I Have Adrenal Fatigue and I Don’t Know What to Do About It. Other Than a Supplement I Was Provided, What Else Can I Do?

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I have adrenal fatigue and I don't know what to do about it other than a supplement I was provided. What else can I do? This is JJ Virgin, four time New York Times best selling author, celebrity nutrition expert and fitness hall of Famer. I've been on a lifelong quest for answers to the toughest health questions and now I'm sharing what I found with you. Welcome to Ask the Health Expert. New York City cutie pie from Instagram says I have adrenal fatigue and I don't know what to do about it other than a supplement I was provided. What else can I do? Thank you for all you do and thank your team too. All right, I will be right back with the answer. Stay with me.

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Adrenal fatigue. So the first thing is, how did you get diagnosed with the adrenal fatigue? Because the most standard way to address adrenal fatigue is through a salivary test. And in the salivary test, what they do is they take four measurements first thing in the morning when you wake up, lunchtime, afternoon, and then bedtime. And what they're looking for is what your cortisol looks like to wake you up in the morning, midday in the afternoon, and nighttime. Because it has a rhythm to it. It should come up high in the morning, get you up, and then just tapers throughout the day, coming down lower at night so you can fall asleep. It also measures your dhea and it compares the two as well because you're gonna look both at your rhythm of your cortisol. Is it normal all throughout the day? Is it elevated all throughout the day? Is it high, sometimes low sometimes? Is it low all the time? Adrenal exhaustion is when it's low all the time. Other than that, it's just imbalanced. And depending on what's going on, like if it's high all the time, you're gonna do things that help it back down. If it's low all the time, you need to do things that help raise it back up. So, and if it's all over the place, then you're going to do things that help tonify it, that help stabilize it. So depending on what's going on, you may need different things. Now, what I found is most people don't come and start to complain about this till it's low, because when your adrenals are higher, you feel like you can pretty much take on everything you are out there buzzing around. You get tired at night, but you're like that, tired and wired. The challenge is when you have have elevated cortisol, you will also start to get catabolic. You'll start to not only will you burn fat, you'll also burn muscle and you'll drop sugar into your bloodstream. So you start having a higher fasting blood sugar even though you're eating well. And that's one of the signs of a Cortisol problem is, even though you're eating correctly, your triglycerides look good, your blood sugar is higher than it should be. And remember, even if your blood sugar is just a little higher than normal, say it's 90 fasting blood sugar that can 5x your risk of dementia. So that's a classic sign of you having a stress problem. You know, there's obviously just an easy assessment of checking in on how you feel. But if you're starting to notice that you have higher fasting blood sugar, you could do a continuous glucose monitor to start to monitor that. And you are starting to gain weight around your waist and you can't get it off. That's why you want to check your weight every day, especially weight and body fat. But check your waist and hip measurements every week as well. And look at this as a way to check in to see what's going on. We're not using the scale as some kind of mean person. We're using the scale just like we would the apple watch. An OURA ring, right? A continuous glucose monitor just to see what's going on with your body. So if things start to shift, you know, if you're starting to gain weight around your waist, your blood sugar's going up, but you still have healthy triglycerides, good diet, so it's not an insulin resistance thing. This is probably stress. So what can you do about it? So whether you're high or low, there's a couple key critical things that are going to help here. Number one is sleep. It is the single most important thing. Now, if you've got elevated cortisol, it can be tough to sleep. And so you're going to have to look at what you can do there to help bring that cortisol down. One of the things that can lower cortisol is tapping. Shout out to my buddy Nick Ortner of the tapping solution. He has the tapping app. Tapping can lower cortisol by as much as 27%. I don't know anything else that can do that like that. So tapping is a huge. One other thing that can be helpful here. Vitamin C can also do that. Vitamin C is the number one vitamin used by the adrenal glands. Super duper important. So vitamin C is important here. And dhea, if your DHEA is low and your cortisol is high, bringing DHE up can start to help lower cortisol. So there's the first one is sleep. You can't heal those adrenals if you're not sleeping. The challenge is a Lot of times when you've got elevated cortisol, it impacts your sleep. So another one I love and it's in my sleep Candy is gaba can be super helpful in L theanine. Those can be helpful here as well. All right, next, other things that can help here. So doing HIIT training, if you're not totally burnt out, if you have not burned out your adrenals yet, but you have some issues doing high intensity interval training can help train your sympathetic nervous system how to handle stress better. So that can be helpful. And then looking at activities that bring you joy. Now I know that sounds crazy, but we just don't think of things throughout the day that actually are fun, like talking to a friend, hugging your partner, petting your dog, laughing at a YouTube video, and then beyond tapping as a mindful thing, find a meditation practice, something like that that you like. So you really gotta get outside in the sunshine. That's another super important one. Especially first thing in the morning, getting out in the sunshine, getting your feet in the ground, in the grass, if you can do that makes a big difference. So there are supplements that can help tremendously here too. And I would be remiss if I didn't mention supplements. And again, when I look at supplements, the first place to go, you want to make sure that you really are doing a very good blood sugar balanced diet. Eat from the plate. Clean protein, healthy fats, lots of fiber from non starchy vegetables and slow low carbs. So you got to have good blood sugar balance. Super important. And don't do all that snacking. You've been around my my world. You know about that. Vitamin C is the first one to think about. And depending on how stressed you are, because stress will blow out your vitamin C, you might need to take 2 grams a couple times a day. You'll know if you're taking too much because you'll get loose stools. So you know, ramp up slowly so you don't get mad at me. If you've got elevated cortisol, consider and you've done a lab test and your DHEA is low, consider taking DHEA for women, that can be anywhere from 5 to 10 milligrams. For men, 25 to 50 milligrams. It's not a lot for women. It can also help boost your testosterone which can lower during stress. So that's important if your cortisol is low. Glandulars, adrenal glandulars can help rebuild them. Licorice can help keep the cortisol that you do have around longer, so that can be helpful there as well. And then things if you're kind of all over the place. Rhodiola, Holy basil, ashwagandha, and American ginseng are all very good tonifying herbs as well. All right, so those are all the things that you can do for your adrenals. I really love the adrenal salivary test. I used to do that. I used to do it like every six months because I had such bad behavior. I will tell you, I would mess my adrenals up and then I'd repair them and then I'd overwork and mess it up again. And I found like, I'm not just not going to do that anymore. And so that's when I started to prioritize my sleep and all of that. One of the things that will happen if you trash your adrenals is it can mess up your body's ability to convert from T4 to T3. So a lot of times you'll see thyroid issues happening and also because of the breaking down of muscle, you'll see insulin resistance start. So a lot of challenging things happen with stress. And I know it's been a stressful last 2412 months rather, to say the least. So this is definitely something to check in with and work on. And if you do need to quantify it so you take it seriously, that adrenal cel index is a great place to start.

This is JJ with Ask the Health Expert.

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