On the wagon

Now I like a drink as much as the next person, I am after all one of those people who claim to be Irish but who were not actually born in Ireland, but even I deduced that alcohol was not being too kind to me of late.

The silly season in Melbourne starts with Cup Week (first week of November) and lasts till about, oooh, late March.  I undertook FebFast in 2014 partly so I could have a socially acceptable excuse to stop drinking and partly to keep me honest.  Near the end of FebFast, still feeling like rubbish, I read in the weekly FebFast magazine about all the vitamin and mineral deficiencies caused by drinking.  I realised I had all the signs of a Vitamin B deficiency so started taking some Vitamin B supplements and a few weeks later was feeling pretty good. 

Over the 2014/2015 silly season, despite any appearances to the contrary (eg weekly Christmas parties starting the second week of November), I really did try to maintain a slower pace, but by February 2015 when it was time for FebFast again, I felt much worse than the previous year.  Along with waking up frequently at night, not being able to get up in the morning and generally feeling tired all the time, I also had daily issues with my stomach (random pain, nausea, diarrhoea, occasional short bouts of fatigue after eating certain foods), so I went to my doctor to she what she could do about it.  That's when she sent me off to do a battery of tests (still have the last one to go) and diagnosed adrenal fatigue (other diagnoses still pending).

In spite of all this, to read the words "Alcohol is a special kind of poison for the adrenals"* still came as a bit of a shock.  Five weeks into not drinking, I have to admit I have found a noticeable improvement in my state of health, so much so, that I have decided I might as well continue to not drink, at least until my birthday in September. 



* Location 2181, kindle version of Adrenal Fatigue: the 21st Century Stress Syndrome by Dr James L Wilson

So what's this blog about

Two weeks ago my doctor confirmed I have Adrenal Fatigue. Having read a book she had previously recommended when she sent me off with a bunch of test referrals, I can't say I was in anyway surprised. I am, however, extremely hopeful. Adrenal Fatigue is something you can recover from, so all those things I thought were just something you had to put up with as you got older (I'm 44) suddenly became annoyances that will go away as long as I follow the program to get better.

So, I'm currently sitting in the patient area at Stream Diagnostics, undergoing a glucose test (to be the subject of a future post) and was thinking how helpful patient blogs were to me when I was diagnosed with Graves Disease a few years ago (my thyroid was removed in 2013) so I decided to start one about adrenal fatigue to record my journey back to health.

Based on my first read through of Adrenal Fatigue: The 21st Century Street Syndrome, I've identified fifteen behaviour changes I need to make, which seems much more than enough to get started with even though I know if I read it again there would be a bunch more.  So in this blog I will tackle each one in turn and write a post about how it goes. Here is the list in no particular order -

Things to start:

• exercise daily
• meditate daily
• go to bed (lights out) by 9pm, so I can get 8 hours sleep
• scheduled unstructured time into the week
• do yoga
• take the supplements recommended by my doctor
• put salt on food
• drink water and add salt
• take annual vacations
• chew each mouthful of food 30 - 60 times before swallowing

Things to stop:

• drinking caffeinated drinks - tea, coffee, hot chocolate
• drinking alcohol
• eating chocolate
• staring at screens before bed
• eating fruit in the morning
• eating commercially prepared peanut butter

As I participated in FebFast, a charity event in which you give up alcohol for a month, stopping alcohol will be my first behaviour change post.  I will also work through all the medical tests I have taken and what they all mean (as best I can).



Resources

Book: Adrenal Fatigue: The 21st Century Stress Syndrome by James Wilson and Jonathan V Wright