What to do if counting calories, exercising, and making the environmental changes I suggested last week are not making any difference to your metabolism?
What if you still feel sluggish, tired, and your weight just won’t budge? It could be subclinical hypothryoidism and adrenal fatigue. This super common condition is poorly understood and can literally simply be caused by prolonged stress.
Ask yourself: have you been through a stressful period recently? Or have you been living under stress for a long period of time — months, years, even decades? If so, focusing on boosting thyroid and adrenal function is going to be more helpful than trying diets and struggling over weight loss. Stop thinking weight loss and start thinking adrenal repair.
It’s no secrete that stress affects your body from head to toe, and can have a tremendous impact on your weight. Studies show that sress can cause changes in eating patterns and they also suggest that cortisol reactivity is one of the reasons why. So instead of monitoring your eating, maybe what we should be monitoring is your cortisol and stress levels.
Cortisol is produced by the adrenal glands and by supporting your adrenal health, you can normalize your cortisol levels. Stop the focus on weight and instead focus on reducing your body’s stress hormone output. In fact, releasing your weight struggle and embracing your adrenal repair instead may be the best way to stop unhealthy food consumption that is due to stress, which is what is triggering this change in the first place.
As I wrote about in this article here, feeling stress and shame over your weight is actually harmful… and unnecessary, when what we could be doing instead of stressing is nurturing. Nurturing your body, nurturing your adrenals, and relieving stress to naturally reset your eating patterns.
If you have been focusing on trying to control your food intake, maybe it’s time to stop beating yourself up over something that is actually being triggered by high levels of stress and high cortisol. I’d like to suggest that weight issues might be actually adrenal issues.
5 Tips for Healing Adrenal Fatigue & Boosting Thyroid:
1. Instead of reducing calories, reduce gut inflammation:
Eating foods that are inflammatory to your gut lining can cause leaky gut syndrome, and you might find new food sensitivities develop to foods that you had no problem eating before, and ultimately this can even result in hypothyroidism.
The main culprits? Gluten, dairy, sugar.
All three are highly inflammatory to the body… gluten being the most inflammatory directly to the lining of the gut. When you consume gluten, dairy and sugar while you are repairing adrenal fatigue… even if these foods would not normally bother you in any way… the small amount of sub-clinical inflammation that it triggers is enough for your body to increase the amount of antibodies it makes in response to the increased inflammation.
Blood markers for inflammation goes up, the body is on high alert for irritants, and you might find yourself getting heartburn when you normally wouldn’t, sensitive stomach to foods that normally don’t bother you, constipation or irritable bowel worse than ever, skin rashes and eczema and hives that you don’t normally have, even seasonal allergies getting worse by the year instead of better as your body is on higher alert than ever before!
All of this inflammatory response sets you up for easily triggering an autoimmune reaction — the antibodies circulating begin to attack your normal tissues, and in this case, where your energy levels are crashing, your body feels stuck in fight-or-flight mode, your food intake might be causing more cortisol to be required and your nutritional building blocks are absent, then the body wants to decrease it’s own metabolism in order to preserve energy for the long haul.
This results in the body using it’s own immunity to attack the thyroid. Autoimmune hypothyroid is the number one form of thyroid disease. Even if your thyroid labs appear within normal limits, if you have symptoms of hypothroidism with normal lab values, this is called subclinical hypothyroidism and is a real thing. And because it’s real, you can actually heal from it.
Did you know that just the act of removing gluten from triggering gut inflammation can be enough to turn an early hypothyroid situation around? It’s true. Because it stops the cascade of inflaming the gut which produces antibodies which attack the thyroid.
And we can go even further than that… we can decrease all triggers (gluten, sugar, dairy) at least temporarily, while we are healing the adrenal glands, and we can restore balance to the gut lining by supplementing with probiotics, digestive enzymes and drinking aloe vera juice (shown to significantly help heal the gut lining!) and we can eat adrenal and thyroid supportive foods to help facilitate repair.
Now is also a good time, if you feel concerned about hypothyroid or if you are already being treated for it, to remember to get your TSH, thyroid antibodies, and reverse T3 checked and have any Rx thyroid medications optimized.
Symptoms of hypothyroid go right along with symptoms for adrenal fatigue because they are so interrelated.
Do these sound like you? Fatigue, weight gain, thinning hair, dry skin, constipation, depressed mood, and feeling cold all the time?
If so, double check your thyroid function by getting your thyroid labs taken with your local physician.
And whether you are requiring thyroid Rx medications or not, there are plenty of wonderful things you can do right now to turn your entire health around by addressing adrenal fatigue, healing your gut and decreasing gut inflammation and whole body inflammation, supporting your adrenal gland and your thyroid gland nutritionally, AND by introducing adrenal supportive supplements into your diet as well.
Let’s talk about those below, and also print out this hand shopping guide (by clicking the button below) to make implementing these changes easy:
Free Printable Shopping List
2. Take Supportive Supplements:
We can exponentially support the speed of our body’s recover from Adrenal Fatigue with high quality supplements. Most important during the repair process are herbs that directly support the adrenal glands, like ashwagandha and holy basil.
Although it’s absolutely possible to repair your adrenals without taking supplements, it’s super helpful to support your healing process nutritionally. Contraindications to starting Adrenal Supportive Supplements like the ones I link to below are anyone currently taking prescription sedatives, drugs that treat Bipolar Disorder, participants who are or may become pregnant, and participants on immunosuppressants.
But for the vast majority of us, adding on supplements that boost our adrenal gland function, boost our thyroid function, and help calm and repair our digestion and gut lining are all very good ideas because they will exponentially speed repair and restore us to our innate health and energy levels more quickly!
My favorite adrenal supportive ingredients:
1. Ashwagandha: used for thousands of years in India, this ancient herb has a calming, anti-inflammatory, and immune boosting effect. Many medical studies prove the safety and statistical efficacy of this herb, which is why it is my top choice for adrenal repair.
2. Rhodiola: this herb is anxiolytic (decreases anxiety) increases mental clarity and boosts immunity
3. Holy Basil: this herb has been in use for over 5,000 years and is renowned for increasing energy, stabilizing mood, decreasing blood glucose levels and stabilizing blood sugar.
4. Probiotics: shown in medical studies to decrease cortisol levels (read more about that here) and support mood (as I wrote about here) probiotics are a big help in restoring balance to the gut and decreasing whole body inflammation
5. Digestive enzymes: taken along with meals this helps the digestive process become easier and less inflammatory, less bloating, gas, pain and other symptoms of irritable bowel
6. Aloe vera juice: medically shown to help speed repair of the gut lining, I recommend drinking a beverage with aloe vera juice in it daily (at least 4 oz a day… add to any fruit juice or smoothie if you don’t want to drink it solo!)
7. L-glutamine: this one is a game changer. Not only does glutamine help repair the gut lining, but it also has the wonderful side effect of decreasing sugar cravings, carb cravings, even alcohol cravings! Right at a time when we are wanting to decrease our sugar consumption and switch from simple carbs like wheat and sugar over to more nutrient dense foods like healthy fats and proteins, taking an L-glutamine supplement can be a life saver. Here is a good article that guides you through the use of L- glutamine to decrease sugar cravings.
I’ve put all of these supplements, in the brands I trust and have found work the best, into one protocol that combines all of these awesome healing plan, waiting for you in my online dispensary here:
Adrenal Recovery Protocol
3. Realize how much this affects how you feel:
The least understood thing about adrenal fatigue is that it has not just caused you to burn out of your cortisol, but it has also actually robbed you of the sex hormones that help you stay balanced and young and vibrant too.
In fact, did you know that repairing your adrenals is absolutely going to improve your mood, your metabolism and muscle tone, your hair and skin, even your boost your sex drive? That’s because cortisol is made out of the same precursors that the sex hormones (like estrogen and testosterone) are made from.
So as your body uses more and more of the precursors trying to keep up with outputting more and more cortisol into your body, it literally steals these precursors away from your estrogen and testosterone production. As a result, when your adrenals are strained and your cortisol has been over-produced for any length of time, your sex hormones decrease, your sex drive disappears, your skin and hair lose luster, your mood plummets, your muscle mass decreases and more — this goes for men and women alike.
Basically, adrenal fatigue makes you feel aged.
It accelerates the lowering of sex hormones, plummets mood, worsens PMS, hastens menopause and andropause, robs you of restorative sleep, and dampens your mood.
So being very very diligent about implementing the repair work outlined in this article can truly make such a difference that you feel ten years younger again. Or maybe even… better than you’ve ever felt before! If you want to take a fun quiz to determine if you are in adrenal fatigue (and what stage of adrenal fatigue you would fit into) click the button below to take a free adrenal fatigue quiz I created for you:
Free Adrenal Fatigue Quiz
4. Keep track of your progress:
To help track your progress, print out this monthly mood and energy tracker to keep track of your improvement over the next few months. It is really crucial to track your sleep and daily rhythms so that you can see concrete evidence of change. It’s too hard to contrast how you will feel in a few weeks with how you feel right now if you don’t have evidence in front of you of the changes. Tracking your progress will encourage you to keep on going!
On top of that, using a tracker helps remind you to stay in the new patterns that are so essential to this work, and keeps your targeted activity changes and sleep goals on your radar. Just click the link below and print out as many copies as you need — one copy per month — and let’s begin tracking your healing progress today!
Free Printable Energy Tracker
5. Join My Online Class That Just Started Today
The next thing I recommend you do — for tons more support on uplifting, natural ways to lose weight — is to join my Weight Release & Reset online class, which starts today!
Hop over here for more information and to reserve your spot.
“I just wanted to say how much I enjoyed the Weight Reset emails and videos! I looked forward to each and every day. Your class gave me so much hope!” – C.C.
“This was AWESOME!! I loved all the information — the medical studies to back it up and the daily reminders. Plus — I love that you can do this at your own pace. Thank you!” C.W.
“I was surprised at how many different things can affect your weight and when you talked about them in the class… it was like a bell went off. I would definitely recommend the class to others” – S.G.
Together, we go over the 5 pillars of sustainable, feel-good weight loss. One pillar a day for 5 days. Simple and sweet. I’ve based this course directly off of the medical literature and my 20 years of experience helping to support my patients with their weight loss goals, holistically and easily and with no stress.
You’d be surprised that your body naturally knows what weight is the perfect one for you, and it can sustain it at this perfect weight effortlessly once you naturally align your metabolism. I’ll show you how in a very non-threatening, supportive, uplifting way. It’s not about being rigid or militant or hard on yourself, in fact, it’s the exact opposite. The harder you are on yourself, the harder it is to align with your healthiest version of you.
Release that struggle by understanding the things that sabotage weight loss and once you do, the weight releases, naturally.
Class starts today so of course today is the last day for you to sign up. Snag your spot here and let me support you:
To your resilient, natural health!
xoxox, Laura
PS: If you’d like the information in this blog post in a PDF format, I turned it into a free ebook that you can download and save.
Click the button below to order your free copy of my Adrenal Fatigue eBook… it will be instantly emailed directly to you, to keep forever, and please share it freely:
