How I beat chronic fatigue syndrome

Angela Johnson’s story started when she was in high school, a highly active student who kept up on her academic work and played sports as well as working at several jobs after school for pocket money. But by her senior year, she was stuggling with feelings of complete, overwhelming fatigue that she just couldn’t shake.

“It was like my body just decided to give up,” she says. “I felt like I was in a very vulnerable position. It got to the point where I didn’t really recognize myself anymore. I was only 17, there were all these things I wanted to do socially, and I just couldn’t keep up.”

The fact that she was mindful about her health—eating well, not following the usual sugary, highly processed, packaged, fast-food teenage diet, doing yoga and meditating—made her situation all the more puzzling. But no matter how much she refined her diet and sought out natural answers like vitamins and supplements, nothing had a long-term effect on the exhaustion that was rapidly becoming debilitating.

She was also experiencing a lot of body pain, especially joint and muscle pain. “It was like I was a 20-year-old in a 90-year-old’s body,”she says. “I would struggle to get out of bed. I would struggle to lift a kettle of water to make a cup of tea for myself. I would struggle to