Episode 1 – Welcome to the Chronic Fatigue and Burnout Recovery Podcast

Show Notes

Welcome to the Chronic Fatigue and Burnout Recovery Podcast. Your host, Anna Marsh, introduces herself and explains what you can expect from listening to the show. Anna is a Trauma-informed Functional Medicine Nutritional Therapist who has worked in the health industry for over two decades.

However, when her health began to circle the drain, and she was eventually diagnosed with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS),
Anna realised there was so much she didn’t know she didn’t know about health generally and fatigue specifically.

In her fatigue recovery journey, she realised there weren’t many valuable podcasts dedicated to fatigue recovery. 

The Podcasts that did exist were from people who had recovered but didn’t have the scientific background OR those who had scientific knowledge but not a personal experience of the debilitating effects of fatigue.

Then there were those with a nervous system-centred background but without a deep understanding of where Functional Medicine meets trauma-informed care.

Anna’s goal for this podcast is to offer insight from a deep understanding of the experience from a Functional Medicine and Trauma-informed lens while integrating her personal experience overcoming the condition.

Useful links:

Website: https://annamarsh.co.uk/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/anna_marsh_nutrition/

Fatigue Recovery Quiz: https://app.annamarsh.co.uk/quiz

Welcome to the chronic fatigue and burnout recovery podcast.

I am your host Anna Marsh, a trauma-informed Functional Medicine and nutritional therapist, which I appreciate is a bit of a mouthful. 

I just wanted to create this introduction episode today to talk to you a little bit about the podcast, and a teeny tiny bit about myself, so that you can know what to expect. And if it’s appropriate to keep on listening, I’ll be sharing a much more detailed account of my own fatigue recovery story in the next episode, but for today, I thought I would keep it brief and just share some of the bare bones back. 

So I have been practicing now as a nutritional therapist since 2009. Over time, I’ve also done my certification with the Institute of functional medicine.

Although my master’s degree is in personalized nutrition, I am South African, if you can hear a little tinge of my accent. I grew up in South Africa and did my first degree in South Africa, in what was called Human Kinetics and Ergonomics, which I usually say to people is the same as Sports Science and Biochemistry. 

I have a lot of training in the human body and its workings, including working with clients.

Despite all this experience and knowledge, I was not invincible. In 2019, I hit my health rock button or my energy crisis. I was diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome. When I was diagnosed, I began to search for more information. 

Of course, I was at an advantage because I already had a background in health and was already connected to various people, practitioners, and thinking frameworks. 

So maybe it was a little bit easier to find the information, but I found having a lived experience of chronic fatigue. Combining that with what I knew from professional practice made my professional practice so much more powerful. It helps me understand that unless you’ve lived through the trauma of having a chronic illness or burnout, it’s tough to understand what that’s like. 

And yet when I was searching for podcasts and information to help me understand the condition better and why I couldn’t exercise and keep on getting this post-exertional malaise and all the extra challenges that we experienced that we don’t fully understand and know how to address. There were hardly any podcasts available on chronic fatigue syndrome specifically. 

I found that what was available was either created by practitioners sharing information about the condition without a lived experience or those who had experienced the condition but didn’t necessarily have the practical scientific and biochemistry knowledge I needed.

The shared information was surface-level, and I wanted to go deep. So that’s what I hope this podcast will share with you. 

I hope this podcast will bring a combination of that lived experience and a deeper scientific understanding of what’s going on in your body and how you can address it. Not just the basic stuff at the surface level, but understanding the nuance and complexity of what may be happening in your body. 

Since having this chronic fatigue experience and sharing it online, I have attracted clients who are also going through the same thing. And I have the privilege and the honor of working with women with all types of fatigue conditions, whether burnout, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome, and all the nuances in between. And I run many tests on my clients and see many test results. 

There are similarities in every case, yet every case can be unique and need its approach. And therefore, my job is to tease out what each person needs based on how they’re doing because sometimes we can also need the same things. But our nervous system isn’t necessarily ready to implement and apply those things at that specific time.

So really, what I’m trying to say and communicate is that there’s a broad range of interventions we can use to support burnout. We can use it to help with chronic fatigue, syndrome, and other complex energy conditions. 

Different things work for other people. Some things are inappropriate for some people. And some things are universal. 

Nevertheless, we all want to pay attention to some items as we work towards better health, more energy, thriving, and aliveness. 

That is why I hope this podcast will bring a combination of science, the nuance within science, and lived experience perspective. 

Finally, something I haven’t touched on yet, which is the trauma-informed piece, is also combining this with an understanding of the nervous system and how we need to work within the capacity of the nervous system to make the interventions required to heal and become fully well and fully thrive. 

I hope you enjoy the journey with me. I have done podcasts before with a co-host, but this is my first time as a solo host. It feels weird sitting here talking to myself. I hope to bring you some great content over the next few weeks, months, and hopefully years. 

And I would love it if you could subscribe to the podcast. The intention is to release a weekly episode. So you can get that in your app, inbox, or wherever these things go weekly. 

Leave a review if you’d like the content because podcasts are generally found and ranked based on reviews and downloads. 

So if you are enjoying what I’m sharing, leaving a review helps other people find these podcasts, and then the podcasts can help them, too. So that is everything for me today. 

In the next episode, I’ll talk a lot more about my personal story as we kick off all the information and everything to come. 

I’ll see you in the next episode.