Have you heard of the saying “healer heal thyself”?
When I get off balance, my adrenals are the first to suffer.
I have a bad habit of biting off more than I can chew (no pun intended 😉 because I get so excited about new work projects and healing opportunities that can help others with their health.
While I’ve made a lot of strides in this area, learning to truly temper this habit will always be a work in progress for me.
Ultimately, in order for true adrenal healing to occur, it’s crucial to gain control of our stressors and to have realistic expectations of what we can accomplish while retaining balance in our lives.
When I first transitioned to the online model a few years ago, it was like working two full-time jobs for about a year. I was running a full private practice and managing a team, building two TV shows, and building an entirely new set of online courses and a brand new business model.
I get tired just thinking about it.
That time period in my life depleted most of the cortisol I had in my poor adrenal glands and I had hit a wall called stage III adrenal exhaustion.
Insomnia, tired but wired, kind of depressed and a little bit anxious most of the time “for no reason”, no appetite, and no energy to exercise or do the things I usually enjoy.
If you’ve ever experienced adrenal exhaustion, you know it can take its toll on every aspect of your life.
So I sought out help and support to keep me accountable as I pulled myself out of this chronic stress cycle.
I worked with Jeanne Rubin at East West Healing and Performance because I really liked her approach to heal a broken metabolism (thyroid, adrenals, digestion) using only food, hardly any supplements and no lab work. I already knew what supplements to take and what my lab values were, I just needed to put myself first for a little while and to focus on using food as my medicine 6 times a day, every time I ate.
Jeanne is a huge proponent of Ray Peat’s work, which advocates consuming animals, roots, and fruits in the ratio of 25% protein, 25% fat, and 50% carbohydrates (the RIGHT type of carbs, no refined stuff) in order to shut off the stress response, feed the thyroid easily and quickly, and make it easy on your GI tract.
Within 3 weeks of eating like this, I was able to sleep better, turn off that wired feeling, and gain a little balance and emotional perspective. It took another 6 weeks to pull me out of the deep adrenal exhaustion (from stage III to stage II) and of course lifestyle and stress reduction is crucial.
Only when I got past our first launch of our three-month online nutrition program (the irony of creating a program to help others heal from adrenal fatigue actually helped drive me into it, right?!) and closed my private practice did the external stressors let up.
This change in lifestyle and some time off allowed me to go from stage II to stage I and it’s always a work in progress from there.
I was literally working 14-hour days 7 days a week, so spending a lot of time cooking healing meals was not an option for me. I needed quick, easy go-to snacks and meals to make this work in my life during this time.
This is why The Adrenal Healing Creamsicle that Jeanne recommended to me literally saved me (and consequently most all of my adrenal-fatigued clients at that time).
I drank it every morning and for at least one snack in the afternoon or sometimes before bed or if I woke up in the middle of the night between 1-4am with low blood sugar and high cortisol.
The Adrenal Healing Creamsicle was an awesome, easy tool to help train my body to go back to living in the parasympathetic nervous system (goodbye fight-or-flight response) and one you can also use to do the same.
Ingredients:
Directions:
Blend it up into a delicious creamsicle, shake it up in a blender bottle, or pour into Popsicle molds and freeze (kids LOVE it).
For adrenal healing/balancing, drink it as soon as you wake up and 1 other time throughout the day to keep your blood sugar balanced and your thyroid fed, which will help pull you out of metabolic chaos.
Benefits Of The Adrenal Healing Creamsicle:
This drink is supportive for about 80% of people. If you struggle with bacteria or yeast overgrowth, you may not react well at first and would want to add this in after treatment.
An alternative for those undergoing this type of treatment is to use 1 mug of bone broth with added collagen, coconut oil, and sea salt and to have it with a side of (1 cup) organic berries.
You will get the same effect without feeding yeast or bacterial overgrowth and that is still a go-to snack for me as well.
There’s more than meets the eye to healing from adrenal fatigue, so I’m not promoting this drink as a panacea but as one of the tools in your healing tool kit. I’ve included 5 of our most popular blog posts on adrenal healing, metabolism, and thyroid healing to help round out your understanding and tools to help you heal and recover.
Remember to “let food be thy medicine.” Don’t underestimate its power to take you from merely surviving to thriving.
I’ve included 5 of our most popular blog posts on adrenal healing, metabolism, and thyroid healing to help round out your understanding and tools to help you heal and recover.
