Hope in Her Chronic Fatigue Illness with Mandy Meehan
Mrs. Mandy Meehan is
an amazing woman. I'm so grateful to
call her my friend. She is a pastor's
wife and a pastor's daughter, and she is living out an incredible story right
now of struggle and triumph...3.5 years ago, she was diagnosed with chronic
fatigue syndrome.
She got sick right
before (like, 2 weeks!!) she was about to walk down the aisle to get married
and has been on an adventure to heal her body ever since. Her illness has taken her life in many new
directions. One of the most significant
has been her journey to becoming a functional nutritionist where she helps
women who are going through very similar journeys to hers, to heal and
find freedom.
Mandy married James
almost 3.5 years ago. They absolutely
love marriage and think it's the greatest thing ever (I can totally relate - I
love, love, LOVE being married to Derick and talking about marriage!). They are really passionate about talking about how amazing marriage is in a world where people
can be really negative towards marriage.
James is on staff at their Church as a pastor and before Mandy got sick, she was a part of the
Church Ministry as well. She's still a
part of it, just in a different way. She
serves as a volunteer alongside James.
Church, serving the community and leading people to become fully devoted
followers of Christ is a huge part of their lives.
Mandy's illness
started out as mono and turned into 3.5 years of chronic illness; chronic
fatigue syndrome, catalyzed by mold toxicity, chemical toxicity, and chronic
Epstein-Barr virus. It forced her to
leave her job. She just did not have the
energy or the health to work. Along her
healing process, she began making YouTube videos to share her story and what
she was learning on her journey of living with chronic illness. Her pain literally fueled a new passion for
health and wellness and a desire to help people find hope in the midst of
suffering.
She's now a
functional nutritional therapy practitioner, AKA nutritionist, functional nutritionist, or holistic
nutritionist. She's in the beginning
stages of starting to see clients and helping them heal with nutritional
therapy as she is still doing a lot of healing herself. She's so grateful that she has the physical
ability to get to even be able to share and guide people. To her, it's a sign that she's made enough
progress in her health to now be able to use her struggles to have an impact.
Shifting Your Perspective From Enduring To Embracing
What Life Throws Your Way
To some extent,
Mandy has lived in pain every single day for the last 3.5 years and one of the
biggest lessons that she's learned through this is that whatever you're dealing
with in life, whether you're going through a hard time or your life is great, it's
really important that we don't just
endure.
For a while, she
didn't want anyone to know what was going on.
She just wanted to keep it all to herself and move through it quietly,
thinking that once this tough season was over, she would move on with the rest
of her life and get all the things done, work super hard and make up for lost
time. When it became apparent that the
season of illness wasn't ending and she had to quit her dream job that she
thought she was going to be doing for the rest of her life, it
got real. At that time, her world
totally shifted. She was facing a really
dang hard, new reality. Will I be able
to work again? Am I actually dying? What on earth is happening to me? These are just some of the thoughts she
had...in reality, she just had a huge question mark over her entire life. And because the change in this season of her
life was so massive, she realized that her perspective needed to shift from
enduring to embracing this new season.
To embrace suffering
and hard times can sound counter-intuitive because obviously, we fight to get
past our challenges. Endurance can be
important, but sometimes, we need to make the decision to embrace where we are at,
and in doing this, so many things change.
For Mandy, part of her embracing this season was to share her struggles
and be vulnerable. She knew she had to
do this; she had to tell her story if she was to make a difference in the
world. That's when she began making her
YouTube videos. And around this time,
she also began focusing on nutrition as a way to help herself heal -
she knew she couldn't be passive about her situation. She knew she actively had to work to heal.
This journey of
embracing her struggles led her into a new season of a career in nutritional
therapy. Her message in this is that
there is hope for healing. Whatever it
is we are facing, if we embrace it and accept that God has put this on our
paths for a reason, we can find purpose in our lives and find comfort in
knowing it is just one of our many seasons He has in store for us.
Holding Onto Hope As You Are Healing
Mandy's never been
in a place of complete hopelessness, which I think is incredible. She attributes this to her faith in
Jesus. She really believes that God does
work for the good of those who love him and are called according to his
purpose. So, from the beginning,
even though she struggled, she could hold onto hope knowing this. I talk about this a lot in Chasing
Freedom...that anchor; that faithful anchor we have is truly what makes us
resilient when something like this comes up.
I can only imagine
how hard staying in faith and keeping hope has been for Mandy. There is still so much unknown in the area of
chronic fatigue and chronic illness and a lot of the time it is trial and
error. The areas of her illness where
there are so many unanswered questions have been what's caused Mandy to feel
the most depression and anxiety. In all
the uncertainty, she has learned to be careful about what she focuses on, what she does with the
research she comes across, and where she looks for answers. The world can be really negative toward
chronic illness, especially in Facebook groups set up for support which is so
heart-breaking.
It really can be so
depressing how hopeless people are who struggle with something like this. Mandy explained to me how there are people
who almost just give up because their doctor tells them it's something they're
going to live with for the rest of their lives.
For her, it's been important to actually find people who have healed
from their issues and/or made progress. You have to focus your thoughts and your mind on hope and healing as you search for answers.
Asking For Help During Hard Times
Community is such a
huge part of healing. It's not just the
science and the protocols, but it's also the people and support behind
you. In my own story, I recognize this
so much. My environment and what I was
consuming (and who from) on a day to day basis impacted my well-being as a
whole drastically.
Mandy is a bit like
me in that she's not naturally the type of person who is comfortable asking for
help. So, you can imagine the fact that
she can't even clean her own house is tough!
As if not being able to work a full-time job like everybody else wasn't
hard enough to come to terms with, she literally asks herself what the main
thing is she has to do in a day and then she has to budget her energy around
that. Recording a podcast, getting out
to the chiropractor and picking a couple things up at the grocery store is a
good day, doing significantly more than she used to be able to do.
The best way for
someone to support Mandy is to actually be present, not just offer support, but
to actually show up and help her with the practical things...like cleaning her
house. When someone is willing to help in
this way, it really does show ridiculous love and support.
One super hard part
of chronic fatigue and other illnesses like anxiety and depression is that it's
not something that you see on the outside.
Sure, maybe your husband can tell you you're struggling more from your physical
appearance, but the majority of the time, you look like you're fine. And this just shows the importance of telling
people what you're going through or asking someone for help and support,
because unless you do say something, or unless someone is in on what's going
on, you can't ever expect someone to fully show up for you.
I can relate to this
all too well - recently, I have been struggling with a hormone imbalance on my
trying-to-conceive journey. And when
your progesterone drops really low like mine did, you can fall into a hormonal
depression...something I've never experienced in my life until now. It just really reinforced for me that while I
looked fine, inside it was such a different story. I felt like I wasn't fulfilling the
relationship roles in my life that I serve: wife, daughter, sister, and so
on. So hearing Mandy's story about
asking for help was an 'aha!' moment for me...any type of internal struggle in
suffering or pain can't be done alone.
The lesson in all of
this is to not assume because you never really never know what
someone's actually experiencing. When we
choose to not assume and choose to seek understanding more than anything,
that's when we can really serve people and love people well. And serving and helping people deal with
similar things is something Mandy is so grateful that she gets to do now. She gets to help people the way she wishes someone
would have been able to 3.5 years ago for her.
I love how she also expresses her gratitude for actually having the
illness. As horrible as it's been, God
knows that He has brought her purpose out of pain.
How To Eat Intuitively When You Have Restrictions In
Your Diet
It's no secret that
most women have ups and downs in their journey and relationship with food and
Mandy is no different. In High School,
she started to struggle with food in that she began counting calories and while
she never had an eating disorder, she was definitely disordered in her
food-mindset for a while. She still has
to be really careful not to lean too far into Orthorexia; an extreme obsession
of eating pure, clean and healthy food.
Mandy has found many
times she's restricted food unnecessarily on her healing journey. It is really hard when you're dealing with
health issues because you're constantly researching what to eat, what not to
eat and all of a sudden there are all these rules and health foods that you're
told might actually be harming your health.
And it can really start to snowball when you let fear creep in.
In nutritional
therapy, people are often put on elimination diets, which can be totally
amazing and helpful to allow you to remove something for a season so you can
slowly add it back in and see how/if you react to it. But what Mandy did far too often was restrict things because she thought it was better to be safe than sorry. She believes that when you unnecessarily
restrict, even if you're not in an unhealthy, disordered mindset entirely in
that moment, it can be a very slippery slope.
When your focus is
on healing, getting your energy back and finding health again, you're less
likely to let restrictions feel like dieting.
It's about the intention behind why you are or aren't eating something. Through this healing journey, Mandy actually
improved her relationship with food. She
was learning about nutrition and how food really impacts our bodies. One example of this was her fear of sugar
early on. Like many of us, we think that
sugar can make us fat, create inflammation or even maybe lead to cancer. So, she restricted sugar unnecessarily. Through her studies, she learned that some
natural sugars can actually be beneficial for your immune system, like raw
honey and pure maple syrup. And since
eating these, she feels good!
All whole foods can
be really beneficial in the right amounts.
When we are healing or even just trying to have a healthy relationship
with food; intuitive eating and rejecting diet culture, it's important to focus
on all the things we CAN eat and include in our diets rather than what we
can't. It can take some time to find
your groove in intuitive eating, but what Mandy would suggest is to just go
back to those whole, nutrient dense foods that are properly prepared and eat
mostly those things. While proper
nutrition is incredibly complicated when you study it, it's actually also
extremely simple when it comes down to the main principles: go back to basics
and eat whole, real foods. And remember
that stressing over what you're eating is worse than eating the food that you
think could be bad for your body.
When you're having
to restrict certain foods because of your health issues, remember that there is
a difference between a healthy diet and a healing diet. When you are
healing, you will follow a healing protocol/nutritional protocol/healing
diet. And when you are no longer trying
to heal, you no longer need this diet/protocol.
As a healthy person, you don't need to be restricting foods; you should
be including as many nutrient dense foods in your life as you can.
So, ask yourself: am
I in a season of needing a healing diet right now or do I just need to focus on
a broader healthy diet?
Personal Boundaries And Managing Energy
Whether or not she's
dealing with chronic illness, Mandy is chasing freedom in setting boundaries
and managing her energy. For her, this
means saying 'no' to good things, and 'yes', the most important things. It can be really hard to say 'no' to some of
those good things that come up especially where it might be an
opportunity to connect, encourage, and serve in some way. But in this season, Mandy has to
give her energy to the things that are going to make the biggest impact. And when she chooses those and says 'no' to
the other things, that's when she experiences more freedom.
To Mandy, chasing
freedom means giving up things she loves for things she loves even more. God blesses that intentionality when you say
'yes' to what is truly going to make a difference. If you say 'yes' to everything, you're gonna
be asked to do more things because you create an expectation of
yourself, and doing all the things, all the time is not always where God needs
us.
The way that we
choose to spend our time and energy matters so much. Part of managing energy well can be to give
your energy to the most important things first and then use what's left. That's why it can be important to spend the
first part of your morning with Jesus, in the Word, to set you up well for the
day ahead.
If you want to go
follow Mandy, or find more information on her nutritional therapy, go check out
her Instagram @mandymeehan
and her YouTube Channel: Mandy Meehan.
She's working on a website that she'll have up pretty soon too!
P.S. Happy
2020! I love New Year's so much...it's
the best time to take stock and set new intentions for the year ahead. If you need support with your food freedom or
health journey, then remember, that is EXACTLY why I created the Freedom Method
Mentorship. Registration is closing
SOON (we start on 6 Jan) - it's the only way to work with me in 2020 for health
coaching. I only have 2 spots left!!! The 6-month walk together is super high touch
and a serious commitment where we dive into your freedom journey together. Let me join you on your walk of faith, and
experience massive transformation and find true freedom in your body and mind -
for more information or to register, click here. If you have any questions, shoot me a DM on
Instagram or email me info@trainertanner.com. I'm holding space for conversations over the
next week to make sure that these last 2 spots are filled with women who are
ready, who are excited, who know that transformation is coming, and who are
ready to walk through the freedom method with open arms.
If you liked this
post, check out episode 79 of my podcast - The
Chasing Freedom Show. You can
find it on Spotify, iTunes,
or SoundCloud. If
you love the episode, screenshot and share it with me on social media @trainertanner
#chasingfreedom.
Xo,
Tan
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