I understand you contracted some parasites and took a long time to fully heal them. How long did it take for you to finally get back to yourself?

Chris Kresser:  First of all, to be clear, after that experience, I didn’t just return to where I was before that. I reached a new state of equilibrium that was different than where I was before, but I have no idea. I mean, this is part of the thing that we need to help our patients with. Say someone in my situation, they go traveling. They’re in the early 20s and kind of in the prime of their health or at least that’s what it should be. It’s not always that way. We have a lot of patients in our early 20s who aren’t feeling that well, but I was feeling great, and I got sick. I am sick for many years after that, and it takes me a long time to recover my health. Maybe by the time I’m 30 or in my early 30s I’m feeling much better again. If I then think being healthy is actually equivalent to how I felt when I was 22 before I went on that trip and got sick, I’m almost certainly going to be disappointed. Even if nothing had happened and I had gone on a trip and gotten that parasite, I undoubtedly would feel different at 32 than I felt at 22. Things happen depending on our diet, lifestyle, and behavior choices, and we are also just getting older. Health is a very dynamic process, and it’s always changing, so I think we have to encourage our patients to remember that. We just we need to deal with what’s in front of us and not refer so much to the past and how we might have felt in the past and more to how we want to feel in the present. Also just expanding the definition of health further, as I have talked about elsewhere, to not be so much even about symptoms or lack of symptoms and more about what you’re able to achieve and accomplish in your life and your experience of yourself and of the world around you. I think that’s a more inclusive definition of health. But in terms of people who are doing a lot of treatment and not improving, generally to me as a practitioner, that suggests that we haven’t found the problem. It certainly can suggest that we have found the problem, but the treatment isn’t working. That’s a real possibility, but it either means that the treatment is not effective and we need to keep searching for treatment, or it means that the diagnosis is incorrect. That’s just something to keep in mind with that kind of situation.