How To Do The Adrenal Fatigue Diet
Lets first talk a little bit about adrenal fatigue and weight gain. Can adrenal fatigue cause weight gain? Unfortunately, yes. Not only can adrenal fatigue affect your ability to lose weight, but a chronic problem may also cause weight gain. However, the adrenal diet may help support your ability to lose weight and prevent weight gain.
Heres how to do this effective diet plan.
Belly Fat: A Common Sign Of Adrenal Fatigue
Adrenal imbalance can lead to all kinds of different issues, including an expanded waistline. Why is it the belly in particular that tends to collect extra fat during periods of high stress and adrenal dysfunction?
The science behind it is quite interesting. Normally, when we begin to feel hungry, our blood sugar drops and the brain sends a message to the adrenal glands to release cortisol. Cortisol activates glucose, fats, and amino acids to keep our body fueled with energy until we eat.
Cortisol maintains blood sugar levels, and insulin helps our cells absorb glucose. When we have long term stress, both insulin and cortisol remain elevated in the blood, and the extra glucose is stored as fatmostly in the abdomen.
Heres where it gets interesting. Scientists have discovered that fat cells actually have special receptors for the stress hormone cortisol, and there are more of these receptors in our abdominal fat cells than anywhere else in our bodies!
In addition, scientists have shown that belly fat is actually an active tissue, acting as an endocrine organ that responds to the stress response by actually welcoming more fat to be deposited! This is a vicious cycle that will continue until we take steps to correct this adrenal imbalance. How do we do that so we can overcome adrenal fatigue and achieve weight loss?
I Cant Think Straight Im Foggy
Blame it on: High cortisol and its effect on the hippocampus.
Ever noticed how hard it is to keep your mind operating on all four cylinders when youre having a heavy-duty day? You sit at the computer but cant focus, go to the shops but forget what you need to buy, misplace your keys or wallet or both. This mental meltdown is a direct result of adrenal fatigue.
Stress induced brain drain is caused by the hippocampus, a little seahorse shaped organ in the brain involved in our short term memory. With too much cortisol in the brain, dendrites start to shrink and dont work as properly.
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Ways To Manage Adrenal Fatigue
1. Follow a plant-based diet
A plant-based diet can help your body detox and relieve the physical symptoms of adrenal fatigue. Your body digests plant-based foods more easily, which puts less stress on your system. Whole and plant-based foods include:
- Slow-burning carbohydrates
Limit your intake of processed carbs, such as bread, pasta, crackers, and chips, to keep your blood sugar levels steady.
2. Avoid meat
When you eat cow meat, any chemicals ingested by a cow, such as herbicides and insecticides, enter your body as toxins. Adhering to a meat-free diet for a short period can help you cleanse and detoxify your body.
3. Eat regular meals
When you skip meals or ignore hunger cues, it can have an impact on your adrenal health. Irregular meal scheduling can cause your blood sugar to drop too low between meals, prompting your body to release too much cortisol to correct glucose imbalances. For example, eating breakfast is crucial because it restores your blood sugar levels after depleting glycogen stores during the night.
Adrenal fatigue can make it harder for your body to store energy from the foods you eat, so eating small, regular meals and snacks can help fight symptoms of fatigue.
4. Stay well hydrated
Hydration is crucial for the endocrine system. Without adequate water intake, your body cannot deliver nutrients and hormones to the cells.
5. Exercise regularly
6. Limit your exposure to toxins
7. Consider magnesium supplements
Here’s What You Can Do To Soothe Your Nervous System And Lose Weight
It’s critical to turn off this fight/flight/freeze response and direct the body into more natural processes. How do you do this? First, see a good functional medicine provider. You can get tests and have a professional evaluate your stress levels and adrenal function. In the meantime, eliminate processed carbs and sugar and make sure you get high-quality rest, which means seven to nine hours a night of unbroken sleep.
Another great thing to do is to start meditating. Don’t worry about being an expert just sit still and breathe. Make your exhales longer than your inhales this activates your parasympathetic nervous system, which is all about rest, relaxation, digestion, restoration. And finally, slowly and methodically work on resolving the underlying causes of your stress one at a time. It takes some dedication and patience, but it is entirely possible to heal the adrenals and lose those pesky extra pounds!
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Best Foods For Reducing Adrenal Stomach Fat
If youre looking to reduce adrenal stomach fat, youll want to make sure your diet includes plenty of protein and healthy fats as well as foods that are high in:
Best Food Sources For Vitamin B
If youre looking to increase your intake of Vitamin B, youll want to make sure your refrigerator and pantry are stocked with:
- Leafy greens, including: spinach, collard greens, turnip greens, and romaine lettuce
- Liver and other organ meats
- Shellfish, including: clams, mussels, and oysters
- Legumes, including: black beans, chickpeas, kidney beans, pinto beans, lentils, green peas, edamame, and soy nuts
Best Food Sources For Vitamin C
Vitamins C comes from fruits and vegetables. Good sources for Vitamin C include:
- Citrus: oranges, lemons, grapefruit
- Greens: kale, turnip greens, swiss chard, spinach
Best Food Sources for Vitamin D
We get the majority of our Vitamin D from exposure to sunlight.
Vitamin D isnt found naturally in many foods. However, many foods are fortified with vitamin D to provide us with essential nutrients.
Vitamin D can be found naturally in:
Foods often fortified with vitamin D include:
Adrenal Supplement Vs Weight Loss
When the body is stressed physically or emotionally there is a high demand placed on the adrenal glands to produce the adrenaline hormone called epinephrine. When stressed, the adrenal glands become overused and are unable to synthesize the correct amount of adrenal hormones resulting in: Dehydration, Kidney problems, Aging. The adrenal glands produce over 30 hormones to balance your body including cortisol and aldosterone cortisol is the bodys worst nightmare. When the adrenal glands produce high levels of cortisol, the cortisol will begin to deteriorate muscle. Muscle is what burns fat, so if youre eating muscle, then all youre going to do is store fat. This means that your body now goes into a catabolic state, or eating itself.
In addition to stress, dietary habits including the overuse of caffeine, sugar, white flour, and processed sugars can place additional demands on the adrenal glands
What this will do is support the adrenals gland to take the added stress off of them, to stop the excretion of cortisol, so that the body can start building muscle instead of breaking it down.
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Phase : Tired But Wired
Once constant pressures or a taxing situation puts you under chronic stress, the repeated triggering of your adrenal glands can cause high cortisol release one moment and low another. You cant get going so you start to rely more and more on coffee and tea to try to boost your flagging energy levels. But this article explains why the caffeine only causes further hormonal imbalance.
How Stress Steals Your Other Hormones
Normally pregnenolone works as a precursor hormone to help produce testosterone, estrogen, progesterone and DHEA . When your body is struggling to keep up with stress, it diverts an important hormone called pregnenolone to making more cortisol instead of progesterone. This reaction is known as the pregnenolone steal see the chart below:
The classic example is a woman stressed about getting pregnant who then adopts a child as her stress levels go down with the new baby, she gets pregnant with her own child. Im sure you have heard of stories like that. As her pregnenolone is not longer directed to over-produce cortisol, she can now also produce sufficient progesterone and get pregnant.
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Thats mostly because serious medical conditions that affect the adrenal glands, including Addisons disease and pituitary tumors, dont cause symptoms that look like so-called adrenal fatigue.
For example, with these conditions you lose weight instead of gaining it like adrenal fatigue proponents claim. In fact, severe loss of appetite and weight are hallmarks of adrenal insufficiency, according to the National Institutes of Health.
So there you have it.
Why Youre Really Gaining WeightWith that being said, it is possible that these little glands could impact your weight, just in a different way.
For a majority of women, super-high levels of adrenal hormones are the issue, says Quebbemann.
When dealing with chronic stress , the adrenal glands produce a heavy, steady supply of cortisol, which can impair your bodys ability to respond to insulin, says says board-certified internist and endocrinologist Brunilda Nazario, M.D., associate medical director at WebMD. This messes with your ability to burn fat, which ups your risk of gaining weight, she says.
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You Crave Salty Foods
Salt is essential for life. So it is no wonder that when our adrenal glands fail to produce enough aldosterone , things tend to go wonky. The result? We get salt cravings. This is because our bodies are trying to make up for the lack of aldosterone by retaining salt .So while salt might not be something you associate with wellness, when it comes to adrenal fatigue weight gain, it might not be a bad thing to give in to your salt cravings and see if things improve. Increasing salt might help restore your hormones to healthy levels.
The key here is to choose salts that help nourish your body. Salts full of minerals. Himalayan and other specialty salts can be fantastic options. Try swapping these out for your regular table salt for a bit, and see if you notice an improvement.
Three Ways Stress Is Connected To Weight Gain
When looking at the links between stress and weight gain, researchers conclude that over time, the release of stress hormones, like cortisol, can do three major things to cause weight gain:
Energy level is also a key component of adrenal imbalance. When your energy is low, youre more likely to make unhealthy food choices and have less desire to get out and exercise. But its important for women with adrenal imbalance to eat healthy foods to sustain their energy throughout the day and make an effort to lessen the stress burden on their bodies. This will help create the conditions for natural, lasting weight loss.
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Finding The Solution With Adrenal Fatigue Weight Loss
There is hope, and that is in the form of adrenal fatigue weight loss and a diet designed for adrenal fatigue and weight loss. The following are a collection of tips I can say will help you combat a cortisol imbalance and the dreaded cortisol and belly fat that comes with it.
Of course, everybody is different, so these suggested dietary and exercise-based tips are going to vary based on the amount of effort and restraint you exercise.
If bodybuilders and athletes use cortisol to their advantage, why cant you? There must be a simple way to help combat adrenal fatigue, speed up weight loss and cut those extra pounds out of your life for good. In fact, there is, so let me walk you through some of the best tips to help you reach your goals with adrenal fatigue weight loss.
Can you lose weight with adrenal fatigue? Learn how to lose weight with thyroid and adrenal problems, and utilize some of the following tips
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Im Always Getting Sick Or I Take A Long Time To Recover
Blame it on: High adrenalin and cortisol
Apart from stress management, the adrenals are also responsible for regulating your immune system. Remember a problematic project at work or a family crises that took time to resolve? You had sufficient energy and focus to get through the hard time . But, as soon as it was over, you fell sick. Sound familiar?
Ongoing stress can weaken the adrenals so much so that they are not able to sufficiently stimulate the immune system to keep you healthy. Im not just talking here about superficial conditions like cold and flu but more serious ones like cancer or autoimmune conditions.
I vividly remember my interview with Dr. Veronique , of The Breast Cancer Conqueror, who in spite of being that super healthy person, developed breast cancer.
Cortisol And Weight Gain
Cushings syndrome, a condition resulting from the overproduction of cortisol by the adrenal glands, can make you gain weight and retain fat in specific places, such as the face, belly, and the back of the neck .
This can happen due to a pituitary tumor producing excess adrenocorticotropic hormone . This hormone triggers the production of excess cortisol, thus leading to weight gain, among other symptoms.
Another factor that can cause Cushings syndrome is the long-term overuse of steroid hormones such as glucocorticoids . These steroid medications are commonly used in treating autoimmune disorders, inflammatory diseases, or cancers. When used for prolonged periods can cause cortisol accumulation in the body, making you gain weight.
Elevated levels of cortisol in the body can be a reason for insulin resistance, which can eventually lead to type 2 diabetes and obesity .
High cortisol levels also increase the secretion of leptin , which is the hormone that regulates appetite. Constant high concentrations of leptin trigger leptin resistance , which leaves you hungry, no matter how much you eat. This will significantly increase your food intake and lead to obesity.
In addition, research suggests that hypothyroidism reduces cortisol clearance from the system and thus can result in high cortisol levels and, therefore, can cause weight gain.
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Learn More With Overcoming Estrogen Dominance
The body has an amazing ability to heal. We just need to give it the right resources.
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More than 70% of women experience estrogen dominance. The symptoms range from lumpy and fibrocystic breasts to thyroid nodules, hot flashes, fibroids, uterine polyps, painful, heavy or irregular periods to infertility and miscarriages, from mood swings to insomnia, weight gain to fatigue.
So many women have experienced the pain and frustration that comes when they feel their symptoms and complaints are dismissed or minimized. This is particularly true for women who are experiencing the symptoms of hormone imbalance. Even when doctors do offer treatment, its typically in the form of prescription medication or invasive surgical procedures.
In Overcoming Estrogen Dominance, I hope to show that those extreme interventions are often unnecessary, and to give women a roadmap to reverse estrogen dominance using food, herbs, supplements and natural protocols to rebalance hormones.
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Does Your Day Look Like This
Have the words Im so stressed and Im exhausted become daily mantras? Do you often feel teary and tense and think, I cant handle this pressure anymore? If stress calls the shots on your life, its highly likely youre suffering from adrenal burnout. Or youre well on the way there. Meanwhile, it will also cause symptoms of hormone imbalance.
Over time, as your adrenal fatigue worsens, it can totally compromise your natural hormone balance, which may lead you to experience enormous energy fluctuations that look something like this:
These constant slumps and dips are signs that your adrenals are really struggling. Adrenal fatigue is one of the biggest cause of hormonal imbalance in women.
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Chronic Stress Leads To Adrenal Fatigue
Over time, chronic stress can overwhelm the adrenal capacity for stress. The adrenal glands produces elevated stress hormones like cortisol during the initial stages of stress response and Adrenal Fatigue.
The cortisol is produced as an appropriate response to the fight or flight stimulation. During fight or flight, we would need fuel. And the major fuel of the body is glucose.
Eating food to provide glucose in an emergency situation would be too slow of a process. So, the body has developed a storage form of glucose called glycogen.
Cortisol stimulates the liver and fat cells to convert this glycogen back into glucose and release it into the bloodstream. This is when your body can use it as fuel to fight the proverbial tiger .
