Tuesday, March 3, 2015

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      


                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                

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