Hormones - adrenal fatigue

So in my overview I listed female hormones, what they do, and when they rear their little irritating/helpful heads. 

Now to the long term affects of not properly taking care of yourself. Your adrenal glands are under 7cm small, on top of your kidneys (with one close to the liver), but they are very important. They respond to stress by producing adrenalin, noradrenalin, cortisol (the one we all know as a stress hormone), aldosterone (think blood pressure), and sex hormones. This delicate balance is intended to help you cope with stress. So what happens when this stress on your body is extended, either through external factors, or by your own health? 

One nutritionist says that for every minute of stress, it takes sixty minutes to remove adrenal stress hormones from your body. How many minutes of stress do you think you experience in an ‘average’ day? And what if you experience chronic stress? Your adrenals slowly wear out. 

Score yourself a point for each of these symptoms that you recognise as fairly constant in your life;

• Craving salty or sugary food
• Gaining weight around your middle
• Peaks and crashes with energy
• Feeling less and less able to cope with daily life
• Brain fog - am I stupid? Getting dementia early? Why can’t I focus?
• Constantly catching colds, and not getting over them quickly
• Waking up exhausted no matter how much sleep you’ve had
• PMS that is worse than established ‘norms’ (don’t get me started on common vs normal)
• Joint pain
• Dizziness on standing 

When you look at them all laid out like that, it’s harder to ignore that something is going on with your body that you shouldn’t have to live with. Always see your doctor first if you have health concerns - this blog gives you an idea of where to start getting a diagnosis, not diagnosing you. I don’t advocate any treatments in particular, but I will tell you what has worked for me.

The trouble for me was that I had so many symptoms, which could have been indicative of any number of things, and it turned out I had quite a few syndromes helpfully, so it was a long process working out the issues and the treatments. Fortunately, depending on how you look at it, the majority had the same root cause and therefore similar natural treatments.

The final symptom not listed above, that led me to diagnose myself with adrenal fatigue, was waking up BOLT AWAKE every morning at 3am. I googled, and came across a great article about the liver. Our poor liver is so underrated - its main job is filtering the blood (this is why we shouldn’t take too high doses of fat soluble vitamins, drink too much, take more than recommended doses of medications). When we have all these hormones caused by chronic stress being sent through our livers on a daily basis, our livers become ‘sluggish’. The symptoms in bullet points above will become worse, along with many others (including reduced B12 absorption leading to anemia, which worsens the cycle of PMS, and nerve damage seen in joint paint and tingling) that are only clear when damage is well along. 

So why was I waking up at 3? Traditional medicine says there are peak times of day for each organ to carry out its essential functions, and 1-3am is the liver’s time to shine. 

Adrenaline production uses up glycogen, and adrenaline is produced when we are stressed and our blood sugar levels are unstable. If your blood sugar goes up and down all day then by 1am there will be no glycogen left for your liver to repair. This leaves your body to produce more adrenaline to compensate! If that ain’t a vicious cycle I don’t know what is.

I immediately downloaded an app on my phone that monitored my sleep patterns and kept a record for one week. Then I tried out a natural remedy – within an hour of going to sleep I drank a glass of fresh orange juice for glycogen, half a teaspoon of cream of tartar for potassium*, and half a teaspoon of pink salt for the 84 minerals it contains. You may have heard of other combinations such as honey and bananas before bed - if you look at why they work, the principle is the same. 

*be super careful taking potassium if you have kidney problems

The result was instantaneous. From the first day I tried it I slept through the whole night and woke up feeling refreshed. If you feel that you are at a very advanced stage, you can do this morning and evening to speed up the process. Obviously this is not a cure but merely treats a daily symptom of the issue. 

The first thing you need to prioritise is de-stressing and resting. I can’t emphasise this enough. Your body needs rest to repair. You may think you were resting before and it did no good, but if you do it hand-in-hand with other natural methods the rest will finally catch up. You definitely don’t want to stop exercising and de-condition, which would cause a host of other issues, but gentle regular exercise is your friend. If you’re like I was and totally sick of your body letting you down by now, you just want a quick fix and you may have got in the habit of punishing your body to try to achieve it. When you put it like that, it’s fairly obvious that isn’t going to work. Try to change your attitude towards exercise from something you do to your body (and have to do a certain amount of and have to feel exhausted by for it to be worth it), to something you do for your body to take care of it. 

I really recommend eliminating caffeine at least at first. Coffee has loads of health benefits and one is liver health, but right now your balance is way off and you need a clean slate.

This is a tricky one – altering your diet. Along with my other symptoms I found out I had insulin resistance which created a cycle, I craved sugar until I felt sick, and the more sugar I ate the more I needed. But we’ve seen how blood sugar affects this issue. As with exercise, be patient with yourself. Switch to natural sugars like berries and full fat yoghurt. Don’t let yourself get hungry – this is key to prevent a blood sugar crash that will lead you reaching for pasta or chocolate. This is not a weight loss diet, it is giving your body as much whole food as it needs so that it doesn’t crave the sugar it does not need. You will almost definitely lose weight anyway, without depriving yourself.

I have mixed feelings about vitamins, and definitely the majority we buy are packed with fillers and synthetically produced vitamins. Try natural teas instead - nettle, milk thistle etc.