Can Adrenal Fatigue Cause Weight Gain? A Comprehensive Look
Imagine struggling to lose weight despite eating well and exercising regularly. You feel exhausted no matter how much you sleep. Sound familiar?
You could be suffering from adrenal fatigue, a condition in which the adrenal glands struggle to produce the hormones needed to maintain a healthy weight and overall well-being. This happens when you create more cortisol than your body can handle. This issue creates a vicious cycle of negative effects that hurt the body's ability to maintain proper levels of hormones.
In this post, we'll dig deep into adrenal fatigue and why it causes people to gain weight. We'll also go over why adrenal dysfunction is so hard to diagnose in Western Medicine and some simple fixes to adrenal fatigue.
Understanding Adrenal Fatigue and Its Impact on Weight
Adrenal glands, tiny but powerful endocrine organs, play a crucial role in regulating stress levels and various bodily functions. When these glands become overtaxed due to chronic stress, they can experience adrenal fatigue, which can create a hormone imbalance. When hormone levels are not balanced in the body, it can effect a number of functions in the body like blood sugar, blood pressure, and digestion. Weight gain is a symptom that these hormones are out of whack.
The Role of Adrenal Glands
Adrenal glands secrete hormones such as adrenaline and cortisol in response to stress, allowing for the quick mobilization of carbohydrates and fats to provide immediate energy. This is known as the fight-or-flight response, an involuntary reaction to perceived danger that helps the body cope with stressful situations.
While adrenaline and cortisol have a time and place, too much is a problem.
Chronic stress can weaken the immune system and lead to adrenal insufficiency, which is characterized by frequent illnesses and prolonged recovery time. Circadian rhythm disturbances can also occur, resulting in difficulty sleeping and feeling tired upon waking.
The Connection Between Chronic Stress and Cortisol levels
The imbalance of hormones caused by weakened adrenal glands can lead to weight gain, particularly around the waistline. Stress hormones like adrenaline and cortisol not only trigger energy production from carbohydrates and stored fats, but also reduce the body's sensitivity to leptin, the hormone that makes us feel full. This results are increased food consumption.
Cortisol's Effect on Fat Distribution
Cortisol, a hormone that regulates glucose levels in the blood, can cause fat to be stored in the abdominal area. High cortisol levels are associated with increased weight gain, even with regular exercise.
Fat cells in the abdominal area possess receptors for cortisol, which may result in increased abdominal fat.
Adrenal Fatigue Treatment
When your stress response is stuck open, adrenal disorders and a hormonal imbalance rule the day.
Good news is, a number of studies have shown that restoring proper adrenal function is simple if we follow a simple process and take restorative peptides. The body will naturally reset itself when when we stop high level adrenal stress.
The treatment consists of the following:
1. Take restorative peptides
2. Exercise regularly
3. Implement a stress management routine
This process is simple and predictable to treat adrenal fatigue.
Take Restorative Peptides To Improve Hormone Balance
Restorative peptides have proven to regenerate important bodily functions. This is one of the keys to why alternative medicine has been more successful at treating adrenal exhaustion.
Restorative Peptides are now becoming mainstream due to their ability to slow metabolic aging and improve the function of organs and cells.
The restorative peptide for the Adrenal Glands is Glandokort.
Glandokort has shown to improve Adrenal Gland function in a number of trials. These short chain amino acids unlock the body's ability to produce more adrenal cells
Improved adrenal gland function helps control cortisol and aids in weight loss. This control is important because if you are stressed for an extended period of time, your body will shut down your cortisol receptors.
The good news about Glandokort is it is unlike most supplements. Glandakort only needs to be taken 1-2 times a year to help regulate adrenal function.
Once you get the Adrenal glands functioning properly, you can move on to the next steps.
Exercise regularly and Improve Sleep Patterns
While Glandokort will restore the Adrenal glands, the overall goal should be to reduce major stressors in your life.
The best defense appears to be to develop a regular sleep cycle and exercise routine. Taking these two actions helps your body in two key ways:
A. Help your body to handle more stress and regulate adrenal hormones.
B. Improve endocrine system function to keep you from gaining weight.
Both functions are important to reduce suffering from adrenal fatigue. Once the taxing from adrenal stress is reduced, the body can improve functions of the rest of the body like the pituitary gland and endocrine system.
This will make losing belly fat much easier.
This brings us to the last key step:
Implement A Stress Management Routine
At the core of adrenal insufficiency is too much stress hormones; adrenaline and cortisol. The repeated fight or flight response from these hormones causes blood sugar and blood pressure problems and leads to a number of issues like diabetes and heart problems.
Developing a way to deal with stress can help your body from going into overdrive.
A simple stress management routine can consist of these 3 things:
A. Box breathing (which is used by Navy Seals when they enter high stress environments).
B. Meditation to slow cortisol release.
C. Avoiding high sugar foods.
This is a simple plan to help eliminate adrenal fatigue and high stress levels.
Box breathing and meditation calm the body and communicate it does not need to release cortisol. This can stop the high stress event in its tracks and make it easier for the body to regulate.
Avoiding high sugar foods is important because sugar signals to the body to release more cortisol and can make the stress worse.
The key thing is, small changes can make a HUGE difference.
Summary
Adrenal fatigue and repeated cortisol release is a huge problem for weight gain and overall health of the body. Cortisol's job is to maintain steady levels of glucose. When there's too much cortisol, the adrenals are taxed.
Good news is, once we understand what is going on, we can deal with it. Blood tests including a cortisol test can help us show if we are producing enough cortisol or not. Too much cortisol is a problem for many women and is a huge cause of weight gain.
If we discover we have adrenal fatigue, we can use a simple 3 part plan to get back on track and the body optimized:
1. Take restorative peptides.
2. Exercise regularly.
3. Implement a stress management routine.
Remember, small changes create big results.
