Over the recent years I have been going through periods of chronic fatigue. This article is to share with you what things I have discovered in the process and perhaps some of those will help your situation as well. 
There are always two things that need to be done about any given health condition:
- Deal with the cause.
- Deal with the symptoms.
If you only deal with symptoms you will be stuck forever depending on whatever solution you’d find to keep the symptoms at bay. Unfortunately our medical system is primarily interested with symptoms, and of course those who monetarily benefit from it don’t really want those symptoms to go away completely — otherwise they lose easy income from your dependency on their solution.
While both need to be taken care of — sometimes taking care of the symptoms first is important, before one has the strength to deal with the cause.
Following are different solutions that I have found helped me a lot with alleviating periods of chronic exhaustion and fatigue and replacing those with long periods of not being tired and feeling full of energy and life zest.
Table of Contents
1. Micronutrient Therapy – Myers’ Cocktail
At one point I was on the extended health insurance and I was exploring all kinds of alternative medicine branches. This is when I stumbled upon Myers’ Cocktail, which is a Micronutrient Therapy. Since it didn’t cost me anything I decided to try a set of 5 Myers’ Cocktail IV injections. The boost of energy that I have experienced was amazing! I started feeling it a little after the first injection, and after the 2nd and onward injections I felt fantastic!
Invented during the 60s by Dr. John Myers, and after his death in 1984, lead by Dr. Alan Gab, this micronutrient therapy consists of delivering an IV injection of megadoze of minerals and vitamins, which gets quickly absorbed by your body. Trying to do the same by ingesting the same vitamins and minerals won’t work because of poor absorption rates. Nowadays the cocktail formula varies, but the main ingredients are Magnesium, Calcium, Vitamin C and Vitamin B complex. This therapy can be received in most naturopathic clinics. Your doctor can adjust the ingredients depending on your specific needs.
The cocktail can be delivered in two ways – a drip or a push. I choose a push as it was cheaper and faster. An IV drip takes about 1h, an IV push can be done in about 15min. The drip is when the substance slowly drips into your vein using gravitation, the push is when either a practitioner or a machine pushes that same substance into your vein by applying pressure. Not all clinics offer the push, either because they don’t have the machine, or because they don’t want to waste their time and let the drip do the work.
If you get a chance to get a push, here is a tip. When the cocktail goes in too fast, you’d feel a burning sensation. However, if you flex and unflex your fist of the arm you’re getting the injection in, the burning will go away and you will help with moving the blood and dilute the incoming solution faster. My push was delivered by a doctor and after a few experiments we came up with a pretty quick delivery thanks to that discovery.
This particular treatment is simply awesome if you need a quick fix for your energy levels. For example if you’ve been working on a dead line, or if you’re emotionally exhausted. It gives your body most of the nutrients it needs to feel great.
Of course you still need to go and figure out how not to bring your body to that level of depletion in first place.
Price-wise it’s an expensive treatment if it is not covered under your extended health insurance. But also shop around – I found a huge price difference across different clinics. Also look for packages – my 5 injections package was significantly cheaper than if I were to buy them individually. And I’d say you’d want at least 3 to 5 injections to give your body what it needs.
It’s important for you to know that this is a naturopathic treatment so it’d get covered as such, and not as drugs or supplements which usually aren’t covered by most insurance plans.
2. Vitamin D
Another huge discovery I made is that I lacked Vitamin D, and that it had a direct connection with my body’s energy levels.
As I was researching this – the Canadian medical system conveniently made Vitamin D level test non-free, because it probably was showing too many people with too many low levels of Vitamin D, so let’s just hide it since most people won’t pay $60 for such a test and then we can treat them with all kinds of drugs instead. Hooray.
I observed that, when I traveled to sunny areas, my energy levels were very high, and when coming back to west coast Canada, where sun unfortunately isn’t that common – it made me feel really tired, especially when it rained a lot.
While researching this subject I also discovered that medical system recommended supplemental dozes are a way below what our body needs when it doesn’t get it from the sun or foods. Recommended Dietary Allowance (RDA) goes around 400-600 IU (10-15 mcg). Whereas when we are depleted of Vitamin D, the body can easily take 10 times of that. Moreover I discovered the Vitamin D megadoze therapy which was used by some people with terminal illnesses with huge benefits to recovery or an improved life style. I first read about it in the first edition of this book:
Me and my girlfriend decided to give it a try by taking 50,000 IU/day (100 times more than the RDA) and we felt great after some time, yet after about one month we started getting cramps and experiencing all kinds of weird things. I thought something was amiss, went to research the situation and discovered that when I give my body a lot of Vitamin D, it happily starts using it everywhere to fix things – however it needs more than just Vitamin D, it needs Magnesium and K2 to do the repairs. So what happened to us is that our body was quickly depleting the reservoirs of magnesium and K2 and that’s why after about one months we started experiencing problems. Once I learned that adding K2 and Magnesium solved the problem.
Vitamin D is cheap – I get 100 50,000 IU capsules for about $20. K2 is more expensive. Magnesium is everywhere, just make sure you get some that absorbs well. For K2 and Magnesium I can’t give the exact dozes since each person is different and the needs can vary a lot. In any case you need to consult your doctor before you do any such experiments.
Currently I take 50,000 IU Vitamin D, Ultra K2 and Magnesium every few days if I feel low on energy and it has an amazing impact.
Of course note that chances are you don’t need to take megadozes of Vitamin D to boost your energy level. Experiment with taking 5-10 times of the RDA and see how you feel.
The easiest way to get Vitamin D for free is to be in the sun for some 30min a day. Based on my research putting sunscreen on will defeat the purpose as it’ll block the generation of Vitamin D by your body. And wearing sunglasses will have the same effect. When your eyes detect sun radiation they tell the body to turn on the mechanisms to turn that radiation into goodness. When you wear sunglasses your block that signal and no Vitamin D get generated. Both topics are controversial in the context of various cancers and eye conditions, so do your own research.
Most plants have some Vitamin D in them because they live off the sun, and of course meat and fish – you can easily find lists of foods rich in Vitamin D. Mushrooms that were sun-dried are a very a good source of Vitamin D.
Another excellent idea is to regularly test your Vitamin D level, without waiting for when you feel tired. Hopefully in your country it doesn’t cost much. And as discussed earlier the OK level of Vitamin D isn’t necessarily great. If you just want to be OK, than it’s OK. If you want to have an abundance of energy, you need more than OK level.
My recommendation is to experiment with exposure to sun, foods, supplementation and see what works the best for you.
3. Vitamin C
Vitamin C is a very unique ingredient. This element is amazing at fighting most kinds of disease and pathogens, however for some evolutionary reason homo sapiens and a few other species are the only ones who can’t produce their own Vitamin C in the body. That’s why most mammals can eat rotten food and be just fine – their body generates Vitamin C on demand and it takes care of the bacteria.
When your body fights disease it takes a lot of life force. That’s why when you have cold you are very likely to feel tired. If you give your body Vitamin C it’ll do the fighting for you and leave your energy resources intact.
The Recommended Dietary Allowance (RDA) of Vitamin C is about 0.1gr/day. Just like with Vitamin D it’s a way too little, especially given the life style of most people nowadays. Perhaps if you were to eat really well, sleep enough, and not get overstressed at work, and on your smartphone it’d have been enough. But this is not the case for most of us.
Talking to a naturopath I discovered that one can take easily 10-30gr daily which is 100-300 times the RDA. Your body will tell you when it had too much by giving you diarrhea. At very big dozes you may experience bloating as well. So you’d start with a few grams daily, spreading it out through the day, and slowly increase until your body indicates that beyond is too much. Then step down a bit and use the level slightly below that threshold. It’s important to spread the intake out through the day since your body can’t absorb too much of it at once and will flash what it can’t absorb with urine, which will be of a yellow color.
Of course your intake would be different when you have a typical daily stress as compared to when you get sick.
I have recently survived 2 months in winter in India in the sub-par living conditions without getting diarrhea and cold with about 5gr of Vitamin C daily, spreading out the intake through the day about 1gr every few hours.
There are many papers/articles on the topic of megadoze Vitamin C. This falls under the science of the orthomolecular therapy. Here are a few short articles that cover most of the questions that you may ask about taking large quantities of Vitamic C:
http://orthomolecular.org/resources/omns/v05n09.shtml
http://orthomolecular.org/resources/omns/v05n11.shtml
http://orthomolecular.org/resources/omns/v05n07.shtml
and there is a lot of anti- talk out there. Simply try taking 5-10gr of Vitamin C, 1gr every few hours, next time you start coming down with cold and see the results for yourself. Cost ~$1/day.
Any type/brand/formula will be good if you just do it when having cold, i.e. for a brief period of time.
The problem is the fillers that they add to the pills. So if you find Vitamin C working well for you, and you plan on taking it daily as a preventative – it’s better to take powder, rather than pills. Or at the very least pills that contain 1mg of Vitamin C or more, so you take the least amount of fillers possible.
And also it’s better to take buffered Vitamin C over straight ascorbic acid, since it’s easier on the stomach when taken in large quantities. And having ascorbic acid powder sitting in your mouth might not be very good for your teeth.
Emergen-C is pretty good as a fizzy drink – but slightly more expensive. It comes with a bunch of other supplements in it – a nice cocktail.
There is one more important version of Vitamin C that you need to know about. And it’s Liposomal Vitamin C. Liposomal encapsulation is a recently invented method of delivery of elements to where they are needed in the body using the normal oral ingestion, but which bypasses the destructive gastric juices of the digestive tract. Lecithin is used to create a sphere that protects the payload from gastric juices. When the payload is delivered where it’s called for in the body, the sphere gets broken down, the payload (Vitamic C in this case) is used by the cells as intended and lecithin is also used by the cells as a construction material.
You can buy a factory-made version or make your own at about 1/10th of a cost of the former. It won’t be as efficient as the professionally made, but it’d still work quite well. You can find the instructions of making one on youtube. Assuming that you already have a blender, to make your own Lipo-C, you will need to buy lecithin granules, ascorbic acid and an ultrasonic cleaner. This is the version of Vitamin C that I use when I’m not lazy to make it. I usually make a few liters at once so it lasts easily for several weeks. When I’m lazy I take an over-the-counter 2mg of Vitamin C daily. When I feel I’m coming down with something I increase it to 5-10gr daily which usually prevents from me getting sick.
To conclude don’t let all those different versions confuse you, any version is good enough and it’s very cheap, considering the amazing health benefits you get.In general there is little to be concerned about potential risks when it comes to Vitamin-C. But there are always some groups of people with certain conditions where anything can be a problem. Therefore as with any supplements do your own research and consult your doctor.
4. Cordyceps
There is a lot of research going on right now in the domain of medicinal mushrooms. This could be a topic for its own article, but the researchers have been finding amazing health benefits for those consuming preparations from medicinal mushrooms. A lot of which help with boosting energy levels.
While many medicinal mushrooms are unique, each having its amazing healing properties, Cordyceps Sinensis is the special kind of mushroom. It hitches a ride on an insect, takes control over their brain, drives them to some special location in the forest, kills it, and then uses their body to feed itself, while growing into a mushroom (that looks like a stick). Research shows that this mushroom has an incredible positive impact on the health of the individual who consumes them.
These mushrooms are very rare and are extremely difficult to find. As of 2015 the price in China was about USD$30,000 per 1kg of mushrooms. Due to this gold-like price, many attempts are being made to grow this mushroom in the lab. Apparently at the moment the lab species don’t come very close to the healing powers of their wild counterpart, yet it’s reported that even the “domesticated” are quite potent, and they are still quite expensive as you can see here. As the competition has been increasing the prices have been coming down.
I have only tried a lab-grown cordyceps and did feel a noticeable impact on my energy level, but I haven’t done yet enough personal research to recommend one kind over the other. This is definitely something you’d want to try if money is not an issue.
And of course while at it, look at experimenting with supplementing with other medicinal mushrooms, especially their extracts, which are much more potent than mushrooms themselves.
5. Bach Flower Remedies
Bach flower Rescue Remedy is very useful when you experience anxiety, depression or just having a bad mood. A different product by the same company called Rescue Energy is designed specifically to deal with situations when there is too much stress on the body and you feel really tired. The flower remedies contain vibrational medicine in the form of flower essences. Whether you believe that a healing can occur with vibrational medicine or not, it’s a very cheap product to try. I was skeptical myself until I tried it myself and it just works.
Conclusion
There are many other ways out there to boost one’s energy level, have more life-force and enjoy being in this universe. I have only mentioned a few of those that I have experimented with and I found have a positive impact on my life. I shared those with you in hope that you may find my sharing useful in your own journey. If I get new insights I’ll update this article to share those with you.
The comments facility below is welcoming you to share your own stories, methods, successes and failures on the quest to have more life force and feel less fatigue.
Tags: cordyceps, energy level, fatigue, myers' cocktail, vitamin c, vitamin d
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