Adrenal Fatigue? Not as simple as you might think.

We all wish that the current medical model of diagnosing and prescribe would work but unfortunately, it doesn’t. Taking a pill to get relieved of your symptoms sounds great but doesn’t quite get the actual problem to go away. So a new type of medicine has been gaining some more traction. This area is most commonly referred to as Functional Medicine. Functional Medicine Clinicians try to figure out what is going on in the body by looking at the individual person as a whole and not in separate parts. They also understand that external environmental stressors are huge game players in health and disease. What we hope to accomplish here at Your Functional Life is giving you the most accurate information in this area. Health care is a huge problem in the United States. It’s not going to get any better unless we, as individuals take back control of our own lives. I hope this blog helps people out there.

Our first topic, the Adrenals and how it relates to blood sugar. However, you cannot just look at the adrenals as its own entity. They are a key component, along with the Hypothalamus and Pituitary gland, in regulating stress and your circadian rhythm. This trio is also referred to as the HPA Axis. All three of these organs speak to each and in turn, create that highly talked about hormone cortisol. The adrenal cortex will also make DHEA-S. Which is super important. Cortisol is catabolic and DHEA is anabolic and is used to help make your sex hormones. Already we are seeing how connected all these systems are. So being stressed will affect how efficiently you are creating your sex hormones like estradiol, estriol, estrone, and testosterone. These are all some big-time hormones that cause you to have a wide array of symptoms. Just look at the chart below to get a better idea.

Now you can get a better picture of how so many factors in the body affect each other. if we have dysfunction in one area it can easily transfer to some other area that is you would think is totally unrelated. The HPA Axis is right in the middle of it all. If your being told that it’s just stress that’s causing most of the symptoms you are having, that just might be half the problem. There are a lot of other factors that will cause cortisol to rise that are unrelated to emotional or physiological stress. One thing cortisol does is help regulate blood sugar in the blood in a roundabout way. It’s a defense mechanism. Think of flight or fight response. You want the quickest energy possible because your body doesn’t know what it is getting its self into. Cortisol will raise blood sugar which will do a number of things.

For one it could wake you up earlier than expected if your sleeping. Another thing is if you’re not eating correctly it will break down muscle to get the quickest amount of energy. Each gram of protein is about 4 calories to break down. Which is much lower than fats at 9 calories. If there aren’t enough carbs in the bloodstream your body will start to break down muscle to get its energy. That’s why you might get sugar cravings when you get stressed out. It will lower the pancreas ability to create the insulin and will also increase the glucose utilization by the central nervous system. Cortisol needs to be looked at when there is any type of metabolic chaos. Just the cortisol and glucose interaction is a huge proponent of something we like to call metabolic chaos. This is a term that I will use a lot.

Metabolic chaos is just an easy way of stating
that there are internal problems going on
which then turn into symptoms.

We will discuss this more in future posts.