LESSON 1 – WHAT IS AUTOIMMUNITY? HOW IS IT LIFESTYLE RELATED?

This first lesson is mainly about giving you a global knowledge and background on what is autoimmunity, to understand what we will be aiming for through this course.

This understanding is crucial for all the other steps to make sense. It might be looking a bit dark and gloom at first, but once we decipher it all, it will get much easier and lighter.

So hang in there and let’s dive in.

What is Autoimmunity?

Basically, autoimmunity is when the immune system attacks its own body and tissues.

But of course, this explanation is way too simple and excludes a lot of important factors. It is jumping straight to the consequences instead of looking for the source. Autoimmunity is much more complex than that.

Indeed, the immune system can mistakenly attack anything that looks foreign to him: the nervous system in Multiple Sclerosis, the thyroid gland in Hashimoto or grave’s disease, the joints in Rheumatoid Arthritis, Muscles in Fibromyalgia… and so on…

Now the question we want to ask obviously is why? Why is the immune system reacting like this in the first place?

We might have heard about the immune system being hyperactive, overreacting, overwhelmed, confused, or punching everything good or bad like a blind man. All these are true, but it tells us again how the immune system is acting not what it is really trying to do.

The truth is that the immune system is actually doing its job: protecting us. It feels under attack and fight.

So why is it attacking its own body?

At one point in time and then overtime, we have been exposed to one or multiple things that triggered an immune response. This can be a virus, a food allergy, a reaction to a chemical, a trauma, physical or emotional… or certainly a combination of all these.

These exposures can interact with our body or immune system in many different ways: some particles can look like the tissue in our body, some are damaging and modifying the gut microbiome, others are turning on or off certain genes… but overall, it creates inflammation.

Inflammation is our natural body reaction to an aggression: a cut, a virus, a stress… It is normal and good when it is acute. It is the way our body send signal to the brain and immune system that something needs to get rid of or repaired. When the inflammation is permanent, constant, never stop… that’s when there is a problem.

That is what is happening with autoimmunity. The body is in a permanent state of inflammation and never get a rest. The immune system is indeed always active and exhausted because it is always under the exposure of stressors.

The only way to stop the process of inflammation is to remove the stressors and triggers. The difficulty is that there are a lot of them, so much that we are often not even aware of what we are reacting to. We do not realize that something that we do and repeat maybe everyday is causing inflammation and keep our autoimmune condition active. The other difficulty is also that sometimes the reaction is not obvious or instant.

How can we imagine that the lipstick we are putting on everyday has a supposedly harmless particle that the skin absorbs and then go through the body. The immune system doesn’t like it and start rejecting it. That’s the inflammation. Days later, a weird pain shows up in the shoulder as the immune system think it sees this lipstick particle everywhere. That’s the autoimmune process.

This is a completely fake example just to illustrate. But would you have linked your lipstick to your shoulder pain?

As we see it is complex, there is not just one reason, and it is different from one person to another.

Autoimmunity is not something we catch one day.

It develops overtime depending for a small part on our genetics and for a big part on all the environment triggers that we have been exposed to, also called epigenetics.

Genetics are not our fate. It is what we do that turn them on or off. We need to live accordingly to our genes. Sadly, in our modern days, we have been living against them, putting them under the influence of things they are not supposed to be exposed to. With the consequence of an increase in chronic disease and autoimmune conditions.

Let’s get back into the triggers:

There are a lot of them. That does not mean we have all of them, but certainly a few and a combination of them. Again, we need to remember that they differ from one person to another, even having the same conditions.

We cannot avoid all of them, they are everywhere. But we can minimize most of them when we know what we are looking for.

-        Air pollution

-        Pesticides & herbicides

-        Heavy metals

-        Chemicals

-        Mold

-        EMF

-        Infections & viruses

-        Some medications

-        Stress & Trauma (physical & emotional)

-        Lack of movement

-        Lack of sleep

-        Food allergies

-        Imbalances: nutrients, microbiome, hormones, neurotransmitters…

These 5 last ones are both triggers and consequences, especially the very last one, but they are also the one we can act on. And it is what we are going to work on over the next lessons.

We will not take one trigger after another because we will see that there are different ways to take care of them, through food, exercises, sleep, detox… and that almost everything overlap.

Instead, we need to tackle autoimmunity in a Whole Mind-Body approach. Conventional medicine is divided into domain and body part. We have the brain on one side, the gut on the other. We have many different types of specialists.

This system is failing autoimmune conditions (and not only) because we forgot that it is all interconnected. The human body is not a superposition of body parts, it is a complex network of systems communicating and interacting with each other. Remove one and they all stop working properly, if working at all.

In that sense, we need to talk about the gut and the importance of gut health, and not only as a digestive issue.

Hippocrates, known as the Father of Modern Medicine, said “all disease begins in the gut”. Let’s turn it in a positive way: Health start in the gut.

As weird as it might sound, our intestinal tract is in direct contact with the outside world. It is through it that we ingest and absorb, but also clean and reject, what’s coming from the outside. The gut lining is a protective barrier who decide what is allowed to come through or not, what the body needs or what can harm it. This protection is assured by the gut microflora. These billions of tiny bugs in our belly all have different function and reason to be here.

Sadly, our modern life, and not only the diet, has compromised the microflora who got less and less diverse, therefore unable to protect us properly.

Not only the microflora has been compromised but also the gut lining itself.

The gut lining is made of tight junction which are the control gate for molecules to pass into the bloodstream or not. Normally, only small molecules can go through. But triggers and stressors create a leaky and inflamed gut, causing the tight junction to open more widely and let bigger molecules passing through and into the bloodstream. These bigger particles not supposed to be there are then stopped by the immune system who fight them.

If the inflammation of the gut is not stopped and then, not repaired, we end up in this cycle of an overwhelmed and exhausted immune system, leading then to an autoimmune process.

What causes leaky gut? All the triggers already listed previously and affecting autoimmunity. You see, it is not just the food or a digestive issue.

To go back into the idea of a whole mind body approach, we have to understand that the microbes in the gut are much more than just dealing with the food we are ingesting. They are messengers. They are really close to the immune system with who they communicate. They also participate in creating neurotransmitters. 80% of our neurotransmitters are made in the gut.

The Gut-Brain Axis is real and work both ways, meaning that what happens in the gut influence the brain (brain fog, fatigue…) but what happen in the brain or how we think also influence our digestion and everything else in the body.

We cannot take things separately anymore.

Final point on the gut microbiome. It influences hormones as well. Studies state that the gut microbiome plays a huge role in oestrogen regulation.

We don’t really know why autoimmunity affect more woman than man, even though we know that 80% of people with autoimmune condition are women.

But bearing in mind the important role of gut health in autoimmunity and the affect of gut microbiome on oestrogen regulation is a massive clue.

So, this was the big picture trying to synthesize what autoimmunity is and how it works. Yes, it is complex and there is a lot. It can look overwhelming or discouraging but this is why I created this course: To break it down into doable and actionable step. You will realize by the end of it, keeping in mind this whole mind-body approach, that it is actually much easier than what it seems, that it is much more common sense and logic, then hard and restrictive protocol. The hardest part is the work on yourself, and some habits change. And for this, I’m here for you, ready to help and support you in your journey.