ADRENAL FATIGUE…the uncontrolled WILD FIRE sweeing the country!
As an experienced personal trainer of 12 years, I have run across a lot of things that inhibit peoples weightloss, but I had never heard of Adrenal Fatigue until it happened to me! Here’s my story.
Four years ago I found myself literally exhausted, on every level, physically, mentally, spiritually, and professionally. I was extremely tired and worn down from running around like a crazy woman for the previous 7 years like Hercules with the world on my shoulders as a newly divorce and now single mother, business owner, personal trainer, body building competitor, and supermom.
The year 2007 was an incredibly busy and stressful year. At the top of the list was moving my Embroidery Shop of seven years to a brand new location I was customizing into the perfect Embroidery Shop. I was gutting the new location and running the re-construction job myself, with the kids and I doing the construction cleanup after hours while keeping my current location running simultaneously. Talk about exhausting!
On top of this stress, my father had been diagnosed with bone cancer 4 months earlier and was in and out of the hospital trying medication after medication to no avail. He was in a lot of pain, in his seventies and refused to endure chemotherapy at that age. I was only in my new shop one month when he started to respond to a medication and improved enough to go home and recuperate. We were all thrilled at this huge step forward in his health.
Then it happened, he got up in the middle of the night to get a drink of water, tripped over a kitchen chair leg, fell against the wall and broke his neck! After being hospitalized for the next three days and in excruciating pain that no pain killers seemed to even touch, I stood by his bedside, whispered I LOVE YOU in his ear and watched him slip away as the heart monitor slowly stopped making little peaks and he was gone.
After the funeral, I tried to go on, running my business, keeping my customers happy, bringing in the money, training my clients, raising my children etc. but I was going down hill too. Still mourning his lost, I was trying to keep my new shop floating, playing catchup from the lack of attention while being consumed with my dads illness, but getting buried further and further under the daily stress. By the end of the year, after using up every last ounce of TRY I had left in me, I finally, after seven years of extremely high stress, closed my doors in the middle of a blinding snow storm, put everything into two storage units and went home to bed……for three solid months. Literally!
ADRENAL FATIGUE IS EXHAUSTING!
I was so exhausted and emotionally depleted I couldn’t even handle the tiniest bit of stress. Just opening the mail or emptying the dishwasher would exhaust me and I would need to go take a 3 hour nap to recover and feel better. This went on for months until I finally when to a local Health Food Store where I had heard the owner did muscle testing for free. I doubtingly scheduled an appointment thinking she probably wouldnt be able to help me, but I went anyway out of pure curiosity and desperate for some help. Boy am I glad I did!
This lady sure knew her stuff! I didn’t tell her a whole lot about me, just some basics of how i was feeling. She did some muscle testing on me and told me somethings that totally coincided with the way I had been feeling that I had not shared with her. She then pronounced to me that I had Adrenal Fatigue, told me to go home, keep my stress level very low, eat health, get plenty of good quality sleep and let my Adrenal glands start healing. I took every word she said to heart.
I went home, pulled up “Adrenal Fatigue” on the internet and started reading everything about it that I could get my hands on. Everything I read echoed what she had told me and more. In my search I eventually found a fantastic book titled “Adrenal Fatigue” the 21st Century Stress Syndrome of which I would like to feature today.
This book was of great use to me in healing my adrenal glands and learning more about this stress driven Syndrome. Over the next three years I learned how to keep my stress low, deal with my emotions, deal with my divorce of seven years ago, eat certain foods to heal my adrenal glands, and basically how to rethink and re-invent my life.
As I read this book, I realized I am not the only one experiencing this modern day Stress Syndrome. In fact I was shocked to read the following quote straight from Dr. James Wilson’s Book:
.”At one time or another, adrenal fatigue affects an estimated 80% of people living in industrialized countries, yet it has been largely ignored by the medical community.“
80%???? Really?? That’s HUGE!!! That means most of us walking around HAVE Adrenal Fatigue and we don’t even realize it. What we do know is we are tired, sluggish and really having a hard time dealing with our stressful lives on a daily basis. To combat this daily fatigue people are reaching for the caffeine as a quick fix. But the use of caffeine is actually adding to the problem! What people don’t realize is that using the caffeine for a pick me up and or to give them a shot of energy, is not solving the real problem, it’s only creating a new problem. It’s called Adrenal Fatigue.
Caffeine doesn’t actually give you any energy, especially not from your fat stores. What it really does is makes your body give you a shot of adrenaline! This adrenaline comes from your adrenal glands of course. It puts you on a high for a while while it’s coursing through your veins, but then it drops off and leaves you more tired and drained than you were before. So then you need another pick me up and you do it again. These days we are starting the day with a shot of caffeine in our morning coffee, then during the day we reach for another energy drink, coffee, or caffeinated beverage to give us that lift, and to keep ourselves feeling awake and alert, but this is NOT good!
Adrenaline is meant to be used in emergency situations like, hey wow, I’m being chased by a lion I better run for my life!! Or like the heroes who recently lifted a car off of a man here in Utah after he and his motorcycle went under a car during an accident. You can bet everyone of those heroes had adrenaline coursing through their veins until the emergency was over and for some time afterward.( The good news is, they saved the guys life!!) And their bodies reacted with the Fight or Flight response when needed just as it’s supposed to.
But it’s not supposed to go through that adrenaline rush on a daily or even hourly basis. Not, hey wow, I’m burning my candle on both ends, haven’t slept in 3 days, haven’t eaten anything but junk food and gotta get this project done for work no matter what so I’ll just pump my body full of caffeine so I can stay awake. Then repeat over and over.
So let’s learn a little about what caffeine really is. There are two kinds of Caffeine and they are NOT the same.
One is Trimethylxanthine, and the other is Tetramethylxanthine. Two VERY different chemical compounds.
Let’s start with the GOOD one. Tetramethylxanthine .
Caffeine comes from a plant called Paulinia Cupana which grows widely in the Amazon rainforest and has been cultivated in certain areas for many years, particularly around Luzea, near the River Maues. This stout, twining plant produces nutritious leaves and black seeds twice a year, in March/April and again in October/November. The plants are then naturally sun-dried and mixed with water and drunk as a healthy, invigorating “tea”.
The whole plant Paulinia Cupana contains naturally occuring caffeine that is unprocessed. This unprocessed caffeine is called Tetramenthylxanthine. This form of caffeine in its raw state is wonderful and healthy for you. We offer a natural supplement with this healthy whole plant form in it. It called Awakening .
But when you take the Tetramenthylxanthine and roast, cook or heat it, it destroys the active nutrients, precious enzymes and converts it to Trimethylxanthine, or Anhydrous Caffeine. In this form it becomes a potentially dangerous stimulant.
Most stimulative products found in America contain Trimethylxanthine which is generally referred to as processed Trimethylxanthine also called Anhydrous Caffeine. This bad form of caffeine is synthesized and found in Coca Cola, chocolate bars, tea, coffee, caffeinated soda, energy drinks and energy supplements like 5 Hour Energy. This is the form of caffeine that is literally exhausting us and damaging our adrenal glands sending us into Adrenal Fatigue and if continued, into Adrenal Failure which is called Addison’s Disease which you cannot, my friends, recover from so you really don’t want to go there.
So let me be clear, there are two ways to drain your adrenal glands, one is with the overuse of caffeine and other stimulants, and the other is prolonged high stress in your life. Determine which one is your problem, or both, and then take steps to change your behaviors, patterns, and ways you deal with stress. My first suggestion is GET SOME EXERSISE!!!! and GET SOME SLEEP!!!
So here’s the bottom line…Be good to yourself and take yourself off the adrenal draining caffeine products. Doing this will give them a chance to repair themselves and help you handle your stress better. Other things to do are get plenty of sleep. Your body repairs when its sleeping, and that’s when it grows new muscle, burns fat, repairs your adrenal glands and does a ton of other good things for you. Give your body a chance to repair itself and it will. Also eat healthy whole foods, avoid the junk foods and the processed packaged foods these are filled with ingredients we can’t even pronounce and that are not natural. Click on the recipe title here Adrenal Repair Soup and we will give you a FREE copy of the recipe. This soup is full of ingredients that can help your adrenal glands start healing. You can have a FREE copy just click on the link and checkout on my website.
Even in the best of times you need food to survive and be healthy. Adrenal fatigue is definitely not the best of times and so the food choices you make become even more important to your survival and health.” James L. Wilson, N.D., D.C., PhD
For additional information on this 21st Century Stress Syndrome please read Dr. James Wilson’s book Adrenal Fatigue. He provides information on what to eat, some natural supplements he has developed to help your recovery and much more.
Because of my own experience with Adrenal Fatigue, I am now much more equipped to help my clients overcome this health challenge, and much more in tune with my own stress levels and how to keep them under control.
I hope reading this article has made you more aware and brought to your attention your own high stress level and a realization that you are using caffeine as a band-aid for a much bigger problem. I hope it’s given you some guidance on how and where to find the right kind of help to start healing yourself.
Yours In Health and Fitness,
GymQueen
www.hardbodyfitness.net
P.S. I predict, that Caffeine will be the next Effedra- like product taken off the market in the future for all the damage it is causing and for reeking havoc in the human body. What a high price we are going to pay for this one. But it’s going to be years before this happens.
And shame on all those companies that have pushed caffeine on us in all their products making us believe it’s good for us, it will give us energy, make us lose weight etc. and knowing all along it doesn’t. Shame on them for being so greedy about making money, that they do it at the expense of the public health for as long as they can get away with it.
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