Oh, I've missed some lively debate here!!!!
First of all, Knackered, those little pictures made me nealy wee myself laughing! Cheeky yet hilarious.
Second, Carter, I honestly don't think you and I have got the same thing wrong with us. When you've got ME (yes I can call it ME not CFS if I want to, that's not up to you) you just KNOW it's got a physical cause. Like when you have cold, you honestly just KNOW all that snot is not merely a result of your anxious type A personality or whatever flowing out of you.
I don't want to belittle the suffering of people who have psychological or psychiatric disorders. Depression, for example, is a truly terrible illness which takes many lives and destroys many others. It's just that I get very irritated with people who try to insist that MY illness is a psychological one, because I know it isn't.
And so does my doctor, KDM, by the way. You may be unaware but nowadays there are biomarkers accepted as diagnostic tools for ME/CFS by all the medical profesionals in the field who have studied them with due attention and who have a track record of successfully treating sufferers of this illness. He is the one who measured my blood oxygen saturation at 80 which is severely hypoxic. He is the one who did an ultrasound of my prolapsed heart valve and reviewed the ECGs of my ventricular arrhythmia. He's the one who found my RnaseL cleavage excessively high, my cortisone level below 4, my natural killer cells at half the miminum in a healthy person and my blood full of antibodies to my own body tissues, my urine excreting over 80 times the WHO "safe upper limit" of mercury and 20 times the safe limit of lead and so on.
If all these abnormal results were caused by a psychological condition, then my supernatural powers of mind over matter would be so amazingly influential you can take it from me, I would be using them to manipulate the stock markets amd making myself very rich, not tweaking the outcomes of my own blood tests.
I did have a psychological illness once. When I was a kid I used to vomit spectacularly every morning. My parents insisted on taking me to several doctors. My teacher was bullying me and I was terrified of going to school - that was why I puked. I knew all along there was no physical cause and I did tell my parents that many times. So I have no problem admitting an illness of mine is psychological when that is the case.
It's just that, with CFS, unfortunately for me it is not the case.
Well I won't waste too much time repeating myself, but I've never said anything about CFS being a psychological illness and nothing you're saying goes against anything I've said.
I'm saying CFS isn't a 'disease'. It's a condition/syndrome/state.
That's why the establishment calls it Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, and not Chronic Fatigue Disease. There's an important distinction there. But I think you're filling in a lot of gaps with other people's arguments.
@Knackered
He's not sayign he's fine - he's upto 2-3000 steps a day (if memory serves me) but can drive for several hours a day - I feel much the same about that as you do about me lifting lol
He's sayign he has a protocol that works for him and shoudl work for everyone else - but IMO based on what he's said (how he's described his 'syndrome') it's not likely he has M.E. or even CFS - he may have had/have CF but as we all all know.......IMO a some of what he says is perfectly reasonable advice for symptom management (at least a lot of people with M.E. are trying similar stuff with some success) - if expensive and impratical in the UK - where our specialist is Wessley and a lot of us are on a very low income
but IMO none of what he says is curative - not an issue from his point of view as there is nothign to cure - it's all down to bad habits and lifestyle choices - and this is where I and I suspect others take issue
but - and this IS important - he is trying to help - no matter how he concieves of "CFS" - he's found something that works for him and he's trying to pass it on - or thats my reading of the situation - I may be being niave
is that about it carter?
Yeah, but I can do 2-3,000 steps a day and drive a few hours WITHOUT getting symptoms. That's what's important.
(Even I'm not at the stage where weight training is beneficial btw - I have experimented there. My recovery times are improving but any attempts to get back into weights, using various regimes, have not yet done anything other than blunt recovery rates.)
I'm not saying my protocol will work for everyone, but if you're serious about getting well:
Get in contact with a specialist.
Here's the thing: If you don't think CFS is ultimately a "lifestyle" illness, how would you explain all the people who get well after they make lifestyle changes?
Read stories of recovery from CFS - I've read hundreds - there's almost always some factor which helped tip the balance and got them into a good pace of recovery. Most commonly you see: pacing, mercury detoxing, vitamins/minerals (commonly magnesium or B12, but amino acids make a big difference for some), identifying food intolerances, alkaline diets, different approaches to life, for *some* people graded exercise, and for many, some combination of those.
I've seen blogs where they've listed celebrities who've recovered from CFS, and guarantee you'll always get someone chiming in saying "Oh well they obviously didn't have CFS then if they recovered".
So you set up this idea of an illness in which anyone who recovers never had it? Well if you're doing that, it would make no difference whether it was treatable - whether 99% of people recovered or 10% of people recovered - because by your own criteria, *no one* recovers; you're manipulating the sample data... Not saying that's You, but this attitude seems so common in the CFS community, and it's got no grounding in science and no support from anyone with any knowledge of the condition, it's just what people tell each other. It's depression.
The reason I say it's important to have a positive mental attitude and an understanding of CFS grounded in science is because otherwise you're *unlikely* to make the changes necessary to restore health.
Okay, on
weights. The problem seems to be the recovery period, not the lifting itself. When you exercise muscle tissue, you break it down, then it takes 5-7 days to repair. This is why bodybuilders do split routines, and hit different muscle groups on different days of the week. (Exercise the same muscles 2 days in a row, or alternate days, and you're more likely to push yourself into fatigue/injury; less likely to get results. And that's true for perfectly healthy people too.)
It's those 5 days following any lifting which are going to knock your recovery because the body needs nutrients, glutamine, leucine, valine, etc. which most PWCs are already very low on. Plus there's additional free radical damage, which can worsen mitochondrial problems, longer-term.
I come from a sports science background, so that was my main focus for a long time... What I've found much more important than raising fitness/strength in the short-mid-term, in the recovery stage, is raising your ability to recover...
I gauge this by putting stress on my knee joint. Stand on one leg, bend the knee a bit, see if you feel a weakness/soreness on the knee tendon.
If you do, you're ALREADY "overtraining" -> your body can't repair and keep up with the muscular demands of walking at your current level of activity. (And forget about improving strength/endurance while you're overtrained - you can only go backwards as you add more damage to the system in the vain hopes it'll repair stronger.)
So... I didn't start getting stronger by lifting MORE weights, I started by taking on a nutrition and rest/recovery routine like a bodybuilder, and waiting for my body to catch up... Which it did. And I put on about half a stone of muscle without actually doing anything.
I take L-Glutamine and BCAAs because they help with muscle building and muscle recovery. But you HAVE to be managing the demands of daily life before it's going to be beneficial adding any more stress... I just wish I could stress how important it is to use tried and tested recovery protocols and NOT just exchange information with other people who
haven't got themselves better... Like I said, I was my own worst enemy for years with this. People's health is far more important than their feelings.
