About a year ago, I shared the story of My struggle with adrenal fatigue, and Recovery: my adrenal fatigue story, part II. So what’s going on with me now? Today, I’ll share how you can avoid making those same mistakes and hitting rock bottom with Adrenal Fatigue. Could your type-A lifestyle be the cause?
We’ve all been there: gain the Freshman 15, lose it again, be terrified of gaining it back, and be willing to do anything so that you don’t gain it back. The cycle begins: restrict, restrict, restrict. Binge eat on those foods you were restricting. Overwhelming feelings of guilt over your “lack of willpower”. Over-exercise to “work it off” and then restrict some more. Continue until you just can’t take it anymore.
But let’s back up a bit. After gaining weight my freshman year in college and losing it again during swim season, the self-conscious perfectionist in me was terrified of gaining any of it back again. So, like many others on college campuses, I started to extremely restrict my food. I skipped meals, obsessively counted calories, and exercised like a fiend. I had never been a “runner” before in my life, but I began running six to seven miles and spending an additional hour or more at the gym every day in the off-season. I was hyper-conscious about my body and what other people thought of me, and obsessed with aesthetics. I wanted to be lean, strong, and confident. But the “leaner” I got and more confident I thought I would have been because of my smaller body, the less confident I was, the more screwed up my body image was, and the deeper I got into an extremely unhealthy relationship with food.
The food restriction and exercise binges continued throughout college for me — even during swim season, when I trained between three and six hours a day. I ate only within my “healthy” guidelines: a lot of plain salad, low-fat, and extremely low-carbohydrate. It wasn’t enough food for a regular college student, let alone a varsity athlete. But I just kept going. I totally overworked myself physically in the gym and in practices, mentally in school, and, in hindsight, probably abused my liver one too many nights, as is so typical for college students.
Even after college, these habits continued, but the physical and mental stressors piled on. I suffered from a chronic lack of sleep while working in the field on a political campaign, and chronically elevated stress levels from such a demanding job. I loved it, but I couldn’t slow down. Stress-reducing practices like meditation and yoga? Those were for people who “had time”. I was running myself into the ground, and it became worse and worse as the months went on. Some days I was so exhausted I could barely get out of bed for work, but I had to keep pushing myself. Because that’s the norm in our culture, right? Work hard, play hard. At least, so says the media.
Looking back, there were many warning signs over the years of where these unhealthy habits might have lead, but I never stopped to notice. I lost my period for years, totally messed up my hormones, experienced digestive upset, constant exhaustion, anxiety, and my athletic performance suffered. My type-A, perfectionist, and competitive ways had for years been planting the seeds for a total physical, mental, and emotional breakdown, one for which I would have to pay a heavy price for years to come.
A year after working on the campaign, I was working in another stressful job and had been seeing a naturopathic doctor who was helping me sort out all these health problems I was having. After countless blood and hormone panels, I was diagnosed with adrenal fatigue, a condition that occurs when the adrenal glands are so overtaxed they can no longer produce cortisol (a hormone your body releases in response to stress), and your HPA (hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal) axis is thrown off (meaning your hormones are all messed up, and your body can’t compensate for it). Normal cortisol levels are high in the morning to get you out of bed and low at night to help you go to sleep, whereas mine were completely the opposite. I was shocked to learn that my overall cortisol outputs were so low that I was heading into the more advanced and dangerous stages of the condition. If I kept up the same exercise and diet habits that I’d had for so many years, and didn’t work on the stress in my life, I might be completely bedridden until I recovered — a process which can take months or even years. I learned that adrenal exhaustion (and HPA axis dysregulation) also tied in with a host of other adrenal-related problems, like my thyroid issues, the loss of my menstrual cycle, leaky gut, sudden onsets of anxiety, low blood pressure, weight gain, and massive blood sugar imbalances, just to name a few.
Many people who suffer from adrenal fatigue, or who on track to get it, have lifestyles similar to mine. They overwork themselves in every aspect of their lives, make food choices that don’t adequately support their bodies (specifically with extremely low-carbohydrate, low-fat diets and excess amounts of caffeine and alcohol). They have the “can’t stop won’t stop” mentality, and they force their bodies to go until they literally can’t go any more.
Years and years of striving to be “healthy and fit” had left my health in shambles. And yet, I was only doing as so many others I knew had: living a high-stress life, exercising more and eating less and not sleeping enough, on top of other suboptimal factors in my life like a job I didn’t love, which were only piling on to my stress.
When I was finally armed with a diagnosis, I had to accept that the only way to heal my body was to completely change my lifestyle. Easier said than done, right? Instead of eating less and exercising more, my body needed a real rest, and real nourishment. Even over the previous year, when I thought I had been doing everything “right” to heal myself with strict elimination diets, I had only been working on one piece of the puzzle — food — and neglecting the others (or even making them worse, with too much exercise and stress).
So here’s what I figured out: When it comes to your health, it starts with food, but it doesn’t and CAN’T end there if you really want to heal and thrive in the long term. Even if you think you’ve got your “clean” diet dialed in — whether it’s Whole30, paleo, gluten-free, vegetarian, or whatever — if you’re still feeling sick, unhealthy, unhappy, and stressed out, you need to take a look at the other areas of your life.
Scale back on stress. Eat enough calories. Get enough sleep. Quit that job that makes you dread waking up every day. Take a day off from strenuous exercise, and take a relaxing walk or do some yoga instead.
It took a lot of trial and error, but I finally transformed myself from that obsessive, perfectionist, type-A, orthorexic exercise freak. After all those years of struggling when I followed what the media told me to do to be “healthy and fit”, I am finally healthier, happier, less stressed, have much more energy, and live a much more balanced life, by ditching that same (horrible) advice I used to follow. Better yet, I achieved all of this by first making the simple change of listening to what my body really needed to heal itself — changes that your body might need too! Because sometimes, listening and the willingness to meet your body where it is can be all it takes to start healing.
So. What do you think? Does this sound like you? Feel free to email or contact me and share your story, I’m all ears. 🙂 And as always thank you all for your support!
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Talk soon,
This article first appeared on Further Food.
AWESOME post Dana. I am so with you. I keep dipping back into adrenal fatigue even when I am super clean with my diet because I push the boundaries on how much work/raising kids/whatever I can do. It always backfires. ALWAYS. So you get pretty good at listening to your body, but sometimes the rest of me just doesn’t want to comply! I’m hoping eventually it’s like a hangover – one day I’ll wake up and say “ok, enough is enough, I don’t want to do this anymore” and I’ll really take the time I need for myself every day, not just when i feel the adrenal fatigue symptoms creeping back in.
Thanks so much Michele! I know exactly what you mean – especially owning our own businesses and having all those other responsibilities, we always feel like we can (and should) be doing more! It’s a tough balance, but you need to take care of yourself first 🙂 Thanks for sharing your story too!