"I fought fatigue-and won!"

For years, Anna Warchalowska battled constant fatigue. Then she sussed out the culprit and the diet tweaks that restored her health!

- Danica Uzelac

What in the world is wrong with me? healthcare practitioner Dr. Anna Warchalowska worried, forcing her eyes to stay open. “I was driving on the highway and nearly fell asleep behind the wheel,” she recalls. “Panic-stricken, I carefully drove home…and didn’t leave the house for the next few days.

Barely getting by

“When I hit age 55, it was like a switch flipped. I went from having limitless energy to barely getting through my day. I had always enjoyed exercising, but suddenly, I was too exhausted to go to the gym. To boot, I started to gain weight.

“My physician did blood tests and ruled out common fatigue culprits like hypothyroidism and anemia. Without any answers, I consumed more and more of the two things that gave me a temporary energy boost: caffeine and sugar.

“I continued searching for any explanation for this enormous shift in my energy, starting with what had changed in my life. I had moved to the United States from Poland a few years earlier and developed a liking for the American diet, which contains more refined foods and sugar than I had ever eaten. And the more sugar I ate, the more I wanted! Looking back, the more I gave into my cravings, the more my energy plummeted.

“As I already knew, sugar is highly addictive, and with that in mind, I began reading food labels more carefully and noticing that sugar was hiding in so many products I loved, like ketchup and even crackers. But after attending a nutrition conference, I realized sugar itself was not the cause of my fatigue—it had to be what the sugar was feeding inside my body.”