Adrenal Fatigue

Chapter 8.

Case History: 
Fatigued from Animal Fat, Fixed by Fruit.

Mary, age 35, went to the doctor with the complaint that she was tired all the time. No matter how much rest she got, she couldn't seem to shake her fatigue. On the job at the shipping company where she worked, she never felt fully awake or alert. Mary's doctor performed a number of tests and called when he received the results. "Nothing is wrong," he said. "You're just a little overworked. You'll bounced back when he holidays have pased."

  But the fatigue persisted and steadily worsened in the New Year. This time, Mary visited an integrative medical doctor, who diagnosed her with adrenal fatigue. He was correct. However, along with a huge list of supplements to take, he instructed Mary to remove all carbohydrates and sugars from her diet, except for one green apple a day and occasionally berries. She was to stick to three meals per day, with animal protein at each, plus various vegetables. 

  At first, Mary felt a burst of energy and thought she was healing. Here's what was really going on: to compensate for the loss of sugar in her diet that had resulted in reduction of glucose in her bloodstream, her already exhausted adrenals were now overdrive and flooding her system with adrenaline. Further, eating animal protein—which naturally included fat—three times a day was burdening Mary's liver and pancreas and forcing her adrenals to pump more of their hormones to keep everything in balance. This is an example of this risk associated with a fad diet that's not backed up by true understanding of what the human body needs and how it operates as one organism. 

  After 30 days of eating this way, Mary felt a noticeable decrease in energy. The fatigue was now even worse, and it was harder than ever to drag herself to work each day. On top of this, she had an irresistible hunger for sugar; she started reaching for processed carbs and sweets from the vending machine to feed the cravings. In her bloodstream, the sugar combined with the very high animal fat levels and triggered insulin resistance. Now her adrenals started releasing even more adrenaline and reached a point of near-total exhaustion.

  At this point, an intern at Mary's company told her about how I'd helped his mom, so Mary gave me a call. Right off the bat, we removed the animal fats and protein from her diet and switched her over from three meals a day to the every-two-hour grazing technique. This kept her glucose levels active and stable and put an end to her insulin resistance. We also brought balance into her diet with sodium-rich vegetables, potassium-rich fruits , and protein-rich greens.

  Very soon, Mary was back to where she'd started when she went to see the first doctor. Within a month, she was feeling functional again.

  And within a year, Mary was full of energy. 

When I checked in with her recently, she said she'd noticed blood sugar-related fatigue in others at her company, so she and the intern had started making their co-workers afternoon smoothies—which were very popular. She said she still liked to graze and felt so much better eating the way Spirit had recommended that she only ventured off her healing diet for very special occasions. 

Healing Herbs and Supplements

• Licorice root: helps balance the body's levels of cortisol and cortisone.

• Spirulina (preferably from Hawaii): contains high levels of superoxide dismutse (SOD) and chromium, which reinforce adrenal strength.

• Ester-C: this form of vitamin C lowers inflammation and soothes adrenal glands that have become enlarged from overexertion.

• Chromium: helps balance insulin levels, and augment the strength of adrenal glands, thyroid glands, and the pancreas.

• Eleuthero (a.k.a  Siberian ginseng): enhances the body's ability to react and adapt, which helps protect the adrenal glands from overreacting to stress. 

• Schisandra: helps suppress kidney spasms, which in turn reduces adrenal gland stress.

• Ashwagandha: helps balance the production of testosterone, dehydroepiandrosterone (DHEA), and cortisol.

• Magnesium: lowers anxiety and calms an overactive nervous system, reducing adrenal gland stress.

• 5-MTHF ( 5-methyltetrahydrofolate): augments the strength of the central nervous system, which reduces strain on the adrenal glands. 

• Cordyceps: renews the strength of the gallbladder and liver so these glands can more effectively process excess cortisol in the bloodstream.

• Panax ginseng: enhances the human body's ability to react and adapt, which helps protect the adrenal glands from overreacting to stress. 

• Rose hips: lowers inflammation, soothing adrenal glands that have become enlarged from overexertion. 

• Barley grass juice extract powder: increases the hydrochloric acid in the stomach, which strengthens the adrenal glands. 

• Astragalus: strengthens the immune system and the whole endocrine system.

• Lemon balm: replenishes the nervous system and helps regulate the production of insulin.

• Rhodiola: optimizes adrenal function.


Healing Foods
   Certain fruits and vegetables either help protect your adrenal glands or speed their recovery by strengthening the nervous system, reducing inflammation, easing stress, and providing critical nutrients for adrenal function. The following are among the top foods to eat to bounce back from adrenal fatigue : sprouts, asparagus, wild blueberries, bananas, garlic, broccoli, kale, raspberries, blackberries, romaine lettuce, and red-skinned apples. 

What Not to Eat

  If you have mild adrenal fatigue, you might be set with following the others advice in this chapter. If you have a moderate to severe case, however, then until you get stronger, you'll probably need to take the temporary extra step of cutting out foods that put a strain on your adrenal glands and slow them from healing. Please note that many diet experts recommend eating a lot of animal protein. This is either because they don't realize how much fat can hide in even lean animal protein or because they think that fat content is a good thing. This protein advice can seem very convincing, so beware ; it is bad advice for anyone, and especially unhealthy if you have adrenal fatigue. The high fat strains your pancreas and liver and eventually creates insulin resistance, making it difficult for your body to maintain a stable level of glucose. . . which in turn creates a massive strain on your adrenal glands as they struggle to produce hormones to compensate.

  Diet experts also often counsel people to cut out carbohydrates from their diets. Again, this is not good and can result in strain, because your body needs carbs for energy. Following these diet trends will slow down and keep you from healing your adrenal fatigue. Take care to avoid such unproductive diets, and instead follow the sound advice in this chapter 8 to make your adrenal glands strong again.

ADDRESSING ADRENAL FATIGUE
  If considering the symptoms and scenarios described earlier in this chapter leads you to believe you have adrenal fatigue, do NOT despair. You can take a number of concrete steps, as described above and in Part IV (read below), to heal your adrenals and return them to their optimal strength. 

   If your adrenal fatigue is mild, then you might restore your health in one to three months.If it is moderate, it might take 6 to 12 months. And if it is severe, it might take one to two and a half years. other factors can affect this time span include your overall health and what's going on in your lifeㅡe.g., if you're in a state of crisis that's continuing to strain your adrenals, you'll require a lot more time to heal.  however long it takes, the sooner you get started on the road to recovery, the sooner you will start feeling better and restoring your adrenals to full health.

External Cortisol: For Emergencies Only

  If you're in a state of crisis, a quick fix is taking cortisol replacement medication. This will provide your body with extra hormones to take the place of the ones not being generated by your own under-active adrenal glands.

  While this is the treatment of choice by doctors, it is not an ideal solution, because your body needs a variety of types and amounts of hormones from your adrenal glands throughout the day to address different situations. Taking one pill in the morning is not comparable to adrenal glands that are actively reacting to your body's needs every moment.

  Also, cortisol medication is an immuno-suppressant that weakens your immune system, making you vulnerable to a host of other issues.  

So medication is, at best, a temporary fix to get you functional again . . . and buy you time to heal your adrenal glands properly using the techniques that follow.

Graze Every One and a Half to Two Hours

  Most of us eat three relatively heavy meals a day with long stretches in between. This is tough on the adrenals glands, because one and a half to two hours (1½-2 hours) after meal your bloodstream runs low in glucose, which means you've run out of the sugars you have consumed. Once your blood sugar drops, your adrenal glands are forced to produce hormones such as cortisol to keep you "running." This means that if you frequently go without eating for long stretches, you're putting your adrenals under a steady strain and not giving them a chance to recuperate. 

  Therefore, the best way to heal your adrenal glands is to eat a light, balanced meal every 90 minutes to two hours. 

  In other words, use a grazing approach to food. This is critical to knowㅡbecause diet trends right now are sending people who eat in the the opposite direction. Following the fashion on this will rob you of the opportunity to heal your adrenal fatigue.

  The grazing technique works because the frequent small meals keep your blood sugar steady throughout the day awake; and as long as your glucose is not dropping, your adrenal glands do not have to interfere. Giving your adrenal glands lots of rest allows them to devote energy to healing and restoring themselves. 

  Each of your meals should ideally contain a balance of potassium, sodium, and sugar. Understand that we're talking about natural sugars from fruit here, the type that contains critical minerals and nutrients, unlike table sugar or lactose, the sugar present in dairy. Some examples of great meals for healing your adrenals include:

• A date (potassium), two celery sticks (sodium), and an apple (fructose)

• Half an avocado (potassium), spinach (sodium), and an orange (fructose)

• A sweet potato (potassium), parsley (sodium), and lemon squeezed on kale (fructose)

Fructose, or fruit sugar, is a simple ketonic monosaccharide found in many plants, where it is often bonded to glucose to form the disaccharide, sucrose. It is one of the three dietary monosaccharides, along with glucose and galactose, that are absorbed directly into blood during digestion. Fructose is predominantly metabolized in the liver, but unlike glucose it does not require insulin to be used by the body. Diabetes is a disorder affecting the way the body produces and uses insulin and how it handles blood glucose. Insulin is essential for aiding glucose transport into cells. If you are having diabetes symptoms now, eat more fruits to lower the blood glucose reading.

  To be clear, you can also have large meals. The examples above need not be substitutes for your breakfast, lunch, and dinner; rather, they can serve to keep your blood sugar levels steady in between those bigger meals.

  Beyond eating frequent light meals, there are specific foods you can eat to restore your adrenal glands. 

Healing Foods

  Certain fruits and vegetables either help protect your adrenal glands or speed their recovery by strengthening the nervous system, reducing inflammation, easing stress, and providing critical nutrients for adrenal function. The following are among the top foods to eat to bounce back from adrenal fatigue: sprouts, asparagus, wild blueberries, bananas, garlic, broccoli, kale, raspberries, blackberries, romaine lettuce, and red-skinned apples. 

AVOIDING ADRENAL FATIGUE

  The most straightforward way to keep your adrenal glands strong and healthy is to avoid extended and/or extreme stress and strain that sets them up to overproduce adrenaline. For example, if you're pushing yourself too hard physically by taking on multiple jobs and skipping sleep, consider cutting back on obligations, if that's an option, to allow your adrenals time to recover and heal.

  If that is not a possibility, following the advice here will still help you recover.

  Also avoid artificial stimulants, such as drugs or mega-doses of caffeine, designed to give you an adrenaline "rush" short-term, in long-term crash. These will make you feel good temporarily, but in the long term risk burning out your adrenal glands. 

  Another strain on your adrenals is strong emotion. That does not mean you should avoid all powerful emotions. For example, if you're feeling extreme joy, your adrenals will generate a hormone that's good for your body and won't overtax the glands. That is the reason for the saying, "Laughter is the best medicine." If you are feeling fear, however, your adrenals will produce a form of adrenaline that is destructive, and over time it will wear down both the glands and other parts of your body. 

  You might ask, " How is it possible that some emotions are better for the body than others?" Do not my adrenal glands excrete the same adrenaline in response to any emotion?" That is what medical communities believeㅡand they're mistaken. The truth is your adrenal glands produce 56 different blends in response to different emotions and situations. More specifically, they produce 36 varieties of adrenaline that address everyday situations (e.g., feeling afraid, walking briskly, moving your bowels, bathing/swimming in water, dreaming), and 20 varieties for less common scenarios (e.g., childbirth (for the ladies), fighting off a physical attack, mourning a death).

  As a rule of thumb, if something makes you feel bad emotionally, it is probably damaging your body and making you more vulnerable to illness; and if it persists, it is also exhausting your adrenal glands. So you ideally want to let negative feelings such as fear, anxiety, anger, hatred, guilt, and shame arise and pass by instead of suppressing or engaging with them. 

  Try to say these mantra to yourself repeatedly to process and clear these negative emotions; "I'm sorry, Please forgive me, Thank you, I love you." , in your subconscious mind. 

  Turning away from painful emotions and towards joyful ones is much easier said than done. Tap into spiritual balance exercises when life seems to be throwing everything at you at once. Click here. 

   Key components of your endocrine system are your adrenal glands, which are small lumps of tissue located directly above your kidneys. 


Your adrenal glands produce hormones critical for your health, including adrenaline, cortisol, and hormones that in turn regulate the production of sex hormones such as estrogen and testosterone.  

  The primary trigger for your adrenal glands is stress, which causes them to produce extra amounts of hormones such as adrenaline. This is an excellent survival mechanism built into your body for short-term emergencies, as the additional hormones are likely to help you get through whatever crisis is occurring. 

  If the stress continues over a long period, howeverㅡfor example, if you're going through a bankruptcy, a divorce, the death of a loved one, or some other cause of severe emotional turmoilㅡyour adrenal glands will eventually become damaged from being on continual "hyper-drive." Undergoing a very substantial amount of stress in even a relatively short period can also over-strain the adrenal; a common example is childbirth, which requires an enormous amount of adrenaline.

  In fact, medical communities are unaware that postpartum fatigue and depression are often the result of adrenal glands becoming so exhausted after the process of childbirth that they abruptly fail to produce enough of the right hormones at the right times to keep the mother strong, vibrant, and happy.

  When your adrenal glands become overextended, they have the equivalent of a nervous breakdown and behave erratically.

  Some alternative medicine doctors believe that when the adrenals partially "burn out," they simply stop producing the full amount of hormones needed. That is an oversimplification of the complete role these adrenal glands play in reacting to moment-by-moment emotional and environmental changes. What really happens is that instead of operating in a rock-steady manner that creates precisely the right amount of hormones for each new situation, exhausted adrenals may produce too little or too much hormoneㅡsomething like the massive mood swings in someone with bipolar disorder. 

  For example, depression can result when out-of-control adrenals wildly overreact to a situation and flood you with too much adrenaline. The excess adrenaline may in turn burn away your brain's reserves of dopamine, a neurotransmitter hormone vital to your feeling happy, and so leave you felling depressed. It is this variable behavior producing hormonal extremes on either the low or the high side at any moment that characterizes genuine adrenal fatigue.

  While alternative doctors do not grasp all the nuances of adrenal fatigue, they're way ahead of mainstream doctors who do not even recognize that this illness exists. 

  The truth is that adrenal fatigue has been with us since the start of the human race.

  What's changed is how pervasive it's become. Thanks to our fast-paced and stress-filled times, over 80 percent of us will undergo adrenal fatigue multiple times in our lives. 

ADRENAL FATIGUE SYMPTOMS

  If you have adrenal fatigue, you may experience one or more of the following symptoms : weakness, lack of energy, trouble concentrating, becoming easily confused, forgetfulness, trouble completing basic tasks you could once handle easily, hoarse voice, poor digestion, constipation, depression, insomnia, not feeling rested after waking from sleep, and relying on naps during the day.

  Adrenaline plays a vital role in dreams ( when you're running in a dream, for example, your adrenals become stimulated and release the hormone), so in extreme cases of adrenal fatigue, some people are unable to dream enough for the needs of the mind, soul, and spirit. In very extreme cases, some people are so weak that they can not get out of bed for more than a couple of hours a day. 

  fatigued adrenals will often also have effects on other glands and organs. For example, your pancreas can become inflamed and/or enlarged from working overtime to compensate for adrenal under performance. Your heart may need to work harder as it tries to regulate unusual cortisol and blood glucose levels. If excess cortisol abruptly races through your body and destroys your liver's reserves of glucose, glycogen, and iron, your liver will have to work extra hard to create more. And your central nervous system and brain can go off-kilter (not aligned or balanced.) from sudden floods of cortisol. 

  Too little cortisol can wreak its havoc. Cortisol plays a key role in converting the  thyroid storage hormone T4 into the usable hormone T3, and in allowing the T3 to penetrate and "charge up" your cells. When your adrenals under-perform, they can create a thyroid hormone shortage on the cellular level. In this case, even if you have a healthy thyroid that's testing as normal, you can experience hypothyroid symptoms such as weight gain, depression, hair loss, brittle nails, rough or thinning skin, feeling cold, fluctuating blood glucose, and a myriad of other issues. 

  You can also have these symptoms with perfectly healthy adrenal glands but a malfunctioning thyroid (see Chapter, "Hypothyroidism and Hashimoto's Thyroiditis"). Then again, you can have neurological fatigue, which is caused by the swelling of the central nervous system as a result of such viruses as Epstein-Barr and shingles. because there are myriad causes for energy loss, it is difficult to know whether you have adrenal fatigue based on a list of symptoms alone. Fortunately, there are come additional clues you can look for.

MORE SIGNS YOU HAVE ADRENAL FATIGUE

  IF YOU HAVE SEVERAL OF THE SYMPTOMS DESCRIBED IN THE PREVIOUS SECTION, and your condition also matches two or more of the scenarios that follow, then it is very possible you have adrenal fatigue.

•1. You"crash" in the early part of your day and/or throughout your day.  Again, even if you have had a normal amount of sleep the night before, you may feel the need to lie down and close your eyes before lunchtime if you lack adequate adrenal hormones.

•2. You feel tired all day at work, but feel more energetic at home in the evening. This happens when your exhausted adrenal glands hold back their limited reserve of hormones during your stress-filled day in case as emergency arises, then let go of the reserves when your're back home in a relaxed environment where you're much less likely to encounter a crisis. 

•3. You're exceptionally exhausted at night but have trouble falling asleep. The act  of sleeping, and especially falling into REM sleep , [The brain cycles through five distinct phases during sleep: stages 1, 2, 3, 4, and rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. REM sleep makes up about 25% of your sleep cycle and first occurs about 70 to 90 minutes after you fall asleep. Because your sleep cycle repeats, you enter REM sleep several times during the night.] requires adrenal hormones. If you're short on these hormones, you may experience insomnia, unsatisfying light sleep, and/or dreamless sleep.

•4. You feel unrested even after a full night's sleep. Again, if you lack enough adrenal hormones to fuel REM sleep and dreaming, you won't have a satisfying nioght. On top of that, low hormones can rob you of so much energy that you will feel weak no matter how much sleep you get. Have you drink enough water during the day to prevent cellular dehydration? Drink a glass (200 ml) of plain warm water, put a pinch of sea/rock salt on the tongue and go to bed. 

•5. You experience continual sweating under your armpits after performing even light tasks. This is the result of your entire endocrine system working overtime to compensate for the lack of adequate adrenaline. 

•6. You're continually thirsty and can not seem to quench your thirst; or you have a continually dry mouth; or you're frequently craving salt. This is caused by a substantial number of electrolytes in your bloodstream and nervous system getting destroyed by an abrupt flood of cortisol. Water, soda,coffee, alcohol, and most other beverages won't solve this problem.You need to replenish the electrolytes by drinking something that has the right balance of sodium, potassium, and glucoseㅡe.g., young coconut water, freshly pressed apple juice, freshly pressed celery juice, or a celery-apple or celery-cucumber juice blend. 

•7. Blurry vision or difficulty focusing eyesight. This is caused by a flood of excess cortisolㅡwhich tends to dehydrate any areaㅡaffecting one or more sensitive spots near the eyes, which require a great deal of constant hydration. Other symptoms are dark circles around the eyes and/or sunken eyes. 

•8. Continual craving for stimulants. If you frequently feel the need foe stimulants to keep you going―such as cigarettes, coffee, caffeine-infused soda, sugary snacks such as cookies or doughnuts, or even prescription-drug "uppers" such as amphetamines―you may instinctively be seeking a substitute for your missing adrenal hormones. While stimulants will give you a quick fix energy boost, you will soon "crash" after their effects fade away. Plus, by forcing your adrenals to regularly over-perform  and then become exhausted, these stimulants create an up-and-down see-saw cycle that makes their already poor functioning even worse over time.