Fatigue versus energy
Homeostasis
The ability to stay healthy and heal from disease, including chronic illness, relies on your body’s ability to maintain or regain homeostasis.
Homeostasis means equilibrium in your body, and it’s maintained by various physiological processes. Homeostasis is your body’s number one priority because it’s about surviving and thriving.
Fatigue, or a lack of energy and tiredness, comes from being out of homeostasis.
The diseases that cause fatigue include
anaemia, hypothyroidism, autoimmune disease, infection, pulmonary disease, and organ diseases. Serious illnesses such as cancer, kidney or liver disease, diabetes, stroke and lung disease must also be ruled out.
The physiological mechanisms that cause fatigue are
dysglycaemia (blood sugar imbalance), insomnia, a sedentary lifestyle, inflammation, food sensitivities, chemical sensitivities and oxidative stress (where your body cannot deal with normal toxins).
I’ve talked about many of these diseases and mechanisms in the past.
Mitochondria and ATP
A key aspect that could be involved in fatigue that I haven’t discussed yet is your body’s ability to make energy, otherwise known as ATP. For this your cells need mitochondria.
Popularly known as the powerhouse of the cell, mitochondria are a structure within a cell that generates most of the chemical energy needed to power its biochemical reactions. Mitochondria can also act as a source of cellular signalling and play a role in biosynthesis (translating your genes).
We need a strong output of mitochondria to have adequate energy and no fatigue. In our lives, we can either optimise or disrupt these levels of mitochondria and therefore our production of energy, although occasionally someone may have an inherited mitochondria disease. But my focus is on the rest of us where disrupted bioenergetics, or inadequate mitochondrial production, can lead to fatigue and disease.
How does this happen?
Environment
One key way is through poor diet and lifestyle i.e. your environment is the problem and not your genetics.
For example, a lack of dietary flavonoids and sulphur found in vegetables and fruit, a lack of movement, a deficiency of oestrogen and testosterone or progesterone, blood sugar problems, insufficient thyroid hormones, eating too many calories, not having a balance of macronutrients (protein, fat and carbs), a lack of or disrupted sleep, and toxin/chemical exposure can all compromise mitochondrial production.
One interesting fact about mitochondria is that if you lose good production, you lose the ability to make hormones, which leads to early ageing. Not what any of us wants.
The other cause of poor mitochondria production is through medical conditions. Most commonly these are infections, viruses, injury (e.g. traumatic brain injury, accidents) or chemicals. Drug-induced mitochondrial toxicity can occur too from drugs like statins, NSAIDS (anti-inflammatories), paracetamol and antidepressants. For example, statins reduce mitochondrial production by 30-60 per cent.
The problem is that directly supporting an organ or system will not fix mitochondrial production issues. Instead, attention needs to be directed towards the mechanisms that are impairing mitochondria reproduction.
Gut mitochondria
I’ll give you an example of this. In the gut, impaired intestinal mitochondria can lead to impaired intestinal immunity (which goes systemic), intestinal inflammation and potentially degenerate the enteric (our automated) nervous system.
To overcome this you would need to work out what’s hindering mitochondria production in your gut – perhaps a gut infection like parasites or a virus, a lack of fibre to feed essential short chain fatty acids, or a lack of stomach acid and digestive enzymes meaning your body can’t break food down which is inflaming your gut.
The importance of movement
Diet is always foundational to your health and energy production, and plays a big role in healing.
Another vital factor to healing from mitochondria induced fatigue no matter its cause is movement. You will never recover your mitochondria production and regain homeostasis without it as movement itself creates mitochondria in your cells by turning on gene expression. We are made to move, and this is a key way out of fatigue. This movement should be realistic and you should be able to repeat it daily. If it takes more than one day to recover, you’re doing too much and it’s creating more stress (oxidation) on your body.
“You will never recover your mitochondria production and regain homeostasis without it as movement itself creates mitochondria in your cells by turning on gene expression. ”
The importance of sleep
Sleep and normalising circadian rhythms (your body clock) are also vital to recovery from fatigue and homeostasis. Sleep activates the production of mitochondria and energy production in your cells, removes unhealthy mitochondria Activate autophagy, removes cellular debris and unhealthy cells, and improves brain plasticity and long-term memory.
Summary
To summarise, sometimes you can fix your energy problems by improving your diet, ensuring good sleep and moving where these are the root causes of your problems. But there could also be an underlying medical issue or disease that needs to be dealt with. Our body is a complex system of interrelationships with one area impacting the function of others, but diet, movement and quality regular sleep are a great place to start.