Recovering From a Chronic Illness

At twenty I was diagnosed with a chronic digestive disease.

I didn't understand why it had developed in the middle of my life, and neither did the doctors. For years I took medication, felt awful, and did nothing to try to change my situation.

After years with the illness, while I was living in New York, I came across a different conversation about health.

A conversation that promotes the search for the root of the problem and understanding the person, rather than focusing on the disease and treating symptoms the way we've gotten used to with Western medicine.

I read and researched and understood that my lifestyle wasn't allowing recovery. So I started to change my life.

After a few months of meaningful changes to my diet, my habits, and my choices, I recovered.

I remember how surprised the doctor was when my test results came back completely normal, with no trace of the disease.

I've been off medication for years now, and I feel healthier than ever.

Over the past century, chronic illness has become commonplace. We all know at least one person with a chronic condition: Crohn's, celiac, colitis, arthritis, endometriosis, psoriasis, cancer, depression, and more.

According to the World Health Organization, the development of chronic diseases can be prevented with proper nutrition, physical activity, and avoiding smoking and alcohol. That makes these diseases more a matter of lifestyle than of our underlying health.

So if the development of chronic diseases can be prevented, maybe they can also be healed?

How is it that so many people recover from chronic illnesses, autoimmune conditions, and pain without medication, with nothing but changes to their diet, their lifestyle, and their way of thinking,

and no one talks about it?

They say you can't solve a disease with the same diet and lifestyle that created it. In other words, to improve your health, and ideally even recover, you have to change the choices and habits that led to the illness in the first place.

In our world it's very easy to end up developing a medical problem. It's enough not to eat the nutrients the body needs to function optimally, so we create deficiencies; to eat too much processed food, or foods the body develops an intolerance to, so we create inflammation; to take too many drugs and too much alcohol; to not spend enough time in the sun; to sit most of the day; to sleep poorly; and on top of all that, to be under stress. And that's how disease shows up in our bodies.

But that's not all. The mind plays a huge role in the development of disease.

Dealing with pain, failure, criticism, disappointment, low self-worth, chronic frustration, a toxic environment, and the list goes on. But just like with nutrition and our day-to-day choices, the mind is something we can work on too.

The thing is, in a fast world that demands fast solutions, drugs became the classic "solution" that doesn't work. Of course it doesn't work. You can't solve a problem with the same diet or lifestyle that created it. And yet most people aren't willing to make the sacrifices and changes required to recover.

So can the situation be reversed? According to Western medicine, no.

What's the benefit in telling a person, a free being, an individual soul that is a whole world unto itself, in a world where people recover from the hardest illnesses, that recovery is impossible? What does that do to a person? It breaks their spirit and creates a limiting belief that "there's nothing to be done."

Why does this happen? Imagine you broke your leg. What do you do? You rest, you protect the leg from getting hurt so it can heal. It's amazing, the body knows how to heal itself. Anyone who's ever been cut, scraped, or injured in their life knows this. If we walk on the broken leg, does it become a chronic break? No. We're simply not letting the body finish its healing process.

What happens with chronic illnesses is that something creates the disease, we don't always know for sure what, and instead of investigating, researching, resting, and letting the body heal, we take drugs that don't heal.

Broadly speaking, drugs don't heal. That's a fact. Mostly they numb the symptom. So it happens that doctors know drugs, and with drugs alone, there's really no way to reach true recovery.

I believe you can recover from anything. I've seen others do it, in films, in articles, from the mouths of doctors and people who healed themselves. And of course there's my own personal experience.

Our body is a very sophisticated machine, and under the right conditions, meaning when we don't overload it and harm it, it knows how to heal.

Recovery is a process that takes time, discipline, sacrifice, and devotion. But the results, whatever they may be, full health, are worth everything.

The goal is to start listening to the body, to learn to know it and the signs it gives us. Recovery is a natural process that happens in the body. Exactly the way a wound heals.

If you've just been diagnosed, if you've been suffering from some condition for a while, or if you're in the middle of recovering, I recommend reading books, listening to podcasts, going to workshops and lectures, and above all experimenting, so that you can take responsibility for your recovery into your own hands. Dig deep into understanding the food we eat, our diet, our day-to-day choices, and start aiming for recovery.

How do you begin? Since there's no single approach that fits everyone, here are a few guiding principles that are important to start with:

• Natural food. You can't heal while you're putting junk into your body.
• Go to bed on time, and sleep enough hours (only you know how much you need).
• Physical activity every day (walking counts too).
• Daily sun exposure and time in nature are critical for healing and strengthening the immune system.
• Learn to manage your emotions instead of letting them manage and destabilize you. Negative thinking weakens the body.
• Stress management: meditation, journaling, and enough sleep.

Recovery is far more available than it may seem to you right now.

Don't give up on your health. It's the most important asset you hold.