everyone with Chronic Fatigue will have endotoxemia and intestinal permeability, but if you do, it should be top priority for intervention. In this episode Anna explains the concepts of endotoxemia and intestinal permeability, how you can test for them and what to do about them. Anna covers a variety of factors which can impact intestinal permeability and why a personalised approach is essential when restoring membrane health.

Chronic Fatigue can be the end point of a complex web of dysfunction leading to poor ATP production. Malabsorption Syndromes can be part of the web that needs to be untangled as someone works to improve their health, energy and wellbeing. In this episode Anna covers; what is a Malabsorption Syndrome and how might you identify if it is a problem for you? Causes of malabsorption syndromes and Anna’s own personal journey with overcoming chronic digestive issues and malabsorption.

Weight gain can be a common and often unwanted side effect of chronic illness. In this episode Anna discusses how to approach weight loss when you are well enough to actively pursue it. The episode starts with a recap of concepts discussed in episode 33, reasons why we gain weight when chronically unwell, and then branches off into discussion about non-exercise activity thermogenesis (NEAT), resistance training, caloric maintenance, surplus and deficits and how to utilise these to your advantage. This episode is most appropriate for those who are at the tail end of their health journey and are able to give more attention to weight loss over and above other aspects of healing.

In this episode Anna discusses how trigger avoidance is the first step in fatigue recovery but when we stay at this stage, we stay stuck. Instead, Anna offers a narrative where our limitations can be our superpowers. If we can understand the mechanisms that are generating our most limiting symptoms, we can create our roadmap to better health. She includes examples of common things she she’s in her 1:1 practice.

This is the second part of a two part series on brain health. In this episode Anna discusses diet, lifestyle, nutraceutical and exercise interventions to dampen neuroinflammation and support the health of your brain.

In this episode Anna digs deeper into brain injuries and neuroinflammation. If you are someone experiencing chronic fatigue, your support plan should consider the health of your brain. In this episode Anna explains the concept of glial cell priming and how it may impact brain health long term. Even if you do not have a known brain injury, this episode is worth a listen.

Emily, also known as “The Spoonie Mentor” on instagram joins Anna on the podcast to talk about her personal journey recovering from a brain injury and post-concussion syndrome. They talk about pacing, belief systems, learning to rest and building a business as a spoonie.

Charlotte was a busy Mum of 2, who’s perfectionist, helper and achiever behaviour patterns meant she pushed herself to breaking point. The flu was the final tipping point into CFS. Her recovery from CFS took 6 years and a multifaceted approach. The many tools of yoga were hugely helpful in her recovery and now she offers restorative and gentle yoga for others with energy challenges. In this episode Anna interviews Charlotte about her fatigue recovery journey and how she used gentle and restorative yoga as part of the process.

If you have ever wondered if parasites could be impacting your health and energy, this episode is for you. This episode focuses on intra-intestinal parasites, protozoa and helminths. Anna talks about how these infections can impact the immune system and whether or not we should intervene and address them. She covers testing options and how you may want to consider supporting your body if you suspect parasites could be a problem for you.

If you had a viral infection and have never felt the same since, this episode is for you. Anna discussed post-viral fatigue, reactivation of latent viruses (EBV) and recurring infections. She talks about what testing can be useful if you suspect that a virus is contributing to your clinical picture and most importantly, what to do about it. The goal is to make something that can seem complicated a lot more simple and straightforward and help you avoid common mistakes when addressing viral load.

The podcast will be taking a little holiday over August. This is a quick episode where Anna shares some personal and business updates and explains the holiday and when you can expect the next episode.

Brendan shares his journey living with Chronic Pain until he found Functional Patterns which changed the trajectory of his life and career. He is now passionate about helping other overcome chronic pain and pain syndromes by addressing their biomechanics, fascia and movement patterns. 

Part 2 of a series in Chronic Pain. Anna talks through 5 somatic tools that you can use to cope better with chronic pain. She shares some examples from her own healing journey and how she used these tools to cope with headaches, shoulder and neck pains that were part of her illness experience. 

Anna discusses the link between fatigue, mood disorders and chronic pain. Although these conditions are often not well supported with traditional medicine, they can be unravelled and addressed if you have the patience and commitment to do so. The majority of the episode focuses on chronic pain and the mechanisms that contribute to heightened pain sensitivity, including how to evaluate and address them. 

We’ve all been there. We feel like we’re doing “everything right” and yet continue to feel worse. When the whole point is to feel less fatigued and less exhausted it can be easy to resist relapses in energy. However, being able to connect with and embrace our experience can offer valuable lessons that will move the healing journey forward. Listen for a deeper discussion.

Anna opens up a conversation about privilege and healing. Some people will have more privileges in their healing journey which may make their healing journey “easier” and others may have less privileges in their journey which may make it “harder” to heal. Whatever the case, moving through a chronic illness experience is painful. This episode is designed to make you think and reflect and perhaps consider where you are focusing on your own disadvantages too much, which could be a roadblock to healing.

Shownotes This episode is a reminder that basics matter. It is an opportunity for you to check in with yourself and make sure you have those all important basics covered. It is a recap on some of the concepts covered in previous episodes. Anna also talks about routines and finding the flexibility to dance between […]

In this episode Anna highlights the things she felt made the biggest difference in her own recovery journey. She acknowledges that the journey isn’t linear; there are different stages of healing and not all of them look like progress. She finishes with a general share of things that are working for her clients as inspiration for things to explore.

Grief is an inevitable part of healing. In this episode Anna talks about her own experience of grief in her healing journey. She shares a framework for understanding grief and somatic and mindset tools for working with grief in your day to day life.

Mast cell activation syndrome (MCAS) and histamine intolerance may be part of the complex web of imbalances in Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS/ME) and other chronic illnesses.​​​​​​​​ ​​​​​​ MCAS can be associated with pain, cognitive dysfunction, brain fog, sensitivity to light and sound or intolerance to chemicals and smells. Many of these symptoms, and more, go hand in hand with those who experience a chronic illness. ​​​​​​​​ ​​​​​​​​ This doesn’t mean that everyone who experiences chronic fatigue or a chronic illness will have MCAS or histamine intolerance but it is something to consider as you work on supporting all of your body’s needs. ​​​​​​​​​​​In this episode Anna covers the what and the how.

We’ve all been there. You feel like you are doing everything but nothing seems to be working. You’ve hit a plateau or you’ve gone backwards in your healing. In this episode Anna offers support around the experience of hopelessness including a trauma-informed framework to move from the powerlessness that accompanies lack of hope to a more powerful state. She wraps up the episodes by challenging the belief “Nothing is working” by offering a checklist to make sure that is really true.

In part 2 of this series Anna covers communication, needs and a framework for understanding relationship dynamics. The goal of the episode is to support communication so that both the illness experiencer and their supporters have their needs met. The relationship framework will help deepen your understanding of your relationships so that you are not left disappointed (and unsupported) when your expectations are not met.

This is part 1 of a 2 part series for those experiencing a chronic illness (like CFS/ME) and their supporters. In this episode Anna discusses relationship dynamics and how they influence the ability of loved one’s to offer support and the ability of those with a chronic illness to ask for and receive support. Anna discusses the survey results from the research on this topic and offers solutions so that supporters feel better equipped to support and illness experiencers feel better equipped to receive support.

In this episode Anna explains the differences in Brain Retraining and Somatic Experiencing in theory and practise. She talks about her own experience with these different modalities and shares some updates on her own healing journey working somatically with medical trauma and anaesthesia. She finished with a discussion about where Functional Medicine and Mind-Body Work intersects.

This is part 3 in a 3 part series on how to have better periods with CFS/ME. Anna wraps up the three part series by discussing how we can support the body generally and how to manage estrogen dominance - a common underlying cause of hormone imbalance - more specifically.

This episode is a short and sweet menu of different testing options for your sex hormones. Anna covers blood and urine testing options as well as home monitoring devices. Learn how to make sure you test at the right time in your cycle and possible genetic tests that can be useful. 

This episode is a short and sweet menu of different testing options for your sex hormones. Anna covers blood and urine testing options as well as home monitoring devices. Learn how to make sure you test at the right time in your cycle and possible genetic tests that can be useful.

In this episode Anna offers a framework and a toolbox to support fatigue recovery from a “mindset perspective”. Although it is hard to separate mind and body, we can influence our physiology from the top down using language, cognition, reasoning and voluntary movement. Anna touches on how you can use the power of these tools to help you get “unstuck” in your chronic illness experience.

Navigating a fatigue recovery experience can also come hand in hand with navigating changes in body, shape, and size. For some, this is just part of the process and for others, it can be an uncomfortable experience. In this episode, Anna explains why we might gain weight in fatigue recovery and where weight loss fits in the context of fatigue recovery. She shares guidance for managing food and exercise in support of healthy body weight and minimising weight gain. She ends with a short discussion about where the nervous system may intersect with our attitudes toward weight, exercise, and food. 

Anna shares her perspective on addressing imbalance neurotransmitters in fatigue recovery. She zooms out and offers an understanding about how taking a big picture view can be much more successful and beneficial in the long term.

Anna shares a framework for understanding neuroinflammation from her training in Psychoneuroimmunology with Leo Priumbroom. This is based on the understanding that you cannot have chronic disease without neuroinflammation and that neuroinflammation is the universal mechanism behind disease. She takes her time to explain the mechanism of neuroinflammation in both acute and chronic illness and offers insight into how we support the body to find health again.

Anna shares an update about where she is in her own healing journey. She enters into a discussion about identity and the importance of how we choose to identify with our illness experience. She finishes up sharing some strategies she is using to support her body right now.

Are you just managing your fatigue recovery or are you experiencing the deeper healing that is required to fully recover? In this episode Anna talks about the difference between Fatigue Management and true healing, how she distinguishes between the two and how to know which stage you may be in at the moment.

Knowing what to eat can be really confusing. There are so many mixed messages it's hard to know if you should be vegan, low carb, carnivore or keto!? In this episode Anna breaks down a step by step framework that you can follow to optimise your diet for energy in a way that hopefully shouldn’t feel too overwhelming and restrictive.

There comes a point in one’s fatigue recovery journey where you are doing okay but you want more. In this episode Anna talks about how she progressed her daily exercise from walking to getting back into the gym and lifting heavy weights. She talks about important considerations as you take the next step and how you can minimise PEM and support recovery.

If you are an exercise lover, one of the biggest frustrations with chronic illness is how it impacts your ability to exercise. Unfortunately, we can only start where we are and work with what we have got, but, you can rebuild your health and exercise capacity. This episode covers some basic principles to get you started when it comes to building a baseline of physical activity. The next episode will focus on how to progress.

Having a chronic fatigue or burnout experience and going through perimenopause at the same time, adds another level of complexity to fatigue recovery. Anna invites registered Nutritional Therapist Francesca Liparoti to talk about how we can support perimenopause alongside fatigue recovery. This episode is not just for women over 40, it is also for women in their 20’s and 30’s because the habits we create now, will hold us in a better balanced place as we move through the natural transitions of life.

In this episode Anna discusses the nuance when it comes to ketogenic or low carbohydrate diets and fatigue recovery. You can expect to learn how a ketogenic could be beneficial to someone who wants to increase their energy and how you can identify if it would be appropriate for you specifically. Anna shares steps on implementing a ketogenic diet including top tips for managing side effects as you transition. She shares her own experience and how to begin to transition out of a ketogenic diet once you have maximised the therapeutic benefits.

Anna interviews her very first guest; Mindset and Empowerment Coach, Ellen Murray. Lockdown brought her multi-six figure business to a standstill and then a viral infection swept her off her feet. She shares her journey to recovery;  juggling life as a mum with 2 children under 3, learning to trust and surrender, tame her inner achiever, fall in love with yin yoga and meditation and launching her new business supporting exhausted and burnout women. 

Anna reflects on the types of clients she works with in her practise and puts them in one of two categories. She explains the qualities of each category and how she prioritises support for the client depending on where they fall. You will probably see yourself in one of the two categories and this episode may help you to understand what you could be doing more of, less of or just help you structure your recovery a little bit better.

Shownotes This episode is a little different. Anna offers up 10 journaling questions to help you reflect on the past 12 months. She talks through her own answers to the 10 questions with some vulnerable shares and insights into her health and business journey.  Journal Questions: 1. What did you love in the last 12 months 2. What were some of the magical / extra-ordinary moments? 3. What did you accomplish? 4. What would you duplicate? 5. What did you hate? 6. What was challenging? 7. What do you NOT want to happen again? 8. What did you learn? 9. What decisions did you make that were empowering? 10. What decisions will you make or what intentions will you set for 2023? Useful links: Website: https://annamarsh.co.uk/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/anna_marsh_nutrition/ Fatigue Recovery Road Map: https://annamarsh.co.uk/fatigue-recovery-roadmap/ Nurturing Resilience Program: https://annamarsh.co.uk/nurturing-resilience/ 1:1 Fatigue Recovery: https://annamarsh.co.uk/1-1/

Fasting is a practice that can be controversial in the healthcare space. Some people love it, others feel that it can do more harm than good. In this episode Anna breaks down the benefits of fasting, who it's for, who it might not be for and how you can slowly introduce it into your routine if it is something you want to explore, including timing around your menstrual cycle.

Shownotes Fasting is a practice that can be controversial in the healthcare space. Some people love it, others feel that it can do more harm than good. In this episode Anna breaks down the benefits of fasting, who it’s for, who it might not be for and how you can slowly introduce it into your routine if it is something you want to explore, including timing around your menstrual cycle. Useful links: Website: https://annamarsh.co.uk/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/anna_marsh_nutrition/ Fatigue Recovery Quiz: https://app.annamarsh.co.uk/quiz Electrolytes: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Keto-Pro-Electrolytes-Electrolyte-Astaxanthin-Supporting/dp/B09CDTCYJQ/

Shownotes This episode piggybacks off the previous episode on adrenal fatigue. Here Anna discusses the difference between burnout, adrenal fatigue or exhaustion and the syndrome of Chronic Fatigue. You can expect to learn a little bit about the differences and similarities and how we support each of these fatigue experiences. Useful links: Website: https://annamarsh.co.uk/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/anna_marsh_nutrition/ Fatigue Recovery Quiz: https://app.annamarsh.co.uk/quiz

It can be common practice amongst many Functional Medicine Practitioners and Nutritional Therapists to use adrenal testing to inform clinical decisions. This often comes in the form of addressing “dysfunction” with adrenal herbal adaptogens and glandulars to either “boost” adrenal function or “calm it”. In this episode Anna offers an alternative perspective which considers adrenal dysfunction to be intelligence from which we can learn more about what the body really needs.

The festive season can be a challenging time for so many reasons; more triggers, complex family dynamics, more commitments, late nights and increased food and drink. If you feel overwhelmed about the upcoming festivities this episode is for you. I cover four of the most important things to consider as you support your body through this time and navigate the festive season alongside your healing journey. 

Shownotes Post-exertional malaise is probably one of the biggest bugbears when it comes to fatigue recovery. Anna shares a general framework for tackling post-exertional malaise as well as her own experience and things that made the biggest difference for her personally. Useful links: Website: https://annamarsh.co.uk/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/anna_marsh_nutrition/ Fatigue Recovery Quiz: https://app.annamarsh.co.uk/quiz Post-Exertional Malaise Welcome back to the chronic fatigue and burnout recovery Podcast. Today I&#8217;m going to be talking about post-exertional malaise. If you are anything like me or anything like I posted, exertional malaise was one of the biggest bugbears in my fatigue recovery.&nbsp; It was probably one of the first symptoms to creep in, although I didn&#8217;t realize that&#8217;s what was happening initially. It was one of those last things I needed to deal with to move forward and gain momentum in my fatigue recovery. I know the frustrations of post-exertional malaise very well, and I&#8217;m going to share today some things that you may want to be thinking about if you are as frustrated as I was.&nbsp; And things that work for me, things that work for clients, and things to play around with my work in general. But before I share all of that with you, I guess the first thing to say is, what is post-exertional malaise? Post-exertional malaise is an increase in symptoms that occurs after exertion, which could sometimes be mental exertion.&nbsp; For the most part, it is physical exertion or exercise. Usually, it happens between straight off to exercise to 24, even 48 hours after some demand on the body system. I found in my own fatigue recovery that there was definitely a pattern that I would notice.&nbsp; So if I was going to get any post-exertional malaise after exercise, I might have an hour after I exercise where I would feel on top of the world running on all the fantastic endorphins and then by about almost four hours on the dot after I finished exercising, that&#8217;s when it would hit, and I would tend to feel the symptoms increase. For me, a lot of it was experiencing a lot of brain fog, fatigue and maybe some aches and pains. Although it can be different for each person, there will be a bigger cycle.&nbsp; That was the small four-hour cycle, but the bigger cycle might be like a build-up cycle. If I had been doing a lot of things over, like maybe several days, I knew I could wake up one morning and just need a rest day. That, to a certain extent, was easier to manage because it was a bigger, less intense cycle.&nbsp; But if I were going to get the sort of crash for hours after exercise, that would probably be the more intense cycle. I tried so many different things and many different approaches to exercise. I was constantly trying and crashing, trying and crashing, trying and crashing.&nbsp; I wouldn&#8217;t recommend it. But eventually, I did get to where I needed to go. Hopefully, what I can share today in this episode can shortcut that process for you so you don&#8217;t have to go through those repeated cycles of trying and crashing, trying and crashing. <img decoding="async" loading="lazy" width="1024" height="683" src="https://annamarsh.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/elsa-tonkinwise-BlGFrdgpBqw-unsplash-1024x683.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-7

Shownotes However frustrating they may be, crashes, flares and setbacks are part of the fatigue recovery process. In this episode Anna explains what is happening in the body during a crash or flare and how you can support your body the move through them as quickly as possible. Useful links: Website: https://annamarsh.co.uk/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/anna_marsh_nutrition/ Fatigue Recovery Quiz: https://app.annamarsh.co.uk/quiz How to Manage Crashes, Flares and Set Backs Welcome back to the chronic fatigue and burnout recovery podcast. I am your host Anna Marsh, and today we&#8217;re going to talk about a very popular topic: how to manage crashes and flares. So if you are somebody who is recovering from chronic fatigue syndrome, long COVID, if you&#8217;ve got pods, fibromyalgia, burnout or some other complex, chronic condition, which affects your energy and perhaps leads to energy crashes from time to time, I&#8217;m sure you will know the absolute frustration or hopelessness, anger, and everything else in between comes hand in hand with a setback, a crash or a flare.&nbsp; I&#8217;d like to pre-frame this episode by saying that crashes, flares, and setbacks are an inevitable part of the process. We would love for progress to be linear, but you and I both know that that is seldom the case, maybe never really ever the case in any aspect of life. Whatever goal you&#8217;re looking to achieve, whether that is healing and recovering your health, or maybe achieving something in your business or achieving something on a personal level, there are always going to be ups and downs, and those ups and downs are part of the journey.&nbsp; They are necessary but don&#8217;t always feel good steps, which help us learn what we need to learn so that we can eventually realise our goal, whatever that goal is. Although crashes, players and setbacks are frustrating, the attitude I&#8217;d love for you to come away from this episode with is that they are your greatest teachers, they will bring to you the best lessons and these lessons will shape you and help you to become the person you need to be to achieve your goals. One of my favourite sayings is, &#8220;Achieve something you&#8217;ve never achieved before.&nbsp; You must become someone you&#8217;ve never been.&#8221; This implies that there is an identity shift, and I would also probably say that not only is there an identity shift, but there is a shift on the systemic level of your nervous system. Your entire nervous system must shift so you can be the person you need to be to realise your goal.&nbsp; Through the lessons we learn from our crashes off layers and setbacks, we can start to become aware of our blind spots and learn our edges, which is too much for the body at this stage. And if we embrace these lessons or the learning opportunities offered, we can take the actions required to reshape our thinking, the nervous system, and how we approach and practice self-care and healing. If you&#8217;re in a crash right now, and you&#8217;re listening to this, and you&#8217;re fee

Shownotes Getting enough sleep is important and additionally, there is an increasing body of research which supports that circadian rhythms play an important role in regulating human physiology. In this episode Anna talks through how circadian rhythms impact the immune system and lifestyle practises that you can cultivate to modulate your immune system and sleep better.&nbsp; Useful links: Website: https://annamarsh.co.uk/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/anna_marsh_nutrition/ Fatigue Recovery Quiz: https://app.annamarsh.co.uk/quiz Join the High Achiever Revival Program (HARP): https://annamarsh.co.uk/harp-2/ Work with me intimately in my 1:1 Fatigue Recovery: https://annamarsh.co.uk/1-1/ Mini Courses:&nbsp; https://annamarsh.co.uk/courses/ How to Have a Good Night Sleep Welcome back to the chronic fatigue and burnout podcast. I am your host Anna Marsh, and today, I&#8217;m going to be talking about all things sleep, specifically what you want to be thinking of and how you can support your body to get a good and restful night&#8217;s sleep. We all know that we feel so much better, and life feels much more manageable when we have had a good sleep.&nbsp; Unfortunately, many of us, whether we have a chronic health condition or not, can still really struggle with sleep. So the purpose of this podcast today or this episode today, shall I say, is to give you an overview of how the body&#8217;s sleep rhythms work. And then talk a little about things you could think of as you work to support your body to optimize those rhythms.&nbsp; I&#8217;ll also be throwing in some Chinese medicine philosophy because it&#8217;s interesting. We will be talking about sleep practices or some supplements that could be supportive, the use of light exposure, whether you should be napping in the afternoon, and a little bit about the immune system and how that can impact sleep. Where I would like to begin is helping you first and foremost to understand the importance of healthy biorhythms.&nbsp; For your cells to function properly, they need the right materials in the right place at the right time. Healthy functioning cells are likely to produce energy in the form of ATP much better than unhealthy cells. There are 1000s of genes which have to be switched on and off in a specific order, and proteins, enzymes, fats, carbohydrates, hormones and other compounds have to be absorbed but broken down, metabolized and produced in a specific rhythm.&nbsp; Energy must be obtained and then distributed appropriately to allow for growth, reproduction, metabolism, locomotion, and cellular repair. When this network of systems is disrupted, your biology becomes compromised. This is what is experienced as poor health.&nbsp; So disruption to the workings of our inner biology, our inner biochemistry, is created when our circadian rhythms are disrupted through our light and dark exposure in our sleep and wake cycles. It is the disruption of our natural circadian rhythm that can impact sleep. Still, it can also have a knock-on effect on impacting blood sugar regulation, the immune system and, therefore, inflammatory responses, neurology, the health of our brain and how fast we age.&nbsp; Two main hormones govern these internal biorhythms. The first one is cortisol, which is the stress hormone. You may already be familiar with cortisol. The second is melatonin. A healthy person will naturally experience what is known as a cortisol aw

Shownotes The Mitochondria are often referred to as the energy powerhouses of the cell. Healthy, abundant and well functioning mitochondria are important for health and abundant production of Adenosine Triphosphate (ATP), the energy currency of the cell. In this episode Anna explains the factors that influence mitochondria health and function and the dietary and lifestyle practises that can support better energy production.&nbsp; Useful links: Website: https://annamarsh.co.uk/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/anna_marsh_nutrition/ Fatigue Recovery Quiz: https://app.annamarsh.co.uk/quiz How To Support The Mitochondria Hello, and welcome another episode of the chronic fatigue and burnout recovery podcast. I am your host Anna Marsh, and today we&#8217;re going to be talking about all things mitochondria. Before we dive into that, I&#8217;ll pre-frame this episode by saying, if you&#8217;ve listened to some of the other episodes in the past, I talk about fatigue or low energy as something impacting the body&#8217;s ability to make ATP, the body&#8217;s energy currency. And of course, there are multiple mechanisms or combinations of mechanisms, which can result in poor ATP or low energy production. One of those mechanisms is poor mitochondrial health or some metabolic roadblock in the body&#8217;s process of making energy via the mitochondria. So we do want healthy and well-functioning mitochondria for energy production. What you&#8217;ll probably start to realise, as I talk a little bit more about mitochondria today, is that a lot of the practices that we would use to support the mitochondria or the health of the mitochondria are also practices that we would use when considering other aspects of energy and biochemistry, some of which I&#8217;ve already talked about in previous episodes, like blood sugar, or oxygenation or digestive health. This is where we want to see the body, not in a reductionist approach, so reducing systems down to isolated processes, but rather seeing the body as a network of interlinking symptoms. That&#8217;s why when we work on one aspect of our health, it can start to improve other aspects that we didn&#8217;t think we were directly targeting, that it can have that knock-on benefit. When we are talking about the mitochondria today, there may be a little overlap in terms of some of the other things I&#8217;ve discussed in previous episodes. That means I might not go into those specific details because you can go back and listen to a podcast on blood sugar; for example, I might make small references to what you can do in this episode. So as we dive in, I guess the first thing to cover is what the mitochondria are. I appreciate that I&#8217;ve thrown this word around a few times, and we&#8217;re only a few minutes into the podcast episode, but it might be helpful to understand what it is. Our human bodies are made up of cells, and all cells have mitochondria within the cell. The mitochondria are often referred to as the cells, energy-producing powerhouses or energy-producing factories because it is through a series of biochemical transactions or biochemical processes that happen within the mitochondria that the body produces a well should I say, can produce ATP. We can make a little bit of energy not using the mitochondria, which I&#8217;ll talk about in a moment about how that happens. Still, we make most of our energy using the processes inside the mitochondria and the mitochondrial membrane. This means that if we

Shownotes If you want to know if your gut health could be impacting your energy, the short answer is; YES! However, in this episode Anna breaks things down into more detail. She talks about the 4 main ways digestive health can leave you feeling fatigued and foggy and the “5R” approach for better digestion, health and energy. Useful links: Website: https://annamarsh.co.uk/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/anna_marsh_nutrition/ Fatigue Recovery Quiz: https://app.annamarsh.co.uk/quiz Gut Health and Your Energy Hello, and welcome another episode of the chronic fatigue and burnout recovery podcast. In today&#8217;s episode, I will discuss all things gut health. But before I dive into the content for today, I want to bring your attention to some of the things I&#8217;ve been talking about in the previous episodes. So for the past couple of episodes, I&#8217;ve talked about blood sugar and oxygenation. Prior to that, I do believe I talked about the nervous system, and these are all that I would call low-hanging fruit. These are things that I&#8217;m always working with my clients on either to check. Is this thing imbalanced? Is it not imbalanced? And if it&#8217;s not imbalanced, we need to address it. Because these are easy, accessible, and affordable things that we can focus on as we work to recover our energy. For this reason, these are also available as mini-courses on my website. You can buy a blood sugar mini-course, a nervous system mini-course, and an oxygenation mini-course. Today, on the topic of gut health, you can buy the gut health mini-course as well. But if you feel that you don&#8217;t just want a mini course, and you don&#8217;t just want to work it all out yourself, these topics that I&#8217;m talking about today are also modules in the High Achiever Revival Program, which is my group program for high achieving women who want to recover from burnout and chronic fatigue. The difference between doing the mini-course and joining the High Achiever Revival Program, also known as HARP, is that I combined the information you receive on the modules as you would receive on this podcast, but in a lot more detail with the group environment. Monthly group calls where you can feel supported on a monthly basis and have conversations about your recovery with someone for one personalized consultation. What this means is that when you join the program, you&#8217;ll have several one-ones with me, where we can go through all of this together, and I can highlight to you exactly where you want to be spending your time and your energy and your attention as you work through the program. I just wanted to bring that to your attention as we dive into the next episode. Because if you have been enjoying the content on the podcast and find the information helpful, but you feel like you need a little bit more support and input in implementation, those would be fantastic opportunities for you. The alternative option is to work with me one-on-one in my fatigue recovery intensive, six months of working with me on a much more intimate level. But anyway, that&#8217;s enough of a little bit of advertising slash marketing for you today. Let&#8217;s talk about all things gut health. Suppose you have been listening to the previous episodes. In that case, one of the things I&#8217;ve said previously is that we experience fatigue when the body isn&#8217;t able to make energy and when the body isn&#8217;t able to make what is known as ATP. Many diffe

Shownotes We make energy in the presence of oxygen and this means that the body must be able to optimally take oxygen in through the breath, transport it around the body and then into the cells. Any breakdown in this supply chain can be a roadblock to the production of the body’s energy currency ATP and this can be experienced as fatigue. In this episode Anna discusses red flags and&nbsp; what tests, foods, supplements and general lifestyle practises may be helpful to optimise your body’s oxygenation and energy production.&nbsp; Useful links: Website: https://annamarsh.co.uk/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/anna_marsh_nutrition/ Fatigue Recovery Quiz: https://app.annamarsh.co.uk/quiz Oxygenation and Fatigue Hello, and welcome back to the chronic fatigue and burnout recovery podcast. I am your host Anna Marsh, and we will focus on all things oxygenation in this podcast today. So what is oxygenation? Why is it important for your fatigue recovery journey? If you listen to the previous episode on blood sugar, you probably heard me say that fatigue at the end of the day is the end point of poor ATP production. ATP is the body&#8217;s energy currency. How the body makes ATP or how the body makes energy is dependent on many, many different factors, some of which I covered in a previous episode where I talked about the causes of fatigue. All those causes, which I discussed, result in the endpoint of poor ATP production. Poor oxygenation could be a contributing factor, from poor ATP to poor energy production. So what I want to cover in this episode today is what we want to be thinking about when we consider that our body may or may not be oxygenating well. When I look at these kinds of concepts like blood sugar and oxygenation, these are what I would call the low-hanging fruit. I call them the low-hanging fruit because they&#8217;re accessible and easy to test for. They&#8217;re easy to identify, that I wouldn&#8217;t say, easy to address, necessarily, but fairly easy to address, fairly straightforward to address, and inexpensive to address. When I&#8217;m working with a client, either one on one in one of my one-on-one packages, or even if I&#8217;m doing a one-on-one consultation as part of my group program, then what I&#8217;m doing is I&#8217;m asking these basic questions, how is this person&#8217;s blood sugar? Is this person oxygenating well? These are very easy and accessible things we can address as we work towards the entire big picture of ATP and energy production. Health and well-being are created when the body has the energy for all the systems to function well. When we think about oxygenation, what do we want to think about? What do you need to know? Well, one of the first things I like to lead is that we make the most energy in the presence of oxygen. Energy is made in the cell&#8217;s mitochondria; we make the most energy and ATP when we burn fat for fuel, and we burn fat for fuel in the presence of oxygen. So we need oxygen to get through our nose, mouth, lungs, and bloodstream. <img decoding="async" loading="lazy" width="1024" height="683" src="https://annamarsh.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/pexels-andrea-piacquadio-3771115-1024x683.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-7094" srcset="https://annamarsh.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/pexels-andrea-piacquadio-3771115-1024x683.jpg 1024w, https://annamarsh.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/pexels-andrea-piacquadio-3771115-300x200.jpg 300

Shownotes In this episode Anna explains why blood sugar regulation is essential for anyone who is experiencing and looking to recover from fatigue. She discusses the importance of blood sugar control for nervous system regulation. She highlights discerning signs that blood sugar imbalances could be a problem for you and how to use glucose monitoring and dietary changes to bring blood sugar into better balance.&nbsp; Useful links: Website: https://annamarsh.co.uk/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/anna_marsh_nutrition/ Fatigue Recovery Quiz: https://app.annamarsh.co.uk/quiz Blood Sugar Balance and Fatigue Welcome back to another episode of the chronic fatigue and burnout recovery podcast. I am your host Anna Marsh, functional medicine and trauma-informed nutritional therapist and chronic fatigue syndrome, recoverer or survivor; not quite sure, which is the best one to say survivor sounds very dramatic, and recoverer doesn&#8217;t sound quite slick. So, either way, I have recovered from chronic fatigue syndrome, and I&#8217;m here today with you to talk about blood sugar and fatigue. In today&#8217;s episode, I&#8217;d like to cover what blood sugar got to do with chronic fatigue. Why is it so important? Here&#8217;s a bit of a spoiler alert; it is very important. Then I also want to cover signs of imbalanced blood sugar, how to begin to balance your blood sugar, and factors that will influence your blood sugar control. So let&#8217;s dive straight in. We can talk about what blood sugar has to do with chronic fatigue. Ultimately, fatigue results from the inability to produce enough ATP or energy to meet the body&#8217;s needs. As the body&#8217;s energy currency, there are various mechanisms by which our ATP production can be influenced. Blood sugar dysregulation is one of them. So if you are experiencing changes in your blood sugar, if you think that blood sugar could be a problem for you, I always check with all of my clients, even if I think their blood sugar is absolutely fine. Let&#8217;s check because it&#8217;s low-hanging fruit. It&#8217;s something really practical and actionable that you can address. If it&#8217;s a problem for you, we want to nip it in the bud because it is something that will impact your body&#8217;s ability to produce energy. The reason is that food is fuel, and we get food or fuel from the proteins, fats, and carbohydrates in our diet. The brain needs glucose. A lot of fatigue is brain fatigue. The brain feels tired, and this has low brain energy. Yes, sometimes the muscles or the metabolic system can feel tired and lacking in energy, but I know when I was experiencing chronic fatigue syndrome, there were days when my muscles and my body felt like they were okay; they could do stuff. But my brain just felt tired and didn&#8217;t want to do anything. Of course, there were also days when I just had heavy, tired muscles and a heavy brain and didn&#8217;t want to do anything. But brain energy and good and healthy brain function are important for our <a href="https://www.betterhealth.vic.gov.au/health/conditionsandtreatments/fatigue-fighting-tips#:~:tex

Shownotes In this episode Anna explains how the nervous system works and how nervous system dysregulation can contribute to chronic fatigue and other health conditions. She offers an overview of how to begin to find more regulation day to day.&nbsp; Useful links: Website: https://annamarsh.co.uk/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/anna_marsh_nutrition/ Fatigue Recovery Quiz: https://app.annamarsh.co.uk/quiz The Nervous System and Chronic Fatigue Welcome back to the chronic fatigue and burnout recovery podcast. I will discuss the nervous system and chronic fatigue in this episode today. This is a really popular topic, and I think I always get asked on my Instagram stories on my Instagram account, how do I regulate the nervous system? I get lots of questions about the nervous system.&nbsp; Over the past few years, as I&#8217;ve been recovering, more and more nervous system programs have popped up specifically for people with chronic fatigue and illness. So this episode today is to give you a little bit of an overview of the nervous system and why it is so important in chronic fatigue and fatigue recovery. Finally, I&#8217;ll just be talking about some things you can do to support your nervous system as you work on your fatigue recovery journey.&nbsp; I&#8217;d like first to give an overview of how the nervous system is mapped out. This is something that I would normally teach my clients when we start working together when we&#8217;re doing nervous system-specific work because I think having the understanding and the awareness is helpful for people to understand what&#8217;s happening in their bodies. Usually, when people have chronic fatigue or chronic illness, especially where they feel a little bit abandoned, let down, or maybe even gaslighted by the medical system, there is this real need and want to understand, &#8220;What&#8217;s going on? What&#8217;s happening to me? What&#8217;s going on inside of my body?&#8221;&nbsp; So I would like to do more of the, shall we call, head-based explanations. I want to talk a little bit about the important cognitive aspects that need and desire to understand. But I will also say that much of the nervous system&#8217;s work is not based on understanding. You don&#8217;t have to understand the ins and outs of how the nervous system works to have a resourceful nervous system. A lot of the magic of the nervous system work comes in practice and the self-regulating exercises, which I&#8217;ll touch on towards the end of the episode.&nbsp; Starting with the nervous system breakdown, I was listening to a podcast the other day, and the person I won&#8217;t mention was the one whose podcast I was listening to keep on talking about the central nervous system. &#8220;This is your central nervous system going into a freed state.&#8221; It&#8217;s important to start and distinguish that we have the central nervous system, the brain, and the spinal column.&nbsp; Then we have the <a href="https://health.ucsd.edu/specialties/neuro/specialty-programs/peripheral-nerve-disorders/pages/about-peripheral-nerves.aspx#:~:text=Peripheral%20nerves%20reside%20outside%20your,bodily%20fu

Shownotes Although knowing your root cause may not be essential to moving forward on your journey, it can make all the difference when it comes to a full recovery. In this episode Anna discusses possible root causes that you may want to have on your radar. She also shares her own personal journey and how, when she discovered this root cause, it was the final nail in her CFS coffin.&nbsp; Useful links: Website: https://annamarsh.co.uk/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/anna_marsh_nutrition/ Fatigue Recovery Quiz: https://app.annamarsh.co.uk/quiz Possible Root Causes of Chronic Fatigue Hello, and welcome back to the chronic fatigue and burnout recovery podcast. In this podcast, I&#8217;m going to be talking about the possible root causes of chronic fatigue. Suppose you have tuned into some of the recent previous episodes, specifically the cell danger response episode and the episode I released last week on the big picture of fatigue recovery. In that case, you may already have a sense of what the possible root causes could be. Feel free to go back and listen to those episodes if you haven&#8217;t already, but in this episode. I will touch on them a little bit more, not in huge detail, but just enough to give you a sense of what could be happening for you.&nbsp; So when I first became unwell with chronic fatigue, I guess there were certain biochemical imbalances that I was addressing in my body. For example, when I started working with a practitioner, I already had many self-care practices. I was meditating, I was practising yoga, I was spending time in nature, I was journaling, and there were a lot of things that I was already doing to look after my body.&nbsp; Therefore we jumped straight ahead, and we jumped into rebalancing some of those secondary biochemical imbalances. I worked a lot on my blood sugar in the beginning, I worked on my digestive health, I worked on oxygenation, a lot of those pieces of the puzzle that I mentioned in the previous episode, and then when I spoke with other people about what was going on in my body, a lot of the chronic fatigue, literature or resources or people posting things online, it&#8217;s all very much nervous system focused. There&#8217;s this assumption almost that chronic fatigue is just burnout. It&#8217;s just a dysfunction of the nervous system.&nbsp; I would say yes; we need to factor the nervous system, nourishment, or nervous system care into a chronic fatigue and burnout recovery plan. But sometimes, other things are going on. Ultimately, chronic fatigue develops when something has worn down the system over time.&nbsp; And yes, that could be chronic stress or big traumas which have happened in the past, changing the window of tolerance. Therefore, everyday stress is very stressful to an individual. But where I went so incredibly wrong in my journey was stopping there, thinking that I just needed some supplements for my mitochondria and needed to work on my blood sugar balance an

Shownotes Having a map and knowing where you are on that map can make all the difference to your fatigue recovery journey. Anna shares the framework she uses with her clients which includes the different stages of recovery and the most important tests, interventions, supplements and attitudes for each stage.&nbsp; Useful links: Website: https://annamarsh.co.uk/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/anna_marsh_nutrition/ Fatigue Recovery Quiz: https://app.annamarsh.co.uk/quiz Where to Start? Hello, and welcome back to the chronic fatigue and burnout recovery podcast. I am your host Anna Marsh, a trauma-informed functional medicine nutritionist and chronic fatigue survivor. Today I wanted to talk about where to begin or a high-level view of fatigue recovery.&nbsp; Fatigue recovery is multifaceted. You can do a lot of research and read many things, and it can become very overwhelming very quickly to know what you need to be working on and, more importantly, what order and how to approach it. Albert Einstein said the definition of genius is taking the complex and making it simple, and I&#8217;m not going to hold my hand up and call myself a genius. But I would like to simplify this fatigue recovery journey for you by giving you a framework or at least an idea of some roadmap that you can follow on your fatigue recovery journey.&nbsp; What I&#8217;ll share with you today is essentially the framework that I use when I&#8217;m working with my one-on-one clients. It&#8217;s this sort of big map that I have in my head. When I&#8217;m taking a client history, when I&#8217;m conversing with my clients, I&#8217;m filtering the information that I&#8217;m gathering from them through this lens, and then from here, making decisions about where we begin, what we do, how we structure things, how we order things, what tests to take, what supplements to take, and all those other parts of fatigue recovery. I&#8217;m a big-picture thinker, that&#8217;s my strength, and I think that works well in functional medicine and working with these chronic and complex cases because I can see the big picture, and sometimes that&#8217;s much more helpful than getting zoned in on the teeny tiny little details.&nbsp; I tend to work from the outside in, in the sense that I tend to deal with what I call the big rocks first, and then as we work on each rock one at a time, we can get a little bit more granular on what the specifics of those rocks are. This is a five-step process, which makes it sound super simple and super easy. But in reality, we all know that recovering from a chronic and complex health condition, chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, or burnout, is anything but simple and easy.&nbsp; But I&#8217;m just going to break it down into this five-step process to simplify it for you and make it easier to communicate. Stage one of your fatigue recovery journey revolves around removing anything that is threaten

Shownotes The cell danger response (CDR) is the body’s universal and ancient response to threat. It offers a framework from which we can begin to&nbsp; understand what may be happening in those experiencing burnout and fatigue conditions like CFS/ME. Knowing where you are in the CDR can help you to make decisions about what to focus on and where to prioritise your resources in your fatigue recovery journey.&nbsp; Useful links: Website: https://annamarsh.co.uk/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/anna_marsh_nutrition/ Fatigue Recovery Quiz: https://app.annamarsh.co.uk/quiz Understanding The Cell Danger Response Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the chronic fatigue and burnout recovery podcast. I am your host of functional medicine and nutritional therapist Anna Marsh, and today, we will talk about the cell danger response. The cell danger response is a fantastic framework for understanding or putting your chronic fatigue symptoms into context.&nbsp; So I came across the cell danger response through the work of Dr. Neil Nathan, who I absolutely love. He wrote the book toxic, which prompted me to test my urine and mycotoxins, and eventually discovered that that was a big factor in the symptoms I was experiencing. But all of that aside, the original creator of the model was Dr. Robert Navio.&nbsp; I&#8217;m not the expert that Dr. Neil Nathan or Dr. Robert Navio is in this area. But this podcast is not about bringing you all the very detailed science. And it&#8217;s about helping you understand these frameworks. So you have some context for what could be happening in your body and how to approach the different recovery phases.&nbsp; As I said already, I love this framework. The purpose of today is to teach it to you, and hopefully, some pennies will drop, some things will fall into place, and you&#8217;ll have a little bit more context to support you on your journey. I think one of the hardest things about experiencing a syndrome like chronic fatigue syndrome, when there are many hard things about experiencing a syndrome like chronic fatigue syndrome, is that there&#8217;s this lack of understanding because you&#8217;re not getting the support from your regular doctor, there are some incredible doctors out there.&nbsp; But for the most part, many people have these very traumatic stories of not being fully supported and fully understanding what&#8217;s going on. Today&#8217;s purpose is to give you a little bit more understanding and guide you on your journey. So the cell danger response is an <a href="https://www.academia.edu/35420270/Cellular_intelligence_Microphenomenology_and_the_realities_of_being" data-type="URL" data-id="https://www.academia.edu/35420270/Cellular_intelligence_Microphenomenology_

Shownotes Is it possible to recover your energy and vitality when you don’t know why you became unwell? Anna takes the time to address this question and offers a nuanced perspective that may be important for those that don’t know why they became unwell and for those that do! Useful links: Website: https://annamarsh.co.uk/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/anna_marsh_nutrition/ Fatigue Recovery Quiz: https://app.annamarsh.co.uk/quiz Do You Need To Know Your Root Cause Today I wanted to create a short episode to answer the question,&nbsp; do you need to know the root cause of your fatigue? So the root cause is often the thing that keeps your body in threat. In previous episodes, I discussed the cell danger response, universal response to threat, which affects the body differently.&nbsp; Essentially, this response keeps the body stuck in a particular state where rest, recovery, and repair are impossible until the body feels safe.&nbsp; With that framework in mind, I often talk about how we need to know why we became unwell to address those challenges, threats, or whatever may be going on in the body and move forward. Unfortunately, addressing the root cause may confuse some people because some may not know why they&#8217;re unwell. And then, obviously, that can create a sense of panic, perhaps anxiety.&nbsp; I don&#8217;t know why I&#8217;m unwell. I don&#8217;t know why I&#8217;m unwell. No one can help me. I don&#8217;t have access to the tests that I need, which that internal dialogue I appreciate is not very helpful for healing and well-being and supporting a well-regulated nervous system state. Dealing with a chronic and complex condition can be challenging for so many reasons.&nbsp; We don&#8217;t always get the support that we need through the medical professionals we&#8217;re working with, and we don&#8217;t necessarily get the support that we need from our friends and family because, through no fault of their own, they don&#8217;t understand what it&#8217;s like. So I want to empower people to move forward in their health journey, feeling as supported and informed as possible, and with empowering internal dialogues because that&#8217;s really important for regulating our nervous system and our mental well-being. I don&#8217;t want to create a spin of anxiety, and almost like an obsession around, I need to know why I&#8217;m unwell and why I&#8217;m unwell because I don&#8217;t think that&#8217;s helpful.&nbsp; But there is what I&#8217;ve noticed with the clients that I work with, and there is a strong desire to want to understand, to want to understand what&#8217;s happening in the body and what&#8217;s happening to them, and to help them to make sense of their symptoms. I think this desire to understand is a human desire to feel safer or more in control in a situation that feels very much out of control. And I get that.&nbsp; <img decoding="async" loading="lazy" width="1024" height="682" src="https://annamarsh.co.uk/

Shownotes We’ve all been there – you go to the doctor, they run some tests, the results come in and you are told that everything is normal. Yet, your body, you feel anything but normal. In this episode Anna talks about the difference between functional and diagnostic reference ranges, how you can get more from your blood work than what your doctor is telling you and functional testing options that she finds most useful to support her 1:1 Fatigue Recovery Clients.&nbsp; Useful links: Website:&nbsp;https://annamarsh.co.uk/ Instagram:&nbsp;https://www.instagram.com/anna_marsh_nutrition/ Fatigue Recovery Quiz: https://app.annamarsh.co.uk/quiz What Testing Do You Need For Fatigue? Welcome back to the chronic fatigue and burnout recovery podcast. If you listen to the previous episode of the podcast, I went through the causes of fatigue generally and chronic fatigue specifically. And it was a fairly substantial episode. I think I spoke for about 30 minutes, talking through all the possible things that could be contributing to fatigue.&nbsp; So today, I want to answer the question you were probably asking as you were listening to that episode: How do I know if these things are a problem for me? What I’d like to talk about today is what testing you may want to explore, investigate, ask your doctor to run, or if you’re working with a functional medicine practitioner or nutritional therapist like myself, what do you want to maybe ask them about or ask them to help you with. So what I’m going to do is just kind of run through the various tests and terms of how I do this in my practice. Different practitioners may have different perspectives, and they may do things differently.&nbsp; But this is just a framework for how I work. Also, if that is something you’d like to do, if you’d like to work with me, you could also understand how we would work together to explore some of these options. So, where I like to start is to get a general big picture.&nbsp; Usually, by the time clients come to me, they’ve been to the doctor, they’ve had some blood work done, they’ve been told everything is normal, or there are just one or two things that are out of balance, but nothing that’s helping them to move forward. But if that hasn’t been done, if they haven’t had any recent bloodwork done, then I would like to get some updated bloodwork, just to get a set, get a sense of the lay of the land and what’s possibly going on. So I personally really like the&nbsp;Well Woman Panel by Medichecks.&nbsp; It’s just a nice, all-inclusive panel with some elements I want to see as I’m starting to work with a client. Specifically, things like vitamin D and C reactive protein. It includes a complete blood count, which would then give me a sense of what this

Show notes Fatigue can be complex and multifaceted, with many possible combinations of contributing factors, and every case is different! In this episode, Anna talks through the framework she uses in clinical practice to narrow down the causes of fatigue for each client.  Useful links: Website:&nbsp;https://annamarsh.co.uk/ Instagram:&nbsp;https://www.instagram.com/anna_marsh_nutrition/ Fatigue Recovery Quiz:&nbsp;https://app.annamarsh.co.uk/quiz Causes of Fatigue Generally and Chronic Fatigue Specifically Causes of Fatigue Generally and Chronic Fatigue Specifically Hello, and welcome back to the chronic fatigue and burnout recovery podcast. I am your host Anna Marsh. And today, we’re going to talk about the causes of fatigue generally and chronic fatigue specifically.&nbsp; I wanted to talk about general causes of fatigue because very often, even if someone has a chronic fatigue syndrome diagnosis or has burnout, it’s very common for them to have underlying imbalances, which are general causes of fatigue as well. So, for example, someone with chronic fatigue syndrome or burnout may have nutrient deficiencies, they may have blood sugar imbalances, they may have what I would call oxygenation issues or poor red blood cell health. When we’re working towards helping someone increase their energy and become more well, irrespective of the complexity of their case, we always want to ensure that all areas are covered.&nbsp; So these are the areas I will discuss in this podcast today. I will move through them in sequential order, starting from the most basic and obvious and then moving into the most complex. So this podcast is for you. If you have chronic fatigue syndrome or burnout, or you don’t know why you feel so tired, or maybe you’re actually quite a high functioning, but you’re just struggling with a little bit of fatigue, there will be information in this podcast that will be really, really useful to help you get to the bottom of things.&nbsp; Then further down the line, there’ll be another episode on testing so that you can begin to explore these things for yourself or know where to begin to explore these things for yourself if you want to dig a little bit deeper. So let’s just go straight in. This is the sequence or the, I guess, the sequence of my thinking when I’m working with a client.&nbsp; The very first thing we want to consider when we consider fatigue is the overall energy balance, which is that very simple scientific equation of energy in versus energy out. And essentially, is this person with fatigue? Or are you fatigued, doing too much, and not eating enough calories?&nbsp; Very, very typical for women, very typical for busy women, especially, who are just running like a million miles an hour, maybe there are kids, maybe there’s a career, maybe they’re very involved in work, or they have other life pressures, and they’re just not eating enough. There are a lot of demands, whether that is mental demands, physical demands, or emotional demands. All of these things take energy to cope with. And if we’re not eating enough and not resting enough, we’ll feel tired.&nbsp; Having previously run a successful weight loss program, sometimes this i

Show Notes Who doesn’t love a recovery story? In this episode, Anna talks from the heart and shares her journey recovering from Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and Mold Illness. She shares both her personal and professional learnings that have shaped the framework she uses in her practice to help others make their own recoveries.&nbsp; Useful links: Website:&nbsp;https://annamarsh.co.uk/ Instagram:&nbsp;https://www.instagram.com/anna_marsh_nutrition/ Fatigue Recovery Quiz:&nbsp;https://app.annamarsh.co.uk/quiz ​MY FATIGUE RECOVERY STORY Hello, and welcome back to the fatigue and burnout recovery podcast. I am your host, Anna Marsh. In this episode, I’m going to share my fatigue recovery story. And just full disclosure, I haven’t planned anything; I will talk freely and hopefully share from the heart.&nbsp; Before I go into everything, I guess I wanted to say that often, for me personally, and maybe for many people as well, it can feel really self-indulgent, having this platform just to talk about yourself. So in some ways, I feel it can be quite cathartic to share one story. At the same time, there’s a lot of self-judgment thinking; or who would be interested in this, and is this just a self-indulgent way to express myself? So I’m just going to go for it, I think. And what I would say is that every single person’s story is different.&nbsp; I know in my own recovery, I would read stories, maybe from other people, and listen to other recovery stories. I would think maybe there are certain stories that really resonated with me. And then there are parts of stories that maybe resonated with me.&nbsp; Then there are other stories where I used to think, well, that person is 10 years younger than me, or that person had post-viral fatigue, and I didn’t have post-viral fatigue, so it’s not relevant to me. I would encourage you if you’re listening to this and you’re committed to listening to the rest of this episode, to notice how you respond to the content and take what serves you, discard what doesn’t, and come in with an element of curiosity, because there may be some lessons and insights which will help you reflect on your own story.&nbsp; And there could be something in here today that helps you move the needle forward with your own fatigue recovery journey. So from my heart to yours, I just want to say that I really hope there is something here today that can be of value to you. And if not, hopefully, there will be more value in future episodes. So the first thing that I guess I wanted to say and express was that I had my first fatigue experience quite young when I was nine years old. I had been doing my homework at the dining room table on a Sunday night. And then I lay down on the floor, and I just said,&nbsp;It’s too much, I can’t, I’m too tired.&nbsp; It wasn’t that I was trying to get out of doing my homework like most nine-year-olds probably would be on a Sunday night. But there was just a feeling of lethargy and exhaustion in my body, which I suspect at the time was emotional. To a certai

Show Notes Welcome to the Chronic Fatigue and Burnout Recovery Podcast. Your host, Anna Marsh, introduces herself and explains what you can expect from listening to the show. Anna is a Trauma-informed Functional Medicine Nutritional Therapist who has worked in the health industry for over two decades. However, when her health began to circle the drain, and she was eventually diagnosed with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS),Anna realised there was so much she didn’t know she didn’t know about health generally and fatigue specifically. In her fatigue recovery journey, she realised there weren’t many valuable podcasts dedicated to fatigue recovery.&nbsp; The Podcasts that did exist were from people who had recovered but didn’t have the scientific background OR those who had scientific knowledge but not a personal experience of the debilitating effects of fatigue. Then there were those with a nervous system-centred background but without a deep understanding of where Functional Medicine meets trauma-informed care. Anna’s goal for this podcast is to offer insight from a deep understanding of the experience from a Functional Medicine and Trauma-informed lens while integrating her personal experience overcoming the condition. Useful links: Website: https://annamarsh.co.uk/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/anna_marsh_nutrition/ Fatigue Recovery Quiz: https://app.annamarsh.co.uk/quiz Welcome to the chronic fatigue and burnout recovery podcast. I am your host Anna Marsh, a trauma-informed Functional Medicine and nutritional therapist, which I appreciate is a bit of a mouthful.&nbsp; I just wanted to create this introduction episode today to talk to you a little bit about the podcast, and a teeny tiny bit about myself, so that you can know what to expect. And if it’s appropriate to keep on listening, I’ll be sharing a much more detailed account of my own fatigue recovery story in the next episode, but for today, I thought I would keep it brief and just share some of the bare bones back.&nbsp; So I have been practicing now as a nutritional therapist since 2009. Over time, I’ve also done my certification with the Institute of functional medicine. Although my master’s degree is in personalized nutrition, I am South African, if you can hear a little tinge of my accent. I grew up in South Africa and did my first degree in South Africa, in what was called Human Kinetics and Ergonomics, which I usually say to people is the same as Sports Science and Biochemistry.&nbsp; <img decoding="async" src="https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/RiD0VX7-T7V7iYEURjCuUoEQYTwS4UAQmYh6LLqSgvDrjM355HrJSI_ziAkirxbovhMfan35