Adrenal Fatigue... no one talks about it, but it's what's making you (and me) sleepy

I am one of those people who gets stressed out easily. I have done a lot of work to try to minimize the stress in my life, minimize the amount of anxiety I put myself through, and increase the amount of time I spend taking care of myself.

But every once and a while I let the craziness of running a new business get the better of me and I end up running myself into the ground. It looks like... I get 8 hours of sleep a night, I wake up exhausted and it takes me a long time (and a little bit of caffeine) for me to feel awake. I have racing thoughts, and the constant feeling that I am not getting things done fast enough. I work from the time I wake up until shortly before I go to bed. I wish that I didn't have to sleep at all.

This is not sustainable for me... and it is where I am at right now. I have been aware of adrenal fatigue for a while now and I am pretty sure that this is the reason I constantly feel exhausted when I'm in high stress periods of my life. I have been reading Kris Carr lately (if you don't know about her she is an awesome cancer survivor who turned her life around and now promotes healthy living and eating) and I was just emailed one of her blog videos that I think eveyone would benefit from watching... because we all know most people are overworked, stressed out, and not taking care of themselves!

How many meals should we be eating a day?

I get asked this question from time to time so I thought I would explain my views on how messed up America's eating habits are.

When I was a kid, we ate 3 meals. Breakfast, lunch, and an early dinner (by 6 pm). If we were hungry at 8pm we had a choice of fruit or to wait until breakfast. Somehow since then it has become fashionable to eat 6 smaller meals a day. Where this came from I am not really sure, but it is definitely an American-made concept.

I have tried this at least a few times and have stopped almost immediately because I felt like the only thing I was doing was eating- all day long! It was like I spent so much time managing when I was going to eat that it was annoying and I felt like I couldn't get anything else done because I was always eating.

Since attending nutrition school, I have come to think that not only is eating 6 times a day a little ridiculous, it is completely unnecessary, and actually detrimental to losing weight (which is the argument that trainers use when they tell you to eat smaller meals more frequently).

In a nutshell, your body will not burn fat if it is constantly getting fed. Fat is stored to be used as energy, but it only burns it if there is no food in sight. So if you can train your body to go longer between meals you actually have a shot at burning your fat stores for energy.

This brings up another aspect of eating 6 meals a day: night eating. Inevitably if you are eating 6 meals a day, you are more than likely eating later than you normally would to get that last meal in. Night eating is the worst thing you can do if you are trying to lose weight. It's ideal to go to bed on an empty stomach (slightly hungry but not starving) because then your body burns it's fat stores all night long. Everyone is different, but the ideal time for me to stop eating is 6pm, and I usually eat a large lunch and smaller dinner. When I do not eat a large lunch I go into the late afternoon starving, ravenous, and capable of eating everything. This is what I have been working on...eating my big meal during the day.

I have been chipping away at this over the past few months, and have seen tremendous results (along with all the juice I drink). I gave up the idea that I need to kill myself at the gym everyday and little by little have changed my eating habits. I have seen more weight loss from changing my eating habits than I ever did from spending hours at the gym. Now, a few times a week I go for a six mile walk (more like stroll most days) and an occasional run if I do not have the time to walk.

Changing one's eating habits is tough stuff, especially if you are addicted to sugar, caffeine, etc., but I promise if you just start where you are and make little baby steps you can see lasting weight loss without killing yourself at the gym.

And the most important thing to remember is: IF YOU ARE NOT HUNGRY DON'T EAT! (regardless of what you think you have to do...you don't have to do anything...you are an adult...eat ONLY when you are hungry!)

COFFEE- a drug in a mug?

I could probably say that I know less than a handful of people who DON'T drink coffee on a regular basis. Recently I have been one of them. I had a long standing love affair with my morning cup of coffee which I have recently kicked- and not by intention. Is coffee good for you? Is it bad for you? That is what I intend to shed some light on.

For many years (actually over a decade) I have been drinking coffee every morning, and sometimes in the afternoons. I have tried to stop drinking it, craving it, wanting it. I tried switching to tea with no success. I tried stopping cold turkey- horrible disaster. Actually one time when I hadn't drank any coffee for a few days while I was sick, I developed really bad headaches. My doctor told me my brain was swelling, no joke. I was sick and on this medicine which had a "rare" side effects of brain swelling. She told me I had to go immediately to another doctor for testing. Well on the way, I stopped to get a coffee, and what'd ya know? My headache went away.

I don't know about you, but if I was a doctor, and I knew about caffeine withdrawal headaches, that is one of the first things I would ask my patient who was complaining of bad headaches- "How long has it been since you have had coffee?" Instead she sent me into a panic and ordered thousands of dollars of testing. That was an awesome experience let me tell you.

Anyway, back to coffee, and more importantly caffeine. I have been decaffeinated for about a year now, and I did it very slowly. I started mixing decaf into full strength 25/75 then 50/50 then 75/25 then all decaf. It was pretty easy and I didn't get any withdrawal symptoms. My reason for decaffeinating was because my anxiety was through the roof. Anyone who suffers from anxiety will benefit tremendously from cutting out caffeine completely. To give you an example. I was still heavily working on getting rid of my anxiety, but was already decaffeinated. One day I woke up and made coffee at the boyfriend's apartment, it was regular, and I completely forgot that I was not drinking regular coffee anymore. About an hour later I noticed my anxiety was through the roof and I couldn't get things done fast enough, leading to more anxiety (think when Magda from There's Something About Mary was on drugs and vacuuming).

Anyway, there are very real reasons why caffeine effects people's moods and stress/anxiety levels. I just read a section of Integrative Nutrition: Feed Your Hunger for Health and Happiness (one of the books included in the health coaching course I am taking) about coffee, caffeine, and how ridiculous we all are about it. Here are some snippits:

• Coffee producers spend alot of time touting it's health benefits and ignoring the risks. It is said to enhance alertness, concentration, physical performance, and even prevent diabetes and cancer. Not sure about you, but I see plenty of obese people drinking coffee who I'm sure have some degree of insulin resistance - not sure about you but my common sense is not telling me to drink coffee to prevent diabetes. That is like telling people to eat whatever they want, take vitamins, and they won't get sick (topic for another post).
• Caffeine inhibits absorption of essential minerals such as iron, magnesium, zinc, and B vitamins. All very important for synthesizing energy in your body.
• Caffeine wakes us up in the short term, but in the long term it disrupts the immune system from being able to defend against disease. 

"Coffee is simply a drug in a mug, presented in a more socially acceptable way than having a hypodermic needle stuck in your arm."  -Joshua Rosenthal, founder of Institute for Integrative Nutrition

Gary Null, PhD has "spent his entire adult life has been spent fighting for a better way for all of us to live." His website (www.garynull.com) focuses on getting health information out to people who are concerned and want to take a proactive approach to staying healthy. He researches and writes about everything health related from vaccines to food born illnesses to the government's roll in food. I have had one of his articles on caffeine (Caffeine: Psychological Effects, Use and Abuse) for a while that I have been meaning to read, but haven't up until today. Here is a summary:

"Caffeine, probably the most widely used drug, affects the psychological state of those who consume it. It is a habit-forming drug in which tolerance develops. The fact that it is a drug with potentially powerful psychological effects escapes most of us who think coffee is a relatively harmless beverage. Caffeine has not only been considered habit forming, but also addicting."

"Caffeine particularly has a profound effect on the central nervous system, but it also effects to a lesser degree the heart muscle, gastric secretions, and diuresis (urine production). The equivalent of one or two cups of coffee (150-250 mg of caffeine) is sufficient to induce adverse effects." 

"Caffeine has a psychological half-life of three and a half hours to six hours. It's psychological effects are observed in less than one hour. Infants do not metabolize caffeine as well adults and thus have a half life of about 4 days. Certainly continuous ingestion of caffeine by infants can be dangerous. Caffeine can accumulate in severe liver disease when its half-life can increase to 96 hours. If these patients drink coffee they should be closely monitored."

"Caffeine is known to interact with other drugs resulting in modified effect. For example, caffeine administered with Nardil (an MAO inhibitor) caused headaches and high blood pressure."  

"Caffeine has a profound effect on sleep. Heavy and continued use of caffeine results in tolerance so that heavy users have less sleep disturbance or need more to obtain its stimulating effect." 

Well I can tell you from my experiences that if you have a tendency towards being psychotic (oops! I mean anxious) caffeine definitely has a major effect. I mentioned before that I kicked this habit and not intentionally. When I started making my morning smoothies, I would drink some right away and wait until I got to the office to make coffee. I am not exaggerating when I say that I just gradually drank less and less of my coffee every morning until I realized one day a few weeks ago that I hadn't made coffee in several days.

I still love the taste of coffee and drink a cup of decaf every so often, but I don't crave it and I sure don't need it to start my mornings anymore. AND the funny thing is that I have more energy since I started drinking fruit and vegetable smoothies in the morning instead of coffee.

All around a positive change I would say. :)

WARNING: If you are going to try to decaffeinate yourself...do it very slowly over the course of a few weeks so you don't get withdrawal symptoms.