Whatever it took to get the magazine out and delivered – I did it. I had to.
You can put your body under tremendous stress and bounce back with renewal and recovery only for so long, and then problems present themselves. What many people (especially younger ones) don’t realise is that each time you hurt yourself via stress damage without sufficient recovery it ages the body prematurely. Cells get destroyed and the damage can carry forward. This leads to premature energy burn-out, inflammation, and metabolic issues.
Despite eating a healthy diet with other good lifestyle practices (no smoking etc), I was looking haggard and older than my years – and feeling even worse with the development of heart arrhythmia and extreme fatigue. I would get dizzy easily and my blood pressure plummeted to very low levels. I couldn’t figure out why it was, with my healthy diet, avoidance of chemicals and handful of vitamin pills every day, that I felt so sick, so bad, so low in energy.
To get blood pressure moving upwards with a more stable heart beat I would have to rev up with aerobic exercise or caffeine to produce more adrenalin. I had a terrifying feeling that I needed to stay revved up or my heart might completely splutter and conk out. This meant not allowing myself to get down to a super-relaxed state (the only state actually for good recovery to take place). It was almost a constant ‘fight or flight’ sympathetic nervous system activation and a recipe for fast burnout and exhaustion.
Small white patches started growing on my skin as my body began to attack and kill my melanin cells. This is called ‘vitiligo,’ an auto-immune disorder associated with Hashimoto’s Hypothyroidism. Michael Jackson also had it. Vitiligo affects 0.5 to 1% of the world’s population. However hypothyroidism is even more common with researchers estimating that 20-50% of people in a standard population have hypothyroid (underperforming thyroid) condition. Whether they also develop vitiligo depends a lot on genes.
One day the proverbial straw broke the camel’s back. I was rushed to hospital with a suspected heart attack as my heart arrhythmia escalated, and I got a clammy chest tightening that sent alarm bells ringing.
After being put through the gamut of cardiac tests, the cardiologist told me that my heart muscle was in good order; I had no blockages in my arteries and that I ‘just’ had an electrical system glitch.
This electrical glitch caused the left ventricle of my heart muscle to twitch at random like an involuntary twitch in the eye or a cramp in the leg. He told me that there were no medical drug options because my blood pressure was so low and to, “Put up with it like everyone else.” He said, “You would be surprised how many people have this problem.”
I left the hospital with mixed feelings: On the one hand I was relieved there were no drug options for me, but on the other, I felt frustrated at a lack of solutions to the problem. I wanted to understand why this was happening and how I could fix it. Why wasn’t I in control? I had to find the answers. So, I started to plugged in all the symptoms for internet searches where I found a number of books and research articles about magnesium deficiency and heart rhythm disturbances.
I must thank the pioneering magnesium researchers who had a significant influence on my understanding of this life-supporting master mineral, including Dr Mark Sircus, author of Transdermal Magnesium; Dr Carolyn Dean, author of The Magnesium Miracle; and scientists Mildred Seelig and Andrea Rosanoff, who wrote The Magnesium Factor.