Adrenal Love

I am now loving my adrenal glands. I am supporting the giving and receiving that they do for the body. I am supporting a part within a whole system. I am rewiring and reprogramming. I am not going to stop no matter how deep I have to dig into earth. No matter how much grief and pain I have to swim through. I am on a roll and I intend to stay in with and with it.

What will radiant adrenals tell us, show us? So much of the health "news" is about adrenal disease as is the case with all the endocrine glands. It's time to lift up a new model of health. It's time to identify those wholisitc and holy characteristics and signs. Holy is healthy...simple and pure without all the dogma and claims to the keys to heaven.

Women to Women, Changing Women's Health....Naturally

by Marcelle Pick, OB/GYN NP

Your foundation rests on adrenal health

As the great balancer of more than 50 hormones in the body, the adrenal glands have a broad impact on your health and energy. The adrenals are primarily responsible for activating your stress (“fight or flight”) response, shifting energy away from restorative processes like digestion and toward the organs of action — your heart and skeletal muscles — by pumping adrenaline and cortisol into your bloodstream. But they also synthesize numerous other hormones, including androgens and their precursors, such as testosterone and DHEA, as well as estrogens and progesterone — which is why it becomes more important than ever to support our adrenal glands as we approach menopause, a time when our bodies come to rely more heavily upon the regulation of hormones.

First and foremost: timing your meals and snacks

One thing I often tell my patients is to never allow themselves to get too hungry. Low blood sugar by itself puts stress on your body and can tax your adrenals. You may not realize that your body is in constant need of energy — even as you sleep. And the primary adrenal hormone cortisol serves as a kind of moderator in making sure your blood sugar between meals, especially during the night, stays adequate. It does this by signaling to the liver to release its stored sugar, glycogen, when there isn’t food on board. Long periods without food make the adrenals work harder by requiring them to release more cortisol to keep your body functioning normally. So eating three nutritious meals and two to three snacks that are well-timed throughout the day is one way to balance your blood sugar and lessen the adrenal burden.

When you eat can also make a difference in preserving, supporting, and restoring your adrenals. As you can see in the graph, cortisol has a natural cycle that works with your circadian rhythm. Normally, it begins to rise around 6:00 AM and reaches its highest peak around 8:00 AM. Throughout the day cortisol gradually declines — with small upward bumps at meal times — in preparation for nighttime rest.

A strong nutrient foundation also supports the endocrine system overall. There is great synergism between the different organs of the endocrine system (including the adrenal glands), where each organ and its secretions interact with the others to upregulate and downregulate activity to keep us in balance. But as hormonal levels become deficient or excessive, the natural response of our cells is to compensate by increasing or decreasing their receptors for those molecules. To do all this optimally, they need nutritional support!