Medical Medium

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, however—for example, if you’re going through a bankruptcy, a divorce, the death of a loved one, or some other cause of severe emotional turmoil—your adrenal glands will eventually become damaged from being on continual “hyperdrive.” Undergoing a very substantial amount of stress in even a relatively short period can also overstrain the adrenals; 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.

You can also have these symptoms with perfectly healthy adrenal glands but a malfunctioning thyroid (see Chapter 6, “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’s difficult to know whether you have adrenal fatigue based on a list of symptoms alone. Fortunately, there are some additional clues you can look for.

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’s very possible you have adrenal fatigue.

If considering the symptoms and scenarios described earlier in this chapter leads you to believe you have adrenal fatigue, don’t despair. You can take a number of concrete steps, as described below and in Part IV, to heal your adrenals and return them to their optimal strength.

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 bounce back when the holidays have passed.”

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 occasional 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 sugars in her diet that had resulted in reduction of glucose in her bloodstream, her already exhausted adrenals were now in 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 the risk associated with a fad diet that’s not backed up by true understanding of what the body needs and how it operates.

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 sugars 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 proteins 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, she 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.