Adrenal Fatigue

Stress and how it can be affecting your health

For years I have been battling with a tyre of fat around my waist that I just couldn’t shift! No matter how hard I trained in the gym and how much I reduced the fat in my diet or calorie consumption, it was still there, this thick layer sitting around my middle! I even started doubting myself as a personal trainer and wondered why is it I can get the results for clients yet I can’t seem to shift this weight myself?

One day I stumbled across a video on YouTube! This guy was talking about a holistic side to training it was fascinating! (For me anyway)

Slowly the more I watched these videos the more that curtain that had been pulled over my eyes for all these years started opening. So I contacted him and filled out some questions on my lifestyle, stress levels and mental clarity, he asked me to take a test for my hormones and the results came back that I had stage 3 adrenal fatigue.

I started to realise that there is more to health than just training hard and low fat diets! As personal trainers we don’t look beyond the physical aspect, we expect weight loss to be a simple process of hardcore gyms sessions and reducing calories or portion controls for our clients. Yet do we ever look at bigger picture; emotional characteristics, their lifestyle, what type of character they are and well do they deal with stress! Or important factors such as ‘Why are they tired all the time?’; and struggle to get out of bed every morning? Why have we been training for 6 months yet they are still holding on to that layer of fat around there middle?

In October 2008 when I discovered I had stage 3 adrenal fatigue I didn’t have a clue what it was! And here’s something even more ironic I didn’t find this out from the Doctor! The guy I contacted from YouTube was a qualified functional diagnostic nutritionist (FDN), which in a nutshell is someone who is qualified to re-establish hormonal pathways and resolve chronic stress related disorders. So if you had a choice go see your Doctor and get medicine to cure your symptoms or see a FDN and get to root of the problem to cure the cause? Which would you choice. So I simply want to share my experience of adrenal fatigue with you as I want people to be aware of this condition because it isn’t pretty if you have and the sad part if most people who have it don’t even know it.

What is Adrenal Fatigue?

Adrenal fatigue is a condition with severe to mild forms and is usually brought on by some form of stress whether it’s physical, emotional, psychological, environmental, infections or a combination of these. The adrenal glands are two small glands the size of a almond that sit above the kidneys and are responsible for secreting over 50 different hormones – including epinephrine, cortisol, progesterone, DHEA, estrogen, and testosterone. Over the past century, adrenal fatigue has been recognized as Non-Addison’s hypoadrenia, subclinical hypoadrenia, neurasthenia, adrenal neurasthenia, and adrenal apathy.

What causes the Fatigue?

The onset of AF often occurs because of financial pressures, infections, emotional stress such as divorce, miscarriage, death of a loved one and over training!

What has been your “trigger” event? Do you know?

Other factors include “bad health habits” such as poor dietary habits – skipping breakfast, feast or famine; heavy caffeine or other stimulant intake (like sodas) smoking, drugs, sugar and white flour products. Then there are “bad emotional habits” such bitterness and anger, thoroughness, work-holism, addiction and other control issues.

What are your poor health and emotional habits?

After experiencing many of these events and habits over a long period of time, the adrenal glands tend to produce less cortisol, the body’s master stress hormone. Cortisol’s main role in the body is to enable us to handle stress and maintain our immune systems. The adrenal gland’s struggle to meet the high demands of cortisol production eventually leads to adrenal fatigue.

What are symptoms of Adrenal Fatigue?

• Feeling Fatigue in the morning despite sufficient hours of sleep
• Difficulty getting up in the morning like normal – even when you are A “morning person”
• Feeling Fatigue in the afternoons especially between 3-5 p.m
• Feeling more energetic in the late afternoon and early evening.
• Insomnia/ill regular sleep – fatigued at night but still waking up often.
• Weight gain and can’t lose it, especially around the waist.
• Depression for no particular reason as well as for particular reasons.
• Hair loss
• Acne
• Reliance on stimulants like caffeine
• Cravings for carbohydrates or sugars
• Poor immune function (get colds & flu often takes long to shift them)
• Hypersensitivity to light/sound/touch/odors (for example the sound of the bathroom fan just drives me mad – the car radio may sound generally annoying when it used to be enjoyable.
• Poor Memory/Spaciness/Memory lapses/Difficulty Concentrating.
• Reduced sex drive
• Constipated
• Feel easily – often overwhelmed
• Recurrent Candida infections
• Increased frequency of urination
• Tendency to tremble when under pressure.
• Increase symptoms of PMS for women; period are heavy and then stop, or almost stopped on the 4th day, only to start flow again on the 5th or 6th day.
• Feel dizzy when standing up to quick.
• Heart palpitations

What tests should I have done to confirm or deny that I have AF?

Saliva testing for cortisol levels via labs with the help of a Functional Diagnostic Nutritionist (although as far as i’m aware none of these test are done in the UK! So USA is your best source for now)

What should I do to recover and get my energy back?

Simplify, modify, minimize.

• Minimize any stress in your life, which includes any hardcore gym sessions, try and do relaxing and calming exercise, such as yoga, meditation or gentle walking.
• Take time off from your job try not to work such long hours, give downtime time for yourself.
• Sleep more! Going bed by 10pm will help a great deal as it’s in your circadian cycle (sun and moon) your body repairs itself between 10pm-2am so if you went to sleep at 12am every night and still got your 8 hours it wouldn’t be doing yourself justice. Also sleep in when you can on weekends or when you have no work try and sleep between 7am-9am to give your adrenal glands extra time to recover.
• Laugh more often (increases the parasympathetic supply to the adrenals)
• If you tired don’t push your body take small breaks to lie down.

Should I still exercise or should I just take it easy?

Well if you are a fitness freak like myself! Its time to re-think about your fitness routine and focus on your health first! Because “You can’t lose weight to get healthy you need to get healthy to lose weight” So if you exercise when you have adrenal fatigue you are sending your body to a catabolic state (breaking down) as your adrenaline increases your adrenal glands release more cortisol, which means your body will hold on to more fat around the middle, as it wants to support and provides more nutrient throughout your mid section as it knows that area is under stress.

As far as exercise is concerned, never underestimate the power of a 20-minute walk. Your body needs time to detox and that cannot be achieved by power lifting at the gym or high intensity cardio! Strenuous exercise during adrenal fatigue only exacerbates the problem because your body excretes lactic acid. That’s why it is so important to drink filtered water after a good workout, as you need to flush the toxins from the body.

I personally would recommend a good, brisk 20-minute walk each day. Yoga, breathing exercises and some meditation.

Who gets Adrenal Fatigue?

Type “A” Perfectionist Personalities, University student, mother with 2 or more children & little support from family or friends, single parents, unhappy marriage, extremely unhappy and stressful work conditions, self-employed with a new or struggling business, Drug or Alcohol users, alternating shift work that requires sleep pattern to be frequently adjusted, all work, little play and oh and even personal trainers! Yes we not invincible the buzz you often get from a fitness fanatic lifestyle can be worst of for you but it’s important to understand that your health is more valuable!

Written by Vahdaneh Vahid from VV Fitness.

My theory on interval vs endurance

Over my years of working in gyms I have observed many people that strictly perform 60-90 minutes of cardio, 3-5x per week, for at least 1 year, yet their physquie always appread never to change. If this sounds like your type of program, you will find out why you did not achieve the results that you are looking for. I know many personal trainers who put their clients on 4-6 hours of cardio training per week for several months. When their clients are getting frustrated due to a lack of results, the only thing that the trainers do is encourage them to just stick with the program or to increase the amount of cardio they do. So what is the solution? Is it to do more cardio? Of course not! Doing extra cardio will not help speed you your mebaolism it will in fact slow it down. There are a lot of misconceptions about aerobic training. Most people believe that aerobic training is the only metond to weight loss. There is another side to aerobic training that most people are not aware of because it is NOT the solution to weight loss. So yes you can forget about the long, slow, boring cardio workout. It is not going to get you the six pack abs that you are looking for.

Here’s a quote from Paul Chek:

“ First of all, lifting weights in the intensity zone of 8-12 reps coupled with short rest periods has been shown beneficial for releasing the androgenic hormone testosterone and growth hormone. These important hormones encourage development of lean muscle mass, which is a metabolically active tissue consuming calories 24 hours a day. Fat, on the other hand is just along for the ride! Aerobic exercise has been linked with the release of the catabolic hormone cortisol, which is antagonistic to the development of lean muscle mass. Cortisol also promotes conservation of glucose and encourages the use of fat. This might sound good on the surface, but you also become as efficient as a Honda Civic running for 80 kilometers on one gallon of gas. Then you are just like those people going for hours at a time on machines, only to utilize miniscule amounts of fat! “

I will try to explain to you why most people believe that steady state aerobic (i.e, jogging for 60-90 minutes) is the solution to fat loss. Think of a real example, If you compare the best marathon runers (people who can run for several hours) and the best sprinters (people who can run under one minute), who do you think is leaner? If you said the sprinter congrats you are absolutely right!

The first time that you attempt aerobic training, you might be able to last for only 5 minutes. As you get better you increase your time so 5 minutes eventually turns into 10 minutes. 10 minutes eventually turns to 20 minutes. Eventually you can do 60 minutes, 5-6 times per week. So ask yourself did you get the lean slucpted body that you wanted ?

As you get better your heart and lungs get stronger allowing you to perform longer distances. However, as you do more aerobic training, your body becomes stronger and better at utilizing your body fat (meaning you are burning less body fat). What it means is that if it takes you 30 minutes to burn 300 calories, as you get stronger, it will take 45 minutes to burn the same amount of calories. Is there fun adding more minutes to your cardio just to burn the same amount of calories that you use to burn?

Eventually, as you do more aerobic workouts to burn the extra calories, your body will start tapping into your muscles for energy, it does this by breaking down your muscle tissues to meet the energy demands. Your muscle tissue is converted to glucose (blood sugar) to supply your aerobic training. Which means you are making a smaller, less efficient fat burning machine, therefore weakening your metabolism. So I conclude steady state aerobic training does NOT build muscle, and doing too much can actually make you lose muscle. So here is the solution, it is Interval training (Anaerobic training), Interval training is far more superior to boosting your metabolism than it is to do steady state aerobic training. Steady state aerobic does not increase your metabolism at all. Yes you are burning calories while you are actually performing the aerobics. However, once you have finished your session, your metabolism returns to normal. However, interval training (consisting of moderate to high intensity cardio) will burn more calories per minute and will increase your metabolism for hours and hours. The right amount of resistance training combined with an intensive interval training session can keep your metabolism up for at least 24 hours and in some cases, up to 42 hours. Imagine what that can do to your body if you are burning high amounts of fat all day and all night long (even when you are sleeping).

A lot of people focus too much about their workouts when in fact, they should focus more on the entire picture. It is not the 1 hour of workout that important but it is the 23 hours remaining in the day.

So what type of interval training can you do?

What ever you enjoy and can stick to is best, so you can jog/run/sprint, stationary bike, spinning bike, eliptical machine, rowing, stepper,mountain biking, swimming, etc. It is your choice. The sooner you get started the faster the results!

The Rules to Interval Training are:

Always warm up for 4-6 minutes

High intensity: Perform one minute as fast as you can. (Level 9 or 10 intensity on a scale of 1-10)

Moderate intensity: Slow down to a moderate pace for two minutes (Level 6-7 intensity). Therefore, one round will last about 3 minutes.

Always cool down for 5 minutes Warning: Do not perform interval training BEFORE your resistance (weights) training. As it can actually cause a negative effect on your routine because if you perform interval training first you can actually cause your body to break down your muscle tissue for energy during the resistance training and this is what you don’t want.

Interval training can also be done during your non-resistance day.

You will be amazed how only 15 minutes of interval training can help boost your metabolism allowing you to burn fat through out your body including the fat around your stomach.

How to keep the fat off

weight-training give you a metabolic spike for an hour after a workout because your body is trying hard to help your muscles recover. So if you burn 200 calories lifting weights its really closer to 250 overall!
So if you do compound exercises that get your heart rate up more or combine upper body vs lower body, take short rest periods, basically anything to keep your training session as intensive as possible! keep you gasping for air so you can burn even more!
resistance training has another bonus to burn more fat for every 3 pounds of muscles you build you will burn 120 extra calories a day! because muscles take more energy to sustain!

About Vahdaneh Vahid

My name is Vahdaneh and I can help you achieve your health and well-being goals. Whatever your dreams we can work together to achieve them.

My approach embraces an holistic ethos and is fuelled by a passion for continuous education.

Over the last 7 years I have had the pleasure of working with and helping many clients achieve success with a variety of goals including weight loss, fatigue, pre and post natal fitness and performance enhancement.

However in the midst of what was really a positive time in my career, I noticed that I gained weight and was fatigued all of the time.

In order to understand my condition I started research into health & lifestyle and stumbled upon the answer to the weight gain and emotional imbalances that had plagued me for the last year.

I had developed adrenal fatigue from the hardcore training that had become part of my everyday routine. I realised I had to let go of the gym obsession and focus on improving my health first.

This experience was a ‘gift’ and has given me a much deeper insight into my role as a movement therapist Instead of focusing on weight loss as the way to health, the aim should really be to become healthy in order to lose weight.

Training a client to their max isn’t necessarily the answer. Rather, it’s about giving the client a more balanced understanding of their physical, mental and emotional wellness.

Together we’ll look at everything from what you eat & drink to the types of exercise that works best for you to achieve your goals. I will ensure that you enjoy your journey towards looking & feeling great!

I look forward to sharing my passion for health & well being with you!

Vahdaneh specialises in:

Pre & Post Natal

Boxing

Nutrition

Core Stability

Kettle bells

Health & Well-Being

Quote: “Health is so much more than just exercise!”

“Vahdaneh takes a really holistic view to the body and has taught me to take a look at all elements of my lifestyle and how they impact on the weight-loss and fitness journey”.

“VV realizes that there isn’t a one size fits all approach and has really tailored our sessions to make sure that they work well for me, that I enjoy them and that I am learning good life habits”.

“I have more energy, better focus and I’ve learnt to listen to my body and work out what I should be eating, rather than what is going to give me a quick fix.”

Visit the website www.vvfitness.com