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Adrenal Fatigue: Making The Connection Between Stress, Body Shape and Your Health
Adrenal Fatigue: Making The Connection Between Stress, Body Shape and Your Health
Making the connection between stress, body shape and your health
I hope this book allows you to understand why you feel the way you do.
Success of recovery is dependent on attacking the right problem! The
information below is compiled from many medical text books as well as my own
observations. Nothing in the book is meant to provide treatment for any medical
disease or condition.
You have probably have been told that its all in your head, but before you
think youre are going crazy read on the failure of the adrenal glands to
respond to stress if a real physical issue!
infection, divorce, financial stresses, job-related stress, irritable people, drugs and
medication, surgery, pain, illness, poison ivy, excessive cold or heat, giving birth,
menstruation, staring into computer monitors for hours at a time, eating junk
foods, starvation diets, excessive exercise, and babysitting fifteen small children
under the age of five for over thirteen hours without proper ventilation.
More functions
The adrenals have many other functions such as anti-inflammatory actions
(ridding the body of pain and swelling), immune system protection, balancing
fluid and salt levels, controlling minerals (potassium, for example), rapid heart
rate, and sleep and awake cycles. They even act as back-up organs for the ovaries
during menopause. In other words, they make the same hormones as the ovary
does.
This means that until 90% of the adrenals are destroyed, you will not be able
to see them on testing.
The adrenal glands are set on a timing mechanism in the brain; therefore,
testing the blood or saliva for adrenal hormones should be done every four hours
during a twenty-four-hour period (cortisol test). Testing the adrenals for a one
shot evaluation is useless.
The following is a description of what happens when the adrenal glands do
not function properlysome symptoms occur when theres too much hormone,
and others occur when there is deficiency of hormone.
Excess fat in both the midsection (a buffalo-like torso, for example) and the
face can occur from overreaction of this gland. In the midsection, the fat forms
primarily in and around the abdominal organs and sags downward over the
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belly. This is called visceral fat and cannot be safely extracted with liposuction.
Another term for this stomach is pendulous, meaning loose, hanging and sagging.
This is different from the Liver body shape, which is a potbelly or a protruding
stomach like a water balloon, while in the Ovary body shape, the person has a
small bulge below the bellybutton. More info on this is in my other book, The 7
Principles of Fat Burning.
A common problem with the Adrenal type is the inability to fit into clothing,
around the waist. Some people even wear elastic bands to suck it back in, but this
can constrict vital organs within the abdomen and the pressure around the waist
can irritate the adrenal glands.
Midsection weight
Fat accumulation in the face gives a round or moon face appearance. The
face also shows redness because of weakened blood vessels.
A fat pad can develop in the lower neck and upper back area, called a
buffalo hump. I believe the reason the body creates this hump is to anchor the
belly so you dont fall forward.
Reddish purple striations (strips or bands resembling stretch marks) can
appear on the stomach, thighs, buttocks, arms and breasts as well. This is
because the person loses collagen, the protein glue that holds the body together.
too, especially at the knees. Cortisol, the main adrenal stress hormone, will also
take muscle from the buttocks and use it too, causing loss of tone in that area.
The pictures below show the changes from a normal body shape through the
progressive stages of the Adrenal type.
Normal
Stage 1
Stage 2
Stage 3
Adrenal cases dont necessarily have to have a bellyit all depends whether
the hormones are increasing or decreasing.
The face and eyes become puffy, and a double chin and wrinkles ensue. You
say this is age, but I say its the adrenal hormones being pumped too much. The
adrenal hormones are the aging hormones.
Chronic fatigue
Typically, a person with burnt-out adrenals has darkened circles under their
eyes as well as a very tired appearance. They feel tired, drained, and have brain
fog. Brain fatigue can greatly affect concentration. Due to the lack of quality
sleep, midafternoon naps are desperately needed. Cortisol also destroys the relay
switch in the memory data base of your brain (called the hippocampus). This
causes short term memory problems and the inability to locate things. You might
often lose your keys or your words or even say, What did I come in this room
for again?
you exercise.
Each night our bodies are supposed to go through four 90-minute cycles from
superficial to deep sleepbut not if the lion is chasing you. You might be
thoroughly exhausted but your body just cant fully let go and turn off. Many
times a person will just wake up at 2:00 or 3:00 am for no reason and end up
lying there for an hour (or hours) thinking, thinking, and thinking. Some people
get anxiety in the middle of the night. But the worst thing about this is not being
able to function the next day.
stimulation of caffeine. Most people dont have depression; they just dont sleep!
The stimulation from caffeine acts like an artificial energy booster. If you
measured body stress in these cases, the person would be either in total burnout
or full hyper mode. In either case, adding caffeine to stimulate or boost the body
when its already over-boosted burns out the adrenals even more.
Hair loss and facial hair not a pretty picture for a female
In women, excess adrenal hormones can result in a deeper voice, facial hair,
and male-pattern hair loss (a receding hair line)but other than that, the person
is totally fine. Im kidding. Excess adrenal hormones can really mess with a
persons body.
Facial hair
urine slightly acid, the stomach extremely acid, and the blood just slightly
alkaline.
Overactive adrenals make the blood too alkaline, preventing calcium from
being directed to the bones and muscles, so one gets not only thinning of the
bones (osteopenia and osteoporosis) but also muscle cramps in the calves at
night. Cramps in the calf muscles come from calcium or potassium deficiencies.
But behind that is an adrenal problem. Instead of calcium going into the body it
accumulates on the body tissues. I have observed these cases to have excessive
tartar on their teeth, calcium on the eyes in the form of early cataracts, on the
bones as heal spurs, on the joints as arthritis, on the bursa (joint sac) as bursitis,
on the tendons as tendonitis, in the arteries as arteriosclerosis, deposits in the
kidneys, on the toes as bunions, and twitching under or on top of the left eyelid.
Without this balanced body calcium, a person will have a difficult time
getting to sleep, not to mention staying asleep. The body will be exhausted, but
the head will be awake thinking lots of thoughts and trying to solve yesterdays
problemsit cant wind down easily.
too. In fact, in my 20s, I had bad poison ivy 5 years in a row and had to take
steroidsthis was the point when I started to break down and get sick,
chronically fatigued, ulcers, insomnia, and severe blood sugar issuesother than
that, I was in pretty good shape!
Autoimmune conditions are insane. Insanity is the inability to differentiate.
Autoimmune conditions are unable to tell the difference between a good body
cell and a toxic poisonthey are both interpreted as being the same and must be
attacked and destroyed. This insanity is the bodys attempt to survive gone out
of control.
Another interesting point is that during pregnancy, all autoimmune
conditions turn off, which is your bodys ability to protect the growing fetus. One
way to get rid your autoimmune condition is to stay barefoot and pregnant
well at least wear some shoes.
Bile also allows you to absorb the fat-soluble vitamins. These are the ones that
allow you to see in the dark (vitamin A), the ones that allow calcium to move
(vitamin D), the ones that prevent bruising (vitamin K) and the ones that prevent
the skin from being dry (vitamin A).
Without bile, youll have cravings and you will have a hard time sticking to
an easting plan because youre never satisfied with food or any diet.
I recommend a product called Gallbladder Support Formula, because it will
give you purified bile salts and make additional natural remedies to get rid of the
bloating and start digesting again.
occasional Mad Dog 22 (cheap, sweet, and strong alcohol). You dont sleep, eat,
or take time to recover. Then you get married and have kids. And because you
decided to have each child a year apart, you really never get a chance to recover
at all. Having babies is a big physical hormone strain on mom, not to mention
trying to travel through the airport with one child going this way and the other
two going the that way.
Over time the body becomes stuck in stress mode even when the stress is
gone. You go to bed having every intention of sleeping through the night, but the
body cant turn off fully despite your counting backwards from 100. Your cells
even lose the ability to recharge and make energy, much like a broken alternator
in a car engine.
Around 35, youll start to notice that your stomach is getting a bit thicker.
Despite exercise, sit-ups and boot camp workouts, the mid-section doesnt
budge. This is all an inside job due to cortisols attempt to again help you
survive. As weird as it sounds, you body is trying to help youthink short
term survival. The body is merely trying to hold energythats what fat is
around the most important organs, which are located in the midsection.
Some people feel guilty if they skip a day of exercise. FYI: Nearly all the
benefit from exercise occurs AFTER exercise in the recovery part. Exercise is a
type of stress, and the strength or weakness of your adrenals will determine if
the exercise is good or bad. The worse off your adrenals are, then the more you
need to walk on a FLAT surface. Going up hills or stairs will keep you out of
breath.
As far as muscle tissue is concerned, exercising with weights or doing highpulse-rate exercise is not a good idea with this condition, since the extra stress
overwhelms the adrenals. Like I said before, all the benefit of exercise occurs in
the recovery part, not the exercise part. And this also explains why a person
could spend 8 months at the gym with very little results. Ive even had patients
turn their body into atrophied flab from doing boot camp types of exercise,
which are far too intense.
If you think about recovery as an ACTIVE thing, it will make sense. Your
recovery system works aggressively when you are doing nothing. Lets say you
run up some stairs and find at the top your pulse rate is 130 beats per minute.
Your recovery system will kick in and push your heart rate back down. The
name of this recovery system is called the parasympathetic nervous system. This
system is the one that is burned out when one goes through sustained stress. This
is the same system that helps you burn fat. This is the same system that gets you
into a deep sleep.
So here lies the main problem, sustained stress and the loss of enough
recovery sleep. If the body cant recover it wears out. Fatigue comes from poor
sleep.
Sleep apnea is an adrenal problem. High levels of stress hormones shrink
nerves to the muscles in the back of the throat and sinuses. These muscles
atrophy and restrict oxygen intake through the nose.
In the diagram below, you can see normal cortisol (adrenal hormone) levels.
Notice that cortisol is supposed to be very minimal during sleep.
People with abnormal adrenal hormone cycles have a hard time getting out of
bed, get tired after lunch, need a mid-afternoon nap, and have a hard time
winding down to go to sleep. The best sleep for adrenal cases is a half an hour
before the alarm goes off. People with weak adrenals are more awake in the
middle of the night than during the day.
I remember one night when I experienced torture laying there all night long
with not able to even sleep for one minute. As I counted down the hours from
12:00, 1:00am, 2:00am, 3:00amhoping I would drift offit was terrible because
the next day, I had to be at my best and work all day long.
Tolerance to stress
How your body handles stress tells you the condition your adrenal glands are
in. People who have weak adrenals do not deal well with stress; the littlest things
seem to irritate them rather easily. This physical adrenal problem can definitely
affect your mental state just like a low blood sugar issue. Try to go shopping
with your kids when they are hungry and tired.
Since the adrenals are survival glands, and survival is a logical rational thing,
anything opposite to logic will be intolerant to a degree. Adrenal cases
sometimes have a low tolerance to other people who make mistakes and errors,
incompetent people, and so on. They might come into a room and spot
something out of order.They might have a great day, but that ONE small bad
thing engulfs their attention. They say they are multi-taskers, but in reality, they
just disperse their attention all over the place. They dont feel as productive
because incomplete projects show their lack of follow-through. Their thoughts
come in like pop corn, and not linear sequential thought patterns. They have a
hard time concentrating and feel a bit elsewhere. The reason they procrastinate
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and do things out of necessity is because they have lost their focus and
concentration mojo.
IMPORTANT NOTE: As my disclaimer, I am not attempting to diagnose
you with any mental problems at all. I am merely telling you my observations
made from what a physical problem can do to a person mentally. Youre not
going crazyyou just need your adrenals rejuvenated so you can sleep and
recharge.
Excessive worry and anxiety are common with adrenal weakness due to the
adrenaline stress response (fight or flight). Flight or fight is a reaction to a stress
situation, but when youre stuck in stress, you feel like flight (running away) or
fight (attacking) too often and even when there is no tiger in the room.
remission. Why do you think we have the flu seasonagain in the early fall
after summer? This flu is viral related. Lets take skin cancer. People think its
due to the sun, when in fact, its due to excess vitamin D and low vitamin F. But
if the adrenals are strong, viruses stay in remission regardless of the amounts of
D and F in the body. The moral of the story is to keep your body healthy and
prevent these problems.
As the adrenal hormones get burned out over time, vitamin D becomes
depleted and it becomes difficult to hold vitamins in the body. Many adrenal
cases show low vitamin D in the blood. The doctor puts them on a high vitamin
dose, as much as 50,000 IU, when the bodys requirement is only 1200 IU. But not
understanding the whole picture puts the person into a vitamin F imbalance.
Interestingly, you can develop diabetes from your adrenals because the
adrenals release quick energy in the form of sugar. This stored sugar will even be
made from your muscles, joints and even skin all in the name of your survival.
This first stage in this process is called hypoglycemia, that is, low blood sugar.
This doesnt mean you should eat sugar, as one patient asked me; it means that
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your cells are starved for fuel, which is behind most sugar cravings. Your body
requires frequent meals because it cant hold or regulate sugar properly.
In addition, the demand for protein increases. Many adrenal cases need to
eat protein every few hours just to function. This is because of the muscle
wasting and body protein breakdown. Since recovery is poor, its all breakdown
and very little rejuvenation. You can consume a ton of protein, but it will not
solve the problem since the destructive adrenal hormone will not allow this
protein to replace the muscles. Its like having a bucket of water with holes in the
bottom.
Salt
Cravings for salt in the form of cheese, pretzels, nuts, popcorn, or chips in the
evening are common. People search the cupboards late at night for something
crunchy and cheesy because the adrenals regulate salts in the body.
With salt and mineral imbalances, fluids can get out of balance, causing you
to retain fluid (outside the cells) yet be dehydrated (inside the cells) at the same
time. Water never properly hydrates in an adrenal case. In fact, no part of your
body is pure water; its a combination of salts and waterwe call these
electrolytes (electrically charged minerals). Without the right minerals, water
cannot move through the body, leading to water retention especially in the
ankles. As a result, your heart has to pump blood through your feet, so water
retention puts a lot of stress on the heart.
Wherever sodium goes, water will accumulate. So when sodium gets lost
through the urine, dehydration can occur. But drinking more water will
dehydrate the cells because it also washes out the minerals. So make sure you
ONLY drink when you are thirsty. The rumor that you need 810 glasses of
water per day is just a myth. And drinking water does not flush the fat out of
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your body.
FYI: Never consume table salt; consume good quality sea salt. Sea salt has 84
minerals but table salt has only 2.
Chocolate cravings
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Craving licorice could mean you are deficient in another adrenal hormone.
FYI: Children who eat dirt or clay, or women who crave ice during pregnancy,
could be deficient in iron. (I would recommend eating beets instead of dirt.)
Craving ice cream or cheese could also mean you are low in calcium, which
indicates an adrenal problem.
Autoimmune conditions
Fibromyalgia
Asthma
Increased susceptibility to viruses
Dehydrated (intracellular) despite amount of water drunk
Fluid retention in between cells
Pitting edema (especially in ankles)
Gets out of breath when climbing stairs
Legs feel heavy, especially when exercising
Moodiness and irritability
Brain fog or dullness
Ringing in ears
Low sex drive
I have created a product to support a healthy adrenal gland. Below I listed the
ingredients.
Adrenal substance: Using a non-hormone glandular gives the adrenal various raw materials to support a healthy adrenal
gland.
Anterior pituitary substance: The anterior (front part) pituitary gland is the master gland, which controls the adrenal.
Using this non-hormone glandular helps support and assists the feedback loop between the brain and the body.
Rehmannia root: This root has been used to increase energy without the stimulatory effects as well as help maintain
healthy blood sugar levels.
Acetyl-L Carnitine: This helps support healthy cellular energy, metabolism and brain function by assisting in the
transport of fat into the mitochondria where it is oxidized and converted into ATP (chemical energy for the cell).
GABA: A naturally occurring amino acid, which supports health brain function and ease stress through better recovery
and relaxation. It is known as the brains calming agent easing nervous tension.
DMAE: Known primarily as a precursor to choline and acetylcholine (chemicals in the brain responsible for nerve
transmissions and cognitive function), DMAE has been used most predominantly to improve memory and focus while
stimulating neural activity.
St. Johns Wart: This herb aids in the support of a healthy nervous system and a positive, balanced mood state.
Broccoli Sprouts: Researchers have isolated a key component of broccoli called sulforaphane, a plant chemical, which
may have many health protective properties. Freshly germinated broccoli sprouts contain from 30 to 50 times the
concentration of phytonutrients as mature broccoli.
Acerola cherry: Famed for its vitamin C content, with as much as 4.5% of vitamin C per fruit (compared to 0.05% per
peeled orange) acerola cherries are also rich in vitamin A, magnesium, niacin, potassium, thiamine, iron and calcium.
Vitamin C is involved in chemistry in building adrenal hormones.
Choline: This is necessary for normal nerve transmission and brain health. In addition, Choline is also involved in fatty
acid metabolism in the liver.
Niacinamide (B3): B3 is necessary for the normal breakdown of fats and fatty acids as well as promoting healthy
circulation and nervous system function.
Beet root: Beetroot is a nutritional goldmine of potassium, phosphorus, calcium, iodine, iron, copper and vitamins, in
addition to trace minerals. Recent research suggests that beetroot juice may increase levels of nitric oxide, a recovery
nutrient.
DISCLAIMER
The information contained in this ebook is provided for your general
information only. Dr. Eric Berg DC does not give medical advice or engage in the
practice of medicine. Dr. Eric Berg DC under no circumstances recommends
particular treatment for specific individuals and in all cases recommends that
you consult your physician or local treatment center before pursuing any course
of treatment.
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