I have discussed the fact that I suffer from chronic fatigue and that I have not found anything to help me avoid crashing and sleeping the greater part of two days.

I have discussed this with my doctors and one of them reminded me that I had Grave’s Disease and my thyroid was irradiated and now one of the hormones that the gland produced is being supplied in a pill. The pill has x amount of thyroxine and if my body needs more, I have no gland to produce it. I struggle with this explanation as this would seem to cause day to day to tiredness which I thought was part of our biorhythm. My tiredness morphs over time into the type of tiredness that says you cannot function, you need to sleep.

Another doctor told me that it is my COPD because I am using more energy to breathe and therefore become more tired. This again does not seem to me to be an adequate explanation.

Both these explanations make sense on a day-to-day basis, but do not account for my once a month or once every two-month episodes of flat-out cannot go another step until I sleep for 24+ hours.

Fitbit calculates what it calls readiness for exercise. This readiness is based on your activity level the day before, the quality of last night’s sleep, and the variability of your heart rate over periods of deep sleep. Controversy swirls around this last measurement, but these are the measurements that are calculated to produce your score. After your score is calculated, you are given a prescriptive exercise regimen and prescriptive active or zone minutes. This means that your activity should vary day to day based upon the watch’s calculation of readiness.

Fitbit claims that it is detecting your body’s ability to recover from exercise or activity. I am going to try to follow this prescription and see if I can fend off that terrible fatigue. I am adding my own interpretation to include more sleep on the days that my score is low.

In the light of this new Fitbit information, I can see how what both doctors have told me makes sense. My body has not been able to recover and loses a little bit of readiness over time until I am totally “unready”

I will report back my findings in the very unscientific study because my intent is to help myself and others along the way.

#fatigue  #COPDfoundation  #Grave’sdisease

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