In my 20s I was in and out of the hospital with different doctors trying to figure out why I was always so cold and thirsty. They tested my thyroid MANY times and it always came back ‘normal’…10 years later I’m now certified to run functional tests on clients to explore even if your adrenals are ‘starting’ to fatigue, and I discovered that I’m stage 2 Adrenal Fatigue, so over half of my function is disabled, and my thyroid went down with it! And the sad part, I eat healthier than most people I know, work out regularly, and do yoga daily to manage stress I don’t have as much of anymore. BUT, that’s what’s crazy. Many of us have abused our system for so long that the cumulative effect of stress inside of our body takes it’s toll on us so that we’re forced to do something about it…something MORE than just changing the way we eat and exercise.
You’d have to be living under a rock not to notice that adrenal problems are at epidemic proportions in our modern culture. The fact that a Starbucks or some other coffee shop is on practically every corner and that the average American now consumes a whopping 180 lbs per year of refined sugars is surely evidence enough. By the way, the 180 lbs of sugar per year figure is a shocking 27% increase just since 2003 when sugar consumption was 142 lbs per person per year!
Your adrenal glands are each no bigger than a walnut and weigh less than a grape, yet are responsible for one of the most important functions in your body: managing stress.
While this response is necessary and good when it’s needed, many of us are constantly faced with stressors (work, environmental toxins, not enough sleep, worry, relationship problems and more) and therefore are in this “fight or flight” mode for far too long (chronic stress)– much longer than was ever intended from a biological standpoint. Our adrenals were designed to respond to acute stress, as in a need to respond quickly, for short intervals…such as running from a tiger in the wild, as we Paleo peeps would describe it.
Cliff notes: Our adrenals were designed to run sprints, not long distance.
The Sad Truth: We’re asking our adrenals to run marathons every day!
The result is that your adrenal glands, faced with excessive stress and burden, become overworked and fatigued. The most common factors that put excess stress on your adrenals are:
Anger, fear, anxiety, guilt, depression and other negative emotions- Overwork, including physical or mental strain
- Excessive exercise
- Sleep deprivation
- Light-cycle disruption (such as working the night shift or often going to sleep late)
- Surgery, trauma or injury
- Chronic inflammation, infection, illness or pain
- Temperature extremes
- Toxicity
- Nutritional deficiencies and/or severe allergies
Worth noting: I’ve seen many clients, who describe the start of their symptom downfall, with a loss of a loved one, divorce, financial difficulty, among others…
Emotional stress can hit the adrenals 1000 more than physical stress.
Then guess what the natural evolution is as a next step? Your doctor wants to prescribe you anti-depressants. NO WONDER 1 in 4 Americans are on mood altering drugs. Why doesn’t our medical model see this? Oh yeah, because actually healing someone’s root cause would cut into their deep pharma pocket books.
WHY NOT HEAL NATURALLY AND FIX THIS PROBLEM FOR GOOD?
*The first sign of adrenal fatigue, is you start developing belly fat.
*The biggest indicator of AF is chronic fatigue that doesn’t improve with rest!
*You know when you work out harder and seem to gain MORE weight? Yep, that’s another classic sign that your adrenals need HELP!
The following is a list of symptoms that are common for people who suffer from Adrenal Fatigue and CFS:
- Tendency to gain weight and unable to lose it, especially around the waist.
- High frequency of getting the flu and other respiratory diseases and these symptoms tend to last longer than usual.
- Tendency to tremble when under pressure.
- Reduced sex drive.
- Lightheaded when rising from a laying or sitting position.
- Brain Fog – Unable to remember things.
- Lack of energy in the mornings and also in the afternoon between 3 to 5 pm.
- Feel better suddenly for a brief period after a meal.
- Need coffee or stimulants to get going in the morning.
- Crave for salty, fatty, and high protein food such as meat and cheese.
- Increase symptoms of PMS for women; periods are heavy and then stop, or almost stopped on the 4th day, only to start flow again on the 5th or 6th day.
- Pain in the upper back or neck with no apparent reasons.
- Feels better when stress is relieved, such as on a vacation.
- Muscle and bone loss and muscular weakness
- Autoimmune disorders, especially thyroid.
- Trouble waking up in the morning, despite a full night’s sleep
- Mild depression
- Food and/or inhalant allergies
- Lethargy and lack of energy
- Increased effort to perform daily tasks
- Decreased ability to handle stress
- Skin Problems
- Hypoglycemia
- Low Body Temperature
- Nervousness
- Unexplained hair loss
- Alternating constipation and diarrhea
- HYPOTHYROIDISM OR HASHIMOTOS! It’s very common to have both AF and thyroid malfunction. The symptoms look the same but nearly 95% of the time, all that gets addressed is the thyroid – nevertheless with T4 only pharmaceuticals that inspire more problems such as leaky gut and hypochloridia – aka not enough acid in the stomach to absorb iron = anemia…do you see why FUNCTIONAL medicine is the only way to heal? If a car is in a big accident, would you only fix the hood and not the crushed bumper?
Additionally, people with adrenal fatigue often get a burst of energy around 6 p.m., followed by sleepiness at 9 p.m. or 10 p.m., which is often resisted. A “second wind” at 11 p.m. is then common, which often may keep you from falling asleep until 1 a.m. No wonder America has weight problems:
98% of all fat burning happens at night, NOT during the day. IF YOU’RE NOT SLEEPING YOU’RE NOT BURNING FAT!
So what we see often is that…when women are tired, they try a myriad of things to artificially spike their energy levels, because they’re unsure as to the root of their fatigue…and in the process, feel shame and guilt for feeling as low as they do…which typically, occurs side by side with depression.
When the adrenals are imbalanced, so too are our thyroid hormones, as these two endocrine glands suffer, simultaneously.
When you are prescribed thyroid medication, it pumps the gas on the adrenals to keep up, which it can’t so it will eventually rely on more thyroid hormone for energy, hence returning you where you began.
We see this most often than anything else when they take prescriptions rather than addressing the key underlying reasons for our fatigue.
Eventually, these ‘band aid’s wear off, and further tax our hormone glands, gut and immune system, which is when most women come to see us, desperate to try anything because they have tried what feels like everything.
But truly…there are so many solutions that TRULY work to resolve this ‘depression’ of energy, mind and spirit…even beyond bio identical hormones and natural supplements prescribed by naturopathic doctors, who typically is the last resort we feel can help us. But that’s just not true. There’s so much more to the picture
How You can Fix your Fatigue
Those with adrenal fatigue often also have abnormal blood sugar levels and mental disturbances, such as increased fears and anxiety, and rely on coffee, soda and other forms of caffeine to keep them going. Eat sugar = gain weight = insulin resistance = diabetes = feel like crap and can’t keep up with stress. Reduced tolerance to stimulus such as noise and smell is super common. Rock concerts and social settings tend to overwhelm those I’ve worked with who have Adrenal Fatigue.
As the names implies, the most common symptom of adrenal fatigue is unrelenting fatigue, a feeling of being run down or not able to keep up with your daily demands. And because fatigue is such a common symptom, the syndrome is very often missed or misdiagnosed by physicians.
An estimated 80% of people experience adrenal fatigue and the physical symptoms of stress at some point in their lives, yet it is frequently overlooked and misunderstood by the medical community.
Why are they overlooked? Because doctors aren’t trained to recognize AF and how to explore WHAT may have caused it. I have good news for you…I AM!
I have people who come to me crying for help as a last resort, while I wish they would have come to me sooner because life doesn’t need to be this dismal, it really doesn’t! Why do we wait until we have 4 flat tires before we do something about it? Isn’t 1 tire 
enough? The Adrenal Stress & Sex Hormone panel I run, will help us explore the fundamentals of your endocrine system, through the health of your adrenals and why you’re having the symptoms you are.
Just because the majority of America feels fatigued, overwhelmed, stressed and struggles with weight, constipation, acne, hair falling out, low sex drive and sleeps like crap every night, does NOT make it ‘normal’. Here’s what you’ll benefit from just by taking this test, and following my advice. I’ll:
- Give you 2 hours extra per day. What would you do with 730 spare hours?
- Advise you on EXACTLY which natural herbals, supplements and bio identical hormones to take (no fake, cancer causing, book long side effects Rx & hormones)
- Help you to enjoy your sex live again!
- Take control of your periods & hormones & make healthier babies! (ladies)
- Help you to boost testosterone naturally (men & ladies too!)
- Support your body’s ability to defend against auto-immunity.
- Create a new way of living for you that also includes EXACTLY the types of exercise you need to heal your adrenals, increase energy AND lose weight accidentally!
According to the encyclopedia of endocrinology, 9/10’s of your adrenal gland needs to be unresponsive before it’s clinically diagnosed…what does that mean?
It means your adrenals need to be 90% destroyed before it even shows up on the blood tests that are used on us today to check our endocrine health.
‘Exercise more’ is THE WORST recommendation a doctor should give you when your adrenals are far gone…how can you work out with energy you don’t have? Talk about kicking a horse while it’s down.
Why Hormonal Blood Tests Fail to Assess Energy Health
It’s important that you know the truth.
Blood tests absolutely FAIL when it comes to REAL hormone healing. Here’s why!
Beyond superficial blood testing, in our CHI tribe, what we believe in order to help our clients find the root causes of their fatigue, running a complete hormone panel to explore the function of your adrenals and hence ability to cope with stress and manufacture stress hormones is PARAMOUNT, because often we discover and uncover hormone imbalance metabolism (how your body not only produces hormones but also uses them and excretes them from the body). Blood tests don’t come close to this, they just work with production. Here’s a very common scenario I see where doctors fail their patients.
They are only taught to look at Cortisol once during the day (vs a 24 hour rhythm, which is important so we can check for this stress hormone production throughout the day. If it’s low when you wake up and high when you go to sleep that would mean you’re making less when you need more and more when you need less so you’ll wake up tired and go to bed wired. We see this very commonly, which is typically rooted in gut issues).
They are also only taught to look for what is roaming around in the blood, bound and unbound. The only one free for your body to use is unbound, referred to as FREE hormones.
In this case, the patient showed ‘perfectly normal’ testosterone production and very low Testosterone metabolites, hinting to a potential HPA axis issue. The trigger from the brain to tell the adrenals to make thyroid hormone may be off, so we would want to look deeply into this as well.
So you see, it’s not as straight forward as, check hormone levels in the blood and if you’re low, just take some Hormone Replacement Therapy, or pellet therapy or birth control or Bio Identical Hormones. The way to TRULY heal and fix your fatigue long term is to work with a skilled practitioner to determine the root causes of it and then repair that plus the lifestyle pieces that pushed it out of balance to begin with! Such as these I wrote in THIS ARTICLE
News flash. These are my lab results.
When I got them back, I was astounded at what they hinted toward. The lack of optimization of hormones were a total explanation of my lack of motivation, low energy, quick to fatigue during my work outs and my battle between anxiety, fear and depression. My estrogen was high (estrogen dominance), which is a HUGE market for cancer pre-disposition, among other symptoms women blame on ‘hormonal problems’.
My melatonin was super low making it hard to get to sleep and stay asleep, and hence burn fat. My overall cortisol levels were up and down which makes it difficult to control blood sugar, which hinted toward a war going on inside of my body from a pathogenic/bacteria standpoint.
I run this test along with a few others that will give me the TOTAL and COMPREHENSIVE birds eye view on how the players on your team are working together (or not) in your body. What I will NOT DO, is simply run 1 test that looks at your adrenal health and ‘treat’ that…doing so is irresponsible, negligent, short term and deductive in nature. In short, it’s what Western Medicine does and that renders you ‘still not feeling well’ that spins you into a ‘what’s wrong with me’ cycle.
Here’s a list of my top 10’s Fix your Fatigue with Root Cause Repair
- Address where we’re exhausting our mind with unresolved trauma, worry and fear (inner child and shadow work). Forgiveness & acceptance
- Trade caffeine in for adaptogenic herbs and perhaps my Metabolic Mocha recipe you can download Free in our Warrior Starter Kit
- Get a solid 7-9 hours of sleep, in a dark room, naked preferably, iphone on airplane mode to reduce EMF’s, ideally between 10pm – 6am
- Run proper labs to explore your COMPLETE Adrenal, thyroid and Brain connection to Hormone Production (such as the one referenced above)
- Balance blood sugar – Eat a low inflammatory, hormonal harmonizing diet. I’ve made it simple on you with my WARRIOR CLEANSE RECIPE BOOK.
- Explore the health of your gut with advanced Gastro intestinal lab tests. Over 50% of the clients I have worked with, have a pretty severe stage of bad gut bugs that are draining them via their hormones and causing a phenomenon called, leaky gut, which is all too common today.
- Look for alternative means of healing the root causes of symptoms, instead of blindly thinking prescriptions are the only way to feel better. For example, CBD works wonders for sleep and sleep quality and has helped many of our clients get off of Xanax, which has helped them feel vibrant and alive during the day.
- Do a deep cleanse! Toxins block the receptor sites where hormones can get into the cells, so in order for them to get where they need to go, we need to keep the doors open. Our Warrior Cleanse helps you do this in 4 weeks, however most women need a lot longer to clear the toxins we’ve accumulated our whole lives.
- Try supplementing with Magnesium Glycinate (400-800mg) every night or Magnesium Citrate which could help soften bowels in the case of constipation. You can find the ones I recommend in my Supplement store HERE. (see Top 3 Sleep Recommendation Category after you create a free account)
- Work with a holistic health coach to help you customize the process of healing the root cause, running advanced labs to explore them and working with all of the areas in your life that caused it to begin with. This could shortcut years and thousands of dollars trying short term band aids that don’t work.
Watch THIS VIDEO to get an idea for what kind of support that works
Overwhelmed? Start HERE, with this ONE Thing
If you feel at all overwhelmed and are the kind of person that wants to see immediate results (ahem everyone today LOL), watch our Hormones Masterclass.
Top 5 Secrets The Healthiest Women In The World Use To Overcome Their Fatigue And Hormone Imbalances Naturally – (Even if they’ve been struggling for decades!)
So now you have a choice?
Do nothing, and continue down the path of failing adrenals, Estrogen, hormone im-balancing destruction OR start with one or all of these three steps so you can reclaim your health, hormone balance and hot body!
This TRAINING will change how you think about EVERYTHING and help you free yourself from hormonal hell.
