I've done 4/5 therapies for cfs/me and they're all quite similar.
They seem to want to teach me how to turn off the stress response by being calm and quieting the mind, whilst simultaneously teaching me to feel and express emotions, which obviously makes me feel the opposite of calm,
How do people deal with this , I find it really confusing
Thank you for your post.
Calm is quite achievable, but if my brain is ruminating or I'm not getting much sleep - that interrupts calm.
Calm
Calm comes from fixing digestion. Keep reducing carbohydrate intake and continuing to reduce and reduce until eventually no more carbohydrates. Along that journey when carbohydrate intake gets very low (~20g / day) you become very hungry and our bodies resort to converting protein into glucose for energy. This soon passes and within a few hours we enter ketosis (fat burning mode). When I can't resist the hunger, I find a small zero-carb high fat snack helps, for example a spoonful of butter or coconut oil.
We need animal fat (eg. egg yolk) because only animal fat contains essential fat soluble vitamins. Our brains are 80% fat, so we need these key nutrients to heal our brains.
Carbohydrate and fat do not appear together in nature. Combining in equally large amounts causes weight gain.
If low-fat for a long time, our gallbladder needs to heal and come back online to digest fats. Start introducing a small amount of animal fat early, for example diary or egg yolk.
We need to get our energy from carbohydrate or fat. Do not fear fat, if you don't get enough, your body will break down muscle to convert into glucose for energy, and if this is sustained it leads to protein poisoning.
We can't survive on lean meat like other carnivores. Not eating enough fat with our meat leads to a condition know as protein poisoning (also referred to colloquially as rabbit starvation, mal de caribou, or fat starvation) - an acute form of malnutrition caused by a diet deficient in fat. The term rabbit starvation comes from shipwreck survivors stuck on an island with only rabbits that succumb to a fat deficient diet and eventually die. Rabbit meat is too lean for us. Our big brains need the fat nutrients.
Too little fat and we get constipated, too much fat and we get diarrhea.
'Fativore' more accurately describe what humans are, see:
Growing a Big Brain with Meat | Amber O'Hearn
Adopt this and calm emerges as leaky gut heals. The calm is on a level that no one believes exists until they experience it. This calm used to be called zero-carb zen, now carnivore zen because zero-carb is now carnivore. For me the calm did not come until I strictly adhered to the lion diet for several months.
It's taken me years to get from typical diet to lion diet. You will not succeed if you try to do it over night.
I've come up with a
soft food version, I believe is even more powerful than lion diet, because when I re-introduced meat I felt sick.
I suggest starting by replacing one meal each week with
raw egg yolk and gradually increasing from there. Or start by replacing one meal each week with an animal based meal. With such meals, do not add vegetables, that only makes it less healthy as vegetables block the absorption of key nutrients.