We are approaching the one year anniversary of the release of my eBook: Health Takes Guts® Your Comprehensive Guide to Eliminating Digestive Issues, Anxiety, and Fatigue. In honor of that, I am going to publish the introduction of the eBook over two blog posts. Here is the first half of the introduction to my book. Enjoy!
So many people have unwanted unpleasant symptoms. Are you one of them? Do you want to stop feeling like crap? Of course, you do, but how? The way to do this is to fix the underlying cause of your problem. Treating symptoms while not searching for and treating the source of the problem is like using a bandage. Which makes more sense: taking a pain killer for a shard of glass in your thigh, or removing the shard of glass?
Conventional medicine is really good at some things. Personally, I can say that doctors have saved my life on more than one occasion. However, conventional medicine is not always useful for getting to the bottom of why certain illnesses are happening. Many conventional treatments are aimed at helping to ease symptoms and they fail to address the root causes.
Enter functional medicine and functional nutrition, which are focused on uncovering the underlying causes of symptoms in order to address and resolve the problem at its source.
When clients come to me, they tend to say the same types of things:
- Their doctors don’t believe that diet matters
- How can food, that stuff you put INTO your body all day every day, not matter? In fact, there is a ton of evidence that it does matter and can hurt or heal.
- Their doctors don’t address their suffering because there’s nothing ‘wrong’ with them (this happens with: IBS, anxiety, chronic fatigue, chronic pain, and so on) according to test results
- Their doctors say there is no treatment for their problem, this illness is something to just live with, this isn’t something that can be fixed
- Their doctors give them five different prescriptions—one for each symptom—with no attempt to address what is CAUSING the symptoms, and, of course, these prescriptions cause their own side effects.
Bloating, diarrhea, constipation, fatigue, insomnia, anxiety, depression, pain (anywhere in body), skin rashes, hormone imbalances, and brain fog are symptoms. A symptom is an indication that something is going on in the body. A symptom is not the answer as to what is going on, it is a clue. Getting a prescription to dampen these symptoms doesn’t fix the reason why the symptoms are happening. That is like clearing smoke out of a burning room without putting out the fire.
Doesn’t putting out the fire sound like a better idea?
Well, that’s what this book is all about—resolving the problems at the root of your symptoms.
And what’s the root of most health problems? The gut.
Stay tuned for the second half of the introduction!