Fasting With Adrenal Fatigue|Fasting & Adrenal Fatigue
I work with a wide variety of athletes suffering from some degree of adrenal fatigue from mma fighters to figure and bikini competitors to runners. Without fail, I receive one or two emails per day from an athlete who wants to try fasting with adrenal fatigue.
Let’s lay out the basics of fasting and adrenal fatigue
Intermittent Fasting defines a specific time period, usually 12-16 hours, without ingesting food. There are benefits to fasting such as reductions in blood pressure and insulin levels as well as optimized growth hormone levels. Fasting practically works because you are just eating less which can be a powerful tool for managing overeating and building a better relationship with food. With calories being equal to a general fat loss approach, the individual who uses fasting will lose more weight.
But this isn’t some holy grail of weight loss though, it just provides an additional hormonal advantage to already lean individuals who may want to increase their fat loss further.
Adrenal fatigue is an overly simple way of describing a complex issue known as HPA axis dysregulation. With stress, poor lifestyle choices or inflammatory diets, your hypothalamus, pituitary adrenal axis, essentially every hormonal system from your brain to your hips, becomes over activated and as a result, you see a variety of hormonal issues from decreased thyroid function to poor gut health.
Medically the only test we have is a the adrenal stress index which measures the hormones produced by your adrenal glands, including cortisol. Hence the term adrenal fatigue.
Fasting & Adrenal Fatigue
So what happens when someone who is stressed out, pushing their bodies and already eating a strict diet decides to add intermittent fasting into their diet?
Chaos unless you follow these three tips.
1) Don’t jump all the way into the intermittent fasting pool with adrenal fatigue.
Can fasting increase or worsen your adrenal fatigue? Yes, of course it can especially if you jump into fasting like the internet wants you too. You immediately start fasting three or four days per week, during workouts and without tracking the rest of your daily macronutrients to make sure you’re eating enough to recover.
If you want to fast and have a degree of adrenal fatigue then start with one day of fasting. Make it on a day that you do not exercise, maybe a Sunday. Don’t immediately jump into fasting on a day when you have to train. You have no idea how your body may respond.
Slowly working into fasting allows you to assess if you even like fasting but you also see how you respond energy wise.
2) Don’t fast if you have a low cortisol based adrenal fatigue
A lot of athletes with adrenal fatigue assume that they have high cortisol yet with all the blood work that I’ve seen, athletes have depressed cortisol levels. Low cortisol happens for a few reasons including the fact that your activity levels plus low calorie diet actually cause your body to run through and “eat up” more cortisol.
If you have low cortisol,as verified on blood work, then you should not be fasting. People with low cortisol feel terrible, they have no energy and it takes a lot of effort to get out of bed in the morning. Fasting provides no raw materials to build energy.
If you suffer from low cortisol and decide to fast then you’re likely going to hit the coffee pot harder for your fix of energy. All that caffeine just fatigues your adrenal glands more.
I’d rather you start out of a nutrient rich breakfast than fast with adrenal fatigue. Remember, fasting is a tool and if calories are equal and controlled during the day, you’ll lose just as much body fat eating six small meals per day as you will with fasting.
3) Fasting, Adrenal Fatigue & Training
While fasted cardio workouts aren’t anything new, they are simple. Someone goes and walks on the treadmill at a moderate or slow pace, they don’t really need a lot of food to fuel that activity. Yet the bloggers take that idea and tell people that they can fast and perform high intensity exercise. They can’t.
You can only fuel activity through two pathways-hormonal or metabolic. You can use your hormone pathway but that pathway should only be used when it has to be, to finish up a tough workout. The metabolic pathway, powered by pre workout nutrition, gives your body the fuel it needs to push through a workout.
If your goal is to train intense, build muscle or get stronger then I would not suggest fasting if you have adrenal fatigue.
In summary, adrenal fatigue and fasting should be taken seriously. Fasting is a tool, it’s not the ultimate best tool, just a tool. Use it accordingly but I do not recommend fasting , especially when training, for more than a day or so if you have adrenal fatigue.