How to take health into your own hands

What two decades of getting my own health back and helping hundreds of clients doing so has taught me.

Everyone begins their health journey at a different starting point. Some feel that they are getting older and look at preventing decline or getting their youthful energy back. Others are preparing for athletic competitions, aiming to enhance their performance and optimize their recovery. Again, others are very sick and try to solve the puzzle of getting their health back together.

For me it had been the latter. In years of competitive endurance sports in my youth, I kept pushing through increasingly frequent strep throat infections with several courses of antibiotics per year. At the same time, I slept very poorly, suffered from anxiety, and consumed a rather poor diet, all while trying to somehow keep up a high level of performance (which, no wonder, declined continuously).

After starting university, adding a demanding law study including a gap year at Oxford University, my energy levels tanked further. I stopped exercising, except for snowboarding, which kept adding whiplash accidents into the mix. When starting to see doctors for my extreme exhaustion, nobody could tell me what was wrong until eventually, my body gave up completely.

Years of seeing any doctor or naturopath imaginable followed. The span went from the most prestigious medical institutions in Germany to underground shamans treating me in Australian parking lots (where we had been testing whether a warmer climate would make any difference – spoiler: it didn’t). Nothing helped – in fact, many treatments made things worse.

A year or so later, after another round in an IV clinic which provided a tiny plus in energy, I got myself into a psychosomatic clinic to see if working through the years of forcing my body to perform despite its brutal decline would add another piece of the puzzle. What it did was giving a spark of a new perspective. A spark that lit a fire of radical ownership of the situation.

Nobody could help. Nothing had helped. I have to help myself.

Taking full responsibility

I started looking. Putting every fraction of a day’s energy into research. At that time, functional medicine and biohacking was getting increasingly popular in the US. Finding resources from these fields and people that had been deciphering their biology gave a new sense of confidence. The confidence that everything in the body can be healed.

Months and years of research, education and qualification followed. Tons of trial and error. Dozens of labs and measurements. And tens of thousands of euros spent.

Taking health into my own hands meant becoming the CEO of my mind and body. Addressing all systems that had been broken, working on my mindset and nervous system and showing up every day doing so. Finding root causes, changing my environment and providing everything my body needed to heal.

Starting with the basics

For most people and also for me personally, this started with the basics:

1. Establishing a super clean, nutrient-dense diet and continuously adapting and improving it to this day. I internalised the notion of “you are what you eat” (to be more precise: what your gut absorbs). The lever here is immense: every cell of your body consists of the raw material that you provide via your diet. The choice is yours – for example, do you want your mitochondrial membranes to be composed of highly processed, oxidized seed oils or evolutionary compatible, healthy, as well as anti-inflammatory fats that optimize energy production? Moreover, food is a signal. It can tell your body to prosper and heal or to get sick and inflamed. Going deeper here could and does fill books.
2. Prioritizing and optimizing high-quality sleep. Without proper sleep, the body cannot regenerate. The importance of this cannot be overstated. While in today’s society short sleep is being glorified and connected to productivity, it in fact makes you weak and sick in the long run. Diving deeply into and addressing the topics of circadian rhythm, sleep hygiene, cortisol, neurotransmitter metabolism and other related topics has helped me triple my deep sleep, double my REM-sleep and drastically increase my rejuvenation at night.
3. Addressing the body’s stress and autonomous nervous system. This is another fundamental when it comes to healing: nature designed our stress system very cleverly over thousands of years. It is designed to respond to short-term stressors, such as predators, a chase, or a fight-flight situation very rapidly and with extreme vigilance. For the last century however, this ancient system has been exposed to an environment that has been becoming exponentially faster. Due to constant availability, deadlines, societal pressures etc., stress has become the new norm. For many of us, this system designed for short-term stressors now gets triggered chronically and we find ourselves in "fight or flight" mode for very long periods of time, sometimes even permanently. Biologically, the body, brain, and psyche take a massive toll from this. It is impossible to heal in this state and addressing it has been a fundamental part in getting my health back.
4. Time in nature, adequate sunshine, gentle (or, if your health allows, more intense) movement, grounding. Those seemingly profane things can have a huge impact on our health. Next to being biochemical beings (think for example enzymes, hormones, peptides…), we are also physical beings. Albeit this hasn’t been addressed in the biohacking and functional medicine space too much yet (which is changing, luckily), to my healing it has been crucially important. Take for example natural sunlight: while some people fear every bit of tan they might obtain, getting adequate amounts of sun is fundamental for our body to be healthy. Its health benefits are so numerous, it is hard to put them in a nutshell. But let’s just briefly take the famous Vitamin D, which our body could not produce without UVB hitting the skin. In our body, this hormone alone has countless functions, and many systems cannot work properly without healthy amounts of it. Or take the sun’s infrared wavelengths which have so many healthy functions, that I like to call them “essential nutrients for our body battery”. However, the list is far, far longer.
5. Supplementing the basics. Why? Even though I generally and fully agree with the notion “food first”, our modern time requires for almost everyone to at least supplement with high-quality basics. This mainly has two reasons: first, our foods contain less micronutrients as our soils are getting increasingly depleted of them, even if you eat mainly organic, seasonal, as well as regional (which is by far the best option you can choose in my opinion). Second, our high-paced, modern lifestyle with all its little stabs on our biology increases our bodies’ needs for vital nutrients. So, what do I consider as basics? For my clients and me personally, I would at least subsume Omega 3 EPA and DHA, Magnesium, Iodine, as well as Vitamin D3, at least in winter and ideally combined with K2 and A, under this category. Depending on lifestyle and diet, others could become basics, too. As always with supplementation, aim for high-quality, third-party tested, trustworthy brands. Also, it is best to check your status via lab work and supplement accordingly. For the above basics however, it is also possible to take low to moderate doses without testing and still get their benefits.

Those are the fundamental basics. Without having those set, it will be hard for anyone to achieve optimal or even good health. Hence, while addressing them in my own life, I recommend all my clients to get those in order, as is possible with their lifestyle. If their lifestyle does not allow it, I recommend they change their lifestyle. For most, this helps tremendously or even solves all problems already.

Prevention is easier than healing

However, if a certain threshold of dysfunction has been reached (as had long been the case for me), addressing the basics alone is an important start, but might not suffice in getting one’s health back.

At this point, it is important to highlight the importance of preventing vs. curing. The former is so much easier than the latter. Hence, I recommend taking care of your body as much as you can (without obsessing) while you’re still healthy. This means sticking to the basics above. Getting regular, functional check-ups – looking under “the hood of your car” once or twice a year. Being mindful and not ignoring first symptoms or warning signs our body is sending us. We are great at ignoring way too many of those and push through. Certainly, I had a Master’s degree in this discipline.

Once chronic disease has started and perpetuated, it is much harder getting optimal health back. Here, advanced strategies such as more complex functional medicine, biohacking or modern therapies are often needed to bounce back. Also more, sometimes much more time.

When deeper healing is needed

For me and some of the people I work with, this meant diving into the following advanced health strategies (note: if you are happy with the basics and don’t feel the need to dive into more complex medical topics you can skip this part and finish with the conclusion):

1. Structural integrity, especially cranio-cervical health. If one was to ask which factor has been the root cause tying all my symptoms together, I would probably choose this one: cranio-cervical instability. This area of the body is pretty much the bottleneck of our human physiology. A little protected part, bringing together crucial parts and functions such as blood flow to and from the brain, our brain stem, our nervous system, our spinal cord and vertebrae. For me, a decade of snowboard accidents had heavily damaged this area resulting in severe cranio-cervical instability, vagus nerve and jugular vein compression. The biochemical and physiological implications of such damage are vicious. Getting ahead of this can be very complex. For me, it meant travelling to the US several times to get more than a dozen of ligament injection therapies as well as a surgery. The process is still ongoing but has brought great results already. However, for more “normal” problems in this area such as imbalances or subluxation, seeing a competent osteopath does help a lot of people significantly.
2. Optimizing gut health. This again could and does fill books. Even Hippocrates coined this area with his famous quote: “all disease begins in the gut”. While I would not fully agree to that, its importance can hardly be overstated. Our guts are suffering from our modern diets and lifestyle and are certainly playing a part in most modern disease. From a therapeutic perspective, however, a significant part of healing can be achieved through sticking to the basics above. If this does not bring the results needed, it is worth getting accurate gut testing and looking into the areas of microbiome, gut barrier integrity (“leaky gut”), SIBO, gut motility, and vagus nerve function. Problems in these areas are common. For me and many of my clients, addressing these helped with digestion, inflammation, brain fog, as well as immune function tremendously.
3. Immune function / chronic infections. At least since 2020, these are widely popular topics. As long as our bodies are strong and healthy, our immune systems are usually keeping infections at bay. When there is weakness and dysfunction (think stress, poor diet, toxins, etc.), our immune system might start losing this arm’s race and open some doors to bacteria, viruses, or fungi. When I was a kid, I had been diagnosed with Lyme disease. Later, with the strep infections, Epstein-Barr virus followed. As my health was continuously deteriorating, these kept being active and likely caused a host of problems. Only when I brought my energy metabolism and immune system back online, I could address those with the help of herbal antimicrobials and other therapies. As far as I can tell, this might be the case for many chronically ill people.
4. Detoxing the environment, food intolerances, and mast cells. We are living in a soup of environmental toxins. Some of those are deemed save below certain levels yet nobody knows what the combination of thousands of toxic chemicals does to our bodies. Many of my clients are highly sensitive to an array of substances. Their immune system goes haywire. While it needs to be rebalanced on a deeper level, it certainly helps cleaning up the environment around you. Some examples would be organic food, natural cosmetics, non-toxic cookware, filtered or glass-bottled water, air-filtration and non-native EMF mitigation.
5. Advanced supplementation. This is often needed to provide an extra boost and help the body function until it is back in balance (“homeostasis”). However, as especially in complex cases supplements can backfire, I recommend working with an experienced functional medicine practitioner who is also checking your lab work. For me, I closely pay attention to keep all my vitamins, minerals, amino- and fatty acids in optimal ranges. Moreover, I optimize my energy metabolism with mitochondrial compounds as well as support my gut with targeted pro- and prebiotics. To keep neuroinflammation at bay, I use specific polyphenols and deploy certain amino acids to support neurotransmitters. Sometimes, I do also use IVs. There’s more – yet this would break the boundaries of this article.

Conclusion

Now, please don’t feel overwhelmed by the last part. Taking health into your own hands is absolutely possible and for 90% of people comprises sticking to some very doable basics. The results can be tremendous. If more is needed, do not lose hope. Take ownership. Start small and work your way up. Ideally, get support from an experienced functional medicine practitioner who helps you set up your healing path. Then, one step at a time, regain your health and come back stronger.