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The VH Podcast, Episode 19: The Key to Healing the Thyroid That No One Talks About // deliciousobsessions.com

Thyroid, thyroid, thyroid.

It’s one of the hottest topics right now and for good reason. It seems like a large chunk of the population is dealing with thyroid issues, whether diagnosed or undiagnosed.

When it comes to thyroid health, it’s a topic we’ve spoken about a lot here on this site. This week, Lydia and I wanted to talk about the one key to healing the thyroid that no one talks about…the adrenals.

Let’s not waste any more time. Tune in below and make sure you check out the links from the show as well!

Missed previous episodes? You can find them all here.

Links From This Week’s Episode:

Listen to The Vibrant Health Podcast :: Episode 19

Read The Vibrant Health Podcast Transcript :: Episode 19

Jessica:  Hi everyone. Welcome to episode number 19 of the Vibrant Health Podcast. I am Jessica from DeliciousObsessions.com and I am here with my co-host, Lydia of DivineHealthFromTheInsideOut.com.

Today, we are going to be talking about one of the main things that precede thyroid issues that no one is really addressing. Thyroid issue is one of the hottest topics in our community because so many people are suffering from sort of thyroid dysregulation. So we wanted to talk about that issue today and hopefully give you some insight on the topics that will allow you to make some progress when it comes to healing.

So welcome, Lydia. Let’s dive right in.

Lydia:  It sounds good. Yeah, this is a topic I am very passionate about and love talk to about and love to help people with. A lot of people come to me, I work with clients individually on their health and the majority of let’s say women – men come in too, but it seems to be more prevalent in women – have some sort of thyroid issue.

They have gone with their doctor and they have tested their thyroid and probably inadequately. That’s a whole other topic for another day. But generally speaking, they are getting some type of blood work panel done to try to assess what’s going on with the thyroid and most of them end up on some type of hormone replacement therapy. That’s the treatment.

Years ago, I went to the doctor myself because I was trying to get something out of them and I wanted to have a full panel done and all the stuff. It was very complicated for them to allow that because of the way it’s set up.

And one of the things I said, “I know I have adrenal fatigue. I have been a single mom and stressed for years, and I want you to assess my health with that in mind. What can you do for that?” She looked at me like I had three heads. She said, “What is this adrenal fatigue you’re talking about? I don’t even know.”

And I said, “Well, if you think about it, I’ve been under stress and it affects my body and it depletes my nutrients.” And then I went on and on. She just sat there, “Oh no, I don’t think that’s your problem. Your blood work looks fine.”

This is normal. This is what people are hearing. And I don’t say this to bash any individual doctor out there. This is the system that’s currently in place and it is the standard of care. There are wonderful doctors out there that will treat you with respect and dig deeper. But generally speaking, this is the conundrum we’re in as a nation where treating thyroid is overlooking a deeper issue.

What is that deeper issue? Well, before your thyroid ends up in trouble, you’ve already been probably depleted and your adrenals have been in trouble for a lot longer than you’ve ever known and no one is dealing with this or talking about this. Well, that’s not true. We are. We talk about it all the time. And I think people are wakening up to this issue. But in the mass public out there, it’s not being addressed.

Jessica:  Right.

Lydia:  So that’s what I want to talk about today. And if you aren’t sure what your adrenals are, they are these little small glandular tissues that are no bigger than a walnut, and they weigh less than a grape and they sit at the top of your kidneys. So you probably know where your kidneys are, right?

And the adrenal gland itself is going to produce hormones, several of them, actually way more hormones than the thyroid does. So the adrenals have a bigger job to play in that regard in terms of how many hormones they produce in the body.

We have epinephrine and norepinephrine. The adrenals are a part of our sympathetic nervous system. They help regulate it. The cortex of the adrenals is going to be responsible for secreting certain steroid hormones including aldosterone and cortisol and then various sex hormones and even their precursors. So that’s a lot of stuff, right?

Jessica:  Yes.

Lydia:  And all of us know what it’s like to be in fight-or-flight. We have all those hormones shooting out and we probably feel it more often than we should. And then many of us will feel or will say, “My hormones are just off, I can tell.”  What do we mean by that?

Well, women usually mean something is wrong with their female hormones, sex hormones. And usually a precursor to even that would be something is going wrong with the adrenal gland itself, why it cannot help to produce these things in the right balance. That’s real basic information.

Jessica:  Yeah. We talked about adrenals before. In episode number three, we talked all about adrenal health. So Lydia goes in a lot deeper about adrenals in episode number three. So if you’re new to adrenal fatigue and adrenal health, definitely check that one out for deeper information.

Lydia:  Right and I just need to give a recap. So these hormones secreted by your adrenal glands fulfill all the major physiological processes in your entire body. They have an important effect on how you think and feel, and the purpose of them is to help your body cope with stress and survive. It is their job to help you deal with any stress that you’re facing and your very stamina. Energy resilience depends on these two tiny little glands functioning properly.

I also want to quickly talk a little bit about the entire hypothalamic pituitary adrenal axis. So it’s not just our adrenal glands and we will hear adrenal fatigue termed out there, we will hear people talk about adrenal fatigue, adrenal fatigue, adrenal fatigue. “My adrenals, my adrenals.” Really, it’s more than just these two small glands. They work in sync with the hypothalamus and the pituitary.

So we can know that stress is going to affect this whole system. And many of us will be under stress. Stress can be defined as anything, anything the body perceives as a potential stress.

So it could be anything. It could be driving in traffic. It can be eating a food you are allergic to. It can be an infection in the body. It can be bromine, fluoride, toxins, all this stuff.

Now, if you are aware of all the problems we have that are hitting up our health these days, you’re going to think, “Gee, everyone’s adrenals are probably taxed” because we’ve got so much hammering at us these days.

Jessica:  Exactly.

Lydia:  So we have to take a step back and say, “Okay, how do we support this whole adrenal situation so that we can have better health? And how do we support it so that we can eventually recover our thyroid health flow?”

So that’s what I want to talk about today. If you want to read more about all the physiology of it, we do have more reading there.

Jessica:  So that we know the basics about the adrenals and the system itself, you mentioned your doctors don’t even know what adrenal fatigue was. I also went to a doctor one time awhile back and I asked them. I mentioned adrenal fatigue or potentially having some dysregulation and they looked at me like I was crazy. But he knew what adrenal fatigue was and the adrenals.

He said, “Oh no, the adrenals are not that important.” And so I was just like, “Whoa, okay, so why are doctors not discussing this?”

Lydia:  Right. I don’t really know why they aren’t taught more about this or it’s come up. I can only say our system is not set up for preventative measures that are really set up for sick care, medication, medical procedures, medical technologies, all of that. So doctors only discuss it in part because that’s the way the system is set up. So if you really want to find a doctor who’s going to tackle this, you need to find someone who is more modern and up-to-date and with the times and has some control over how they practice.

Jessica:  Right.

Lydia:  And so more holistic-minded doctors will more than likely know, not all of them, but many will know more. Now, even too with that though, I think that there’s a standard of care in some holistic realms where the most they do is they’ll test saliva, the adrenal hormones with saliva.

Saliva is going to change from day to day to a degree. So you’re doing a one time, one off saliva test to determine some of your adrenal hormones. You’re not really getting a full picture of what’s going on in general. I mean you can get some clues. You can surmise some things from that, but it’s just not enough.

So with that in mind, I think one of the things that we want to talk about today is how to actually test to determine where your body is at, to know, “Do I have adrenal fatigue?” and that kind of thing.

Jessica:  Exactly, yeah. Up until I started working with you last year with the hair analysis, I was only familiar with doing the saliva test. And I had done the saliva test in the past and yeah, it shows some adrenal insufficiencies.

And a lot of people may be able to know. Once they start recognizing the system, you will know. We know when we just don’t feel our best.

So yeah, let’s definitely talk a little bit more about more proper testing so we can have a better idea of what our body is even going through.

Lydia:  Right. And I honestly don’t think someone needs a specific diagnosis to say, “Oh, you have adrenal fatigue.” There are hundreds of symptoms that could correlate with basically the body being exhausted and fatigued in general. It’s not just your adrenal glands per se, it’s your whole body.

Everyone wants a diagnosis. Everybody wants to know specifics about their body. They want to categorize things. It’s another thing, where we’re at in this culture when it comes to finding out more about our health. But the way I look at it is adrenal fatigue is basically exhaustion and mineral depletion in the body.

Our mineral stores have a lot to play into how well our adrenal glands function. And once we lose minerals, they don’t just magically reappear. We have to replace them and nobody is talking about this.

So my personal favorite way, and I know I am hammering this again because we talk about it all the time but it’s so useful, is to determine your body’s general stages of stress really through hair tissue mineral analysis. And this is such a cool way to look at your body as a whole versus just trying to say, “Oh, I have adrenal fatigue. What do I do now?” We can say, “Well, yeah, you are in the exhaustion stage of stress.” And here’s a whole bunch of other things that we need to look at.

When your adrenals are exhausted, you have poor digestion. Often your liver is sluggish. All these things start to slow down because your body is essentially trying to reserve what’s left. It’s saying, “Slow down, we don’t have much left in the gas tank here, people. Let’s just chill.” So everything just really slows down.

So when you look at a hair analysis test, you’re getting a picture of the cellular level that’s going on in your body. You can determine if you are in an extreme stage of exhaustion. Or are you in a more of a sympathetic, fight or flight, stage of adrenal stress? And then you can see what minerals you need, what nutrients you need, what types of foods you need.

And then it’s necessary that additional things can be looked at like a full saliva panel, I would probably say for a whole month. But typically that’s not something that’s offered and it’s also a little expensive where the hair test is a one-time fee and then you get a three-month plan to work on, three or four months, and then you can move on from there.

So it’s very useful. It’s very useful to see into the body that way. I find that it’s probably the best way to get a feel. I really do. And I don’t say that because I’m biased and because I do this for a living.

I say that when I tested myself the very first time, I was in the exhaustion stage of stress. After already knowing I had adrenal fatigue just from the symptoms, without any other testing, my body was just depleted.

And this is shocking when you realized this, but it’s so helpful to know because it can shape your decisions about how you live your life. So it’s very useful.

Jessica:  So I have a quick, and it might be a slight segue way, but it was something that popped in my head as we were talking. So, essentially minerals are the foundation for all things health.

I know that you mentioned on Facebook and on some of our groups, and I’ve seen you talk about it probably on your blog and on your newsletters too, that when you’re stressed out, you burn minerals a lot faster. So I’m trying to I guess change my perspective about adrenal fatigue and maybe help other people too. It’s like, “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?” kind of thing.

Lydia:  Right.

Jessica:  It sounds like in an ideal world, if all of our mineral levels were perfect and we wouldn’t have adrenal fatigue. Correct me if I am wrong. So we get stressed out or we live in this really busy lifestyle, we’re eating really poor food, which all can create stress on the body, which depletes our minerals, which then causes our different organs, our thyroids, our adrenals, our liver to start “failing.” They are failing to do what they are designed to do.

So everything comes back to minerals and keeping those mineral levels balanced.

Lydia:  Yes. So I will go through that with you. You did a good job at summing it up. So when stress dominates our body, we lose essential minerals. Magnesium is a big one. Hopefully our readers are familiar with magnesium. I think you guys are great at educating yourself and you’ve probably heard about that.

o magnesium is a big deal. Magnesium is a huge deal. It’s responsible for so many functions of the body. So when you are losing magnesium and you are not replacing what you are losing, not to mention the soil is already depleted, our foods are already depleted, yadda, yadda, yadda.

Continued stress – and again remember stress can be a lot of things – at first is going to cause an increase in our adrenal output of these mineral corticoids. The stimulation of the glands is going to increase the secretion of hormones that causes loss of mineral corticoids, I can never say that. They’re basically steroid hormones and they are characterized by their influence on salt and more imbalances in the body. They also have a relationship with calcium. So we’re talking about sodium and potassium.

The primary mineral corticoid is aldosterone. That correlates with sodium in the body. And when the stress response is ongoing, other minerals can actually build up in the body. So in fight or flight, people will have elevated potassium and sodium on the hair test and maybe reduced calcium and magnesium probably. But overtime, it can switch and then they lose these and sodium and potassium go way low and calcium can go way high.

So there’s just this pattern of what will happen overtime with the minerals in the body. So long term stress response is going to just keep depleting your minerals if you are not aware and you are not purposely trying to rebuild and replace them and you are in trouble.

Now, another thing that happens in stress response – and everyone’s stress response, some can last for years and years and years and some can just be a little shorter. It just depends.

But when we have the stress response ongoing, it can change our actual intestinal absorption. We’ve talked about that in the podcast before on how you don’t want to eat on the go, you don’t want to eat rushed because that’s fight or flight and your digestion takes the backseat when you are in fight or flight.

So when you are in general fight or flight, you are in this adrenal stress. You maybe have high cortisol and all the stuff going on and your sympathetic is dominant. If you’re the person that’s like, “Go, go, go, go,” you’re going to be losing your minerals like crazy and you will eventually crash.

Jessica:  Right.

Lydia:  So we have this change in intestinal absorption and then also in re-absorption by the kidneys of these minerals, of these elements. So this is sometimes how high blood pressure will flare up. So someone in adrenal stress or acute adrenal stress will have higher blood pressure due to the stress and the increase of sodium with the corresponding loss of calcium and magnesium.

So again, prolonged stress can result in severe mineral deficiency. So I’m going to say adrenal fatigue is really a mineral deficient body.

Jessica:  It’s so fascinating to me because I really feel like it’s just something that’s not being addressed. I’ve always known that mineral is important, yeah, but I really did not start understanding how it is important until the last year or so.

And we’re really holding them in high regard. They are the most important thing that we can be doing for our health because I think you said that they are the spark plugs of our body essentially.

Lydia:  Yeah, the spark plug of life.

Jessica:  Yeah. It’s really fascinating. So I know that was a little segue way off of our main topic, but I felt like I wanted to have you explain it and make sure that I am understanding it, and then also to figure out how to help people understand that minerals are so, so, so, so important. So maybe revising, it is not necessarily adrenal fatigue. It’s mineral deficiency. I love that.

Lydia:  Yeah. It is important to understand our biochemistry and we just don’t. We really don’t.

Stress also changes your metabolism. It causes your body to retain minerals that are needed to stimulate while at the same time, it will lose nutrients and minerals needed to help calm the body.

Within the different stages of adrenal fatigues, you are going to see different mineral patterns and the transition to exhaustion. So eventually, if the stress continues, the body is going to slowly lose its ability to adequately store sedative minerals. You’re going to have people who can’t calm down, can’t go to sleep at night and can’t relax. You’re going to have hyper kids, irritable, really irritable, people who just don’t know why they are irritable. They don’t want to be, but they can’t help it.

Magnesium is a big one. Again, magnesium is very sensitive to stress. And then, because everyone is stressed and losing minerals, they have emotional stress, and then they try to cope, and then there’s alcohol consumption that comes in usually to cope and calm you down because you can’t relax, so you need something to help you relax. So you go and drink alcohol.

Not everybody does this. I am just giving a common scenario. And how many moms are you hearing say, “Oh, I just want a glass of wine at the end of the day once kids are in bed?” That’s common and there’s something wrong with that, but there’s a reason why it’s so common.

And so there are also sugary diets, we’re losing magnesium. Excessive exercise, you’re going to burn through a lot more. And people don’t know this. So you see people who are excessive exercise enthusiasts have certain patterns as well. Pregnancy, breastfeeding, medication will deplete your minerals for sure.

Then when you are already minerally depleted, you are going to end up with more infections commonly because you are already depleted so you are going to be more susceptible. But then you deplete yourself even more when you have these repeated infections namely of magnesium. So it’s a vicious cycle.

Jessica:  Wow, yeah.

Lydia:  Let’s just say with magnesium, the more it’s depleted, the less able you are to deal with stress because magnesium is a natural sedative. But then the more you’re going to need the magnesium, and you’re just going to lose it even more, and you can get to a point where I’ve seen people with really, really, really low magnesium stores. Honestly, it’s almost like being a heart attack away.

Jessica:  Wow, scary.

Lydia:  It’s a big deal. It’s a big deal. Chromium is another one. I wrote that blog post for you a while back about chromium and insulin resistance and diabetes. We really need chromium because it works with insulin and helps the cells absorb and use glucose. So we have a huge problem with insulin resistance these days, even the people who are eating really clean healthy diets.

Stress also depletes zinc. So when you have underactive adrenal glands, oxidative stress, it can also create a relevant deficiency of zinc because zinc is found in those glands. All these vicious cycles can keep happening. So it’s a big problem.

Jessica:  Yeah, absolutely.

Lydia:  For sure.

Jessica:  And it’s one that’s not really being addressed even in the holistic world. I have never met a practitioner in the past that I worked with that has really put a lot of emphasis on minerals.

I know information is constantly changing and evolving, so we have to keep our minds open for that. So I really feel like we’re at the forefront of being able to make some transitions in the holistic world and get more practitioners educated about the importance of minerals and really assessing minerals and the role they are playing in chronic illness.

So I am looking forward to seeing that change take place throughout our community. And I’ve really appreciated everything I have learned from you.

I know we’ve had a little bit of a segue way there. Once you’ve tested for adrenal fatigue or your mineral deficiencies, how do you go about recovering?

I am thankful that my adrenal problems have never been completely debilitating, but I know several people who have had chronic fatigue where they could not even get out of bed.

And I feel sometimes that I just can’t do it. I can’t do my normal work day. I want to just sit down or lay down all day. So I know what it’s like to be completely exhausted like that. So how do you even start recovering? Sometimes it seems hopeless.

Lydia:  Oh, it’s never hopeless. It’s never hopeless. We always have hope. And I want to infuse the world with so much hope to know that you can recover.

I was debilitated. I basically was flatlined at one point in my life where I have four children to care for and I could barely do it. I’m looking back on those years, thinking, “Oh my lord, they lived. How did they stay alive? I don’t even know.” Seriously. And I was in such a fog.

And I know there are more and more people – and there are various reasons as to how you get there.

For me, it was a lot of things, but I have four kids, I was in a depressive marriage, I had a lot of problems. And I was born to a mom who was anorexic and underweight and I had health problems my whole life. So I know my adrenals are weak my whole life. I was probably born with low mineral source to begin with.

So when I finally figured out, I said, “Okay, I know it is adrenal fatigue. What do I do?”

The very first thing, and this is so hard to transition people’s mindset, but the biggest thing you need is rest. You need to rest, more rest than you can ever imagine because essentially you want to conserve what your body currently does have and you want a chance to rebuild.

So in order to start to rebuild, you need to not keep burning up what you are putting back in. And you need rest. You need rest so that the body can actually heal, heal all these glands and organs and everything like that.

Most people will not have the ability to do this. I have clients who have become debilitated and have to go either live with their parents or quit their job or they can barely work well. It’s not pretty. It’s very serious.

So if you’re hearing this now and you are not there, thank god that you are not and hopefully you can take this information to heart and realize that you are not going to be able to “go, go, go” forever. Some people will burn out and it will seem overnight to them.

They’ll say, “What happened to me? I was fine and then all of a sudden, I can barely function. I have severe hypoglycemia. I can’t sleep at night.” And I will say to them, “Listen, this didn’t just happen to you overnight. It can take one traumatic incident to totally turn things around where all of a sudden you’re crashed.” But really, it’s been a lifetime of things, compiling and compiling and compiling.

So the first thing people need to do is rest. They need to figure out how to cut things out of their life that are unnecessary, to focus more on themselves and healing because if you don’t recover, how are you going to help the other people in your life that you need to be helping?

Jessica:  Yes.

Lydia:  So I say this all the time. I tell the moms that you got to put the oxygen masks on first. You got to get your kids to bed so that you can get to bed. You got to go to bed and not stay up late and do all these chores. You need rest, you need support and you need to focus on nourishing activities for yourself.

Then you need to get more minerals, which can be complicated because you need to know what your body needs. But if you don’t know what your body needs and you can’t test right away, there are certainly foods that are mineral-rich and you want to focus on those, eating really nutrient-dense foods, a wide variety of them.

And then you want to realize too that typically in someone who is in an exhausted state, depleted of minerals, you’re going to have impaired digestion. So you’re going to need digestive support to make sure you are simulating the minerals you are consuming.

Those are the three absolute basics that I can say. Usually, if you’re in the exhausted stage and you are not the person that’s “go, go, go” and that maybe has high blood pressure and a little more anxiety kind of person, the more exhausted people tend to get a lot more salt. They’ll crave it because they have low tissue sodium, so they need more salts.

I love Sole. It’s not the fish. It is a salt water solution. If you are not using Sole, give it a try. Go slow. It’s a great way to get ionic salt. Real salt has an array of all the trace minerals in it. So you’re going to get a nice mineral hit there.

Adrenally exhausted people typically need potassium. It’s one of the key minerals that are always very low when you are in the exhausted stage. When you are in the fight or flight stage, you will have elevated potassium, but you likely still need it.

And potassium is an interesting mineral because we need about 4,700 to around 5,000 milligrams of it in the diet daily based on the RDA. That’s a lot.

And I eat a very nutrient-dense, a lot of vegetables. And I spend a week calculating my mineral intake in my food alone. And sometimes I did really good eating, and sometimes they were decent because I was so busy and I wasn’t eating quite enough potassium daily. I’m like, “Wow, this is crazy.”

So some people may need to do a little supplementing and go from there. But the thing about minerals is each mineral has an effect on another mineral. So you can’t just go out and supplement until you really know where your body is at.

So you want to eat food that’s mineral-rich, potassium-rich foods. Magnesium is probably the one supplement I can say safely that pretty much everyone could benefit from. However, there are going to be some variances within, knowing how much and what form. That’s a whole other thing, but that’s a big mineral that pretty much everyone needs.

So you don’t want to just go out and supplement randomly, but you do need to know lots more rest than you ever saw it. This lifestyle in America just doesn’t allow for that. There’s way too much stimulation. There’s way too much to do. There are way too many things to do. There’s way too much stimulation from the internet as well.

And then diet, most people are trying, but we’re just not quite getting there. So you really want to try to get more nutrient-dense foods into your diet, eat more purposeful and start working on your digestion as well.

Those are the basics. There’s a lot more that we could go into, but we don’t have time.

Jessica:  Yeah. When it comes to thyroid and adrenal health, this really is a complex topic. It’s way more than we could cover in a short podcast. We could probably do an entire year’s worth of podcast on just adrenals and thyroid. So it really is quite complex.

So the top takeaway for our listeners today, what can you say?

Lydia:  Get adequate sleep, which can be a can of worms too because sometimes people cannot sleep well when they are exhausted because they don’t have the sedative mineral and things. But you have to try to set up a way to get better sleep.

Go to bed by 10:00. Sleep through 10 PM to at least 6 AM and get that adrenal window of time in the evening, 11:00 to 1:00, where the adrenals get restored. Our body works in this cool Circadian Rhythm and time clock. So we want to be asleep before that time.

And a lot of people sleep really late. So try to get to bed at 10:00 to 10:30 at the latest if you can, as many nights as you can. Take more time to relax daily. Find ways to unwind. Find some relaxation that works for you. It can be a number of things.

If you are feeling stressed, take a few minutes to just do some deep breathing or go for a walk, be out with nature or something, but don’t keep driving yourself when you feel that way. You do need to take a step back.

And learn to nurture yourself. I think a lot of moms do this. We feel like we have to sacrifice, sacrifice, sacrifice, give, give, give and then we have nothing left. And if we need to keep doing that, we need to give to ourselves first. That’s where that whole putting on your oxygen mask first comes into play.

We need to say to our kids, “Mommy needs to rest. You go and play here, and I’m going to sit down and I am going to have a cup of tea.” Or if you have teenagers and they want to be out late at every night, you’re like, “No, I need to go to bed in a decent time. You can’t be out late every night,” whatever it may be.

Also, light to moderate exercise. You don’t want to be pushing yourself when you are exhausted. That’s silly. That’s crazy pants. Please don’t do it. Just step back. You don’t have to do this Nike style “Just do it, push yourself” stuff that our culture perpetuates. You want to nourish yourself.

So yoga is wonderful. Leisurely walk in the park. There’s no guilt in doing this leisurely light gentle exercise. You’re still taking care of your body, which is the whole point of exercise.

Jessica:  I recommend – sorry.

Lydia:  Go ahead.

Jessica:  About the exercise, that’s a big one for a lot of people.

Lydia:  We talked about that. That’s right.

Jessica:  Yeah, episode number nine is about the proper exercise for adrenal fatigue. That’s something that I had really struggled with because I don’t necessarily like to “work out,” but I always felt like it was something that I had to do.

I like to lift heavy things. I like kettlebells and stuff like that. But I got to a point where I literally could not walk up the stairs after doing a set of pushups or a set of squat or lunges that my legs would just almost give up on me. That was when I realized that I cannot push myself, push myself with exercise.

So definitely listen to episode number nine if you are struggling with adrenal problems and how to figure out how to exercise with that because we still need movement. We still need to be working our bodies, but we need to do it in a very gentle and kind way.

Lydia:  Right.

Jessica:  Sorry to interrupt.

Lydia:  No, no. Sometimes, we do need to prioritize rest over fitness and working out. We do not think that way as a culture. We don’t go out for that. We just don’t.

Stage three adrenal fatigue, with the total exhaustion stage, you need to cut it out. You just need to take a step back. And you need to know that it’s not going to be forever. But you really do need to prioritize rest.

Sunshine, get out in the sunshine. It’s great natural way that’s essential for healthy adrenal function.

Cleaning up your diet obviously is a big deal. We cannot refuel with fake fuel, so we need pure fuel, real food, nutrient-dense food, quality meats and good healthy fats. Adrenals need both fats and starches.

When you are exhausted, you probably need a little bit more starch. I know we’ve heard the whole carbs are back, the right way of eating carbs, yadda, yadda. But when the adrenal glands are tired, you can’t rely on them for your energy. So you need your quick fuel. So you are going to need little starches there, too.

It can be healthy, good quality vegetables, a little bit of seeds or grains, some rice and always use good fats that got good fat soluble vitamins in them. So there are plenty of options out there. We’ve got coconut oil, ghee, butter, pastured animal fats, lard, tallow, even extra virgin good quality palm oil and things like that.

And then, as far as other things, vitamins and minerals are great, but you really need to know what your body needs. Herbs and glandulars are wonderful.

Jessica and I love adaptogenic herbs. We talk about that a lot in both of our sites. Whole food C, we did a podcast about that. You just want to be careful you don’t do too much and some people need less than others depending on their biochemistry. But about 500 milligrams a day is nice. Again, that may vary, so don’t quote me on that.

Jessica:  Right.

Lydia:  I could tell you specifically, more specifically if I knew more information. But generally speaking, we do need that whole food C. You can get it in your foods, you can get in your whole food C supplement.

Lifestyle changes may be necessary if you are in a deeper state of this exhaustion. So I had to make major lifestyle changes. I had to cut back on my workload. I had to restructure things, I had to minimize things, I had to get my kids to bed earlier so I get to bed earlier and I had to just take a step back and not do as much in general.

So those are some of the key things there. There can be further deeper things there. There can be further deeper things that are holding your adrenals back that you may need even more support with. All of this stuff that we talked about today is really essential for everyone alive.

Jessica:  Right, right. Yeah.

Lydia:  To some degree.

Jessica:  Obviously you don’t want to wait to make these lifestyle changes until you’re in the troughs of adrenal fatigue. You want to be proactive and treat your body with love and tender care and keep those adrenals happy and keep your thyroid happy and your digestion.

Even if you are not experiencing any symptoms or you don’t think you have anything to worry about, that doesn’t mean that you can still go out and party until 2 AM and eat McDonald’s every day. You really need to start considering the long term effects of whatever your lifestyle is and what you can do now, what small changes you can start making. Just give yourself a little bit more love.

Lydia:  Right.

Jessica:  If people want to learn more about minerals and the hair testing and that stuff, how can they contact you? You’ve got information on your site about that.

Lydia:  Correct.

Jessica:  And you are working with clients still.

Lydia:  Yes. I also have a new Facebook group that’s called Healing with Mineral Analysis. If this spoke to you or you’re interested in learning more about the mineral piece and maybe eventually getting a hair analysis done and I post there regularly with information.

And so, if you really like the mineral piece and want to learn more, you are welcome to ask to join that group. We’d love to have you.

And I do have more information on my site and we’ve got some links below for you.

Jessica:  Awesome. We’re going to go ahead and wrap up. It was a complex topic, so we have probably just scraped the surface of things.

But if this information resonated with you or you have friends or family or other loved ones that you know would benefit from it, please share it. Spread the knowledge. We’re here to really promote and help them on this.

We’d love it if you could share, if you could leave a review on iTunes or Stitcher, that would be awesome too. We’ll have links down below where you can leave a review. It only takes a minute. It’s super simple.

And whenever you share the podcast or any of our blog post or leave us reviews and comments, it really helps us reach more people. So we really appreciate your support.

So make sure you check out all the links on the episodes. This was a really brief episode, so we’re going to have a ton of links I think to share. So that will be down below.

You can also read the transcripts for the podcast on our site if you want. And if you are looking for more information on better living or you need some real food recipes or health and wellness information, make sure you check out our sites.

You can reach me over at DeliciousObsessions.com and you can find Lydia at DivineHealthFromTheInsideOut.com. If you have questions, you can contact us through there. We’ve got contact forms or you can just email us directly with any questions that you might have.

So we are going to sign off. We’ll see you again next week. Thank you so much. Have a great day.

Lydia:  Yes. Thank you so much for listening everyone. Take care.

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