Anti-inflammatory food + botanicals are your best allies …
When I think about inflammation, I often think of the boiling frog metaphor – stay with me on this one…
If you put a frog in boiling water, it will immediately jump out – because that’s what smart frogs do, right? But when you put it in a pot of lukewarm water and very slowly turn up the heat, the frog will hang out in its happy hot tub sipping a margarita until the water hits a rolling boil and it’s far too late.
(Disclaimer: Please don’t test this one out at home.) 🐸
In the same way, inflammation can so easily creep up on you.
It often starts as a low-level discomfort – a little fatigue, trouble sleeping, some new unexplained food sensitivity. The symptoms are mild enough, so you chalk it up to exhaustion or stress and hope that it will pass.
But it often doesn’t pass. It often gradually worsens over time. Why?
By its very nature, inflammation can become somewhat of a feedback loop.
There are many pathways for how this plays out in the body. One example is how stress causes your body to release inflammatory cytokines, and in turn, inflammation can further fuel emotional dysregulation.
Not to mention that these days, It can be so easy to fall into habits and cycles that further disconnect you from your body’s natural rhythms.
Think about the fast-paced workplace that doesn’t give you five minutes of mental quiet. What about that midday latte and sugar-laden scone that quickly turns into necessary fuel required for getting through said workday? The modern lifestyle is so steeped in feeders-of-inflammation that it usually takes some kind of proactive effort to turn off the heat.
Most people are probably walking around with low-grade inflammatory symptoms that are ignored because it’s been their normalized baseline for so long.
The body’s red-hot response isn’t the enemy here. The intelligent human body didn’t evolve for millions of years to face a constant onslaught of stress hormones, toxins, and processed foods. In efforts to keep up with the ever-quickening pace of the modern world, so many have forgotten this truth: that we have so much capacity to feel good in our bodies.
Inflammation becomes most evident when the symptoms are raging loud-and-clear. Or when there’s some sort of clear diagnosis to be placed on it (such as eczema, irritable bowel syndrome, arthritis, etc).
But it doesn’t have to get to that point. You can calm the inflammatory flames long before you’re a boiling frog.
It starts with reconnecting with the body’s natural rhythms and using food and botanicals as an ally.
We’ve made this process as simple as possible. At Farmacopia, we’ve helped hundreds return to feeling good in their bodies through the power of functional nutrition and medicinal herbs. We’ve designed the Summer Inflammation Soother as an accessible free-to-download guide to healing the gut, calming inflammation, and putting you back in control of your own health and vitality.