Skip to main content

Getting Over Adrenal Fatigue

I've got it back, I'm feelin' better every day. Tell all those pencil pushers, better get outta my way.

I'm doing well enough that I've worked out the past couple of days and started going for walks at lunch again--once when it was 14F (-10C). I'm cooling off at night now. It's good to put on my winter pajamas and pull up the covers. Adrenal cortex and hydrocortisone FTW!

Here's what I've learned from my reading and experience:

Minerals=>Adrenals=>Thyroid

In other words:

  1. Sort out your minerals first: iron, magnesium, potassium and iodine. Salt your food to taste.
  2. If you think you have adrenal problems--being tired or wired at the wrong time of day, heart palpitations, frequent colds, sex hormone problems--take a 24-hour cortisol test. Sort out your adrenals--I use Seeking Health adrenal cortex; others use stuff with adrenaline in it, or "adaptogen herbs." The former gave me palpitations; I haven't tried the latter.
  3. If you think you have thyroid problems, get your free T3, free T4, reverse T3 and antibodies tested. I took Thyro-Gold, and it was wonderful for awhile, until I took too much.

I wish I'd done those steps in order. I did them bass-ackwards and it was a big mistake. (Well, I did start with iodine, thanks to the advice of Dr. Davis of Wheat Belly fame.)

So why didn't I see a regular doctor instead of joining Dr. Davis's forum? Sad to say, but if it's not broken, bleeding or infected, a lot of doctors don't know what to do. And many of them don't realize they don't know what to do. If you disagree with them, you're wrong or you're lying. There are the kind of doctors who care about people and want to learn new things to help them--some of those doctors are in my blog roll. The other kind of doctors can fuck off.





Comments

Popular posts from this blog

My Long-Term Experience Eating Safe (and Other) Starches

Years ago, before the Perfect Health Diet came out, I followed a program that involved eating quite a bit "safe starch." It was called Body for Life. It involved eating six small servings of carbohydrate along with six small servings of protein, plus two servings of fibrous vegetables per day. (A serving was the size of your fist or the palm of your hand.) There were six workouts a week (three weightlifting, three cardio) and one free day every week where you ate whatever you wanted and didn't exercise. In all fairness, these two programs are different: BFL allows certain grains, legumes and low-fat dairy and discourages fat. It doesn't call for a wheelbarrow full of vegetation. Nevertheless, my experience eating lots of fruit and lots of starch is relevant to the PHD because the amount and type of digestible carbohydrates are similar, and for the first few years, I didn't eat wheat except on free days. At first on BFL, I felt great. Before, I was continually...

Blog Lineup Change

Bye-bye, Fathead. I've enjoyed the blog, but can't endorse the high-fat, high-carb Perfect Health Diet that somehow makes so much sense to some otherwise bright people. An astrophysicist makes some rookie mistakes on a LC diet, misdiagnoses them, makes up "glucose deficiency," and creates a diet that's been shown in intervention studies to increase small LDL, which can lead to heart disease. A computer programmer believes in the diet and doesn't seem eager to refute it because, perhaps, scientists are freakin' liars and while he's good at spotting logical inconsistencies, lacks some intermediate knowledge of human biology. To Tom's credit, he says it's not the right diet for everyone, but given the truckload of food that has to be prepared and eaten, impracticality of following it while traveling (or even not traveling), and unsuitability for FODMAPs sufferers, diabetics and anyone prone to heart disease (i.e., much of the population), I'm...

Carrageenan: A Sickening Thickener. Is it a Migraine Menace?

Let me tell you about my ride in an ambulance last night. I woke up at six o'clock from a nap with a mild headache. I ate dinner and took my vitamins, along with a couple of extra magnesium pills. Since magnesium helps my TMJ flare-ups, I thought it might help my headache. Then I went to see my mother. A few hours later, I had a severe headache, sinus pain and nausea. During a brief respite from the pain, I left for home, but less than a mile later, I got out of my car and threw up. A cop, Officer Fisher, pulled up behind me and asked if I was okay. He believed me when he said I hadn't been drinking, but he said I seemed lethargic and he wanted the paramedics to see me. (Later he mentioned that a man he'd recently stopped was having a stroke.) Thinking I had a migraine headache, the paramedics wanted to take me to the hospital. But since I knew that doctors don't know what causes migraine headaches, and I didn't know what effect their medicine would have on m...