by Libby Weaver
Perhaps all three of these scenarios apply to you! Never fear, a new understanding is near.
All of these scenarios can have major emotional factors contributing to them. Emotional relationships to food are explored in Puzzle Piece 9, Emotions. However, on a physical level, options 1 and 2 are explored mostly as part of the insulin puzzle piece and are primarily about blood glucose. Option 3 describes “Captain Serotonin.” Serotonin is our happy, calm, content hormone. It is the hormone that helps us feel like there is nothing for which we want in this world. It makes us very content with our lot in life. Melatonin is our sleep hormone and is responsible for sending us to, and keeping us, asleep. These hormones work antagonistically. That is, one goes up, the other goes down.
In our bodies we have what are called circadian rhythms, which govern a multitude of hormonal processes. These rhythms, coupled with fading sunlight, allow melatonin to rise, which, in turn, means serotonin must fall.
When a hormone that makes you feel happy, calm, and content decreases, it can create a noticeable sinking feeling, a distinct change in mood even though nothing in the external world has changed. Five minutes before, you felt fine, yet now there is this nagging feeling that you want something. There is a chance that a relatively lower level of serotonin as evening falls is partly why couples have conversations about “big ticket items” at this time of day. Our chemistry makes us feel like we want something and our brain tries to label what that might be. We usually don’t find ourselves waking up and announcing that we absolutely must renovate the bathroom immediately! We keep those proclamations for evening. Serotonin has much to answer for.
Humans instinctively know that carbohydrate-rich foods promote serotonin production, which is partly why when the “I want something” syndrome hits, many people head for the pantry. They hope what they want is in there. Usually, though, guilt is all they find.
Mornings can also prove a challenge for someone in this pattern. Melatonin is destroyed by sunlight, which is partly why when we go outside and exercise in the morning we tend to feel great all day. The melatonin plummets when the retina of our eyes is exposed to light and, as a result, our serotonin surges. On a day where we get up and expose our eyes to sunlight, with that hormonal profile, we feel like we can cope with anything. The flip side, though, is not so appealing. If we’ve gone to bed after midnight, not slept well, or both, we may not want to rise with the sun, as we don’t feel rested. If we just wander out of bed sometime during the morning, our melatonin slowly seeps away, and our serotonin slowly rises. On such a day, we feel like we need a few coffees to get ourselves going.
If this tale is ringing true for you, and the carb-fest in the evening feels out of control, the solution is not initially—or always—purely dietary.
Step one is to start getting up at the same time each morning and going outside and moving. Or at least open the curtains and recognize a new day has dawned, exposing your eyes to light. Welcome the day with tai chi, a walk, some yoga, or a stretch—whatever floats your boat. Commit to doing this for four weeks, every day, and observe if your evening carbohydrate cravings diminish. These rituals, combined with consuming more whole-food fats, can have a big impact on this biochemical picture. Your serotonin will love you for it.
How to support your adrenals
As you can see, cortisol plays many roles in our body, and optimal levels are essential for us to be able to access body fat to burn it, to feel content, have good energy, and keep inflammation and pain at bay. Is cortisol one of the factors you must address to solve your weight-loss puzzle?
How high your level of stress is and how you feel your body copes with it will influence the steps you take after reading this section. The first section of solutions is general, and I can confidently say that virtually everyone will benefit from applying them.
The herbs used for adrenal support are beautiful; however, it is best to check with a qualified medical herbalist to find out those that will meet your specific needs. I have made comments beside most of the herbs about their applications. If you have identified that you are adrenally fatigued and beyond exhausted on a daily basis, your adrenal support is listed separately later in this chapter.
As you can already see, our perceptions play an enormous role in whether we are stressed or not. Sometimes it may be trauma in the past that takes a toll on the body. Even though you know in your mind you have dealt with it or moved on, your subconscious mind is still wrestling with it. Or stress can be from comparatively “little” things. It is as if you have an itch that somehow gets scratched by your beloved, your children, your boss, or by random people. Our bodies go through everything with us, and despite our minds consciously moving on; sometimes it is as if our bodies and biochemistry are stuck in the past. If this rings true for you, I suggest you read this entire book before you set about “solving” anything. After your first full read, return to each chapter, or puzzle piece, and construct your plan. Even more deeply, I hope that the messages on these pages will allow you to open yourself up to a new perspective on health, on food, on movement, on life, on feeling, on your beliefs, and, so importantly, on how safe you feel in this world. There are some wonderful methods through which you can help shift your body and your emotions when you feel like you have cognitively processed the living daylights out of your stress, yet it still remains a challenge or your weight is still stuck. These are listed below.
How your nervous system affects your health
At the heart of all of my strategies to support you adrenally is the desire for you to rest and to rest well, in a restorative and revitalizing way. Rest must follow action for us to have optimal health and excellent fat burning, and very few people these days truly rest, although we might believe we do. A part of our nervous system called the parasympathetic nervous system (PNS) is active when we truly rest. This is the “rest and repair” arm of our nervous system, but the opposite arm of the nervous system, the sympathetic nervous system (SNS), can dominate. This is described in more detail in a later chapter. For now, all you need to know is that if you do not lose weight from high-intensity exercise, it is likely that your SNS is dominant. If you do shift weight from this type of exercise, then your nervous system is likely to be well balanced. Both the PNS and the SNS are part of the autonomic nervous system (ANS). Understanding and supporting the nervous system is key to all aspects of wellbeing, as you will soon see in Puzzle Piece 8, The Nervous System.
The importance of breathing well
The other reason for this relatively brief section about the nervous system here is to make you aware of the cornerstone of all my adrenal support solutions and, just as importantly, explain why I will insist on this if you take nothing else away from this book: it has nothing to do with food, and it is absolutely free to everyone. It is breathing, and for some, it can be the key to shifting body chemistry from fat storage to fat burning. How is this possible?
The role of the ANS is to perceive the internal environment and, after processing the information in the central nervous system (CNS), regulate the function of your internal environment. The name “autonomic” implies that it is independent of the conscious mind. Think about a family of ducks and their newborn ducklings. Just like ducklings, the autonomic nervous system will always follow the leader, and the breath is the only part of the autonomic nervous system that can be controlled consciously. Your breath leads. Your body follows. The way you breathe offers your only access to your autonomic nervous system, and because we breathe 5,000 to 30,000 times a day—or 200 million to 500 million times in your lifetime—it has the potential to influence you positively or negatively in many ways.
Nothing communicates to every cell of your body that you are safe better than your breath. If you breathe in a shallow way, with short, sharp inhalations and exhalations, then you communicate to your body that your life is in danger. You have just learned about the cascade of hormonal events that follows such alarm and the role these hormones play in switch
ing fat burning on or off. How you breathe is also a fast track to the symptoms of anxiety and, potentially, panic attacks, regardless of what led you to breathe in a shallow way in the first place, whether it was an event, a deadline, the perception of pressure and the consequent “need” to rush, or the lifetime habit of your nervous system. Long, slow breathing that moves your diaphragm communicates the opposite message to your body—that you are very safe. Nothing down regulates the production of fat-storage stress hormones more powerfully.
So, solution number one is to practice diaphragmatic breathing, making sure your tummy moves in and out as you breathe, as opposed to your upper chest. Schedule it at first until it becomes your new way of breathing (unless you literally do need to escape from danger such as slamming your foot on the brake, if another car suddenly drives out in front of you). Make appointments with yourself to breathe. If it is peaceful each morning while you boil the kettle for the first time that day (to make your hot water with lemon of course!), instead of racing around and doing 80 jobs while the kettle boils, stand in your kitchen and breathe diaphragmatically.
If you link breathing well to a daily routine, such as boiling the kettle or having a shower, it quickly becomes a habit. Do it numerous times over the course of your day. Book a meeting into your diary each afternoon at 3 p.m. If you work at a computer, have it pop up on the screen that it is time for your meeting with yourself to do 20 long, slow breaths. We keep appointments with other people, so be sure to keep the appointments you make with yourself. Take part in movement that facilitates a focus on the breath such as tai chi, qi gong, yoga, or walking quietly in nature. Pilates can also be useful, but I have found that it is highly dependent on your attitude while you are doing the session and also to some degree on the attitude of the instructor. This approach is partly about stilling the stories that we constantly hark on about in our mind.
The importance of laughter
Another free and powerful tool is laughter. If we see life as tough, full of hard work, pain, and drudgery, it will be precisely that. Humans have the ability to see only their perspective in the world, rather than the world as it truly is. We see the world through filters, yet we don’t know they are there. I am not denying that life can be tough at times or that being honest with ourselves if we do feel down and out about life is not a good thing. The problem comes when we see the world this way and believe that it will never be any different. For then it won’t be.
Think about it. A belief in the permanence of doom is dangerous for every hormonal signal in your body. Do your absolute best to shift your thinking to see life as an adventure, a journey and a gift, full of opportunity, a process through which we can contribute. Too many people are out of touch with how privileged their lives are given that all of their basic needs are met, as for too many people across the globe this is still not the case. Some of the greatest, most moving stories I have ever heard have involved someone turning a horrific hardship into their greatest opportunity. Keep this in mind.
Signs stress hormone production and/or the adrenals need support
You feel stressed regularly and like you are on red alert
You gained weight during or after a stressful period; you may have lost weight initially during the stress, but then regained that weight plus more
Body fat has increased around your middle and the back of your arms, and you have grown what I lovingly refer to as a “back verandah”
You crave sugar
You love coffee and energy drinks—anything that contains caffeine
You startle (jump) easily
You don’t sleep well
You often wake up feeling unrefreshed
You sometimes wake up feeling like you’ve been hit by a bus
You feel better if you can sleep until 8 or 9 a.m., rather than arising between 5 and 7 a.m. Many of you won’t have been able to assess this as you don’t have a choice about what time you get up
If you don’t go to sleep by 10 p.m., you get a second wind and end up staying awake until at least 1 a.m.
You regularly feel tired but wired
You retain fluid
Your face looks “puffy” or swollen at times (and other causes have been ruled out)
You are a worrier; you don’t relax easily
You are a “control freak”
Your body feels heavy and achy at times, even though you don’t have a medical condition that warrants this
Your blood pressure is high
Your blood pressure is low or at the low end of normal
You get dizzy easily, but particularly when you go from sitting to standing quickly
You feel anxious easily
You tend to experience low moods with no known other cause
Your breathing tends to be shallow and quite fast
You experience “air hunger” (and other causes have been ruled out)
You struggle to say “No”
You laugh less than you used to
You feel like everything is urgent.
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STRESS HORMONES SOLUTIONS
Just as important, if not the most important aspect of supporting adrenal function for a balanced and appropriate stress hormone response, is the application of the emotional health strategies (explored further in Puzzle Piece 9, Emotions) as well as conscious breathing. I know breathing sounds too simple to make a difference but diaphragmatic breathing (making your tummy move in and out as you breathe, as opposed to your upper chest) can literally change your life. And I don’t say that lightly.
Practice restorative yoga, Pilates, tai chi, or qigong a minimum of twice a week for four weeks. Develop a daily practice for outstanding results. My favorite is a practice known as Stillness Through Movement. Commit to a breath-focused practice.
Spend five minutes daily focusing on and giving voice to all the aspects of your life for which you are grateful; you can’t be stressed when you feel grateful.
With the guidance of an herbalist, take some adrenal support herbs. Not all herbal medicine is created equal, however, so you want to ensure the brand you take is reputable. Check that it has been tested by a high-level quality-control system and that the active ingredients said to be in the product are indeed present, as well as no contaminants. Herbal medicine can be taken in a liquid tincture form or as tablets. The majority of the following adrenal herbs are adaptogens, meaning they help the body adapt to stress by fine-tuning the stress response. They include:
> Withania for the worriers
> Rhodiola for the drama queens or occasionally for the worriers
> Siberian ginseng for the fatigued feminine
> Panex ginseng for the utterly fatigued (short-term use only)
> Licorice, especially if your blood pressure is on the low end of normal
> Dandelion leaves, especially if you retain fluid
> The adrenals also love vitamins B and C, and for adrenal support I usually supplement both: the Bs in the form of a multivitamin or a straight B-complex, plus 4–5g per day of vitamin C, preferably in powdered form with added calcium and magnesium, with the doses split over the day. If you are on an oral contraceptive pill, stick to 2g of vitamin C per day.
Adrenal fatigue supplementation
For people with deep, deep fatigue, I almost always use the following herbal tonic that contains:
Panex ginseng
Licorice
Dandelion leaves
Astragalus
One other herb depending on what else is going on for the individual (a liver herb or a reproductive herb are typical)
I will also sometimes use a range of supplements specifically designed for people with adrenal fatigue. I usually suggest they trial them for three months and, when combined with the lifestyle changes outlined above (such as restorative practices and breath work), many have their energy and vitality return to great levels.
The restorative power of good food
Although I often recommend supplements of herb
s and/or nutrients for adrenal fatigue, never underestimate the healing and restorative power of food the way it comes in nature. Taking supplements is not a reason to eat a poor-quality, low-nutrient diet. I simply recommend supplements where appropriate and especially to assist in the restoration of health. There is no pill that can make up for a lousy way of eating.
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Puzzle Piece 3 Sex Hormones
Sex hormones can be delicious substances that give you energy and vitality, yet they can also wreak havoc in your life. When it comes to fat burning, beautiful skin, mental clarity, a sense of calm, the ability to be patient and not make mountains out of molehills, as well as fertility, very few substances in our body impact us more than our sex hormones.
The main sex hormones we will cover in this puzzle piece are estrogen and progesterone, with a particular focus on their role in body shape, size, and fat burning.
Can estrogen make you fat?
Estrogen is a feminine hormone (although men naturally make it in small amounts), and it plays numerous important roles in the human body, including those associated with reproduction, promoting new bone growth, and supporting cardiovascular health. The challenge with estrogen, however, occurs when there is too much of it compared to other hormones, progesterone in particular. Estrogen can also pose a problem if there is too much of one type of estrogen compared to other types of estrogen.
The ovaries of menstruating females make estrogen, and small amounts are produced by fat cells and the adrenal glands. At menopause, ovarian production of hormones ceases.
