We’ve all been there.
You learn about, say, a certain diet that other people with the same symptoms as you have found to be profoundly helpful. You hear account after account from people who completely resolved their symptoms after making the transition to the diet. Everywhere you look, people are celebrating the extraordinary effectiveness of the diet, citing it as the most significant contributor to their recovery.
And so, inevitably, you try the diet. You’ve tried other diets in the past that were also emphatically recommended, only to be disappointed, as you ultimately didn’t experience any benefit from those diets. But this diet is different.
This diet has garnered more attention than the other diets you’ve tried, and experts, in interviews, have referenced clinical outcomes that are more impressive than those of other diets. Famous people have reportedly adopted the diet, too, making it even more compelling.
So you go to the health food store, stock your cart with the foods of your new diet, and leave the store with not only an abundant bounty of health-promoting deliciousness, but also a new identity. You’ve become an official member of the tribe, and it’s now your duty to spread the word about the diet. To go out of your way to bring it up in conversation, with family, friends, acquaintances, and colleagues, because they of course should know about the diet, how important it is to only eat foods within the defined parameters of the diet, and that all other foods, outside of these parameters, are toxic.
Your excitement about your new diet, and the certainty of your symptoms improving, makes the transition easy, and you’ve soon replaced all foods in your kitchen with those of your new diet. You’re totally committed. You’ve never been so committed to a diet, and you can’t wait to begin experiencing the awesome health benefits of this new way of eating.
But, a month goes by, and you don’t notice any changes in your symptoms. Another month. Nothing. By the third month, you’re starting to question whether you’re missing something. It’s a fairly complicated diet, requiring strict adherence, so perhaps you’ve neglected an important feature of the diet. But you haven’t. You’re doing everything correctly, just as all of the advocates and experts had described.
Eventually, six months in, you realize that it’s not working, and you throw in the towel. And the intense enthusiasm for the diet that you felt at the outset is replaced with an intense disappointment at the ineffectiveness of the diet at revolutionizing your life. Just as you had never experienced such excitement and thrill at the prospect of a diet catalyzing an unprecedented improvement in your health, you’ve never experienced such defeat, either, when it didn’t work for you, despite having worked extraordinarily well for others.
Your results may vary
This story, of the emotional rollercoaster of chronic illness recovery, isn’t specific to diet. It’s not specific to any one approach to symptom resolution. It encompasses all approaches, whether diet, supplements, or lifestyle strategies, that are effective for some, but not necessarily effective for everyone.
And that’s what makes resolving chronic symptoms particularly difficult. Just because other people were able to resolve their fatigue by eliminating gluten from their diet doesn’t guarantee that you, too, will resolve your fatigue by cutting out gluten. Or just because other people were able to resolve their joint pain by taking astragalus doesn’t guarantee that you will resolve your joint pain by taking astragalus. Or just because other people were able to resolve their eczema by using a sauna doesn’t guarantee that you will resolve your eczema by using a sauna.
I think this makes sense, intuitively, to everyone. But somehow, in our desperation for symptom relief, and for getting our lives back, we convince ourselves that this diet, this supplement, or this lifestyle strategy will work for us, because it worked for other people with the same symptoms. We become so convinced of the certainty of our health improving that, when it doesn’t, we’re completely disoriented, as if we hadn’t considered the possibility that this one intervention won’t solve all of our problems. When we don’t experience the improvement that other people with the same symptoms experienced, and we lose our momentum, it becomes difficult to maintain our commitment to trying new things that have the potential to move us forward. We might rationalize not trying anything new, because the last thing we tried didn’t work, and it required a lot of effort.
Everything you try is an experiment
At this point, when you realize that something you put faith in didn’t produce the results you were expecting, what you do next is an important determinant of whether or not you continue moving forward to better health. If you allow your frustration at the lack of improvement to consume your thoughts and take your focus away from what you can do to get better to how unfair it is that other people were able to resolve their symptoms but you weren’t, your prospects of recovery aren’t great. Conversely, if you can redirect the energy of your frustration into action, and start exploring new things to try, you’re on a much better trajectory.
To aim for the latter, it’s important to recognize that everything you try, on your recovery journey, is but an experiment, that each experiment is just one of many, and that most experiments don’t work. Most diets, supplements, and lifestyle strategies that you try probably won’t have a significant effect on your symptoms. But it’s not about the experiments that don’t work, so try not to get caught up on those. It’s about the experiments that work. Because, in the context of chronic illness, you often don’t need that many experiments to work in order to piece together an effective strategy for resolving your symptoms.
I’ve tried hundreds of supplements, for example. Vitamins, minerals, amino acids, phytonutrients. You name it, I’ve tried it. Most supplements I didn’t find to be helpful, and I try not to lose too much sleep over those. Some supplements, however, were profoundly helpful, so those supplements made it into my recovery strategy.
I wouldn’t have discovered the supplements that were most effective for me had I stopped experimenting with supplements after the first supplement I tried didn’t work. Or after the first ten. Or even after the first hundred. Determining the supplements that were most effective for me required that I experiment with hundreds of supplements. In other words, I had to get through hundreds of experiments that didn’t work to ultimately get to the few that did, and those supplements became a force multiplier for my recovery.
Keep moving forward
The next time you try something, and you don’t get the results that you were expecting, don’t lose hope. There will always be more diets, supplements, and lifestyle strategies to experiment with. Most of them won’t work for you, despite having worked for others with the same symptoms, so the most effective recovery strategy is to commit yourself not to any one thing but to the overall approach of conducting as many experiments as it takes to learn why your symptoms developed and what you can do to resolve them. Consider each experiment, regardless of outcome, as an opportunity to collect data, and that all data is useful. And that each experiment moves you incrementally forward on your journey to better health, however imperceptible your progress might be.