Diabetes and Adrenal Gland — Part 2

I want to continue our conversation in regards to diabetes and your adrenal gland. So, if you did not read that, make sure to do it before this one. Go back, and you’re not going to be off at all. I think you’ll really enjoy it, it’s just to kind of give you a recap of what we spoke about last time. The first part of the adrenal gland, and how its involvement in regards to stress and how most of us are dealing with some sort of stress. Some of us are dealing with more stress than others. But we’re all under some sort of stress on a regular basis, and also how the adrenal gland can impact the brain. And the adrenal gland is heavily involved in how the brain functions. So that’s an important thing to really understand. And so I don’t want to go too much to that because I want to spend as much time as possible on a few other things that are important in regards to the adrenal gland.

One of those things is sleep. You may or may not know this, but your sleep patterns can be disrupted by adrenal function. If the adrenal gland is working properly, then you’re going to have a better quality of sleep. And one of those reasons is because of cortisol production, which we spoke about last time. Cortisol production from the adrenal gland, the major hormone by the adrenal gland, an imprint impact the way the brain functions, which can impact the way you sleep. So many times I talked to patients and they’re unable to sleep or get to sleep at night. And also they’re not able to stay asleep. And that oftentimes is due to cortisol production by the adrenal gland, trying to stabilize your blood sugars. And so you know, when we eat dinner, for example, let’s say you eat dinner at 7 pm, no doubt three hours later, by 10 pm, all the sugar from that food that was converted to sugar is gone. So your body still has to produce or have sugar for the brain to function your organs or tissues. So the liver, the pancreas, and the adrenal gland are all kind of intertwined there and help you to support that blood sugar while you’re sleeping. And oftentimes, those cortisol spikes can be pretty high, which can impact your brain and wake you up. And you may think it’s because you have to go to the bathroom, but in many situations, the cortisol levels are spiking the response inside your brain because it is a stimulant to your brain. And so you’ll wake up. And then other times, we’ll have patients telling me that, “You know, I can’t go to sleep, I just lay down and my brain is just spinning and thinking about the day and I can’t shut it off.” Maybe you’ve experienced that. That’s also a component of your cortisol levels being spiked or elevated at a certain time, which is at night, which is definitely going to impact the way you sleep. So if you’re having sleep issues right now, and you have diabetes, which many of you have, it’s more than likely due to adrenal dysfunction. So that requires your adrenal gland to be analyzed by a practitioner like myself. Usually, when you get an analysis done, if ever, by your healthcare provider, they’re just not going to run the right tests and are not going to analyze you appropriately. And so you’re not going to get the full impact of what’s really going on with the adrenal gland. So sleep can definitely be a component of this issue in regards to your adrenal gland, and how the adrenal gland is actually functioning. So if you’re in a situation right now, where you’re popping melatonin like crazy and trying to do all these things to help with your sleep, it very well could be an adrenal issue or worst-case scenario, taking a pharmaceutical drug to help you sleep because those can have negative impacts on your body. It may just be an adrenal dysfunction and you get that fixed.

The second thing that I want to discuss in regards to the adrenal gland is the hormonal situation. Now, let’s talk about two different situations that could be going on here because we have male hormones and we have female hormones. What you may or may not know is that both males and females have male and female hormones. So a female will have testosterone a male will have estrogens, those levels will obviously be different inside each one of us, but they’re still there. And they’re definitely going to make an impact on your body. Now, your adrenal gland has a component to stabilizing or managing your hormones. Now, as a male, we can still produce hormones through our reproductive system for our entire life, right? That’s one of the reasons why, as males, we can still have children at an older age, but females can’t, because their reproductive organs stop producing those hormones. But the adrenal gland has a role in the regulation of these hormones as well, which is very important in regards to diabetes, because hormone disruption, elevated or depressed, can cause insulin resistance or increase the risk of insulin resistance. Looking at the hormones is also another important factor that should be done in your evaluation process. And if you’re just looking at blood through hormones, well, that may not be the best way. It is one way but it may not be the best way to analyze hormones. There are other types of testing that are much more specific and will be giving us the right type of data to know what your hormones are doing, how they’re functioning, and how they’re impacting your insulin resistance and diabetic condition. But we know that the adrenal gland is involved in this process. For example, with a female, there’s a certain time in their life where they stopped producing hormones through their reproductive system. It’s called menopause, right? And so that’s a process that all women should go through. Now, what most women may not realize is that menopause should just be a transition. There should just be no issues. There shouldn’t be any symptoms, there shouldn’t be any problems, maybe a few things here and there, but they should just move into that phase of their life. But most women don’t have that scenario. Most of them are going to have hormonal shifts, maybe hot flashes, irritability, these things are going to happen with their situation and they go and see a healthcare practitioner, and what do they do? They give them hormones to try to stabilize that situation, it may not be the best option, but that’s what they’re doing. Many of them are not having their adrenal gland analyzed And I will tell you from my perspective, most of the women that I evaluate who are having these hormonal issues, their adrenal gland does not function optimally, which is also contributing to their diabetes condition. We have to be analyzed. Every single individual who is dealing with a condition, I don’t care what the symptom is or what the disease is, there is something wrong inside their body, there is something broken that needs to be addressed and needs to be analyzed and in most situations, a pharmaceutical drug will not be the answer. It may be helping them to feel better, it may be helping them to make things look good on paper, but it’s not helping their body heal, because we all know if we stopped the medication, the problems will still be there and there is still going to be an issue.

Another component to this scenario is with the adrenal response and diabetes, the adrenal gland can then play a role in how well your hormones are functioning. So again, if we just see that there’s low testosterone, for example, in a male, would it be the best option just to give them testosterone? Maybe that might be an option. But what if their adrenal gland is not working properly? What if it’s not functioning optimally? And it’s causing that low testosterone situation? So would it be best to give them testosterone and not leave the adrenal gland the way it is? Or would it be better to maybe modulate that with some hormones for a little while and fix the adrenal gland so they’re able to continue doing this on their own? That’s the mindset when you work with a functional medicine doctor like myself. We’re always trying to re-establish homeostasis, we’re always trying to establish the function, improving function, rather than trying to just suppress the symptoms, just like diabetes. If you come in to see me for your diabetes, of course, I want to know what your symptoms are. Of course, I want to know what your problems are. Of course, I want to know what your blood sugars are. But I’m not going to give you recommendations to help you lower your blood sugars. I’m not going to give you recommendations to help you reduce your symptoms or help you feel better to an extent. What I mean by that is, I’m going to evaluate you to find out what is causing your symptoms, what is causing you to feel that, and what is causing your elevated blood sugar. Because if we were to address that and fix that component, then over time, you will get better, you will feel better, you have fewer symptoms, and you will stabilize your blood sugars naturally. Like most of our patients, they’re able to get off their medications, survive and thrive on their own like they were able to at one time in their life. Again, if you’re not functioning properly if you have symptoms, something must be broken. And when regards to your adrenal gland, you can see how many areas that it impacts. It impacts the brain, your ability to regulate blood sugar, the communication between your brain, the communication between your thyroid, between your liver, the communication with hormones, in increased cortisol levels, which can increase the risk of gaining weight, and it impacts so many things inside your body. But, as I mentioned last time, in most situations, you’re not being tested. And if you are being tested, they’re running the wrong tests in most situations. You have to have the right test, you have to have the right analysis, you have to have the right recommendations. And these recommendations have nothing to do with pharmaceutical drugs and have nothing to do with what you’re eating, in some cases. What you’re eating could be a problem because it could be causing stress in your body, but it’s not going to directly impact your adrenal gland. It’s going to be a secondary problem, and over time, it can start to cause bogging down or constraints in the way the adrenal gland functions. This information is super important because if you don’t know what potentially could be going on inside your body, how are you going to get better? How are you going to get the results? Are you going to stay in that rat race of just constantly doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result? Or you’re going to do something different that actually will get you results and get you the changes in your life and help you establish a new way of living a new lifestyle. So then you can function at your optimum and be able to have a healthy lifestyle for the rest of your life. Hopefully, this two-part series on this adrenal response and how much it impacts your body is giving you some good information. You have got to take action steps to move forward to get you the better health that you want. You’re not going to be able to just sit at home, watching TV, and losing weight, right? There’s got to be steps that have to happen to make sure you receive the best results. You’ve got to find someone who can take you through the right steps who can analyze you appropriately, who can give you the right recommendation customizing it to your needs so that you get the results. It’s a standardized process. There is no book even though we have a book here, I wrote a book in regards to helping you reverse diabetes, but it’s not specific to you, there’s still gonna have to be some specificity. You have to work one on one with someone. Again, like always, if this information was valuable for you today, please share this information on your networks. There could be someone right now who is suffering, who could be in a situation like I’ve seen many times in my office where they’re already having major issues and now looking for help. We’ve got to help these individuals now. Don’t wait to have an amputation. Don’t wait to have a heart attack. Don’t wait for your kidneys to start failing before you do something about this. It has to be done now.