The Capacity to Begin
This post is part of Sheryl's August 2026 Writing Prompts for People with Chronic Illness and Disabilities. My posts usually begin as a stream of consciousness spoken into a Word document, then I sort through the wall of text until the shape becomes clear. Writing from prompts is new to me, so this challenged my process, or maybe my lack of one.
The Choice
In 2019, I wasn’t deciding between diets. I was deciding what I had the energy to attempt.
The year before, I’d been circling the usual suspects: Wahls Protocol, fasting-mimicking diet, time-restricted eating, intermittent fasting.
Every approach came with conviction, and I didn’t have the bandwidth. When you’re already depleted, cost-benefit calculations drift into analysis paralysis.
Then things got worse. A lot worse than I imagined they might.
Flare intensity, duration, and frequency escalated. Unabated pain everywhere. Loss of capacity that looked a lot like disability. My world kept shrinking, becoming increasingly confining. A kind of weight that not only drags you down but makes it hard to maneuver and breathe.
The kind of steady depletion that settles into the body before you even notice it happening. Then you're just in the middle of it. The loss and longing for a previous life. Grieving the life you may never have.
I needed to do something. Anything.
Fielding the Options
Everything competed for attention, each protocol presented as decisive. If you’re stuck in that noise, it’s real.
I don’t have a specific answer for what’s right. I still don’t. Bodies, conditions, medications, and circumstances vary too much for that. If any of these sound worth exploring, further reading and resource links are at the bottom.
Wahls Protocol: A paleo-style, high-vegetable elimination framework that grew out of one doctor’s progressive MS story.
Fast Mimicking Diet (FMD): Valter Longo’s five-day, low-calorie, low-protein cycle designed to imitate a prolonged fast.
Intermittent Fasting (IF): An umbrella term for patterns like alternate-day and Ramadan-style fasting.
Time-Resricted Eating (TRE): Eating within a consistent daily window, grounded in circadian rhythm research and linked to better sleep, reflux, and metabolic markers in real-world and early study data.
All of them had potential. The question was what I could actually carry.
Safety Note: If you’re considering any of these approaches, especially with a serious chronic condition, talk with your clinician first. Active flares, low BMI, adrenal or thyroid issues, and Type 1 diabetes are common red flags in the literature.
No Fasting, At Least Not at First
Fasting protocols assume you can absorb a short-term dip in energy in exchange for longer-term repair. I couldn't. I was already running at a significant deficit, and the day-to-day was already draining. An exhaustion that never really lifts, like dense permanent fog that just sits there.
Additional dips were a non-starter. For me it came down to baseline caloric and functional reserves, the capacity to take a hit and still go to work.
TRE didn't ask me to go without. It asked me to define when I ate. It met me where I was, not where I might need to be to attempt it. No "fasted" or "failed." No orthodoxy or identity in it, just timing.
Timing helped. The anchoring came from hiking, not something new. It was the same thing the trail always gave me long before diagnosis. Breath, pace, and the ground under me, regardless of what the rest of my body is doing that day.
These days I do use intermittent fasting occasionally, for specific reasons and with real caution. It's a bodily stressor, and I take it seriously in the context of a chronic condition.
What Changed, What Didn’t
The scale moved and I felt slightly better. Same foods, meals, and groceries. The only variable was timing.
Over three to four months, my weight went from the mid-220s to the mid-180s. The narrower window reduced overall intake, cut snacking, and reduced late-night eating.
Still, no meaningful pain or flare relief. TRE by itself didn’t touch disease activity, but it cleared enough space to start asking better questions.
Once I had some cognitive space, I started looking elsewhere: nutrients, deficiencies, and gut health.
Drug-Induced Nutrient Depletion
Long-term medication use can deplete specific nutrients, which is a well-documented pharmacological effect. Corticosteroids can affect calcium and vitamin D balance, and other common medications can reduce levels of nutrients like vitamin B12 or magnesium.
As I started addressing both baseline nutrition and medication-related depletion, there was a noticeable shift a few months later. Less fatigue and slightly reduced flare intensity.
Not a dramatic turnaround. Enough of a shift to keep looking.
The Gut Question
Of everything I layered in, gut-focused changes produced the clearest improvements I personally noticed.
Weight continued dropping, eventually to 165, and energy improved in a way earlier steps hadn’t achieved. I was still overweight, but more focused on how I felt day to day.
A growing body of research links gut microbiota and autoimmune activity. Patterns of dysbiosis, such as reduced diversity and increased intestinal permeability. It shows up across conditions like rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, and MS.
For me, it was another layer.
Not the answer, part of rebuilding the floor.
Around the Block to the Trail
None of these changes in isolation created a dramatic turning point. Capacity returned in fragments, a kind of restoring that wasn’t visible at first, until it was. A slow trickling stream disappearing into a wall of rock, then appearing on the other side with momentum.
By 2020, gentle movement was back on the table. At one point, I could hardly manage the stairs to my front door. For many people navigating chronic illness, getting outside and walking around the block is a negotiation with real constraints. For some, it's not an option.
In 2024, I was hiking again. Not cured, not in remission, still flaring.
Hiking was movement, nervous system regulation, and awareness. It brought clarity on what I wanted from the capacity I had.
Somewhere between the 220+ pounds and the trail, the goal shifted. It became less about managing disease and more about quality of life.
Still Here
I was catching up with a friend at the dog park this past weekend. We talked about what the last eight months have looked like: the decline, the loss of capacity, the prolonged flares.
How I went from neighborhood walks to hiking five or six days a week on challenging terrain, then back to two days a week if I'm lucky enough to get out the door at all. Doing mostly level-ground walks in an urban park.
What I've done over the last five or so years is a grind most people in my circumstance probably wouldn’t choose. It comes with real stressors, and some have likely contributed to the increase in disease activity I’m dealing with now.
Whether I can slow disease progression or get better is hardly the point anymore. That stopped being a calculation once I got back to hiking in 2024.
These days, TRE, nutrients, gut work, training, and hiking are less about optimizing for remission. They’re about staying engaged with the life I have.
I told my friend it’s less about just being alive and more about holding aliveness, and to mind those are two distinctly different things. That I’m probably going to ride this until the wheels come off. And then I'll make different choices.
She said something to the effect of:
"Of course you are, that’s who you are. But maybe consider some different wheels?"
I’m still pondering that one.
Everyone’s circumstances and priorities are different. I don't share what I do to flex, or as an argument for how anyone should negotiate their life.
It’s simply the path I’m choosing to walk with the body I have.
→ Share this with someone who could use another trail marker.
More on the way → Subscribe free for new posts delivered by email.
Further Reading & Resource Links
→ Rhonda Patrick: Time-Restricted Eating
→ Dr. Jason Fung: Intermittent Fasting
→ Valter Longo: Fast Mimicking Diet
→ Dr. Terry Wahls official site
→ Intermittent fasting and autoimmune disease
→ Gut microbiome and autoimmune disorders
→ Drug-induced nutrient depletion
Thank You
To Sheryl at A Chronic Voice for creating and fostering a community that brings together perspectives on chronic illness both different from and similar to my own. It's part of what inspired this series, to contribute something alongside those voices.
My writing sits at the intersection of trauma-informed chronic illness, nervous system regulation, and the ways nature and time outdoors can support healing. Most posts aim to spark contemplation through experience and recognition.
Connecting to the parts of the human condition and the patterns beneath illness.
The Trail Provisions series emerged as a natural progression of that. I also wanted to share what I've learned from a decade of applying scientific curiosity to my own circumstances, sorting signal from noise.
A living resources page:
S. Rolling
← Back to Trail Provisions
* Peer reflection, not medical, nutrition or therapy advice. Your body is yours. What works for me may not work for you. *
Member discussion