An Adrenal Supporting Lifestyle  

Managing the stress in your life is key to supporting your adrenals. The most important factor in managing the stress is understanding the mind-body connection in regards to stress. We know that what makes a situation stressful for one person may not be stressful for another. Remember the example of a person in a car stuck in the middle of rush hour traffic.  It can be perceived as an opportunity for listening to a self-health audiotape or perceived as highly frustrating. Either way the operative word is perception. Whether a situation is stressful or not is based on our perception. And our perception is based on what we believe to be true. Our beliefs determine our perception. So if we believe bumper-to-bumper traffic is stressful, guess what for us it will be. But it doesn’t have to be that way. We can learn to change how we perceive things by changing how we look at things and yes even our beliefs. Letting go of our fears is the first step toward creating a fuller, more satisfying life. We need to seek joyful, loving and fulfilling activities, ones that stimulate us to grow and be happy at heart. After all we are worth it! Let this be our mantra. I do those things that give me joy and let go of those things not in harmony with my joy.

Providing nutritional support. Now let’s talk about a day-to-day adrenal supporting plan. 

On a fresh sheet of paper make a heading “health drains” and list everything and everyone in your daily life that are health-limiting factors. The following are examples;

Junk food, alcohol, overwork, chemicalized water, coffee, financial pressures, unhappy work or home environment, prescription or non-prescription drugs, lack of fresh air, tobacco, lack of sleep, soft drinks and chemical pollutants. The idea is to minimize as much as possible those health-limiting factors in your life that take away from supporting your adrenals and overall health.  

Someone who has adrenal fatigue have used up much of the body’s stored nutrients and are in desperate need of new supplies just to continue to function, let alone heal. Good quality food is the best source of these nutrient. Nutritional supplements can increase your ability to heal and speed your recovery.

If you have adrenal fatigue, when you eat is almost as important as what you eat. Low blood sugar is in itself a stressful situation that further drains yours adrenals. Therefore, avoid letting your blood sugar levels drop too low by eating natural, high quality food at frequent, regular intervals. Small high quality meals are ideal. It is important that you eat before 10:00 am. If you eat breakfast earlier in the morning around 8:00 am then you will want to have a snack around 10:00 am. You need to replenish your waning glycogen supply after the previous night’s energy requirements. Then lunch at noon, a snack sometime between 2:00 and 3:00 pm and your evening meal around 5:00 to 6:00 pm. Later in the evening, before bed, just a couple of bites of a high quality snack is often the key to successfully getting through the night without sleep disturbances or feeling wrecked in the morning.

It is best to combine fat, protein, and whole food carbohydrates at every meal and snack. Eating sugar or sugary foods is hard on your body. It makes blood sugar rise too high, too fast, and subsequently fall too low, leaving your body starving for fuel again.

Salt craving is a common symptom in all stages of adrenal fatigue. Most people with adrenal fatigue have low blood pressure, not high. Salt is a welcome addition to the diet in adrenal fatigue because it not only helps increase blood pressure, but also helps restore some of the other functions related to sodium loss within the cells. If you have concerns about taking salt and high blood pressure check with your doctor. We recommend natural unrefined sea salt and Ziquin Nanomeds. Another way to naturally increase sodium levels are to take sea vegetables like kelp and dulse.       

Vegetables that are high in sodium and helpful in supporting adrenal recovery include the following; kelp, dulse, green and black olives, beet greens, celery, zucchini, and Swiss chard. Please refer to the recipe for adrenal recovery soup that is posted on our blog.

People with adrenal fatigue are hugely lacking in several vitamins, minerals and essential fatty acids and this is where high quality supplemental can speed recovery. Both Ziquin’s mind and body tonic and EFA complete is crucial to supplying the body and adrenals of the nutrients it so dearly needs. 

Summary of what to eat: Eat a wide variety of whole, natural foods. Combine a fat, protein and carbohydrate source with every meal or snack. Eat lots of vegetables, especially the brightly colored ones. Use unrefined sea salt if you crave it. Eat mainly whole grains and vegetable sources of carbohydrates. Eat high quality foods.

Adequate rest. For people with adrenal fatigue, it is important to be in bed and on your way to sleep by 10:30 pm. Although most people’s schedules do not allow it, it also helps to sleep in until 9:00 in the morning. For those who have a day job, sleeping in on the weekends until this time is highly beneficial. Sleeping in until 9:00 am gives your adrenals a chance to rest, allowing your cortisol levels to rise. Normally cortisol levels rise rapidly from 6:00 to 8:00 am, but quite often in adrenal fatigue these levels do not rise as high and/or drop faster than normal. Also when your cortisol levels are lower, as in adrenal fatigue, it takes longer to feel fully awake in the morning. Sleeping in, therefore, is not only restorative for your adrenals but also helps you feel much better when you wake up and during the rest of the day.

If you wake up in the middle of the night and can’t go back to sleep this is a sign that your cortisol levels are probably low due to depleted or exhausted adrenal function. As mentioned before the reason you awaken in the middle of the night is due your body releasing adrenaline instead of cortisol to raise your blood sugar. This works as a brain stimulant, which naturally keeps you awake. To help counteract this have a light snack that contains protein, unrefined carbohydrate, and a high quality fat before going to bed, such as a slice of whole grain bread with almond butter.

1)     Be sure to get enough physical exercise during the day. Rapid breathing expels volatile gases out of your body that become harmful if they build up. The increased blood flow helps keep plaque from building up in your arteries while stimulating your liver to perform more efficiently. Cell function improves with accompanying acceleration of carbon dioxide, oxygen and nutrient exchange. Exercise normalizes levels of cortisol, insulin, blood glucose, growth hormone, thyroid, and several other hormones and puts more oxygen into your brain. Exercise also decreases depression.

2)     Avoid coffee, caffeine containing beverages and chocolate because they act as stimulants. These can interrupt sleep patterns and increase morning lows.

3)     If you are having difficulty going to sleep and usually watch TV or work on a computer late at night, try having an 8:00   PM limit on these visual stimuli.

4)      Some common herbs used to promote better sleep are hops, catnip, valerian root and licorice root.

5)     Try to schedule breaks around times when you feel more tired so that you can lie down for 15-30 minutes. Lying down is much more restorative than sitting, for the person with adrenal fatigue.

6)     Laughter. Norman Cousins found that two important keys to rebuild your adrenals are laughter and vitamin C. He laughed himself back to health from a debilitating disease. We recommend a whole food natural source of vitamin C like Acerola cherries.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 11th, 2012 at 12:11 pm and is filed under Adrenal Self-Health, Essential Health, Essential Steps.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.