If you want to feel your best this year and into the future there are five simple steps you can take to get started on your journey to better health. If you take these five steps, you can move on to fixing other issues. These simple steps are the foundation to good health for people with autoimmune disease. Taking the time to make sure you have a stable foundation can help you turn around autoimmune disease and build the health that you want. Just like when you build a house; if you don’t invest in a sound foundation, then the house is going to collapse.
In this blog post, we will make sure you have the ingredients in place to allow healing and repairing to happen. Here’s how to be healthier in the New Year and beyond.
How Much Water Should I Drink Each Day?
Drinking enough water is critical to overall health. We need enough water to have good circulation, to deliver nutrients to all parts of the body, and to make sure our detox pathways are working efficiently. After all, most of our body is made up of water.
We should be drinking about half our body weight in ounces of water per day. A lot of people struggle with drinking enough water. Sometimes, they’re drinking beverages that are more dehydrating. They are often drinking caffeine and soda or even sports drinks. Many of these are missing the benefits of water and they have unhealthy ingredients in them, too.
If you don’t like plain water, I recommend adding some flavored electrolytes. Not only is that going to make the water taste better, but it’s going to increase your hydration.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, some people might actually drink too much water. Drinking too much water dilutes sodium in the blood so that the sodium level drops. Symptoms of low levels of blood sodium mimic those of dehydration. Symptoms are: nausea, vomiting, headaches, convulsions, and brain swelling.
Adding electrolytes to water is a good practice for anyone who has a tendency to drink too much water.
Figure Out What Foods Your Body Likes
When it comes to the best autoimmune diet, there’s no single best diet for everyone. It’s different for everybody. Figuring out what foods your body likes or doesn’t like is an important first step. Otherwise, you may think you’re eating all the right foods, but in reality you are eating foods that are causing an inflammatory reaction or an immune reaction and bothersome symptoms. Figuring out what to eat is part of the picture. This is best done by trying an elimination diet, where you stop eating the offending foods. Then after a few weeks, you add each food back in- one by one. You will watch how your body reacts when you introduce each food, checking for symptoms.
You also need to figure out how often to eat. Sometimes people are eating the right foods but their eating habits are not optimal and could be causing problems. Especially in the New Year, everybody’s trying to lose weight, so a lot of times people will jump into intermittent fasting. Yet, intermittent fasting isn’t right for everyone. It should be initiated carefully. Likewise, not everybody should be eating every few hours, either. Or maybe if you’re trying to lose weight in the new year, you’re not eating as much. If you have blood sugar imbalances, not eating enough could create other problems, such as causing your blood sugar to drop too low (hypoglycemia).
You should also think about the best way to combine foods since the way you combine foods can affect how much they can raise blood sugar. Fiber, for example, can slow down glucose absorption in the blood.
Identify Forms of Stress
People think of stress as just mental-emotional, but there are also physical-chemical imbalances that can create stress in the body. Be mindful of what kinds of stress you might have in your body. You can do this even before you get labs done or talk to doctors. Consider whether you have hormonal imbalances, gut problems, or if you’re reacting to foods. Or maybe your body is low in certain vitamins and minerals. These are all forms of stress on the body.
The next step would be taking action and investigating further with the help of a functional medicine doctor. But it all starts with understanding what stress is, so you can be mindful of what kind of stress your body might be under.
Sleep and Autoimmune Disease: Timing Beats Sleep Duration
First, make sure your body is getting adequate amounts of restful sleep. When your body is in a state of rest, it can heal and repair. Another important factor is paying attention to your sleep habits. Do you stay up too late and then sleep in to recover? Researchers are now finding that people feel more refreshed if they keep the same sleep schedule. In other words, people feel better when they go to bed and wake up at a consistent time every day. Maintaining a regular sleep schedule is more important than how long you sleep, research has found.
Another factor to consider: Are you on your phone and watching TV before bed so that blue light is blocking your melatonin? If so, maybe you’re not getting a good deep sleep. This is unfortunate because sleep is one of the most important factors involved in healing rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, and other autoimmune diseases.
Get Moving: Exercise and Autoimmune Disease
For people with autoimmune disease, movement is important. Movement every day should be included in your regimen. I’m not talking about strenuous exercise or going to the gym an hour a day. Some people can’t start there and shouldn’t start there. Rather, make sure you move your body in a way that it needs. Get to know what your body likes and doesn’t like.
If you have already been consistently exercising, then try to figure out how much more intensely you can push yourself before you go too far and have a hard time recovering. If you’re just starting out or if you have rheumatoid arthritis or are in pain and fatigued, then start gently. Remember that exercise is a form of stress. We want to make sure we can give the body just enough exercise that it’s going to help calm down symptoms. We don’t want to push your body so far that it creates another imbalance or makes your autoimmune issues worse.
A good example is exercise and rheumatoid arthritis. In RA, stiffness gets better with movement. It doesn’t need to be intense exercise. In fact, a lot of people with RA should not be doing intense exercise until they’re stable. But we want to make sure they’re moving. A five-minute or 10-minute walk might help decrease inflammation, pain, and stiffness. That 10-minute walk might be way better and healthier for them than an hour at the gym. Another option for exercise and RA may be getting in a pool. Moving in water is gentler on the body than walking. You have to figure out what your body can handle.
The same goes for exercise and lupus. You want to start slowly and work your way up to what you can tolerate.
If you’re starting from scratch, no matter what autoimmune disease you have, set a goal of starting with five minutes a day of some kind of gentle movement. If that helps, next time do more as long as you can handle it without being wiped out afterward and having to recover for days. If you discover your body is having a hard time recuperating after exercise, then you’re creating more inflammation and more stress. That’s the time to back off.
Splitting up the exercise can help people who feel like they don’t have time for a workout. You can try five minutes in the morning, five minutes on your lunch break, and five minutes before bed. At the end, you’ve done 15 minutes and your body might like it a lot better because you did it in smaller bursts.
I also recommend you find a type of exercise that you like doing, so you can successfully build a regular habit. You can try different modalities such as walking, yoga, tai chi, pool exercise, stationary bicycle, and weights to see what you like and what resonates with you.
Here’s How to Build a Foundation for Good Autoimmune Health
If you do the five foundational steps I mention in this article then you can move on to fixing other issues. But if you’re not giving your body the right nutrition, you’re not giving it the rest it needs, you’re not hydrating, you’re not exercising, you won’t be able to fix other problems. You won’t be able to fix gut problems, microbiome problems, or get your immune system to calm down. You won’t be able to have your adrenals working well. Your body won’t heal or repair unless you’re implementing the five foundations of autoimmune health.
Often it helps to have a good functional medicine provider working with you to identify and resolve the foundations to good autoimmune health. That’s where the Caplan Health Institute comes into play. We can help you pinpoint an individualized approach to mastering all five foundations of autoimmune health.
The first step? Schedule a free 15-minute discovery consultation, by phone or video.
If you decide to come on board as a practice member, we can order tests and create a personalized plan to show you which strategies will work best for you. We call our patients “practice members” because they take an active role in their health. In addition, our Caplan Health Institute coaches can work with you to make sure you’re staying on track and not slipping backward. The result? You’ll feel so much better in 2026. Even better, you will start to turn off the autoimmune process so you can get back to your old self again.
For more details on diet, stress, and exercise, we recommend you read our Daily Habits That Make Autoimmune Disease Worse (and What to Do Instead) blog post.
Leave a Reply