> Health and Disease > Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (Epstein-Barr)

Her breakthrough came with choosing to be healthy: "What can I do to be healthy, full of energy, feel great and have an awesome memory?"

The solution, as Forstbauer has discovered, is a whole-food diet high in vegetables, fruits and grains, and complemented by seven or eight glasses of water per day.

Many experts also recommend garlic, ginseng and oils rich in omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids, which collectively help to fortify the immune system and restore hormonal balance.

In the late 1980s, reports surfaced of a mysterious illness that seemed to target young professionals. Lasting for months, even years, the flu-like ailment would sap them of energy and muddy their concentration–leaving them a shell of their former selves. The media dubbed it the "yuppie flu."

Around the same time, Natalie Forstbauer, then a 19-year-old college student, was realizing that whatever she had come down with wasn’t going away anytime soon. At school, she tired easily and kept drawing blanks whenever she had to concentrate or remember. At night, she either fell coma-like into a 13-hour sleep or stayed up, a hostage of insomnia, until the early morning hours.

Listless and exhausted, she scheduled an appointment with her doctor to find out what was wrong. He told her she had chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS). “I was curious initially,” Forstbauer recalls. “Mystified. It was something I had never heard of before.”

In fact, CFS had only been identified two years prior to her 1990 diagnosis by a US researcher studying cases of the “yuppie flu.” Since then, a long list of symptoms has been grouped under the syndrome, including memory loss, dizziness, poor concentration, insomnia, low blood pressure, fever, sore throat, swollen lymph glands, headaches and, above all, profound weakness and fatigue.

In Forstbauer’s case, the news that she had CFS as well as fibromyalgia, a disorder that causes severe muscle pain and stiffness, was devastating. “I was an athlete,” she remarks, “the oldest of 12 siblings, involved with my community, and I loved to live life to the fullest. The shame I felt about being so sick and being diagnosed with CFS was extraordinary.”

What Causes CFS?

Forstbauer did have one thing working in her favour: a doctor who understood her condition. Not all people with CFS are so lucky. To this day, many doctors still dismiss it as psychological–a cry for help from an overstressed patient–even though every major medical body now recognizes the disorder as real.

Part of the problem lies in the still-mysterious nature of the syndrome. No one knows definitively what causes CFS, but the most compelling theories point to an abnormal immune reaction or an infectious agent such as a virus, bacteria or parasitic micro-organism. In someone with CFS, the immune system seems to remain in a state of activation, disrupting neurotransmitters that control such important functions as blood pressure, appetite and sleep. As a result, the individual becomes stressed, depressed and even more prone to illness.

As she tried to learn more about what had hit her, Forstbauer met other CFS sufferers. She found out at least 12 percent of CFS sufferers eventually make a full recovery. Determined to be one of them, Forstbauer decided to make a “pivotal shift” encompassing all aspects of her health–from what she ate, to when she slept, to how she exercised, to her very outlook on life.

Sabitri Ghosh is a researcher and award-winning freelance writer whose work has appeared in The Globe and Mail and World Vision’s magazine, ChildView. Natalie Forstbauer’s book Healthful Solutions for the Time-Starved will be published in September. To sign up for her free health and wellness e-zine, visit dare2feel.com or contact her directly at natalie@dare2feel.com.

Source: alive #249, July 2003