How to recover from Adrenal Fatigue

So you've wondered what is adrenal fatigue and you've ran the home tests or maybe your Naturopath has diagnosed you, OR maybe you just want to do what you can to keep your adrenals in tip top condition? I have been reading a fab book by James L Wilson called "Adrenal Fatigue - The 21st Century Stress Syndrome" and I recommend it.  I have had the copy for my library for way way to long and must return this book as there are others waiting for it, sorry if this is you.

Healing from adrenal fatigue really just involved leading a primal lifestyle - eating whole foods, avoiding foods that cause aggravation and embracing a lifestyle that involves rest, relaxation and connection.  I seriously could write you a blog that would take you three weeks to read on what to do to achieve this, but with the library fine pending I am lifting a review straight from the book by Wilson.  It's a lovely bullet pointy overview.  I hope you find it helpful. 

• Be in bed before 10pm (I call this PaleO'Clock).
• Sleep in until 9am whenever possible (yeh right).
• Look for things that make you laugh.
• Eliminate energy robbers from your life (people who drain you).
• Make your lifestyle a healing one.
• Do something pleasurable every day.
• Whenever you are not enjoying your life read this and find a way to deal with it.
• Notice one small thing every day that you are grateful for.
• Take your supplements regularly.
• Move your body and breathe deeply.
• Believe in your ability to recover.
• Use your mind as a powerful healing tool.
• Keep a journal and jot down your daily experiences.
• Eat the foods your body needs.
• Learn which foods disagree with you and eliminate them.
• Salt your food, salt your water.
• If you eat sweet things, combine them with fats.
• Combine starchy carbohydrates, protein and fat at every meal.
• Eat an abundance of whole food.
• Eat lots of coloured vegetables.
• Chew chew chew chew and chew your food.
• Take the power and responsibility of your own health into your own hands.
• Make the lifestyle changes needed to make you regain your health.
• Laugh several times a day.
• Enjoy your recovery.
• Consider taking 1,000mg of vitamin C complex with 200mg magnesium and pantothenic acid at 2pm daily to avoid the 3-4pm low.

and I would like to add:

• Focus on healing your gut as all heath starts in the gut.
• Make rest a priority, it is part of the cycle.
• Get out in nature.
• Meditate, nap or lie with your feet up for 20mins after lunch.
• Practice yoga.
• Remember "life is not an emergency".
• Take care of yourself first so that you can take care of others.
• Breathe fresh air.

Avoid these things

• Getting overtired.
• Caffeine, sugar, alcohol and white flour products.
• Coffee, even decaf.
• Staying up past 11pm (avoiding your second wind)
• Pushing yourself.
• Energy suckers.
• Being harsh or negative with yourself.
• Foods you are addicted too. (these tend to be what's making you ill).
• Foods you suspect and allergy or sensitivity to.
• Foods that make you feel worse, cloudy or pull you down.
• Never skip breakfast.
• Avoid fruit in the morning.
• Never eating starchy carbs by themselves.
• Do not eat foods that adversely affect you in anyway, no matter how good they taste or how much you crave them.

and I would like to add these to the avoid list:

• Over exercising.
• Becoming too hungry.
• Letting yourself become uncomfortable in anyway e.g. too hot, too cold, need the toilet and holding on.
• Grains. refined sugar, dairy.
• Household chemicals.
• Cosmetic chemicals.
• Fasting.

So there you go Fallsy, nothing too new really hey?  I hope you enjoyed!!

About my primal shift

It all starts with food and this was my starting point.  I found it didn't just end there, I also needed to make some simple but committed lifestyle changes too which mainly helped me chill out and actually digest all this amazing food I was putting in my belly. More about those in blogs to come...

A good place to start is by eliminating foods that commonly cause digestive issues (which leads to a myriad of other common ailments). The major culprits are GRAINS, LEGUMES, ALCOHOL, SUGAR and DAIRY.  Yikes, what's left?

When I first heard about this from my well informed friend Kirsty in the form of the Whole30 (I just did my first links, feeling like a pro!) I absolutely scoffed at the idea, how absurd, no way, pft what next kind of reaction.  I now wonder if it was the colonies of bad bacteria in my gut that were causing my food choices. 

I've always considered myself healthy and have always done what I can to be as healthy as I can, with the information I had available to me at that time.  Unfortunately I now realise that the information to eat LOW FAT and do lots of CHRONIC CARDIO at the gym was probably a recipe for disaster for my gut and adrenals. 

I would have never ever ever in a million years cut out the offending food groups mentioned above if I had not felt so utterly shite.  I was nauseous, it was like a hangover or morning sickness.  For six months very intensively but looking back it was a slow two year build up.  I was exhausted, stressed, constipated, sleep was shocking I was feeling how a lot of people say they felt and I became to think it was probably just normal for a mum of two kids who was approaching forty herself to feel.  I even goggled exhaustion two years ago and smugly posted on Facebook that the search had suggested that giving up caffeine, alcohol and sugar could help alleviate exhaustion and that perhaps being tired wasn't so bad after all. So I had my coffee on a morning and my wine on a night and that's how I coped on my sugar and carbohydrate roller coaster day of ups and downs, feeling hungry every 2-3 hours, and feeling overwhelmed, stressed and losing it around the 'witching hours' 4-7pm.

I used to get HANGRY (hungry and angry, love that word thanks Slips) I used to feel dizzy sometimes my vision would go temporarily for example at the gym when we went from something lying down to something standing up quickly.  But mainly I felt sick, sometimes it was so bad I would get the shakes.  Then my thoughts went weird.  (This is the bit that upsets me now the most).  I started having irrational thoughts, mainly about the kids getting gastro.  I was struggling through the day and I couldn't cope with anymore, plus being 100% nauseous all the time, the last thing I wanted was vomiting kids in the house. It was mental torture.  My thoughts just went down the negative track all the time and I felt I had no control over them.

I went to see my Dr, she ran loads and loads of blood tests, I had a full body ultrasound, stool samples, you name it...the results came back, there is nothing wrong with you everything looks fine, your iron is a bit low, take some supplements, maybe you have got some IBS but there is no drug for that.

In a moment of crisis and desperation I decided to try gluten free, that again is another post worthy story, this caused a massive gluten hangover for about three days followed by massive change and relief most markedly in my thoughts, no more weird obsessive thoughts, that part happened quickly!

Then I went to see my saviour, my Naturopath Rae she quickly diagnosed me as having Small Intestinal Bacterial Overgrowth , a leaky gut and some irritable bowel syndrome.  More on all of these to come. So Rae set about soothing my massively inflamed gut and healing and sealing  as well as some delicious (not) tonics for adrenal nourishment amongst other things. I also started on some excellent probiotics.

So my Whole30 ended up looking more like a Wholeish60ish with some liver detoxing in there.

I ditched gluten in April, started my Wholeish60ish in May and now its beginning of September.  The nausea is all but gone, sometimes if I've overdone it or its cycle related I get a mild nausea.  That's all I wanted, the nausea gone.  But soon I started to feel better, then good, then kin awesome!  I was getting stressed less, I was having more fun with the kids and making up daft songs just cause I felt like it.  My energy started to become constant and steady all day and that aching exhausted feeling was gone.  I started to feel sleepy as soon as the sun went down and sleep changed from a fits and starts light sleep to passing out at 9;15pm and knowing nothing until 6:00am the next day.  (I thought only husbands could sleep like that!)

OK, so I promised myself I'd stop after an hour of chatting with you, thanks for listening.  Next time I want to talk to you about the food I am eating now and what the hell JERF means.

Below is a selfie of Milly and I down at the beach in May this year.  I had started my healing process but I still felt very fragile, but I was out there getting on with it, cos you have to when you're a Mum don't you?  But I can see in my eyes here that I was suffering.