Exhausted adrenals can cause you to experience pain in different parts of the body because you are running out of anti-inflammatory hormones. If the “on-off switch” within the adrenals gets stuck, a person can go into a chronic stage in which pain and inflammation stay in the body for years. A person can also experience sore muscles that don’t seem to recover after exercise. As this situation worsens, fibromyalgia develops, which is a condition of muscle pain throughout the entire body. What happens is there is an excess of inflammation throughout the body’s muscles, tendons and connective tissues due to lack of the anti-inflammatory hormones normally produced by the adrenal glands. Having pain and inflammation and losing weight don’t mix. The stress hormone triggered by the pain can block fat-burning hormones.
As far as muscle tissue is concerned, exercising with weights or doing high-pulse-rate exercise is not a good idea with this condition, since the extra stress overwhelms the adrenals. In chapter 17, you will learn more specifics for the Adrenal body type; adrenal exercise will involve walking and keeping your pulse rate no higher than 130 beats per minute. Adrenal exhaustion will also cause overall body exhaustion with an inability to get restful sleep at night. Consequently, the Adrenal type of individual is usually fatigued, dragging their body around during the day, half awake.
With weak adrenals, the person is more awake in the middle of the night than during the day. They can’t get out of bed, feel tired after lunch, feel tired in the early evening, and if they don’t get to bed at a certain time, then they can’t go to sleep. If the Adrenal type has a sedentary job, they will have a wave of sleepiness right around 2:30–3:00 p.m. Due to a lack of quality sleep, midafternoon naps are desperately needed.
Typically, an individual with burnt-out adrenals has darkened circles under their eyes as well as a very tired appearance. They feel tired, drained and have brain fog. The brain fatigue can greatly affect concentration. Adrenal types need coffee to wake up—strong Cuban coffee.
Europeans use very small cups for coffee; Americans have humongous jugs of coffee. Caffeine—which is also in chocolate, sodas and tea— stimulates adrenal hormones and acts like an artificial energy booster, giving you mental alertness for one or two hours until it wears off. However, over time there are fewer highs and more lows. In college, I would drink pots of coffee at a time, trying to stay up at night and study. At that age most people can get away with it, but at 28 it caught up with me—stomach ulcers, insomnia, inflammation and severe fatigue. Over the years a person can feel depressed and very lethargic from this. Most people don’t have depression; they just don’t sleep!
Artificial sweeteners also aggravate these hormones. In my last book, I recommended Splenda as a substitute for sugar. In this book I am not recommending it because it could worsen the adrenals. I found a reference saying it could contribute to adrenal tumors in animals. An interesting note about tea: Green tea, despite having some caffeine, has anti-caffeine properties and tends to not create the same jittery effect that drinking lots of coffee will. In some people it actually helps adrenal function. If the adrenals do not work properly, this can affect oxygen levels, causing you to feel out of breath, particularly when the body is stressed, such as while climbing stairs. 9 The lower legs also will feel heavier, as if you were carrying around lead ankle weights, especially when you try to exercise on inclined surfaces.
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