Keto Diet And Adrenal Fatigue (Is It The Best Diet?)

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

kinds of explanations you found some value in this please make sure that you

subscribe and hit that notification bell and it's very easy to share these videos

we really appreciate when you help us help others by sharing so you can click

the share and then it takes you to you can single click and share it on

Facebook Twitter etc thanks for watching