4 Ways To Support Your Adrenals Naturally

{Today, please welcome Trish from Keep the Beet to the site as she shares 4 ways to help support your adrenals naturally. I personally know just how critical it is to keep those adrenal glads supported! ~Jessica}

How the body responds to chronic stress can be enhanced by diet and lifestyle changes. Making some simple changes to reduce your toxic load in your environment will go a long way to support your hormone health.

In this post, you will learn how to support your adrenal glands and hormones in your body, as well as how to support your endocrine system via clean food, clean environments, and using herbs. You will understand how to support the hormones within the body and what causes it stress to improve your overall health.

What Are the Adrenals?

The adrenal glands are part of a larger group called the endocrine system. They are the chemical messenger’s in contact with every cell within the body. There are over 100 hormones in our bodies and each have a complicated and delicate relationship with each other. Hormones transfer information and instructions from one set of cells to another.

 

Image Courtesy of Quest Garden

What Causes Stress To the Adrenal System?

Stress, toxins, poor diet , poor digestion, mineral deficiencies, essential fatty acid deficiencies, and dehydration cause a downhill cascade of issues for the endocrines.

Image Courtesy of King County Gov

Toxins in these classifications are ones to be particularly aware of :

• Phytoestrogens: Occur naturally in soy, flax seed and other legumes.
• Mycoestrogens: Food contaminants produced by molds and other fungi.
• Xenoestrogens: Synthetic estrogen’s found in industrial products, detergents, plastics, pesticides.
• Metalloestrogens: Found in heavy metals.

All environmental estrogen’s are immunotoxic, meaning toxic to the immune system in large amounts.

The study of these effects on the body is greatly understudied. But it is known that the endocrine system is extremely sensitive to any outside toxin.

Image courtesy of Natural Health Techniques

Supportive Nutrients and Approaches to Enhance Your Adrenals

Each endocrine organ has a mineral that it relies on and in order to support these glands, we need to ensure we are receiving the proper amounts of minerals through our diet and supplementation. Minerals are finely balanced in the body, so you don’t want to end up with too much or too little.

• Adrenals = copper
• Thyroid = iodine
• Pituitary = manganese
• Gonads = selenium
• Pancreas = chromium
• Prostate= zinc

Support your diet with these whole food choices. To offer some guidance, check out these downloadable PDFs:

• Food Sources for Calcium
• Food Sources for Magnesium
• Food Sources for Zinc

Get lots of whole food recipe ideas here.

Clean up your diet to remove foods that cause inflammation:

• Sugar
• Grains
• Gluten
• Caffeine
• Alcohol
• GMO foods
• All processed foods
• Vegetable oils like soybean, canola, corn, sunflower, safflower, etc. (choose healthy fats like coconut oil, butter, ghee, tallow, etc. instead)

When talking about herbs and adaptagens here is a great article that discusses adaptogenic herbs and how they support the body.

Here are a few herbs that I like to use to support the adrenals:

• Rehmannia: Supports and nourishes adrenal gland, supports healthy immune and liver function, combines well with ashwaganda.
• Ashwaganda: Also known as withania,  a tonic, adapogenic, anti-inflammatory and helps with stress-related conditions and promotes learning and memory.
• Echinacea: Supports immune system, anti-inflammatory, safe with autoimmune conditions.
• Licorice: Supports healthy adrenal gland function, anti-inflammatory, supports digestion.

What Should You Do Now?

Supporting the adrenals is not difficult and should not be overwhelming. To get started, I recommend the following steps:

• Clean up your diet
• Clean up your environment
• Support with herbs
• Prepare to properly detoxify for 21 days to further clear out toxins

Important note regarding the 21 day detox: The recommendation on the 21 day detox should be monitored before starting it. It is extremely important to not begin this without being properly prepared for it. It is usually through a 3-6 month or longer program on a clean diet before moving into this stage. 

For more information on how to support your adrenals through your diet, environment, and cleansing, please contact me. I’d love to hear from you!

References

Balance Hormones, Balance Health Seminar Dr Rhonda Nelson 2014
Nutritional Therapy Association, Endrocrine Module
The Paleo Approach by Sarah Ballantyne, PhD

About Trish of Keep the Beet

Trish Carty has been a Professional Chef for over  30 years. She leads workshops locally and globally. Trish is a Certified Nutritional Therapy Practitioner, Certified GAPS Practitioner. She is currently studying to become Board Certified in Holistic Nutrition.

Food and the connection of a healthy lifestyle can be found on her blog and as a guest blogger for others. You can follow her at Keep The Beet. You can also connect with her on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, and YouTube.

 

Supporting the Thyroid & Adrenals Through Herbs

When it comes to supporting the adrenals and thyroid (because they are very closely linked), caffeine may not be your best friend. While those with sluggish adrenal glands tend to feel run down and in need of a regular pick-me-up (like coffee and other caffeinated beverages), in the long run, caffeine can do more harm than good while you are healing. I go into the “whys” around caffeine and your adrenals in this detailed post here. In addition to the caffeine, there are other constituents, molds, and mycotoxins that can show up in coffee that some people find they react to.

When I was diagnosed with autoimmune disease and adrenal fatigue, one of the first things that had to go was coffee. To be honest, I never drank coffee because of the caffeine. I drank coffee for the taste and aroma, as well as the emotional experience I felt to my morning cup of joe. For me, it was a ritual that I looked forward to every day (and sometimes multiple times a day). Whether I was brewing it at home or going to my local coffee shops, the experience was one that I clung to tightly.

But, when I was faced with new health struggles, I knew I had to do whatever I could to support my body and give it the tools it needed to heal. Giving up coffee and caffeine was one step in this direction.

And it sucked.

I turned to the coffee substitutes on the market in a desperate attempt to recreate the ritual I had grown so fond of, but nothing ever tasted the way I wanted it to. Nothing ever gave me that same experience that my cup of “real” coffee did. I knew there had to be something better, but I simply could not find it on my health food store’s shelves.

Necessity is the mother of invention so that is why I created my own coffee substitutes. They were made with organic, sustainably harvested herbs with zero grains, zero gluten, and zero caffeine. Just herbs. Herbs that not only tasted delicious but supported my body’s function, like liver detox, bile production, digestion, etc. In my mind, if I can get something to not only taste amazing but do amazing things for my body, then it’s a no brainer!

I sold these pre-made blends on Etsy for awhile and the demand was more than I could keep up with. People literally LOVED these blends and were stunned at how much like coffee they actually tasted. Customers who had been dealing with a variety of chronic illnesses had given up coffee to heal their bodies, but like me were deeply missing their morning cup of joe ritual.

After careful consideration and work with some highly experienced advisors, I decided to stop selling the pre-made blends and instead share my proprietary recipes in the form of an eBook. That way I could arm people with the knowledge and recipes they needed to make their own caffeine-free, gluten-free, grain-free blends in the comfort of their own home. 

That is why I created the best-selling DIY Herbal Coffees eBook: A Complete Guide To Making Delicious Herbal Coffees to Support Healing & Stress Relief. Now in its second edition, this ebook features all of my proprietary herbal blend recipes to you can craft a homemade herbal cup of “coffee” at home.

In addition, you get a ton of researched information about coffee’s impact on the health of those dealing with issues like adrenal fatigue, blood sugar dysregulation, autoimmune disease, thyroid disease, and any other chronic illness.

Lastly, you get access to your own personal coffee shop. I show you how to recreate your favorite coffee shop drinks and pastries with wholesome, nourishing real food ingredients. No junk here.

This book truly is a comprehensive guide to supporting your health, reducing your stress, and bringing a little something special back into your healing journey. You can learn more and download your own copy of this revolutionary wellness guide here, or simply click on the image below.