— Brenda Stratton

Where you bring up a really important question here Brenda as we step back and congratulations on the plant-based diet. It is the right choice in it. It will help to heal your body and it's the best diet, you know because of the research that shows it will reduce inflammation. It will begin to write your system and it will improve your microbiome. However, in my practice when somebody would come to me in a situation like yours where they say, they're eating a plant-based diet. They're feeling you know, still feeling fatigued it always tells you that, you know, it's it can be other things other than just a diet that's causing issues. And so I would typically get black blood work, you know looking at iron levels to make sure that someone's not anemic looking at the thyroid to make sure that they don't have any issues. You know, I live in Pennsylvania. So it's not uncommon for people to have Lyme's disease and so I would do a line tighter. So a good medical workup is also important because not everything is related to diet and sometimes we need to identify some of the other causes of fatigue. Fatigue, you know can also be caused by Sleep disruption or poor sleep people that are working night shift can have disrupted sleep during the day and be not get and not getting enough sleep. And so, you know working on a sleep hygiene exercise and then also stress chronic stress can be another cause of chronic fatigue. So, you know, look at all of those aspects of your life, you know, the lifestyle factors. I'm sure you know about sleep activity Stress Management and diet and then, you know a good medical workup. I would recommend with your physician just to take a look at all of the components of your health and your physiology to make sure that we're not missing anything else. The last caveat I would add is that, you know, when someone transitions to a plant-based diet, I typically will tell them it takes about 12 to 18 months for your body to really start to heal and recover and sometimes it can take your microbiome a little bit longer than that. And so typically in an early transitional recommend to people that they use some probiotics to help rebuild their gut and microbiomement is the microbiome starts to heal that can also Boost energy as well. So I hope that does give you a little bit of guidance Brenda and it's really important question. I'm thankful that you ask that question because it's easy for us to to fall into these these belief systems that if we just change our diet that everything is going to get better and certainly most things get better. But we also want to practice good medicine. So I hope that gives you guidance and if you're looking for a good plant-based doctor, you know, there are a couple of good resources plant-basedocs.com is a good resource with more than a thousand Whole Food plant-based practitioners internationally and you can find one nearby and they're also some other good resources American College of Lifestyle medicine can also be a good resource and help you find a physician. So and they can also work with you and help give you some guidance.

https://plantbaseddocs.com