Self-blame, the body’s natural ability to heal, and the importance of personalised nutrition.

It’s common for clients, once they’ve realised the impact that diet and lifestyle can have on their condition, to wonder if they should be blaming themselves for causing their autoimmune condition in the first place.

So it’s important for them to understand that the answer is absolutely not.

Autoimmune conditions have a strong genetic component, which predisposes that person to certain autoimmune conditions.

Certain factors in that person’s diet and lifestyle and certain life events may combine over a period of time to trigger an autoimmune condition.  This combination of factors may be fairly common across the population, and may appear innocuous, but due to that person’s particular genetic make-up, they can combine to act as a trigger for an autoimmune condition.

As the saying goes: ‘the genes load the gun, the environment pulls the trigger’.  

But there is something else I want to highlight.

The body has an amazing ability to heal and its default mode is to heal and restore balance (homeostasis) wherever possible.  So when the body isn’t able to heal, we always need to ask why?  

It’s vital to understand that the factors preventing healing may not be the same as the factors that triggered the onset of the autoimmune condition.

For example, an autoimmune condition may have initially been triggered by a virus combined with a period of significant stress, but even though the virus is not longer active and the event causing psychological stress has passed, ongoing blood glucose dysregulation, certain nutrient deficiencies and damage to the gut microbiota may be significant enough to interrupt the body’s natural healing process.

So it can matter less what factors combined to trigger the condition, and more what factors persist now that are preventing the body from healing.

This is where personalised nutrition and lifestyle support can make all the difference; identifying the key factors that persist in preventing healing for that individual is crucial.

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