keto diet and adrenal fatigue a lot of people are interested in these two
topics but they have some concerns that it may not be a good idea to combine the
two so we're gonna explore those topics coming right up so can you do the keto
diet if you think that you have adrenal fatigue so let's talk about the adrenal
glands first what do they do what's their purpose etc whenever we have
stress whenever your nervous system perceives stress then it's the adrenal
glands that sit on top of the kidney they're actually an extension of the
brain the adrenal glands even though they're so far out into the body they
are an extension of nervous tissue because the nervous system doesn't have
time to relay the information it wants to drop the info right away so there are
no synapses between the brain and the adrenal glands so adrenal glands are
super important and they need to respond quickly that's their purpose so they
carry out the hormonal instructions whenever the brain responds to stress
what is stress well stress is an increased need whether we have an
emotional stress that you're sitting in your car on the freeway and somebody
cuts you off or does something rude and your knuckles go white
now you just had a stress response because your body is anticipating a
fight it thinks that there's going to be something in the short near future that
requires increased energy resources so it wants to mobilize more resources so
that you're prepared for that fight physical stress that's if you exercise
for example then you have an increased demand and your body makes available
those resources or if you're fasting so if you're not eating for a while then
your blood sugar starts to go down and need to have a system of mobilizing
energy from the stores you need to get the resources available so whether it's
emotional physical or fasting that's still a stress that results in the
perception of an increased need so now what the body does is it responds the
adrenals respond by making cortisol and cortisol the purpose of cortisol is to
raise blood sugar because blood sugar is the fastest fuel in an emergency
so when we have stressed the body wants more blood sugar and the cortisol
mobilizes the blood sugar from glycogen stores so the way the body can store
glucose is in the form of glycogen then we have a limited amount of stores and
whenever we have stress cortisol tells the body to start retrieving fuel from
those stores and then when the blood sugar goes up we also have an insulin
response because the insulin is necessary to deliver that glucose to the
cells that need it for fuel another function of cortisol is to regulate your
sleep rhythms your circadian rhythms so when you go to bed your blood sugar is
high because you're normally in a well-fed state but then you don't eat
during the night so cortisol is the lowest when you go to bed but then
because you don't eat because you're fasting while you're sleeping the
cortisol rises gradually and it hits a peak right around the time when you wake
up and that's because cortisol is also involved in waking you up cortisol is
directly opposed to melatonin which is your sleep hormone so that's why it's
part of your sleep cycle so it's the highest when you wake up and your body
anticipates food and once you're awake you the cortisol starts dropping off
again so so far it seems like everything I've said indicate
that keto and fasting would be a bad idea because it would increase the
demand on the adrenal gland and that is true but we need to really explore this
next part to understand the the bigger picture of this that even though fasting
and keto can be a little stressful in the short term it is the best solution
in the long term and to eat more carbs and frequent meals is the very thing
that perpetuates the problem so what happens when we go keto when we cut our
carbs way way way down then the body has to start looking for an alternative
source of fuels so it looks for fat fat is plentiful it's a great fuel and it
learns to burn the fat and now the glycogen stores go down because we're
not eating so much carbohydrates so much glucose that the body can turn into
glycogen so the glycogen stores go down so again that might look like a bad
thing because we want that glycogen for blood sugar and if we don't have it then
the body might have to work extra hard to make cortisol but again it works the
other way around because and here's the key when we go into ketosis we teach the
body to use another fuel so now we learn to burn fat for the most part and
ketones for the brain so the body can learn to run on 90% fat and the brain
can run about 75% or so on ketones and 25% on glucose but that's a very very
small amount of glucose needed so when we go into keto when we become keep keto
adapted fat adapted we reduce our reliance on cortisol we reduce our
reliance on glucose for fuel so the need for cortisol is much much less and now
the adrenals get to rest one further and of course is that if we don't need to
make so much cortisol and we don't eat so many carbs then our insulin is also
going to go down cortisol drives insulin so with less carbs less cortisol now we
have two ways of reducing that insulin so the key to understand is that yes
cortisol does work like this but we're more dependent on cortisol if we are
adapted to a carbohydrate metabolism once we come adapted to a fat metabolism
we don't need so much glycogen we're not as reliant on glucose and then the need
for cortisol drops dramatically when we develop a stable blood sugar through fad
adaptation now most of these problems go away the adrenals get to rest up and
everything starts balancing itself much much better the other thing that I want
to mention though is there's the caution here and for people who will also want
to combine the keto diet with intermittent fasting because there's a
transition period here when you're going from a carb dependency into a fat
adaptation and intermittent fasting that is a stress on the body because during
this transition your body isn't really good yet at getting the fuel from the
fat it still wants that carbohydrate so now it's gonna go crazy on the cortisol
because it's trying to retrieve it so what you want to do then is you want to
go really really slow you start off with lowering your carbs somewhat you stop
you cut out all of the processed foods and the sugary foods and then you start
reducing the number of meals you start cutting out the snacks you get down to
three meals and then you start gradually maybe pushing the breakfast a little bit
until you can get down to two meals so do all this very very slowly so that
your body can adaptive so your body can slowly get
adapted to the fad adaptation because if you are carb dependent and you go
straight into intermittent fasting and keto then there's going to be a few
weeks where your adrenals are going to be overworked and that may not be a good
idea it probably won't be a good idea because you won't feel so good in the
process but the keto and the intermittent fasting is the long-term
solution so just learn how to do it and do it gradually so if you enjoy these
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