Your Functional Timeline and the ATMs of Health
Your Functional Timeline
and the “ATMs” of Health
When dealing with chronic illness, it’s important to investigate the “root cause” of what’s going on in the body. Often times treatments for autoimmune disease involve medications or interventions to manage or suppress symptoms, but they don’t always dig down to the root to see what’s going on at a deeper level. When we’re working in functional medicine and looking at things through a functional nutrition or functional medicine lens, it really is all about identifying the root cause of disease and understanding how your personal history influences disease expression. The most important tool in the functional medicine toolkit, in my opinion, is the functional timeline. It’s something I take all of my clients through when I work in one-on-one programs with people, and it’s almost always how we start out because we can't move forward unless we really understand where we've been in our history. This tool allows us to put our presenting illness or symptoms in context with our entire life, and helps to identify the roots of illness to move towards resolution.
Why we use the Functional Timeline
Even if we have the exact same diagnosis as someone else, or even if we don't have a diagnosis, just the same symptoms, what led us to that place is going to be very different. In order to move forward and work to support the body in a way that makes sense for you, it’s important to understand the whole tapestry of you, and what led you to where we are now so that we can move the needle forward and actually make a difference in your health.
The “ATMs” of Health
Antecedents
First, we look at antecedents. This is where we'll try to identify what factors in your life, genetic or acquired, may have contributed to the illness or condition. This can be your family history and what's going on on either branch of your family tree.
Antecedents are things like:
Prenatal exposures
Being born prematurely
If you’re a twin
Vaginal birth or C-section
Understanding what happened during our infancy and early childhood:
Early nutrition
Formula-fed or breastfed
Allergies
Dietary insufficiencies
What we want to understand with antecedents is that they’re things that have to do with our genes and our very early history, and they're not necessarily things we can control. We kind of accept that they are there, and they might give us greater insight into what's true for us. We also have to understand that our genes are not our destiny.
The study of epigenetics allows us to understand how the expression of our genes can be influenced by our environment. As we go deeper into these next steps - triggers and mediators - we begin to understand how our genes are influenced.
Triggers
Triggers can really be seen as the final tipping point leading to the expression of illness. Here’s how you can create your timeline and identify your triggers:
Grab a piece of paper.
On the left-hand side, you have your antecedents and birth that you just uncovered.
Then draw a line that goes over to the right side of the paper. Think of this as a timeline of your progression through the years. I do a really in-depth timeline for my one-on-one clients where we leave no stone unturned.
I typically section it out into childhood, teens, twenties, thirties, and so on.
As you work across this progression start to ask yourself: What was going on around that time? Going all the way back and starting in childhood, maybe you had a lot of infections and you took antibiotics a number of times for strep throat or ear infections? That can influence what's going on in the gut. Did you have Epstein Barr or Lyme or other infections for example?
Trauma and adverse childhood experiences can play a factor here too. This is something I've been thinking and talking a lot more about recently in light of everything going on in our world right now - understanding racism and systemic racism, and understanding how racism affects our bodies. And we know this is not a new issue, right? I've been learning and understanding even more recently, how things like inherited and ancestral trauma and daily microaggressions can directly affect our health.
As you move across your timeline, triggers can even be things like a big move, a job where you didn’t feel like you're really you're seen, heard, or treated well. It can be a toxic relationship or difficult family dynamics.
Sometimes these events just add up over time, and sometimes we might actually see there was a big period of stress or an event, and then we start to see the manifestation of illness or symptoms right after that. As you detail your life events you begin to understand how they contributes to this tapestry of you.
Mediators
Mediators are the factors that are ongoing and prevent the resolution of the problem that you are seeking help with in the first place. Essentially, they're what make you feel better or worse. Broadly, they can be things like diet, nutrition, food, sensitivities, and stress. I'll tell you right now the main one I’ve seen working with hundreds of people over the years is stress. To be more specific, how different stressors on our bodies and how our bodies deal with this load of stress and how that influences how we feel.
Understanding our mediators is really the heart of the work that I do with clients, and some of the questions we want to answer are:
What makes you feel better or worse?
And then how can we leverage that?
It sounds very simple, but as many of you who have gone through this process will know, it involves deeply understanding your body. That’s why the functional timeline is so useful. We can really understand your antecedents and your triggers and your unique physiology to help us know which mediators are actually going to make a difference versus which are not for you.
This is also why a standard protocol doesn’t always work because you haven't actually pinpointed which mediators are actually going to make a big difference for YOU. That's why we use tools like food and symptom journaling and different coaching techniques to understanding this and to figure out what works for you. We want to understand the roots - understanding stress, understanding your life history, understanding how you relate to the world, understanding how you relate to work. We use these pieces to figure out what's true for you, and we want to ensure that you learn how to take care of yourself for the rest of your life.
Through these processes and through functional nutrition coaching, we're able to bring a lot of this to light so you can start to feel really confident about what works for you and what doesn't. It doesn't have to feel like a mystery where you just keep second-guessing yourself and questioning what you're doing, jumping from one intervention to the next.
This helps you to get rid of all the overwhelm and noise so you can feel calm and connected to what works for you. And then you can use these tools for the rest of your life, so that no matter what season you are in, and no matter what comes at you, you know what your mediators are. You know what you need to move you forward into more vibrant health. That is the power of using functional nutrition timelining and working through a functional lens.
I really love it when we start to put these pieces of the puzzle together and clients begin to have “aha” moments! I've coached so many women and men through this process and moving from that place of feeling stuck and confused to breaking through a lot of these blocks and truly understanding how to care for your body for the rest of your life.
Check out the audio below for more information on functional timelining and the ATMs of health. If you’re giving this functional timeline practice a try leave me a note in the comments below, I’d love to support you!
If we haven't met before, I'm Christina Tidwell, founder and owner of Live Well with Christina. I'm so excited that you're here and have begun to delve into your health and wellness journey! Here at Live Well we help people with autoimmune disease take control of their health through nutrition, lifestyle shifts and personal empowerment.
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Symptoms of autoimmunity
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