I’m Dr. Tom Rofrano and today I’m going to talk to you about five simple solutions for more energy. One of the things that most patients come in with is just sheer exhaustion. They’re tired all the time. Even if they could get a good night sleep, they just don’t feel refreshed. And it’s just one of the main things that everyone I see is complaining about. There are some simple things that usually turn up to help turn this around so we can find solutions for fatigue.
Vitamin Deficiencies
The first thing on how to have more energy is to find out what’s going on when we do an initial evaluation and order some lab tests. Almost always nutritional deficiencies come up. And the most common ones I see are vitamin B12. If that’s low, it can cause fatigue, brain fog and lack of focus, being tired all the time and numbness and tingling. There is a whole lot of things that go along with that.
Vitamin D is another one that comes up as being low. Magnesium is a very common deficiency that we see over and over again. Iron is common, especially in women and children. When that is low, it can cause you to feel tired all the time and get restless legs at night. Most of the time when you go to the doctor, they just don’t check for these things. And even if they did, they’re not looking at the ranges properly. So for instance, if they get them to check your iron level, the range might be 10 to 300. As long as you’re on 11, they’ll say oh that’s fine, that’s not an issue.
But actually, if you’re below 50 was an optimal range, say 50 to 100, 60 to 100 in that area that if you’re a 30, 20, 10 or you know 11 which is in their normal ranges you can still feel miserable. Those are the things we look at. And if you’re below optimal in more than one of these, often, when I look at lab work for new patients that we run, they’re below optimal and Vt4 for different things. It has an additive effect so even if you’re just a little low in say V-12, maybe it won’t be a big deal. But if you’re below often V-12, iron, magnesium and vitamin D which is most often the case you can just feel horrible. Once we get this information and we then start supplementing, often people turn around very quickly, even if you got fatigued for many years.
Thyroid
Another area is thyroid. That’s huge as far as fatigue goes as well as brain fog and cold hands and feet and just overall feeling miserable aches and pains. The thyroid is one of the most common things I see when people come in they say, “Oh, I had my thyroid checked, and everything was okay.” Well, this is another thing, doctors, your medical doctor, your primary doctor typically will check your thyroid with maybe TSH and t4, and that’s it. And they’ll say, “Oh, you’re fine.”
When I run lab test, I’ll check not only TSH and Vt-4 but also Vt3 which is another thyroid hormone that’s so important. There are also two thyroid antibodies that we check and a reverse t3, so those six different things are so important. So TSH might be normal where your doctor says you’re fine, but then we’ll have thyroid antibodies which are elevated, meaning you have a thyroid autoimmune conditions or say your t3 is low but your TSH is fine and t4 might be fine.
All these different subtle things can make you feel awful, just exhausted. Again brain fog, lack of focus, insomnia, all these things come along with it. Depression is also a very significant symptom of a thyroid, look thyroid function. And adrenal glands are glands that handle stress.
Stress
Normally your cortisol goes up when you’re under stress, you know to handle the situation. But in this day and age cortisol is elevated and a lot of us just from the day-to-day stresses that go on. It is important to have your adrenals evaluated when you are fatigued. There are some simple tests we do in the office, and there’s also some blood tests and a home kit that we use as well. This is something that doctors don’t always check for, but there are three simple tests you can do.
One is your Vivino, another is DHEA, and then another is Cortisol. Often we’ll see cortisol being elevated and DHEA being low and that’s one category of adrenal fatigue. In the case like that, you can feel anxiety, lack of focus, brain fog, depression. And insomnia is a huge symptom of adrenal fatigue. Feeling exhausted and overwhelmed there’s another common symptom. So these are all from adrenal fatigue. Once we find out the exact pattern, it’s a very simple fix. You use some supplements for that and a diet as well and whole lifestyle changes. And we would be happy to sign you up for a free PDF report of summarizing what I’m talking about.
Myofascial Pain and Fatigue
And the fourth thing is myofascial pain as it relates to fatigue. Often we get these aches and pain, these knots, that we call trigger points. Those are tight bands within muscles in our body. They can cause all sorts of problems. For example, if you have trigger points, which are very common in your shoulders, neck, jaw, in your jaw area, that can cause headaches, neck pain, jaw, and TMJ pain and it can keep you actually from getting a good night’s sleep.
I had a case not too long ago, a patient who had just some frequent headaches. We put her on a nutritional program, and she was doing better all these different areas, she had more energy, and her digestive and skin issues were clearing up. But she still was having a hard time falling asleep and staying asleep. She was just exhausted from lack of sleep. We started doing some treatment. She had a lot of myofascial pain trigger points and, we started working with that. Within a few treatments, a lot of this started to release and she was able to sleep through the night for the first time in years. And once you’re able to get a good night sleep, that ties in with rejuvenating and strengthening your adrenal glands and just really being able to function at a much higher level throughout the day.
What’s important is just making sure that you address any issues of facial mouth pain and we do that. We do evaluations to figure out exactly what’s going on in that area and then recommend specific treatments or exercises to help clear that up. Even if it’s been going on for years, often it can be cleared up in just a matter of a few short weeks.
Food Sensitivities and Allergies
And lastly here and this is a big one, is our food sensitivities and allergies. So how can those make you feel exhausted? Well, there are some common foods that people have sensitivities to, and there are two things. One, there are allergies where if you eat food, you get an immediate reaction, those are quite obvious. But what’s not so obvious are the food sensitivities, and that’s where food, by eating it you have a delayed reaction.
It might be an hour, an hour or two or a few hours; it might not even be until the next day. We just kind of feel off. It could just zap your energy. It can also cause skin reactions, digestive issues, sinus issues, such as a runny nose or sinus congestion. Those are all be related to food sensitivities. And the way we figure that out is one of the two ways. One is we do feed sensitivity or allergy testing through blood, where we can test a 100 or 200 different foods to figure that out.
Another way is come up with a diet; I call it the free diet because it’s free of all the common allergens. After doing lab testing hundreds or thousands of people over the last thirty years, some common patterns come up with foods that people are sensitive to. The free diet is a diet that’s for you. Common allergens are grains and yeast, and sugar, dairy, eggs, legumes, and GMOs are other things that can be very problematic. You can follow the free diet for Phase One. Then in Phase Two start adding foods back and one at a time to see if you have any reactions. That’s another way, besides testing, that we find out what were people reacting to.
I’ll finish up with a story just from a few days ago. A patient came in who had migraines for many years and not only migraines, but she also had chronic digestive problems, back pain, neck pain, whole body pain, fatigue, insomnia, anxiety, depression and more. By the way, now she’s doing great. She first came late last year. Now we are treating her for just a period, she got better, migraines cleared up, all her pain cleared up, her digestive issues, and this is through our seven-step functional and free program that we put patients through which involves diet and supplement and treatment and exercise.
Now she just comes in every once in awhile, if something’s going on.I hadn’t seen her in a little while, and she came, again she was doing great, no pain, no symptoms, and was off all her medications. Then Monday she came with just a severe migraine, she didn’t sleep all weekend, she was just completely exhausted, in pain and just miserable. She had to call in sick from work on Saturday and Sunday. So she was out on Friday, and it was getting late. So doesn’t feel like going home and cooking something, so she stopped at Bud’s chicken, of all places, because she’s been eating so clean on the free diet for probably almost a year now and doing well. She has the fried chicken and french fries and soda.
All that night she wakes up 2:00-3:00 in the morning with this raging migraines. It lasted all through the weekend. She was in bed all day Saturday, all day Sunday, she finally was able to make it in here Monday, and I was able to treat her and give her some advice on how to get this cleared up. She called us the next day said, she’s all better, back at work and doing great. So going back to the food sensitivity issue, in her case she had a real sensitivity to one of these foods. Something like that could cause fatigue and all these other issues.
Like a lot of people, during her whole life, she was eating food junk food, and that’s why she was miserable throughout her whole life. By eliminating those foods, I can make a huge difference in your energy levels and overall health and help you find solutions for fatigue.
So I hope you enjoyed this and if you have any questions, feel free to leave comments. If you want me to cover something, feel free to leave a comment.
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