The Adrenal Glands and Your Health
Your adrenal glands play a major part in maintaining a healthy body and metabolism. The hormones your adrenal glands secrete and regulate can either help you balance your hormones in favor of a high metabolism or they can have the opposite effect, shutting down your metabolism and resulting in loss of energy and weight gain, usually around the waist. Your habits, food choices, exercise, and lifestyle determine how your adrenal glands behave.
Cortisol regulates glucose, fat, and proteins and helps keep the body’s metabolism regulated. Cortisol is important in managing blood pressure and in controlling inflammation. However, long term cortisol in the blood stream can have long term deleterious effects not only on the adrenal glands but on the hormonal system and whole body. Dr. Tindall's Adrenal Health Video
Hormones, such as adrenaline, cause the “fight or flight” response. They also help mobilize sources of energy (glycogen), since energy is needed for “feeding” this stress response. Should be a very short term reaction, but unfortunately for most people stressful lifestyle is chronic, which leads to chronic adrenal problems.
What can causes adrenal gland dysfunction? A lot of things: chronic pain, mental/emotional stress, food sensitivities, gastro-intestinal issues, blood sugar imbalances, infections (i.e. parasitic, bacterial), excessive exercise… basically, anything that is a perceived as stress on the body.
First step in restoring your adrenal gland health: We must identify (stress survey and history) and we then work together to remove and manage the source of stress. This may mean removing and correcting sugar imbalances, managing chronic pain or food sensitivities, addressing an infection, resolving physical/mental/emotional stress, or whatever it may be that is negatively impacting adrenal glands health.
We find that restoring adrenal gland health is one of the most difficult systems to restore, and almost impossible doing it on your own.