Hippocrates once said “all disease begins in the gut” and, even though as a naturopathic doctor I have internalized this to the utmost degree, I still forget from time to time.
So, when I was having an increase in histamine symptoms (itchy eyes, runny nose, inflammation, congestion, itchy skin, immune issues), dental issues (bad breath, swollen tongue, increase in plaque and bleeding gums), gut issues (bloating, constipation, sugar cravings) and mood issues (PMS, low motivation, fatigue, brain fog, lower mood, fatigue) as well as other random symptoms such as decreased stamina, cold intolerance and otherwise just feeling “blah”, it took me an embarrassingly long amount of time to connect all these symptoms to being caused by a gut microbial imbalance.
The dental issues I was experiencing, like bad breath, swollen tongue, and increased plaque buildup, were all signs that something deeper was off. Bleeding gums, which I initially attributed to inconsistent flossing, were actually part of a bigger issue tied to my overall health. It was frustrating to deal with these problems, especially since I didn’t immediately connect them to my gut. But the truth is, oral health and gut health are closely linked. A gut imbalance can lead to inflammation that affects not just the digestive system but also the gums and teeth. When the gut isn’t in harmony, it’s much easier for bacteria to thrive in the mouth, leading to plaque, cavities, and gum disease.
Finding the right support for my oral health became a priority. I realized that alongside addressing my gut, I needed professional dental care to manage these symptoms. That’s when I turned to vibrant dental, where they not only provided excellent cleanings and treatments but also offered holistic advice that took my overall health into account. With their help, I started to see improvements in both my oral and gut health, which ultimately boosted my mood and energy levels. It was a reminder that our health is interconnected, and sometimes, solving one issue requires looking beyond the obvious symptoms.
Our gut bacteria outnumber the cells of our body by 10 to 1. These little guys influence our digestion, mood and immune system. They affect our brain function. A recent study in Frontiers in Psychiatry (Nguyen et al., 2021) even connects the diversity of our microbiome with loneliness and wisdom.
Interestingly, loneliness and wisdom have been found to occur in inverse relationship with one another. In other words, the wiser you are, the less lonely. It’s important to note here that loneliness is not the same thing with isolation or being alone–sometimes alone time is necessary for the type of self-reflection that imbues wisdom.
Wisdom is a complex phenomenon that is made up of traits like compassion towards self and others, self-awareness and reflective thinking and deep knowledge about the world and the meaning of life events. From this description we can imagine how protective wisdom might be against mental illness and how it may lend to mental, emotional and physical wellness.
The wiser you are, the better able you may be to make meaning of and persevere through life’s difficulties and connect with others. Wisdom lends itself to an overarching view of self, life and humanity that may allow us to respond to life’s challenges with resilience.
Perhaps a wise person who is alone may also be aware that they are also part of an interconnected ecosystem that includes self and others. They may be aware of their place within the fabric of existence. In this way, they are never really alone.
Further, the meaning they may derive from states of aloneness may protect them against the feelings of social isolation that are characterized by loneliness. Imagine a wise figure. Perhaps they are alone, but would you say they are lonely?
Our gut is sometimes called “the second brain” and forms part of the microbiota-gut-brain axis in which our gut bugs influence the health of our intestines and thus influence our nervous system, immune system and brain (Cryan & Dinan, 2012). Our gut microbiome can even influence personality traits such as agreeableness, openness and even neuroticisim (Kim et al,m 2018). Interestingly, unhealthy gut bacteria like proteobacteria (associated with SIBO) were associated with low conscientiousness and high neuroticisim (Kim et al., 2018).
Does this mean that diet can influence our tendency to hand things in on time and keep our rooms clean? hmm…
It’s interesting to think that we all have a sense of our personalities and who we are as people. We imagine ourselves to be introverted or extraverted, artistic, creative, liberal or conversative. We might consider ourselves kind or trustworthy, blunt or afraid of conflict. We may identify as people who make healthy eating choices and enjoy exercising or who have sweet tooths (teeth?).
Amidst this self-discovery, the exploration of mbti personalities seamlessly weaves into the fabric of our understanding, adding another layer to the rich and diverse mosaic of human characteristics. Delving into the realm of MBTI personalities opens a door to a nuanced comprehension of ourselves and those around us. The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, with its sixteen distinctive personality types, provides a structured framework to decipher the intricacies of our individuality. This insightful exploration not only enhances self-awareness but also fosters a greater appreciation for the diverse ways in which personalities interlace and contribute to the vibrant mosaic of the human experience.
But what if we are less in control of our behaviour and even personality than we think? The truth is the bacteria in our gut produce chemicals that influence our behaviour: what we crave and eat and even how we act and think. In turn, this influences the composition of our gut.
Prosocial behaviour is associated with more gut biodiversity, and people who are more social tend to have microbiomes that are more diverse (Johnson, 2020). This makes sense if you think about it. If you’re exposed to a variety of people and environments, you’re likely exposed to a variety of bacteria and viruses as well. These microbes are ingested and incorporate themselves into our bodies.
When we visit different environments we consume foods in those environments. When we socialize with various people, we often share food. This increase in food diversity will also influence gut microbial diversity.
As I write this, I wonder about the effects of social isolation of the past 2-3 years. During Covid, our social circles decreased. Currently we are seeing a rise in infections: colds, flus and other illnesses (RSV, hand food and mouth disease, pink eye and so on), particularly in children. I wonder if this lack of socialization has affected our microbiomes and thus our individual and collective immunity. A hypothesis worth exploring, perhaps…
Further, the hypersanitization may also have contributed to shifting the health of our microbiome. It still remains to be seen.
We know that a lack of gut diversity can affect our immune system and is associated with obesity, inflammatory bowel disease and major depressive disorder (Jiang et al., 2015). In mice, the health of the microbiome is essential for their social development (Desbonnet et al., 2014)!
So, what does this mean practically and clinically?
Throughout my studies and years practicing as a naturopathic doctor, a clear-cut path towards improving microbiobial health of the gut is still unclear to me. We know that increasing the amounts of plants and fibre in the diet can support gut diversity. But we also know that fibre can cause constipation and bloating in some individuals and aggravate their digestion and that there are many indiviudals who at least anecdotally seem to thrive on diets that reduce fibre, such as the Carnivore Diet or an Animal-Based Diet (which, by the way, I’m not necessarily recommending here).
For me, gut health has largely been about paying attention and noticing when things have gone astray and then (and this part is harder than it sounds) correctly attributing what has gone astray to a shift in the health of my microbiome.
This has been years in the making. Our gut produces pain in response to stretch (i.e.: from gases in the intestines). We don’t necessarily feel pain in our gut if we’re experiencing intestinal permeabilty (leaky gut) or dysbiosis. This means that there is not a lot of feedback from our body that tells us about the state of our gut. Our gut doesn’t always hurt if it’s inflamed or imbalanced in the way your shoulder might. We need to look for other signs and symptoms that alert us to the state of health of our guts.
For me symptoms of gut imbalance often correlate with symptoms of candida overgrowth (something I, like many, am prone to). Candida, a species of yeast, tends to flourish in my body if my overall gut ecosystem is failing to keep it in check. Sometimes this can occur due to stress, and increase of sugar in my diet and other factors.
Symptoms I notice are:
– A change in oral health: more plaque on my teeth, bad breath, tongue coating, bleeding gums, and so on. – A change in mood and mental functioning: symptoms of depression or dysthymia such as apathy, low motivation and lethargy. Brain fog, difficulty concentration, poorer executive function (particularly initiating tasks or increased procrastination). – A change in digestion: persistent bloating, more constipation (involving not just frequency but stool quality. They might be stickier or harder to pass). – A change in immune function: more mucus production and congestion. Allergy symptoms. Trouble breathing,. – A change in energy and metabolism: reduced stamina despite exercising. Weight gain. Water retention. Fatigue. Feeling cold. – A change in cravings: wanting more sugar, binge-eating and overeating. Obsessing about food. Cravings for sugar after meals. Feeling “hangry” more often. Difficulty feeling full. Mental hunger (hunger despite feeling the presence of food in the stomach). – A change in hormonal health: changes to libido, vaginal flora. heavier periods, irregular periods. Increased PMS.
And so on. If this seems like virtually every system in the body is affected, I remind us all that Hippocrates said it first (or at least most famously): “all disease begins in the gut”.
What is the solution? Like recognizing the cause, the solution is often subtle. For me it was focusing attention to gut health and slowly steering the ship back to healthier habits.
The problem with dysbiosis is it often maintains itself. Low energy leads to less socialization and less motivation to cook healthy meals. More cravings lends to poorer food choices. These are just some examples of what you can imagine to be a variety of maintenance processes that are caused by and serve to perpetuate dysbiosis.
Therefore for me, the solution is not to make drastic changes but to identify and shift these patterns in support my microbiome.
1) I took sugar out of my diet. For me this involved shifting away from my 3 fruits a day to starchy vegetables (like squashes, etc.) I thrive on a Paleo-like diet (a whole foods diet that emphasizes fruit, vegetables and animal protein) and subtly shifted back to one.
I didn’t completely eliminate fruit sugar as I don’t believe there is a need. However, I recognized that I was likely overconsuming sweet foods as a response to dysbiosis and this wasn’t serving me.
2) I got on a comprehensive and broad-spectrum probiotic. I often tell my patients that probiotic prescribing is more of an art than a science and involves some trial-and-error. I typically look for one that has 8+ strains and a high CFU (colony forming unit) count. I took Colon Care 90 Billion by New Roots. This is certainly not the only good one and it might not be the right one for you, but it’s one I selected for myself based on a variety of factors I was looking for that supported my individualized assessment of my gut health.
For me probiotics can be highly effective, but they take time to work. They often can aggravate symptoms initially. The first symptoms I notice that indicate improvement are an improvement in oral health.
3) I supported my digestion in general. This involves for me supporting the liver and gallbladder, which influence gut motility, bile flow (which helps keep the small bowel free of bacteria) and fat digestion (which prevents growth of more pathogenic microbes and stabilizes blood sugar).
4) I consumed anti-candida, antimicrobial foods that work for me (again, this is after much trial and error). Raw garlic, coconut oil, apple cider vinegar and oregano oil. I also started on a candida herbal supplement that incorporates cloves, black walnut and other anti-microbial herbs that selectively kill pathogenic microbes while typically preserving healthy ones.
5) I supported my microbiome by integrated back into nature: getting outside more, reducing chemical exposure (soaps, fragrances, plastics, pesticides, etc.) and getting more sunlight. Camping outside in the cold, sleeping on the ground and brushing my teeth in a natural brook in Nova Scotia also likely contributed to shifting the diversity of my microbiome through encouraging the exchange of my microbes with those of the earth.
6) I supported the body’s stress response by getting more sleep. When I’m awake I try to get as much sun exposure as possible. Our microbiome and our Circadian Rhythms are intricately connected. Supporting one can support the health of the other (Bishehsari et al., 2020). Regarding this, I wonder if Daylight Savings Time made some of us more susceptible for microbial imbalances in our guts? Hm…
Getting off track is a holistic multi-facted process. We all know our own vices and susceptibilities if we look deep enough.
Therefore, getting on track is an equally holisitic and comprehensive process. It involves wisdom (which, conveniently, increases as your microbial health increases). I can help you figure things out if you’re new to this process.
After implementing these strategies and paying a bit more attention for a few weeks I slowly and surely notice myself feeling more like myself. Getting back on track: more energy, better mood, better cold tolerance (this is a big one!) and better gut health. My appetite has regulated incredibly. I feel like a different person. But the shifts have been slow and sometimes subtle (as is often the case with shifting an entire ecosystem) and paying attention to them is a very important part of the process.
Wisdom.
It’s not just diet. It’s not just supplements. It involves looking at the relevant factors and gently moving back in the right direction with patience and persistence. Maybe your main point of focus needs to be eating regular meals and meal planning. Maybe you need more strength-training. Maybe you need to start socializing more, getting out in public (knitting circle, anyone? I’ve been hearing so much about knitting circles these days, haha–a sign from the universe?).
Maybe it’s time to look at emotional eating with a pair of fresh eyes (perhaps through the lens of your microbiota). Maybe you need to take a walk outside today. Everyday. Breathe fresh air. Take a probiotic.
Contact me if you need support! I’m here for you.
What else do you do for your gut microbiome?
References:
Bishehsari, F., Voigt, R. M., & Keshavarzian, A. (2020). Circadian rhythms and the gut microbiota: From the metabolic syndrome to cancer. Nature Reviews Endocrinology, 16(12), 731–739. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41574-020-00427-4
Cryan, J. F., & Dinan, T. G. (2012). Mind-altering microorganisms: the impact of the gut microbiota on brain and behaviour. Nature reviews. Neuroscience, 13(10), 701–712. https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn3346
Desbonnet, L., Clarke, G., Shanahan, F., Dinan, T. G., & Cryan, J. F. (2014). Microbiota is essential for social development in the mouse. Molecular psychiatry, 19(2), 146–148. https://doi.org/10.1038/mp.2013.65
Jiang, H., Ling, Z., Zhang, Y., Mao, H., Ma, Z., Yin, Y., Wang, W., Tang, W., Tan, Z., Shi, J., Li, L., & Ruan, B. (2015). Altered fecal microbiota composition in patients with major depressive disorder. Brain, behavior, and immunity, 48, 186–194. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bbi.2015.03.016
Johnson, K. V. A. (2020). Gut microbiome composition and diversity are related to human personality traits. Human Microbiome Journal, 15, 100069.
Kim, H. N., Yun, Y., Ryu, S., Chang, Y., Kwon, M. J., Cho, J., Shin, H., & Kim, H. L. (2018). Correlation between gut microbiota and personality in adults: A cross-sectional study. Brain, behavior, and immunity, 69, 374–385. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bbi.2017.12.012
Nguyen, T. T., Zhang, X., Wu, T.-C., Liu, J., Le, C., Tu, X. M., Knight, R., & Jeste, D. V. (2021). Association of loneliness and wisdom with gut microbial diversity and composition: An exploratory study. Frontiers in Psychiatry, 12. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyt.2021.648475
Brett Weinstein and Heather Heying have a t-shirt that says “Welcome to Complex Systems” on it.
Indeed.
Many patients and biological reductionism want to know what caused my anxiety, depression, hormonal issues, and autoimmune disease? What did I do wrong, or that went wrong for me? What was the food I failed to eat, the ingredient I was missing or the thing that caused the house of cards that represented my health to topple?
I think it’s appropriate to answer, “welcome to complex systems.”
Like everything else in nature, your body, your mental health is a complex system. This means that it consists of many factors, many of which have yet to be identified, virtually all that have yet to be correctly understood, that drive its function—even seeing health as an absence of disease, which is essentially how our medical system is organized, is a product of biological reductionism. Biological (or rather mechanical reductionism), the attempt to identify the loose screw or the spring that’s out of place, works for your car, but it doesn’t work for your brain, body, mental or physical health.
Understanding health might be better done using the Biopsychosocial Model, a framework for understanding where we sit today in terms of our health from the context of our biology, psychology, and social environment. Further, the biology part of the biopsychosocial factors that drive our health can be considered triggers and drivers rather than cause and effect.
This understanding is crucial when setting health goals. Because health is more than just the absence of disease, goals should extend beyond simply treating symptoms. They should encompass improvements in all aspects of our lives. While a balanced diet and exercise are foundational, some people may find that ideal supplements can address specific nutritional deficiencies or provide additional support for their unique needs. Whether it’s managing stress, improving sleep, or boosting energy levels, a personalized approach that considers the interplay of biological, psychological, and social factors will ultimately lead to a more sustainable and fulfilling path towards a healthier you.
Say you are feeling terrible. You’re feeling exhausted and agitated, and you’re constipated, and your hair is falling out. You see your doctor, and they tell you everything is great. You push for some bloodwork. Your doctor says your thyroid is slightly off, but it’s likely nothing.
So you take the bloodwork to your naturopathic doctor, who tells you your stimulating thyroid hormone, or TSH, is out of range, indicating that your thyroid seems to be under-functioning. They order more testing to understand what else lies under the hood and find your anti-thyroid antibodies are sky-high. It turns out you might have Hashimoto’s thyroiditis or a condition of under-functioning thyroid driven by autoimmunity.
You also have celiac and a family history of multiple sclerosis, thyroid issues, and other autoimmune diseases. How did this happen?
For months you were dealing with a ton of stress. You also haven’t been eating the greatest. But you haven’t been sleeping well either, and it’s hard to eat well when you’re so darn tired. You’ve been working a lot, dealing with a global pandemic and all, and things haven’t been great. But this is compounded by the fact that you’re not feeling great, which makes it harder to deal with the stress, making the condition worse–a vicious cycle.
At least now you know that something is going on, and it’s not all in your head, but what caused this?
We want to know the exact cause of something to find the specific treatment. This is biological reductionism. Something is missing; we’ve identified the thing, so here’s the magic bullet that will target the exact issue and either replace it or weed it out.
The problem with complex systems is that when we pull one thread on this ball of yarn that is your health, a knot gets tightened somewhere else. Like the post on Chesterton’s fence, complex systems are difficult to understand. So we must assume we don’t fully understand them, and therefore I believe we should exercise humility when it comes to tugging on pieces of yarn that comprise the whole operation.
For example, the side effects of drugs aren’t side effects; they’re effects. Some of these effects are wanted. But all the other effects that happen, such as weight gain, agitation, or migraines from anti-anxiety medication, are unwanted. And they are still effects of the drug. Side effects of drugs are indications that we have failed to understand the implications of messing with complex systems entirely.
Sometimes this might be warranted. The system might be so far out of bounds that it could kill you unless we intervene. Sometimes the drug is more specific–if you don’t have a thyroid, you need thyroid hormone. However, does the thyroid have a role beyond simply producing T4 (thyroid medication)? While thyroid hormone medication might be indicated or necessary, is it fully completing the thyroid’s function in the complex system? What about T3? (or T1 and T2)? What about iodine? What about the driver contributing to thyroid dysfunction? Is it still driving disease? Might it start to create other symptoms elsewhere in the body?
In other words, have we entirely dealt with the problem when we reduce thyroid dysfunction down to deficiency of a single hormone?
So, I explain to my patient; there isn’t a cause of autoimmune disease or a thyroid condition. There are drivers, such as chronic inflammation (which might be triggered by a specific food your immune system doesn’t like). There might be a driver like chronic stress triggered by a more stressful event. Genes can be drivers or susceptibilities triggered by environmental factors, such as nutrient deficiencies. So, it’s not gluten that caused your thyroid issue, but it might start or driveimmune system overactivation and chronic inflammation, contributing to the problem.
So what does this mean for treatment? It means we need to look at the ball of yarn respectfully. We need to appreciate how many symptoms are a healthy response and compensation by the body. If we randomly attack a symptom like fatigue with a stimulant, we might further drive the inflammation, nutrient deficiencies, or stress that underly that symptom. We need to understand what the body lacks (what’s it deficient in?) and when it might have too many environmental toxins, allergens, chronic stress, blue light, etc.
We need to look at the system and help it re-establish its equilibrium. Cleaning up garbage in a pond is likely a good idea–it probably shouldn’t be there in the first place. The pond didn’t create the trash. But what about something else we don’t want, like an algae overgrowth? But if we throw an algaecide in the water, what unseen harm might we be doing to the pond’s ecosystem if we mess with it? Has the pond created algae for the reason that currently escapes us, but wouldn’t if we looked a little deeper?
Why doesn’t our modern medical model treat our bodies as complex systems? I’m not sure. A few guesses, though. Complex systems are complicated, if not impossible, to understand. They require time to unravel. They need patience and education. They require effort on the part of the patient to try to shift their environment to eliminate or adjust possible triggers. They are impossibly hard to market and profit from.
Getting our concept of a complex system “right” can take time. It might take trial and error, collecting information, curiosity, and a willingness to try. It might take admitting that our culture has many aspects to it that are inherently unhealthy.
We might have to find a mini culture where people get sun, eat well, move, and sleep early to support our health. We might have to be “stricter” than the people around us. These people may have similar drivers working below the surface, but their symptoms may look different. They do not display symptoms like fatigue or anxiety until their systems have completely shifted beyond balance.
We are all a manifestation of complex systems. Laini Taylor says, “Inside each of us, there is a world that no one else can ever know or see or visit.”
Quentin Crisp says, “Repeat yourself loudly and often” and so I’m repeating myself on blood sugar regulation.
I guess if I had to leave a legacy in the world of natural health and lifestyle medicine, if I could sum everyone’s problems down to one key major concept and one key take-home action plan it would be: blood sugar regulation and: eat protein.
Last week was pretty busy in my little homegrown virtual naturopathic practice and I found myself repeating myself loudly (well, in a normal volume voice) and definitely often, the importance of eating protein at every meal and the connection between their symptoms and blood sugar with virtually every patient I saw.
All of my patients last week seemed to be suffering from some combination of the following symptoms:
Fatigue, anxiety, overwhelm, disrupted, restless, and non-restorative sleep, sugar cravings, emotional eating, binge-eating/stress-eating, nausea and bloating, PMS, migraines, low focus and concentration, low libido, low motivation, poor exercise recovery, and weight gain/puffiness/body image issues.
Of course, many of these symptoms were presented as being unrelated to the other. Perhaps stress and stress-eating were related, but sugar cravings and low motivation weren’t necessarily related in my patients’ minds. Neither were their sugar cravings, overwhelm and low libido.
And yet, the common thread that connects all of these symptoms is, you guessed it: blood sugar.
I explained to one patient: even if I gave you a magic wand, that you could wave to make all of your life’s problems disappear, you would probably still be feeling that deep, disconcerting, restless, anxious, “all-is-not-well” feeling in your gut. The reason for this? Blood sugar dys-regulation.
Our body has certain physiological mechanisms that it likes to keep tightly regulated. Among them are blood levels of our sugar (which controls the amount of fuel our brain has for its minute-to-minute functioning), carbon dioxide, salt, and water. When these levels drop in the body we start to feel off. Our stress response is triggered.
Imagine the feeling of holding your breath, as carbon dioxide starts to build up in your blood, you’d pay someone a million dollars to be able to take a breath. Similarly, if you’re seriously thirsty it’s likely all you can think about.
When our blood sugar drops, we feel terrible. The symptoms are anxiety, shakiness, fatigue, low mental energy, burnout, decision fatigue, waking up in the middle of the night, irritability, dizziness and weakness, and an unsettled, doom and gloom feeling. Most of all, however, we crave sugar.
Despite all of the symptoms my patients were expressing last week, one of the main issues they were contending with were sugar cravings. “I just don’t have the motivation to cook a meal”, one patient expressed, “and so I end up eating a bag of chips for dinner, even though I’m not really hungry.”
“You are hungry,” I explained, “the hunger is just not manifesting in the way that you’re used to.
Let me repeat this loudly, ala Quentin Crisp: if you ever find yourself at the end of a bag of chips, or a plate of cookies, or a pile of donuts–you were hungry.
Eating disorder expert Tabitha Ferrar highlights a phenomenon in people recovering from anorexia as “mental hunger”. Physical hunger, the grumbling, gurgling, empty feeling in your stomach is the result of ghrelin and gastric motility, which builds up when leptin levels fall and our stomach is physically empty and creates what many of us assume are the sensations of “true hunger”.
However, these symptoms require energy form our body to produce. This is the reason why people with hypothryoidism are constipated–gastric motility takes metabolic energy.
If your body is malnourished, such as the case of anorexia, or even chronic stress and under-eating throughout the day, we often don’t get these signals of “true” hunger.
Our bodies simply don’t have the battery power to create these symptoms. And yet, we need nourishment, particularly we need to elevate our blood sugar to supply our brains with energy.
And so our body sends our signals of “mental hunger”, that feeling of “I can’t stop thinking about the chips in the cupboard”, that often leads to mindless binging as our body tries to replenish its reserves.
If you’re craving sugar, emotionally eating, devouring chips in the afternoons or evenings, or feeling decision fatigue/ or “lack of willpower”, you might need to start focussing on your blood sugar.
Blood sugar dysregulation is also tightly connected to our moods. Think of our body’s homeostatic mechanism as a tightly regulated machine, a fuel gauge on our body’s resources, which are needed in times of stress. When our blood salt, sugar or water levels dip, and our blood CO2 levels rise, we start to feel uncomfortable. This can be remedied by drinking water, sighing, deep breathing, or eating something. When these levels fluctuate and we fail to notice, our body releases stress hormone.
Cortisol is our stress hormone, but it’s also the hormone that plays a role in blood sugar regulation. When blood sugar dips beyond homeostatic levels, cortisol steps in to save the day. Low blood sugar is a stressor on the body. This might look like morning anxiety, feeling tired and wired, waking in the middle of the night unable to fall back asleep.
Again, you might not feel hungry during these moments–just overwhelmed, anxious, irritable, unsettled, weak, dizzy, and fatigued.
You’re in a fight with your partner. You’ve been cleaning out the garage and it’s hot out. You’re annoyed at the way he breathes, at the slow methodical way he goes through your stuff. The mess feels overwhelming, the heat feels stifling. You leave in a huff, ready to set fire to the entire operation.
Grumbling and fuming, you go inside. You take a breather, you eat something, you exhale deeply, you drink some water.
Gradually, as your body starts to shift into physiological neutral, your perception starts to change. The garage feels slightly more tolerable. It’s really just above moving one box at a time, going through it and then starting on the next one. You can do it.
Before you know it, you’re done.
When blood sugar is low our prefrontal cortex, the “ego”, “decision-maker”, executive functioning, planning and cognitive part of the brain, becomes depleted. We might call this “decision fatigue”, “willpower fatigue” or “ego depletion”.
“Administering glucose completely reversed the brain changes wrought by depletion…
“When glucose is low, [your brain] stops doing some things and starts doing others. It responds more strongly to immediate rewards and pays less attention to long-term prospects.”
In essence, you stop being able to make calm and effective decisions.
Brain sugar levels (the brain uses up 60% of available blood sugar) directly contribute to the feeling of being “solid”–able to make rational decisions, to respond to fears and anxieties, to emotionally regulate, to make competent and calm decisions.
When our blood sugar levels dip we start to spiral: we might think erratically, gloomily, catastrophically, and irrationally.
I had a patient who crashed at 3pm everday after school, when his major depression would “come back”. I asked him what he had for lunch, to which he replied he often worked through lunch. Breakfast was a croissant or piece of toast.
His first real (and only) meal was at dinner. The rest of the day was a sea of grazing on ultra-processed foods, sugar and white flour. No real food in sight.
Scarfing down an emergency granola bar every time blood sugar drops is one solution, however whenever we eat carbohydrates on their own, particularly the quick-release carbs like white sugar, or refined grains, our blood sugar spikes. Soon after, insulin is released, causing it to drop again.
Many of us start the day without food, or with a measly breakfast of toast or cereal, or some other carb-only meal. As I tell patients, though, a serving of carbohydrates is not a real meal.
You know what I mean: a bagel for breakfast, a sandwich and pb for lunch, a plate of pasta for dinner. Carbs, while an important part of a complete meal, are completely inadequate at keeping you fuelled for the hours of mental, emotional and physical labour you engage in between meals.
Does this mean you should eat low-carb? No, not necessarily.
What it means is that a meal contains fats, carbs, and protein. Therefore all meals, especially breakfast, and even snacks, should combine those three macronutrients to assure proper fuelling and blood sugar regulation.
When you eat a proper meal in the morning, your blood sugar rises slowly. It requires less insulin to get the fuel into your cells. Your blood sugar is metered out slowly throughout the next few hours instead of being rapidly absorbed.
This means no more spikes and crashes–in blood sugar, energy, mood or cravings. A proper meal provides hours of calm focus, more willpower, and more ability to concentrate and emotionally regulate.
Instead of just toast in the morning, add about 20g of protein to your meal: a scoop of protein powder, 3-4 eggs, a piece of chicken, 3 tbs of collagen powder– in essence, have a proper meal.
Then, for lunch do it again–have a chicken breast on your salad, or a piece of salmon or beef.
Make yourself a smoothie with protein powder. Have a cold soak oats with collagen powder. Make yourself an omelette. Have a bean soup with 1 cup of beans.
Substitute your wheat or rice pasta (which is just carbohydrate) for a legume pasta made of mung bean or lentils, or black beans, which contain fibre and protein and are easier to make into a fast, complete meal.
When patients start having complete meals, starting with breakfast, their change in mood is often dramatic. They feel more mentally and emotionally stable. They have more energy.
Often we feel we get our second wind in the evening: (“I’m more of a night owl”). But so many of us work through our morning meals and only sit down to a complete meal at dinnertime. Maybe your “second wind” is actually just your first wind, purchased from the proper meal you had when you finally sat down and nourished your body.
What about intermittent fasting? Whenever I speak about breakfast there’s at least one DM or question, or “but I thought that…” and the topic of intermittent fasting almost always comes up.
Giving the body a break from eating is a good idea. For about 12 hours, if possible, stop eating.
This usually means stopping eating 3 hours before bedtime and creating an eating window from something like 7am to 7pm.
12:12 (12 hours of fasting and 12 hours of eating) can be great for resting the digestive system and supporting sleep. However, many of my patients use more extreme version of “intermittent fasting”, such as the 16:8 (16 hours fasting and 8 hours feeding) as a go-ahead to skip breakfast.
They wake up and get through the morning on coffee (with cream and sugar, which isn’t actually a real “fast”), and then eventually binge on sugar and chips after dinner, when they finally give their bodies permission to eat. It’s rare that they see the connection.
Most of us attribute the feelings of lack of control around food an issue with emotional eating and willpower. I find that in 99% of cases, “emotional eating” us usually just a result of blood sugar dys-regulation, protein deficiency and under-nourishing earlier on in the day.
A morning without food is a stressor on the body. Female bodies in particular respond to stress by becoming more insulin resistant, which further affects blood sugar dys-regulation and affects metabolic health–this is not what you want.
If you’d like to restrict your eating window, research shows that removing any after-dinner snacking (when our bodies are naturally more insulin resistant) is the way to go.
It’s also important to take a Protein Inventory. Sometimes I just have patients track their protein intake on a website or app like cronometer.com
The exercise is often enlightening, as patients are able to see how the protein density of their diet connects to their mood and energy.
I often get them to track their food for a few days to a week and then ask them: How do you feel on a higher protein day, where you meet your nutritional needs vs. a low protein day? What is your energy like? Your sugar cravings? Your mood? Your mental focus and clarity?
Conditions like OCD, ADHD, depression, anxiety, PMS, PMDD, cognitive issues, dementia, diabetes, pre-diabetes, weight gain, and bipolar all have roots in blood sugar regulation.
Blood sugar dys-regulation, over time can start to result in insulin resistance (often detected far before any changes to lab blood glucose start to show up).
Insulin resistance is the process in which the cells stop responding to insulin, requiring more insulin to be released. This causes inflammation and weight gain and, over time, elevated blood sugar. Insulin resistance can contribute to mood and hormonal issues, cognitive issues, like dementia, and metabolic conditions over time. This is definitely something you don’t want.
If you think you might have insulin resistance (characterized by sugar cravings, fatigue, abdominal weight gain, difficulty losing weight, hormonal issues, mood issues, low energy, and cognitive issues) consider getting your fasting insulin and fasting glucose tested. These two numbers can give you a HOMA-IR score, used to gauge insulin resistance, so you can work to reverse it before it progresses to pre-diabetes and type II diabetes.
Often insulin resistance, inflammation and stress are a never-ending cycle and all need to be addressed, with blood sugar regulation as a key strategy to getting your body’s insulin signal working again.
Signs that your metabolic health is healing are more energy, less cravings, better mood, better sleep, and some weight loss (which usually starts occurring about 6 weeks into a lifestyle change program).
Low calorie diets can also be a significant stressor on the body affecting blood sugar. Making sure that your fat and protein intake are sufficient (aiming for about 1 g of protein per lb of body weight for an active person) is essential to regulating blood sugar, cravings, mood and energy.
So, how do you take control of your sugar cravings today?
Here are some places to start:
Start your day with a complete breakfast that includes fat, carbs and 20 g of protein
Eat full meals regularly throughout the day
“front-load” your calories, eating 60% or more of your food before 1pm
Aim for 1 g of protein per lb of body weight, or 90g of protein as a minimum
Track your protein intake along with your mood, energy levels and cravings so that you can have more agency over your food choices, dietary patterns and symptoms.
Have ready-to-grab protein sources like pumpkin seeds, eggs, protein powder, legume pasta, precooked chicken breasts, canned salmon, and so on.
If you’re going to try Intermittent Fasting start slowly, begin by avoiding late-night snacking or snacking before dinner.
Finally, book an appointment if you feel ready to support your metabolic health and get your nutrition right to support your hormones and mood!
For more on how to regulate your blood sugar (as well as nutrient levels and inflammation levels) to eat for your mood, check out my course Feed Your Head:
Gorf is a man of his age, which, in his case, happens to be the Stone Age.
Yes, Gorf is a caveman.
And, perplexingly, Gorf suffers from insomnia.
Gorf wakes up sluggish, long after the sun has risen, wishing he had a snooze button to smash.
He struggles through the day, exhausted. In the early afternoon, he sucks glycogen from the raw meat of a fresh kill to get an extra blood sugar boost.
Gorf prays for someone to discover coffee and refined sugars so that he can join the ranks of modern zombies getting through their 3 pm slumps with artificial pick-me-ups.
When the sun sets, Gorf feels depleted, but also restless and wired. He frustratedly tosses on his bed of mammoth skins beside the dying embers of his campfire while his family snoozes on.
Wide awake at 2 am, Gorf knows that the next morning he’ll begin the cycle again, his body completely out of sync with the Earth’s rhythms. Such is the cursed life of a Prehistoric Insomniac.
If this story seems preposterous, it’s because it probably is. Whatever we imagine prehistoric humans to be, insomniacs is not high on the list.
Those of us who have spent a night outside—whether it was a weekend camping trip or longer—might remember how deeply we slept under the darkness of the starry night sky and how refreshed we woke when the sun began to warm our faces in the early morning.
The closer we get to nature, the better our bodies seem to align with the Earth’s light and dark rhythms.
Now, if we took poor Gorf, dressed him in a suit, and dumped him in a desk chair in an office building in any major modern city, we might believe his claim to insomnia.
Now that Gorf is one of us, his eyes are exposed to bright lights at night as he slogs away at his computer, answering emails, or surfing social media pages into the late hours.
During the day, Gorf now spends his time indoors, where light exposure is 400 times less than that of a bright sunny day.
On bright days when he has a chance to get outside, Gorf protects his fragile eyes with dark glasses.
Welcome to the modern industrial lifestyle, Gorf. Don’t forget to help yourself to the coffee and cookies.
Our Body’s Circadian Rhythms
Our body runs on a 24 hour clock, which is orchestrated by an area in the hypothalamus of the brain called the Suprachiasmatic Nucleus (which we will refer to as “the SCN” from now on).
Our organs, body tissues and cellular processes, from our digestive function, hormones, mood, body temperature, metabolism, sleepiness and wakefulness, cellular repair, to detoxification, among others, have different objectives for certain times of day. The SCN coordinates these functions with the Earth’s daily cycles.
The SCN runs without the aid of outside influence, however several zeitgebers, German for “time givers”, or environmental cues, tell our internal clock what time of day it is to sync our internal and external worlds. The most important zeitgeber is light, which directly activates the SCN through a pathway that connects the retina in our eyes to the hypothalamus (the retinohypothalamic tract).
In our bodies, timing is everything. The more we are able to sync our cycles with the environment, the better our body organs function. Working against circadian rhythms by engaging in activities like sleeping and eating at the wrong time of day can negatively affect our health, decrease our lifespan, and make us miserable (like poor, sad Gorf in his dimly lit office).
The digestive system, for example, is wired to break down, absorb and convert food energy into fuel during the day and repair and regenerate itself at night.
At night, the pineal gland, located in the brain, releases melatonin, a hormone produced in the absence of light, to help us sleep. However, exposure to bright lights before bed can impede the natural release of melatonin, preventing restful sleep.
Science shows that healthy circadian rhythms equal optimal metabolic health, cognitive function, weight, energy levels, cardiovascular health, immune function, digestive health, coordination and mental health. Regulating our circadian rhythms can increase our health-span.
Our Liver, Muscles and Adrenal Glands Also Have Clocks
While the SCN is the chief executive officer of the circadian cycle, other organs, such as the liver, muscle and adrenal glands, help regulate our body’s rhythms through peripheral clocks.
These clocks register cues from the environment and report back to the SCN.In turn, the SCN tells the organs what jobs they are supposed to be performing according to the time of day.
Dr. Satchin Panda, PhD, a researcher at the Salk Institute, is discovering how important our eating times are for setting our circadian clock.
The first bite of our breakfast tells our liver clock to start making the enzymes and hormones necessary to digest our food, regulate our metabolism, and use the food we eat throughout the day to fuel our cells.
A few hours later, our digestive system requires relief from food intake to invest its resources into repair rather than spending precious resources on digesting food.
Dr. Panda found that restricting a “feeding window” to 8 to 12 hours in mice and human participants (for example, eating breakfast at 7 am and finishing dinner no later than 7 pm), allowed the system to digest optimally, left time for the system to repair itself at night, and also acted as a powerful circadian regulator.
New research suggests that food is a potent zeitgeber, which has the power to regulate our circadian rhythms. This suggests that eating at the right time of day can heal our adrenal glands and sleep cycles.
Fasting for 10 to 16 hours at night, or “Time Restricted Eating”, helps optimize health and increase lifespan in mice. In human participants, it improves sleep and results in modest weight loss.
According to Dr. Panda, we become more insulin resistant at night, which means that late-night snacking makes us more likely to store the calories we consume as fat.
Consuming calories in a state of insulin resistance can also predispose use to metabolic syndrome and type II diabetes.
In addition to light and food intake, rest and movement are important zeitgebers. Therefore, engaging in these activities at the right time of day has the potential to promote physical and mental health.
Circadian Rhythms and the Stress Response are Tightly Connected.
If the internet is any indicator, it seems that everyone is suffering from the modern illness of “adrenal fatigue”, or HPA (Hypothalamic-Pituitary-Adrenal) axis dysfunction
Because of the stress of our modern lifestyles, our adrenal glands and brains are no longer able to regulate the stress response.
This leads to a host of symptoms that wreck havoc on the entire body: fatigue, anxiety, sugar cravings, and insomnia. It also negatively impacts digestion, hormone production, and mood.
Our adrenal glands make cortisol, the “stress hormone”, a hormone involved in long-term stress adaptation but also in wakefulness, motivation, reward, and memory.
Deficiencies in cortisol signalling can result in issues with inflammation and depression. Too much cortisol floating around in the body can cause weight gain, cardiovascular issues, such as hypertension, and metabolic syndrome.
Cortisol has a circadian rhythm of its own. Our cortisol levels rise within an hour of waking; 50% of the total cortisol for the day is released in the first 30 minutes after we open our eyes. This rise in cortisol wakes us up. It allows us to perform our daily activities in a state of alert wakefulness.
Cortisol levels decline steadily throughout the day, dipping in the evening when melatonin rises.
A flattened or delayed rise in morning cortisol results in grogginess, brain fog and altered HPA axis function throughout the day. Elevated cortisol in the evening cause us to feel “tired and wired” and affect sleep. Waking at night, especially in the early morning between 2 and 4 am can be due to cortisol spikes.
Our adrenal glands help regulate our circadian rhythms through the production of cortisol. Both the adrenals and the SCN communicate with each other as early as 2 in the morning to ready the system to generate the waking response a few hours later.
Psychiatrist Dr. Charles Raison, MD says, “The most stressful thing you do most days is get up in the morning. Your body prepares for it for a couple of hours [before waking by activating] the stress system. The reason more people die at dawn [than any other time] is because it’s really rough to get up.”
Waking up is a literal stress on the body.
However, we need the stress response to get through our day effectively and healthy HPA axis function and optimal mood and energy are a result of properly functioning circadian rhythms.
Without these rhythms functioning properly we feel tired, groggy, tense, and depressed. Like Gorf, we need sugar and caffeine to help us through the day.
Circadian Rhythms Affect Our Mental Health
In nearly everyone I work with who suffers from anxiety, depression, or other mental health disorders, I see disrupted circadian rhythms and HPA axises.
Many of my patients feel exhausted during the day and wired at night. They have trouble getting up in the morning (or stay in bed all day) and postpone their bedtime. Most of them skip breakfast due to lack of hunger, and crave sweets after dinner, which further throws off the circadian cycle.
Lack of sleep can disrupt circadian rhythms leading to obesity, depression, diabetes and cardiovascular disease. Even two nights of shortened sleep can affect cortisol production and the HPA axis, worsening mood and energy levels.
Depression severity on the Hamilton Depression Rating Scale (HDRS) falls by 6 full points when sleep is restored, which is enough to bring a patient from moderate/severe depression to mild. In comparison, the standard medication SSRIs, like cipralex, only drop the HDRS by 2.
Bipolar disorder is particularly affected by a misaligned circadian clock. In an interview, Dr. Raison claims that a single night of missed sleep has brought on episodes of mania in his bipolar patients. Their moods level once the sleep cycle is restored.
Our mood is tightly connected to our circadian rhythms and sleep.
Circadian Rhythms and Chinese Medicine
Thousands of years ago, the Chinese developed the Theory of Yin and Yang to describe the dynamics nature, including the cycles of night and day.
Yin and yang (symbolized by a black-and-white circle with dots) represent the process of change and transformation of everything in the universe.
Yang, represented by the white part of the circle, is present in things that are hot, light, awake, moving, exciting, changing, transforming and restless.
Yin is present in material that is cold, dark, soft, inhibited, slow, restful, conversative, and sustaining.
Yin and yang are dependent on each other. Yin feeds into yang, while yang feeds and transforms into yin. Everything in nature consists of a fluctuating combination of these two states.
The circadian cycle transforms the yin night into the yang of daytime.
Yang zeitgebers such as food, light, and physical and mental activity, help stimulate yang in the body, which helps us feel energized, light and motivated.
Before bed, yin zeitgebers like darkness, rest and relaxation help our bodies transition into the yin of night, so that we can sleep restfully.
Lack of sleep and relaxation can deplete our body’s yin energy, causing yin deficiency. Individuals with yin deficiency feel fatigued, anxious, and hot, experiencing night sweats, hot flashes, and flushed skin. Conventionally, yin deficiency can look like burnout compounded by anxiety, or peri-menopause.
Out-of-sync circadian rhythms can result in yang deficiency resulting in morning grogginess, an insufficient rise in morning cortisol, and a failure to activate yang energy throughout the day.
Yang deficiency is characterized by the build-up of phlegm in the body, leading to weight gain, feelings of sluggishness, slow digestion, bloating, weakness, and feeling foggy, pale and cold. Yang deficiency symptoms can look like depression, chronic fatigue syndrome, IBS, estrogen dominance, hypothyroidism, or obesity and metabolic syndrome.
In Chinese medicine, the organs have specific times of activity as well.
The stomach is most active from 7 to 9 am, when we eat our breakfast, the most important meal of the day according to Traditional Chinese doctors. The spleen (which in Traditional Chinese Medicine operates much like the Western pancreas) is active from 9 to 11 am, converting the food energy from breakfast into energy that can be utilized by the body.
According to the Chinese organ clock, the liver is active from 1 to 3 am. Individuals with chronic stress, insomnia and irritability, sometimes called “Liver Qi Stagnation”, frequently wake up restless during those early morning hours.
Entraining our circadian clock with environmental cues can help us remain vital by balancing the flow and transformation of yin and yang energies in the body.
Healing the Circadian Clock:
When I work with patients with depression, anxiety and other mental health conditions, or hormonal conditions such as HPA axis dysfunction, one of our goals is to heal circadian rhythms.
This involves coordinating our internal rhythms with the Earth’s night and dark cycle by setting up a series of routines that expose the body to specific zeitgebers at certain times of day.
How to Heal Your Circadian Rhythms
Morning Activities: Increasing Yang with movement, light and food:
1. Expose your eyes to bright light between the hours of 6 and 8 am. This stimulates the SCN and the adrenal glands to produce cortisol, which boosts mood, energy and wakefulness in the morning and can help reset the HPA axis.
2. Have a large breakfast high in protein and fat within an hour of waking. The intake of a meal that contains all of the macronutrients wakes up the liver clock. This activates our metabolism, digestive function, blood sugar regulation, and HPA axis.
Consider eating 3 eggs, spinach and an avocado in the morning. Or consume a smoothie with avocado, MCT oil, protein powder, berries and leafy greens.
Eating a breakfast that contains at least 20 grams of protein and a generous serving of fat will help stabilize blood sugar and mood throughout the day while obliterating night-time sugar cravings.
3. Move a little in the morning. Morning movement doesn’t necessarily have to come in the form of exercise, however, it’s important to get up and start your routine, perhaps making breakfast and tidying, or having an alternate hot and cold shower (1 minute hot bursts alternating with 30 seconds cold for 3 to 5 cycles).
Muscle movement triggers another important peripheral clock that helps entrain our circadian cycle with the day.
4. Turn on lights in the morning, especially in the winter time. Spend time outside during the day, and avoid using sunglasses unless absolutely necessary so that light can stimulate the SCN. Consider investing in a sunlamp for the winter, particularly if you suffer from seasonal affective disorder.
5. Consume most of your supplements in the morning, with breakfast. Taking adaptogens (herbs that help reset the HPA axis) and B vitamins can help promote daytime energy and rebalance our morning cortisol levels. This, of course, depends on why you’re naturopathic doctor has recommended specific supplements, so be sure to discuss supplement timing with her first.
Night Routine: Increasing Yin with dark and stillness:
1. Maintain a consistent sleep and wake time, even on the weekends. Retraining the cycles starts with creating a consistent routine to get your sleep cycle back on track.
2. Try to get to bed before 11pm. This allows the body to reach the deepest wave of sleep around 2 am. It also allows for 7 to 8 hours of continuous sleep when you expose your eyes to bright lights at 6 to 8 am, when cortisol naturally rises. Of course, this sleep routine will vary depending on personal preferences, lifestyles and genetics.
It’s important to first establish a routine that will allow you to get at least 6 hours of continuous sleep a night. If you suffer from chronic insomnia, working with a naturopathic doctor can help you reset your circadian cycle using techniques like Sleep Restriction Therapy to get your body back on track.
3. Avoid electronic use at least an hour before bed. Our smartphones, tablets, computers and TVs emit powerful blue light that activates our SCN, confusing all of our body’s clocks. Blue light also suppresses melatonin release, making us feel restless and unable to fall asleep.
For those of you who must absolutely be on electronics in the late hours of the evening, consider investing in blue light-blocking glasses, or installing an app that block blue light, such as F.lux, on your devices. These solutions are not as effective as simply turning off electronics and switching to more relaxing bedtime activities, but can be a significant form of harm reduction.
4. Fast for at least 2 to 3 hours before bed. Avoid late-night snacking to give the body a chance to rest and to signal to the peripheral digestive clocks, such as the liver clock, that it’s now time to rest and repair, rather than digestive and assimilate more food.
Avoiding food, especially carbohydrate-rich food, at night can also manage blood sugar. A drop in blood sugar is often a reason why people wake in the early hours of the morning, as blood sugar drops spike cortisol, which wake us up and off-set our entire circadian system.
5. Engage in relaxing activities in dim lighting. Turn off powerful overhead lights, perhaps lighting candles or dim reading lights, and engage in at least 30 minutes of an activity that feels restorative and relaxing to you. This might include taking an epsom salt bath, reading a book while enjoying an herbal tea, doing yoga or meditation, or cuddling with a partner.
Taking this time helps us step out of the busyness of the day and signals to the body and its clocks that it’s time to sleep.
6. Take nighttime supplements before bed. I often recommend sleep-promoting supplements like prolonged-release melatonin (which is a powerful circadian rhythm and HPA axis resetter), magnesium or phosphatidylserine, before bed to help my patients’ bodies entrain to the time of day. Talk to your ND about what supplements might be right for you.
If you suffer from chronic stress and mood disorders, do shift work, or are dealing with jet lag, you may need to engage in these routines diligently for a few months to get your circadian cycles back on track.
These practices can also be beneficial at certain times of year: daylight savings time, periods of stress and heightened mental work, and the transition of seasons, especially early Spring and Fall.
Finally, consider working with a naturopathic doctor to obtain and individual plan that can help you reset your body’s rhythms.
In order to make sense of the world, people create stories. It is our greatest gift and most fragile weakness.
Boy meets girl, they fall in love, they encounter difficulties that they eventually overcome. It brings them closer. They live happily ever after—the classic love story.
Stress has a classic story too: cortisol, the “stress” hormone, is released during stress. It wreaks havoc on the body. Lowering stress helps lower cortisol.
However, when it comes to human hormones, telling stories in a linear narrative is impossible.
Hormones are signalling molecules in the body. They are produced by endocrine organs, such as the adrenal glands, the brain, and the ovaries. They travel through the bloodstream to impact the expression of genes on distant tissues, which impacts how our bodies function.
Production of norepinephrine in the adrenal glands as a response to stress can make your heart race, your pupils dilate, your hands to shake, and your senses become hypervigilant—when a perceived threat or danger activates the release of this hormone, your entire body pulsates under its influence.
Hormonal stories are hard to fit the human desire for narratives. Their relationships with our genes, bodily systems, receptor binding sites, and each other make their actions too complicated to be described linearly. Instead they act like webs, or tangled networks of intricate connections.
When hormone levels rise in the body, beyond our delicate homeostatic balance, a phenomenon, called “resistance”, can occur. With resistance, cells reduce their responses to the hormones that interact with them.
When telemarketers keep interrupting your dinner at 6pm, eventually you stop answering the phone.
When certain hormones continue to call at the surface of cells, stressing the body’s capacity to respond, our cells simply stop answering.
Many of us ask, “what happens when I pull this thread here?” when learning about one hormone that we’ve blamed all our woes on. We tug the thread, without considering the entire web of connections, and our actions affect the entire system.
Our hormones exist in an ecosystem where everything hums and flows together, as a unit. It’s impossible to lay out explanations for their actions in a linear fashion.
Hormone stories flow like a Choose Your Own Adventure novel—a hallway with many doors that snake down long corridors and meet again, and interconnect.
Go through the door marked “estrogens”, and you encounter serotonin, cortisol, progesterone, insulin, thyroid hormones, leptin, BDNF, dopamine, norepinephrine, and many others.
Hormones are the conductors of your body’s personal orchestra, composed of thousands of musicians, a complex musical score, highly-trained arms, fingers, and mouths manipulating instruments: a million moving parts working together in harmony.
The best we can do to understand the entire interplay is to slow down the action, take a snapshot of it, and to try to understand why these symptoms are occurring in this individual.
Symptoms of Hormone Imbalances
Because hormones affect absolutely every system of our body, I am always attuned to the possibility of hormonal imbalances in my patients.
It helps to look at hormones in terms of their symptom patterns rather than how any one hormone affects us in particular.
Common signs of hormonal imbalance are:
Fatigue, low libido, restless sleep, depression and anxiety, waking at 2 to 4 am, a high-stress lifestyle, and brain fog might indicate cortisol imbalance.
PMS – and the more severe related condition, PMDD – infertility, fatigue and low libido, missed and irregular periods may be related to fluctuations in the hormones estrogen and progesterone, or low estrogen and progesterone levels. Many of these symptoms could also be related to estrogen dominance, in which estrogen is either high or normal, and progesterone is low.
Endometriosis, a family or personal history of female cancers, anxiety and panic attacks, heavy and painful periods, frequent miscarriages, infertility, fibroids, fibrocystic breasts and weight gain around the hips and thighs can indicate estrogen dominance.
High levels of male sex hormones like testosterone, irregular periods, weight gain, acne, and hair loss may indicate a female hormone condition called PCOS.
Fatigue, brain fog, difficulty losing weight, puffiness, constipation, dry skin and hair, and low body temperature can be signs of hypothyroidism.
Symptoms of reactive hypoglycemia, such as feeling dizzy, anxious and shaky between meals, sugar cravings, weight gain around the abdomen, difficulty losing weight, and low morning appetite, night-time carbohydrate cravings, and binge eating can all be related to insulin resistance and poor blood sugar control.
In my naturopathic practice, I see common patterns of symptoms that indicate certain hormonal imbalances.
These patterns often represent vicious cycles where our body is stressed beyond a capacity to balance these interconnected webs of chemical interactions, causing further imbalance.
Cortisol
Speaking of stories, here’s one I hear often.
You wake up in the morning, exhausted. Your brain is in a fog and you don’t feel alive until a cold shower or double espresso knock you out of your stupor.
Things get a bit better once you get moving, but you wonder why your energy never fully bounces back.
You used to play sports in university, you think to yourself. Now just thinking of sports makes you tired.
Is this what getting older feels like? You’re in your 30s.
The days at the office stretch on forever. Concentration and focus are difficult. You see a coworker whose name, you realize with horror, can’t be brought to mind.
You’ve known her for a year. Cynthia? Sylvia? Your brain hurts.
In the afternoon you think longingly of napping, but instead take your place in the long line for coffee and something carb-y like a cookie.
When it comes time for sleep you are either out like a light or find it hard to turn your mind off; you’re tired, as always, but also wired.
Sleep doesn’t feel restful, and you often wake up, sleepless, at 2-4am in the morning.
When your alarm rings a few hours later, the cycle begins again.
Cortisol, one of our stress hormones, has a circadian rhythm. Its levels are highest in the morning, about an hour after waking. Cortisol promotes energy, alertness and focus. It is also a potent anti-inflammatory hormone.
Cortisol is what makes us feel alive in the morning, bouncing out of bed like Shirley Temple and her curls.
Throughout the day our cortisol levels slowly dwindle (unless a major stressor causes them to spike abnormally). They are lowest in the evening, when melatonin, our sleep hormone begins to rise, inducing feelings of sleepiness, preparing us for a night of rest.
Our modern day society, however, calls on cortisol to perform more than its fair share of work. Cortisol is around when we’re hauling ourselves out of bed after an inadequate night of rest.
Cortisol fuels gym workouts, gets us to our meetings on time, allows us to meet deadlines, tolerates traffic jams, responds kindly to tyrannical bosses, and makes sure the kids get to all their after-school events.
Cortisol is made in the adrenal glands, two endocrine glands located on each kidney, in response to signals from the brain that perceive stress in our environments and bodies.
When stress hormones levels are too high we experience a “tired and wired” feeling. During this time we might feel we thrive better under stress: workouts boost our energy, we have a hard time quieting down and we rarely feel hungry.
We might still struggle with weight gain, however, especially the abdomen and face, where cortisol tends to encourage fat deposition.
We might feel tension—tight muscles and shoulders, and body pain, as muscles clench up, preparing to fight or flee.
Chronic stress is associated with high levels of cortisol. We work long hours, late into the night. We go, go, go. This may give us a “high” or it may feel exhausting and depleting.
Many of us can exist in this state for months and even years. Sometimes a compounded stressor such as a divorce, accident, or loss, can tip us over the edge into a depleted, burnt out state.
Burnout, often following a period of prolonged stress, can be associated with low cortisol signalling. Our bodies have simply stopped being able to produce the stress hormones necessary to meet the needs of our daily lives, or glucocorticoid receptors in the brain and body cells, have stopped responding to cortisol.
Just as cell can be become resistant to insulin, they can also become resistant to cortisol. Too much (or even too little) of a hormone can cause cells to start ignoring their signalling, resulting in symptoms of low levels of the hormone in some areas of the body and high levels of the hormone in others.
Cortisol is a complicated molecule. It both encourages the stress response, but also turns it off, when levels reach a certain point.
Often, cortisol levels that are too low result in an impaired stress response, preventing our fight or flight system from properly shutting off—cortisol resistance can lead to further stress hormone disruption.
The result of an imbalance in cortisol, otherwise termed Hypothalamic Pituitary Adrenal (HPA) Axis dysregulation is weight gain, fatigue and brain fog, inflammation and immune system activation, digestive issues, restlessness, impaired sleep, decreased cognitive function, and mental health conditions, such as anxiety and depression.
When cortisol levels are low, the body makes adrenaline and noradrenaline to meet our needs, which often leads to anxiety and feeling shaky and nervous, contributing to symptoms of anxiety.
Cortisol also influences the function of our sex hormones, thyroid hormones, and our blood sugar. Imbalances in any of these other hormonal systems can be a result of an impaired HPA axis.
Cortisol Testing
The two main ways to assess the body’s levels of cortisol are through serum (blood tests) and saliva.
A study found both tests were equal when it came to diagnosing Cushing’s disease, a condition of highly elevated cortisol.
One of the advantages to salivary cortisol testing is the ability to obtain multiple samples in one day to be able to view a patient’s cortisol curve, in which cortisol peaks approximately one hour after waking and declines throughout the day.
The cortisol curve is measured by assessing 4 samples of salivary cortisol taken at 4 key points during the course of one day. It measures free cortisol, which may only represent about 5% of total cortisol in the body.
While salivary cortisol levels can be a good starting point for assessing the cortisol curve, it doesn’t tell us everything about the health of the glucocorticoid receptors or HPA system as a whole.
High cortisol levels may be seen in patients with low cortisol signalling, such as depression, anxiety and chronic fatigue. Errors in obtaining salivary cortisol samples (such as not taking samples at the right time) can lead to falsely low cortisol readings.
In my opinion, this makes symptoms and health history the most valuable tools for properly assessing HPA axis function.
Cortisol and Melatonin
Melatonin, our sleep hormone, also operates on a circadian rhythm. It is released by the pineal gland in the brain and induces sleep. Its release corresponds to a drop in cortisol levels at the end of the day.
That release is impeded by artificial light exposure at night, lack of daytime sun exposure, alcohol, stress, and HPA axis disruption, among other lifestyle and environmental factors.
Melatonin, like other hormones, can be tested for in blood, urine and saliva, but I find more value in assessing for sleep quality and quantity by taking a thorough health history while also restoring a patient’s sleep hygiene and HPA axis regulation.
Many patients with sleep issues can benefit from a trial of supplemental melatonin to see if that helps their sleep. Taking it 2 to 3 hours before bedtime to coincide with the body’s natural melatonin surge and taking a prolonged-release version to promote sleep maintenance are two strategies I use for helping patients sleep better.
Working on sleep and circadian rhythms is also beneficial for restoring HPA axis functioning.
The “Female” Hormones: Estrogen and Progesterone
The most prevalent female sex hormones are estrogen and progesterone. These two hormones eb and flow in distinct ways throughout a woman’s monthly cycle.
Estrogen creates an “M” shape, rising at the beginning of the cycle to its first peak around ovulation, half-way through the cycle. At this time women typically experience their best mood, energy, and motivation, perhaps noticing a rise in libido.
After ovulation, estrogen dips a little bit and then rises, peaking again about a week before a woman’s menstrual cycle is due.
After this, estrogen takes a nosedive, reaching low levels around the time that menstruation begins: Day 1 of the menstrual cycle.
Progesterone, on the other hand is largely absent the first half of the cycle, before ovulation. Then, it begins a steady climb to peak with estrogen, about a week before the arrival of the next period.
After peaking, just like estrogen, progesterone then takes a dip, which stimulates the uterine lining to shed, resulting in menstruation, in which the entire cycle begins again.
PMS and PMDD
My practice is populated by women who experience various forms of grief at different stages of their monthly cycles.
Many of my patients experience PMS, and the more severe PMDD (Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder)—which is characterized by intense mood swings, irritability, depression, or anxiety, panic attacks and psychosis in the most severe cases— up to two weeks before their periods.
The mood changes in PMS and PMDD are associated with fluctuations in the hormones estrogen and progesterone, which can wreak havoc on our brain chemistry.
Estrogen has a beneficial effect on mood, increasing dopamine and serotonin action in the brain. Dopamine and serotonin are two antidepressant, feel-good neurotransmitters.
Estrogen also increases something called Brain-Derived Neurotrophic Factor (BDNF) a chemical that stimulates the growth of brain cells. This can boost memory, concentration, and cognition, as well as positively influence mood.
Progesterone breaks down into a chemical called allo-pregnenolone, which acts like GABA, a calming neurotransmitter, in the brain. Bioidentical progesterone therapy is often used as a treatment for anxiety and insomnia.
When estrogen and progesterone levels surge and drop suddenly, drastic fluctuations in mood can occur. Cravings for sweets, crying, lack of motivation, or severe anxiety can all occur when hormones drop right before a period is due.
However, elevated levels of estrogen can also be problematic. Estrogen stimulates dopamine, which typically makes us feel good, gives us energy, and helps to motivate us. In genetically vulnerable women, elevated levels of dopamine can cause excess irritability, low stress tolerance, and even mania or psychosis.
Estrogen also slows the recycling of the stress hormones epinephrine and norepinephrine, which can lead to symptoms of acute stress and anxiety, when dysregulated.
This means that dramatic rises and falls in estrogen throughout a woman’s cycle can cause her to feel irritable and anxious one week and unmotivated and depressed the other.
Smoothing out hormonal ups and downs can be a key factor in regulating a woman’s menstrual cycles and soothing her mood and emotions throughout the month.
Perimenopause and Menopause
Perimenopause is characterized by a declining production of the ovarian hormones estrogen and progesterone.
Estrogen levels tend to rise and fall dramatically throughout a woman’s remaining cycles, while progesterone levels tend to stay low.
The result of these changes are symptoms like hot flashes, night sweats, brain fog, fatigue, and depression when estrogen levels suddenly tank, and increased stress and anxiety when estrogen levels abruptly spike.
During this time, cycles may become irregular. Some of my patients comment that their periods are incredibly light one month and the heaviest of their lives another.
Some get periods every few months and some notice increased frequency, even spotting between cycles, or have a full-blown period every two weeks in more extreme cases.
Weight gain tends to drift from the thighs and buttocks to the abdomen. Once pear and hourglass-shaped figures begin to resemble apples.
Fatigue is a common symptom. Women may experience poor sleep due to night sweats from estrogen deficiency, and anxiety from insufficient progesterone.
What a joy, right?
Many of these perimenopausal symptoms are a relatively modern phenomenon, stemming from a dysregulated HPA axis.
After cessation of periods, it’s the job of the adrenal glands to take over sex hormone production. However, if the HPA system is preoccupied with organizing a stress response, this can affect the production of other hormones.
Impaired Estrogen Clearance
Many women struggle with symptoms that are related to relatively high levels of estrogen, often caused by impaired estrogen clearance.
These conditions include heavy and painful periods, fibrocystic breasts, or conditions like fibroids or endometriosis.
Chronically elevated estrogen levels also include a risk of certain hormone-associated cancers, such as breast cancer.
These women may experience irritability and anxiety through estrogen’s interaction with stress hormones, and also from a relative deficiency in progesterone.
A relatively high level of estrogens compared to progesterone is termed “Estrogen Dominance”.
Estrogen is normally cleared through the digestive system: the liver and intestines.
A sluggish and congested liver causing a slower rate of hormonal clearance (think of it like a clogged drain), an increase in environmental toxin exposure, or an overconsumption of alcohol, can slow the liver’s ability to regulate estrogen levels in the body.
Constipation and a dysbiotic gut can also impair estrogen clearance.
Symptoms of estrogen dominance include stubborn weight gain, typically around the hips and thighs, heavy and painful periods, tender and painful breasts, fibrocystic breasts, endometriosis, uterine fibroids, acne, cyclical mood swings, especially premenstrual anxiety and panic attacks, and irregular menstrual cycles.
Low Progesterone
Aside from impaired estrogen clearance, another pattern of estrogen dominance is low progesterone.
In this case, estrogen levels are normal or even low (as in the case of menopausal or perimenopausal women). However, an even lower progesterone level still results in a pattern of relative estrogen dominance.
This can cause some of the same symptoms as excess estrogen (anxiety, irritability, heavy and painful periods, weight gain, PMS, fibroids, fibrocystic breasts, etc.).
Low progesterone can also be a culprit in unexplained infertility or early term miscarriage, as progesterone maintains the uterine lining in pregnancy.
Progesterone is released from the ovaries after ovulation. Lack of ovulation, therefore, is a primary reason for low progesterone levels. Anovulatory cycles can occur in women with polycystic ovarian syndrome, women with high levels of physical and emotional stress, or women entering menopause.
Some progesterone, however, is also made in the adrenal glands, where it can be eventually turned into cortisol, aldosterone (a steroid hormone involved in salt-water balance in the body) and androstenedione (a male sex hormone), eventually making testosterone and estrogen.
Women with high cortisol demands due to chronic stress may shunt the progesterone made in their adrenal glands to producing other hormones that support the stress response.
Not only can stress alter ovulation and fertility through various other mechanisms, it can also rob the body of progesterone, directing any progesterone made towards cortisol production.
Testing Estrogen and Progesterone
Estrogen and progesterone can be tested reliably in saliva, blood and urine.
Month long salivary hormone testing of estrogen and progesterone can be an easy and effective way to track the eb and flow of these hormones throughout a women’s menstrual cycles.
In this test, women obtain a saliva sample every 3 to 5 days for the duration of the month to track how estrogen levels corresponds with progesterone and how both hormones rise and fall.
In my practice, however, I often start by running blood tests. I test hormones on day 21 (of a 28-day cycle) to coincide with progesterone’s peak. This can help us calculate the progesterone to estrogen ratio and establish whether the cause of estrogen dominance symptoms is high estrogen or low progesterone.
Blood tests offer the option of looking at estrone, which is a more problematic form of estrogen, as well as estradiol (the most common, metabolically active estrogen in the body). In blood we can also look at LH and FSH, two hormones produced in the brain and ovaries that orchestrate ovulation.
FSH tends to be high in women in menopause or perimenopause, while LH tends to be elevated in women with Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome (PCOS).
Dried urinary metabolite testing, or DUTCH, is an effective way to understand how hormones are broken down and processed by the body. Looking at the entire hormone breakdown pathway provides a more in-depth look at the complexity of hormones in a woman’s cycle, and can guide treatment in specific, useful ways.
The “Male” Hormones: Testosterone
Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome (PCOS) is one of the most common causes of infertility (and the most common endocrine disorder) in women of reproductive age. It affects about 10% of menstruating women.
PCOS is a collection of various symptoms and complex hormonal causes. However, it is characterized by missed periods, anovulation, male-pattern facial hair growth, especially on the upper lip, chin, breasts and abdomen, and the presence of cysts on the ovaries.
Other common symptoms of PCOS are weight gain, estrogen dominance, male-pattern hair loss (on the crown of the head), insulin resistance, infertility, and acne, especially hormonal cystic acne on the jawline.
PCOS is characterized by elevated levels of testosterone, a male sex hormone, or “androgen”, on blood work.
Acne, weight gain, infertility, and hair loss are the main symptoms that bring women with PCOS into my office.
PCOS is a complex process that involves an overproduction of testosterone in the ovaries coupled with insulin resistance. Therefore, balancing blood sugar through diet and lifestyle can have a major impact on symptoms.
The conventional treatment for missed or absent periods is oral contraceptives, which of course doesn’t treat the underlying cause of anovulation. That’s why women with PCOS often seek naturopathic and functional medical solutions to treat the root cause.
Testing for PCOS
When I meet a new patient with PCOS, I often test her blood for estradiol and progesterone levels at Day 21 of her cycle. A very low progesterone level may indicate that she has not ovulated that cycle.
We also test LH and FSH. A high LH:FSH ratio can be indicative of PCOS even if cysts are not present on an ovarian ultrasound.
Other important tests that are often ordered are free testosterone and DHEA-S, another male hormone made in the adrenal glands.
Glucose control and insulin resistance can be assessed by looking at fasting blood glucose, fasting insulin and HbA1c (a marker that looks at long-term glucose control).
Prolactin, another hormone released by the pituitary gland, can sometimes be elevated in anovulatory women with PCOS.
A 4-point salivary cortisol test may be useful in women with PCOS who are also experiencing symptoms of cortisol dysregulation, which can contribute to insulin resistance and affect ovulation and hormone regulation, particularly progesterone production.
Prolactin
Prolactin is a hormone released by the pituitary gland to promote milk production after child birth.
However, some women will have elevated levels of prolactin in blood, despite not currently pregnant or breastfeeding.
Called hyperprolactinemia, elevated prolactin may be a cause of anovulation, mimicking some symptoms of PCOS and menopause, including hot flashes, absent or irregular periods, infertility and even milk discharge from the breasts.
Hyperprolactinemia may be caused by low calorie diets, liver issues, hypothyroidism, and issues with the pituitary gland itself.
Prolactin can be tested in blood. If levels are elevated, an MRI must be conducted to rule out a physical issue with the pituitary gland, such as a tumour.
Oxytocin
Oxytocin is a hormone produced in the brain and secreted by the pituitary. It aids in childbirth. Also termed the “love hormone,” it’s associated with feelings of intimacy and connection.
While high and low levels of blood oxytocin can be possible in men and women who are not pregnant or breastfeeding, the clinical applications of it are not fully known.
Thyroid Hormones
The thyroid, a butterfly-shaped gland on our neck, is the master thermostat of the body, controlling heat and metabolism. It pumps out thyroid hormones T4 and T3, which tell cells to burn fuel, creating energy and heat.
Because our thyroid hormones interact with the cells in every body system, symptoms of hypothyroidism, or low thyroid function, can be incredibly diverse.
Common symptoms of hypothyroidism are weight gain or inability to lose weight, fatigue and sluggishness, brain fog, hair loss, low body temperature, constipation, dry skin and hair, puffiness, infertility, and altered menstrual cycles, such as missed periods or heavy periods.
Aside from autoimmunity, other causes of low thyroid function can be HPA axis dysregulation and chronic stress, a very low calorie or very low carbohydrate diet, sudden weight loss, a deficiency in nutrients needed for thyroid function such as iron, zinc, iodine and selenium, and a body burden of environmental toxins such as heavy metals.
Testing Thyroid
To assess thyroid function, conventional doctors will test a hormone called Thyroid Stimulating Hormone, or TSH. TSH is not a thyroid hormone, but a hormone made in the brain that urges the thyroid to pump out the thyroid hormones T3 and T4. It gives doctors an indirect measure of thyroid regulation.
When TSH levels are high, this suggests that thyroid function is sluggish; the brain needs to send a louder signal to get an unresponsive thyroid to work.
However, TSH is only a periphery marker of total thyroid function, not giving us the whole picture. Also, TSH ranges on conventional lab tests may fail to pick up some cases of subclinical hypothyroidism or impending cases of autoimmune thyroid conditions, otherwise termed Hashimoto’s Thyroiditis, which is the most common cause of hypothyroidism.
To properly assess thyroid function in someone with symptoms of thyroid dysfunction, a slightly elevated TSH, or a family history of Hashimoto’s, I will order a thyroid panel: a blood test measuring TSH as well free thyroid hormone (T3 and T4) levels.
It’s also important to assess for autoimmune thyroid conditions by testing for anti-thyroglobulin and anti-thyroperoxidase antibodies. Both of these antibodies, when elevated, suggest the presence of an autoimmune thyroid condition.
Insulin
Some of the most common hormonal dysfunctions I see in my practice are insulin resistance and reactive hypoglycemia: blood sugar imbalance.
These issues often lie at the heart of other hormonal imbalance patterns, such as irregular menstrual cycles or HPA axis dysregulation.
When we eat, glucose enters our bloodstream, providing fuel for our cells. Insulin helps our cells access this hormone, spiking with each meal.
The higher the meal is on the glycemic index (i.e. the more sugar or refined carbohydrate it contains), the higher our post-meal blood sugar and insulin spikes will be.
Without insulin, we would slowly lose energy and die, unable to get precious glucose into our cells. Individuals with type I diabetes cannot make insulin. They must inject it daily to keep their cells fuelled and blood sugar stable.
For the rest of us who do make insulin, large blood sugar spikes after a meal can be problematic.
Insulin is a storage hormone. It helps energy get into cells, and it helps build muscle and brain cells, but it also blocks the breakdown of fat cells, blocking weight loss.
Insulin also drives down blood sugar levels. When blood sugar rises too quickly after a meal, a large insulin response can drop blood sugar levels too drastically, causing reactive hypoglycemia, or feeling “hangry” (hungry, angry, irritable, tired, light-headed, weak and dizzy) in between meals.
Individuals who experience hypoglycemia feel irritable, shaky, dizzy and anxious between meals. They often suffer from anxiety and panic attacks, and feel hungrier at night.
They may wake up in the middle of the night, as their bodies are unable to go 8 hours (the length of a decent night’s sleep) without food. This causes them to wake up, restless and perhaps anxious, in the early hours of the morning.
These individuals, paradoxically, rarely feel hungry at breakfast time.
I often see anxious patients wake from a restless sleep and toss back only a coffee in the morning, skipping breakfast due to slight morning nausea.
At 10 am, feeling ravenous and shaky, they might scarf down a high-glycemic bagel or croissant. Later on, they’ll enjoy a light lunch—maybe a sandwich—often feeling foggy and lightheaded after eating it.
At 2 to 4 pm, they may feel like an afternoon nap, instead indulging in a coffee and sweet treat to buy them some energy for the remaining hours of the work day.
Finally, after enjoying a larger dinner once they get home, they find themselves snacking all night long. Their bodies are finally urging them to ingest the nutrients they were lacking throughout the day.
They then fall into bed, feeling full, restless and wired, and the cycle begins again.
When our blood sugar falls, we not only feel hangry, weak, and crave processed carbs, our HPA axis also gets stimulated.
Cortisol, a glucocorticoid, can help our body control blood sugar, bringing it into the normal range after insulin sends it tanking too low.
This drop in blood sugar, therefore, needlessly triggers a stress response from the adrenal glands, which can further worsen anxiety, HPA axis dysregulation, and glucocorticoid resistance.
When blood sugar and insulin are spiked repeatedly for days, months, and years on end, cells stop responding attentively to insulin’s signal. Like our response to a pesky telemarketer, cells eventually stop picking up the phone when insulin calls.
However, cells still need insulin. More and more insulin must be released to trigger the same response from insulin resistant cells. This makes cells even more resistant, as they require even more insulin release the next time blood sugar rises to get glucose into the cell for fuel. And so the cycle becomes vicious.
Elevated insulin levels cause inflammation, fat gain, fatigue, depression, reactive hypoglycemia, and HPA axis dysregulation. The more resistant our cells become to insulin, the more cortisol must be called on to maintain blood sugar levels.
PCOS is also characterized by higher insulin levels. This prevents ovulation, causing infertility and female hormone imbalance.
When insulin resistance persists, type II diabetes, where the body is no longer able to keep blood sugar in a safe range, develops.
Type II diabetes is characterized by chronically high blood sugar—which poses a danger to small blood vessels, and is a potent inflammatory condition, increasing the risk of heart disease—and elevated insulin.
It affects almost 10% of the adult population and is the 7th leading underlying cause of death in North America, costing 350 billion dollars a year to manage in the United States alone.
Insulin-related weight gain can affect female hormones, as fat cells make estrogen in the body, leading to estrogen dominance.
Insulin also interacts with a hormone called leptin, which is created by fat cells in response to calorie intake. When body fat levels get too high, cells can become leptin resistant. The body no longer senses dietary calorie intake, leading to increased hunger. This exacerbates the problem of weight gain and insulin resistance.
Testing for Insulin Resistance
When I meet a patient who is presenting with stubborn weight gain, estrogen dominance and stress, I assess their blood for insulin resistance by looking at blood levels of fasting insulin and fasting glucose.
With these two values a calculation that measures insulin resistance, called the HOMA-IR, can be performed. This can give us a baseline measure of how well the body is compensating to control blood glucose.
I also run HbA1c, which looks at glucose levels over 3 months. I will often run a blood cholesterol panel, and inflammatory markers, such as CRP.
Insulin resistance often puts all of our hormones on a rollercoaster, which becomes very difficult to get off of unless we prioritize the diet and lifestyle interventions that address blood sugar control.
Assessing Hormones
When presented with a patient suffering from a complicated symptom pattern, I begin by taking a thorough health history in which we investigate:
Energy levels,
Sleep quantity and quality,
Mood and mental health history,
Period health history,
Family history,
Dietary intake and exercise,
Health risk factors like smoking, alcohol use, and past health history.
Depending on how clear the patient’s symptom picture presents, we may opt to make some changes before testing, to gauge their body’s response to an increase in nutrient intake.
Then, if necessary, I will order a comprehensive blood work.
Blood testing might include a thyroid hormone panel, and an in-depth look at female hormones, fasting insulin and fasting blood glucose, and other markers that help us assess health, such as cholesterol and inflammatory markers, or nutrient levels.
Patients requiring a more comprehensive view of their cycles may opt for month-long salivary testing. Others may opt for a dried urine test that looks at hormonal breakdown in the body.
A Sample Case
Jenny (name changed for privacy) came to me feeling fatigued and anxious.
She had suffered from anxiety periodically as a teen, but now at age 46 she was experiencing bimonthly panic attacks that seemed to occur cyclically; the panic would come around ovulation and premenstrually.
It was hard to tell, however, because Jenny also claimed that her periods were “all over the place”. One month they were heavy and painful, causing her to take time off work, crouched on the bathroom floor in agony. Other months she barely noticed them, experiencing some light spotting, if anything at all.
Very troubling to her was her major mood volatility, which she described like a “switch” that would suddenly flip on or off, causing her to breakdown at work or pick fights with her family.
Then, almost as suddenly, the cloud would lift and she would be her cheerful, friendly, loving self again.
It was maddening, both to her and those living with her during these darks times, she said.
She also noticed disrupted sleep and weight gain around the abdomen, which seemed to ignore her intense workouts and strict dietary regime.
Jenny was highly accomplished at her high-pressure job and commented that she thrived on being busy and achievement oriented.
I tested Jenny’s blood estradiol, estrone, progesterone, LH, and FSH levels one week before her next expected period, had her fill out a weekly diet diary, and gave her some recommendations about sleep and supplement intake.
Jenny’s blood revealed elevated FSH, indicative of impending menopause (FSH encourages the ovaries to ovulate, as TSH encourages the thyroid gland to make thyroid hormone). She also had low estradiol, and low progesterone, but elevated levels of estrone, the more problematic of the estrogens.
According to her labs and history, Jenny was experiencing estrogen dominance and perimenopause. Many of her symptoms were stemming from elevated estrone, low progesterone and a disrupted HPA axis.
Together, we worked on her diet to provide her body with the nutrients needed to make hormones and to support her brain, mood and adrenal glands.
We used herbs and dietary nutrients to promote liver estrogen clearance and to support Jenny’s adrenal glands.
We addressed the stress in her life, encouraged relaxation, and made sure her body was supported in its ability to make and respond to cortisol.
After a few months, Jenny reported a reduction in hot flashes, better sleep and feeling calmer. She had a reduction in her waist line and better energy and mood.
Our hormones, when imbalanced, can cause vicious cycles in the body that trap us in a state of worsening imbalance.
Through correctly assessing these common hormonal patterns through a health history and appropriate testing, and then making diet, lifestyle and supplement suggestions addressed at stopping these cycles, naturopathic doctors can address underlying hormonal issues that might be causing these complex and troublesome patterns of hormone disruption.
I review my adventurous year of living on the Low Carb High Fat Ketogenic Diet.
I’ve always had a sweet tooth.
I remember binging on Halloween candy as a kid, stuffing one tiny chocolate bar after another into my mouth, as fast as my little fingers could unwrap them, trapped in some kind of sugar-filled trance.
“Never get between Talia and her food!” My family would joke when my blood sugar would crash between meals and I’d rage towards the fridge for a snack to keep me sane.
I remember digging into the little bags of cheese popcorn reserved for school lunches, finishing off one after another and then hiding the wrappers in their big Costco box so that it would look like it was still full, the way rebellious teens top up empty vodka bottles with water.
I can gain weight with the drop of a hat (but also put on muscle fairly easily), and it takes concentrated effort and dedication to take it off.
After a period of temporary stress and bagel-related weight gain, I decided to embark on a bit of experimentation. Work was getting busy and I wanted to supply my brain with constant energy without having to take snack breaks every few hours. Also enticed by anecdotes of shattered weight loss plateaus, I decided to “go Keto”.
I like experimenting with diet. Like many health-conscious people, finding the right nutrition regime for me has been a process. In my teens I started controlling portions and switching out white breads for whole grain rye and Jolly Ranchers for carrot sticks. In my early 20’s, I was vegetarian. I tried being vegan for a while before deciding it was a disaster for my health when I began to experience nutrient deficiencies, weight gain, and hormonal issues.
Later on, I followed my naturopathic school classmates to a modified Paleo diet (keeping in some gluten-free grains and legumes), then moved to a more traditional Paleo diet (taking out the grains and legumes), before going back to the modified version (which is probably the best eating style for me—more on that later).
For the most part, my diet is comprised of whole foods, with lots of vegetables, but in the Fall of 2016, when this all began, I was in a pretty Standard North American place when it came to food intake. At the time I was suffering from IBS, some issues related to subclinical PCOS, and fatigue. I was also starting to see some signs of impaired glucose control.I wasn’t feeling good and I was in need of a kind of reset of sorts.
I was interested in seeing how relying on ketone bodies for fuel would help my body, mental performance, and improve my blood glucose control and symptoms. I have a family history of type II diabetes and I wanted to do what I could to prevent insulin resistance and metabolic syndrome. Drastic times call for drastic measures, I thought.
Ergo, The Ketogenic Diet.
About the Diet:
The Classic Ketogenic Diet was first developed in the 1920’s to treat children with medication-resistant epilepsy.
When our brains are starved of glucose, their preferred fuel source (our brains use up 60% of the body’s glucose), the liver creates ketone bodies from stored or dietary fat that the brain can use as a substitute source of energy.
One of these ketone bodies, beta-hydroxybutyrate, is thought to be a particularly therapeutic molecule for the brain, conveying anti-convulsive benefits, thereby helping to reduce the incidence of seizures in children who don’t respond to medication.
However, the original Ketogenic diet is more extreme than the general health and weight loss-aimed diet we see described in recipe books these days. The Classic Ketogenic diet consists of about 90% of calories coming from fat. In order to achieve that, followers need to severely restrict their protein intake, and virtually eliminate all dietary sources of carbohydrate, which drastically limits their nutrition choices.
Since, the benefits of beta-hydroxybutyrate are being studied for other neurological disorders, such as Parkinson’s disease, dementia, migraine headaches and narcolepsy. It’s being looked at as a potential treatment for mental health conditions, like autism and depression, and metabolic disorders such as type II diabetes, and even to increase the efficacy of chemotherapy and radiation treatments in cancer. Other studies are looking at its role in improving cognitive function in mice and humans.
Some research shows that beta-hydroxybutyrate can expand lifespan by interacting with genes that slow aging. It is also shown to confer anti-inflammatory and antioxidant benefits.
In the 1970’s, Dr. Atkins responded to the high-carbohydrate, low-fat dogma of the nutrition world at the time, by bringing a modified Ketogenic diet into vogue. Restricting all forms of carbohydrates and encouraging a consumption of the still-vilified high-fat foods like bacon, eggs and cheese, Atkins affirmed that people could lose weight by eating fat, as long as they restricted carbohydrates at the same time.
The modern version of the Ketogenic Diet is slightly more health-conscious, promoting a higher intake of vegetables. The current diet restricts carbohydrates to under 20 to 50 grams per day, and encourages a high fat intake and a moderate protein intake, in order to encourage the body to turn to fat as its primary source of fuel. The current version of “Keto” is less strict than it’s initial epilepsy-treating incarnation, with anywhere from 60-85% of its calories coming from fat.
My Version of Keto:
I started the whole journey by tracking my food intake (using My Fitness Pal). My aim was to consume 20 grams of net carbs, or less, per day to push my body into using fat-turned-to-ketone bodies as a its primary fuel source.
Net carbs are calculated by subtracting dietary fibre from total grams of carbohydrates. For example, 1 cup of raw broccoli contains 6 grams of carbs. 2.5 of those are fibre. Therefore, the net carbs in broccoli are 3.5, which would count towards my net carb goal of 20 grams per day.
This isn’t easy. Take a look at any package of food you regularly consume. 1 cup of cooked oatmeal contains 23 grams of net carbs: 3 grams over my entire daily allotment. Therefore all high-carb foods like grains, legumes, starchy nuts, all fruits, and some starchier vegetables, were off limits.
Many people opt to test their blood, breath or urine for ketone bodies to determine whether or not their bodies are in ketosis. I dabbled in this, using the urinalysis strips in my clinic to test for urinary ketones. However, even though I was sticking to the diet, the strips would mostly turn up negative for ketones.
There are a few reasons why ketone strips may not be a reliable marker for ketosis. Firstly, the don’t test for beta-hydroxybutyrate, which is the main ketone body utilized by the brain, but acetoacetate, another ketone body produced in the liver.
Secondly, urinalysis strips only test for urine ketone spillover. They don’t necessarily reflect blood levels, and they won’t pick up the ketones that are being utilized as fuel by the body. If cells are absorbing all the ketones the liver produces, urine testing may not be positive.
The most accurate, albeit more expensive, method for testing ketone bodies is through a skin-prick test that analyzes blood levels of beta-hydroxybutyrate.
While I knew that the urine strips weren’t highly accurate, not having my state of ketosis validated was discouraging. I was often left in doubt over whether things were “working”. I wondered if there was some other mechanism going on. Was my body finding carbohydrates from someplace else? Did I have Small Intestinal Bacteria Overgrowth that was digesting my fibre and allowing me to absorb it somehow? Were my blood ketones being used up somewhere else (by the yeast in my gut, for instance)?
I did have signs of being in ketosis that I could watch for, however. When I avoid carbs, or fast for a few days, I start to develop a metallic taste on the tip of my tongue. It’s not a common sign of ketosis, a more common sign is a “nail polish” or “paint thinner” taste in the back of the throat, but still a symptom that some people report.
Keto Flu:
During the first few days of switching to Low Carb High Fat, I had to white knuckle through a phase realistically termed the “Keto or Low Carb Flu”. This horrible phenomenon is thought to be a result of the body switching from burning glucose as its primary fuel source to adapting to ketone body production. There is often a painful adjustment period for brains that have to learn how to rely on ketones for their main fuel source after a lifetime of glucose abundance.
It was nasty. I felt intense hunger and sugar cravings, nausea, dizziness, and weakness—it truly was a “flu”.
I knew that I had spent most, if not all, of my life as a sugar burner. Before Keto, I would crave food even just two hours after a full meal. I would often feel “hangry”: dizzy and shaky in between meals, and irritable if made to wait for food for too long. I had been existing between carb-dense meals, experiencing insanity-inducing reactive hypoglycemia between my regular sugar fixes.
The more I read about others’ experiences, the more I was assured that the keto flu symptoms were actually a sign of my body healing. I was becoming adapted to other fuel sources, which was a good thing, I thought.
So, I muscled through and followed the online advice: I consumed more fat to provide more fuel to my brain, including medium chain triglyceride (MCT) oil, which is quickly absorbed by the lymphatic system and turned into ketones by the liver, and I consumed electrolytes, which are more rapidly excreted from the bodies of low carb dieters.
For some people, Keto flu can last for days, for others it lasts weeks. For me, the Keto flu thankfully only lasted two days, after which my body began to adjust and my cravings for sugar went down. I began to feel more energy, which felt encouraging.
Daily Meal Plan:
For breakfast, I would typically eat a high-fat smoothie containing coconut milk yogurt, gelatin, and avocado, and topped with pumpkin seeds and cacao. Sometimes I’d make fat bombs or homemade unsweetened chocolate.
I’d have my second meal of the day in the mid-afternoon, around 2 to 3 pm, for which I’d consume a few cups of cruciferous vegetables, like broccoli or cabbage, with a fatty cut of meat like ground beef, chicken thighs, or salmon, all topped with liberal amounts of fat from coconut, olives, avocados, or grass-fed ghee. I made a lot of batch-cooked grain-free curries and stews.
If I had a third meal or snack in the day, it would be another serving of fat: a handful of macadamia nuts or a hunk of creamed coconut.
Eating this way made me feel like Obama and his grey suits—I didn’t have to plan my meals too carefully. All I had to do was eat fat. My food was so calorie dense and my blood sugar so stable that I didn’t need to eat often. This meant that I didn’t need to worry about bringing food with me everywhere I went; one meal could satiate me for half the day. Hunger was never an emergency situation, as it had been in the past. Hunger would come on very slowly, and it would never be “hanger”; my already low blood sugar had nowhere to dip to. If I needed more food, I could always wait until I got home to eat.
More Benefits:
Within a few days, my PCOS- related cystic acne cleared. I also felt slimmer as some water retention deflated. This felt good. Our body stores carbohydrate in the form of glycogen in the liver and muscles. Glycogen stores retain water.
When glycogen stores are used up, a rapid 5 or more pound drop in weight can occur. This is the “water weight” that people talk about losing when they first begin some kind of nutrition plan.
It’s also common to notice a drop in water weight from a decrease in inflammation, when embarking on a new eating plan. I know that I am sensitive to certain carbs and dairy and, because those things were out of my diet overall (although Keto can certainly include high-fat dairy products for those who can tolerate them), the water retention caused by chronic inflammation seemed to clear.
Although it seems to attract people primarily for its hip-slimming potential, the Ketogenic diet probably does not cause weight loss in and of itself. Instead, the diet encourages a passive reduction in calories by stabilizing blood sugar and insulin levels, while promoting the intake of highly satiating foods containing protein and fat. Ketone bodies also have appetite-suppressing effects. Therefore, it’s probably a calorie deficit that causes the weight loss, rather than any specific biochemistry in the diet itself.
I didn’t lose much more weight than the water weight. However, my mood was brighter. I would wake up in the morning looking forward to the day, which often doesn’t happen in the winter. I felt more sustained energy throughout the day, and really enjoyed the decreased appetite, which led to more productivity.
I felt fine consuming two meals a day, able to get through hours of back-to-back patient visits without needing a snack or a break. It was actually incredible to need so few meals; it was like becoming another person, one no longer ruled by sugar cravings. I was like a camel, switching to stored fuel when the fat from my last meal had run out, and the transition was seamless. There was no wall to hit, and no hypoglcyemic crash to be seen.
I also noticed less bloating and digestive issues, probably from the lack of fermentation in my gut and the reduction in foods that tend to aggravate IBS, like certain vegetables, fruit, and legumes.
However, all was not roses on the Keto diet. While the first few months were dreamy, the longer I stayed on it the more I started to notice changes in my body that indicated the honeymoon period I was enjoying wasn’t going to last.
The Microbiome:
The research is in: human beings probably need 10 servings of fruits and vegetables a day (roughly 5 cups), or 800 g, a day to get the most heart disease, stroke and cancer-preventing benefits that diet can afford us. The International Journal of Epidemiology concluded that, if the correlations found in their February 2017 study were causal, almost 8 million lives might have been saved in 2013 if everyone in the world had simply consumed their fruits and veggies.
It’s one thing all diets, even the faddy ones, agree on—from the Paleo Peeps, to Plant-Based Hippies, to Raw Macrobiotic Sun Worshippers, to Whole Foods Michael Pollen Omnivores, to the dejected nagged-at husband pushing brusselsprouts around on his plate—fruit and vegetables are good for you. You should eat them. If you’re a typical North American, you should probably eat more than you’re eating. The health value of everything else we eat seems to be up for debate: red meat, saturated fat, soy, bread, coffee. The benefits of eating enough fruits and vegetables, however? There’s no contest.
It’s hard to pick one way in which fruits and vegetables are so health protective. It could be because of their high concentrations of micronutrients, reducing the risk of common nutrient deficiencies, like magnesium and vitamin C. It could be because, if you’re filling your body with a kilogram of fruits and vegetables a day, you probably aren’t scarfing down an entire medium-sized pizza and supersized orange pop as well—there just isn’t room. It could also be the antioxidants they contain that protect cells against free radical damage, protecting DNA. Or perhaps its the fermentable fibres present in fruits and vegetables that feed our invaluable microbiome.
The problem with keeping net carbs under 20 grams a day was that I needed to restrict my fruit and vegetable intake. I was eating no fruit at all, and staying away from the starchier veggies, like carrots and beets. I still stuck to my beloved leafy greens and crucifates, but even eating 2 to 3 cups of those guys a day would push me to the upper limits of my carbohydrate intake, which meant I couldn’t eat them as liberally as I had been.
Getting enough vegetables and (any) fruits on the keto diet is hard, if not impossible. This can impact our ability to get the micronutrients we need, but also enough fermentable fibres from vegetables like garlic, onions, yams, Jerusalem artichokes, and legumes, which provide food for our microbiome.
Feeding our gut bugs is important. They benefit us in numerous ways, from digesting out food, to calming inflammation, to fuelling gut cells by producing a short-chain fatty acid called butyrate. They help our immune systems function optimally. They produce neurotransmitters for our brains to work. They balance our stress responses and our circadian rhythms.
Jeff Leach, at the Human Microbiome Project speculates that the lack of dietary fibre in most low-carb diets may impact the health of the microbiome in negative ways by depriving the gut bacteria of their preferred food sources, as well as altering the acidity of the colon and intestines. He cites this article, in which obese subjects on a high-protein and low-carb diet had lower levels of butyrate in their bodies and intestines, likely due to decreased diversity in their guts.
There are, however, some studies that suggest that a Ketogenic diet can improve the microbiome in children with epilepsy, and autism, and some speculation by the researchers that that may be how the diets treat these conditions. However, since these studies are not done in “healthy” children, with an already healthy microbiota, it’s hard to extrapolate the findings to the healthy adult population.
Then there’s the fact that most studies that look at high fat diets and their impact on the microbiome are mostly done in rats. Of course, rats aren’t humans, despite there being relative genetic similarities. In these animal studies, researchers refer to “a high fat diet” when in fact they mean a high fat, high sugar diet. The sources of fat in these “high fat” mouse diets are often corn, margarine, or soy oil, which we know are highly inflammatory and offer few if any health benefits.
In other words, many studies on “high fat” diets are not looking at a relatively balanced Ketogenic diet that consists of vegetables, proteins, and healthy sources of fats from avocados, coconut, fish, olives, nuts and seeds and grass-fed meats.
Context is important as well. Is it the high fat diet that causes a reduction in gut diversity or the absence of fibre? This one mouse study showed that simply providing the mice with fibre in addition to their high fat diets decreased their risk of obesity.
I felt that my gut initially improved in the first few months on Keto: the diet was low in foods that aggravate me: namely refined carbs, sugar, gluten and dairy, as well as some of the fermentable fibres that can aggravate IBS. However, it never fully healed. After a few months, I started to notice the symptoms of bloating and digestive irregularities coming back.
Candida, a yeast that resides in the gut and can overgrow in the intestines in some people, especially the immunocompromised, causing symptoms of fatigue, IBS, and weight gain, among a variety of other symptoms, can survive on ketone bodies. Yeasts have mitochondria of their own. Some species of gut bacteria can consume protein, bile salts and even fats.
Contrary to what many claim, a Ketogenic diet doesn’t necessarily “starve out” the bad gut bugs. Combined with the lack of fibre to feed the beneficial gut bacteria and promote more bacterial diversity, a prolonged Ketogenic diet may be a recipe for gut dysbiosis.
Hormones:
Throughout my year spent in ketosis, I definitely noticed an improvement in my insulin signalling and glucose control, especially in the first few months. Looking at my blood work in March, after about a year of the Ketogenic diet (and then having been off it for a few months), my fasting insulin was very low and fasting blood glucose levels were in the low-optimal range. HOMA-IR, a calculation that is used as a marker of insulin resistance, was also low, indicating good insulin sensitivity.
I personally believe that this means that my risk for getting metabolic syndrome or type II diabetes is low, as long as I maintain this level of insulin sensitivity by watching the glycemic load of my diet and my stress levels.
The metabolic flexibility awarded to me from my year in ketosis also proved to be invaluable. Now, I no longer fear fasting and I can survive on other fuel sources besides sugar. My brain knows how to tap into stored and dietary fat more efficiently, and use those for energy. Even when not following any sort of low-carb diet, I noticed that I could survive between meals while travelling in Southeast Asia for two months, whereas normally I would have had to exist on unhealthy, sugary snacks.
However, after a few months on the diet, I began to notice a decline in my menstrual health. My cycles began to get longer, and soon I started missing periods. I noticed more hair falling out in the shower and more cystic acne developing on my chin. When I ran my blood estrogen and progesterone levels, I was surprised to see that their levels were very low.
We know that insulin, while often vilified as a “fat storage” hormone is actually responsible for storing everything, including nutrients. It also correlates with estrogen levels and the conversion of T4, one of our thyroid hormones, to its active friend, T3, which runs our metabolism. Insulin builds muscle, bone and brain cells. Very low insulin levels, in my case, were contributing to amenorrhea and a disruption in my sex hormones.
This wasn’t good.
While not quite the same as Intermittent Fasting (IF), Keto is often grouped into the same category because of its similar impact on blood glucose and insulin. The difference is that Intermittent Fasting induces ketosis through periodic food restriction, as opposed to carb restriction. Keto and IF often go hand in hand, however. The reduced hunger and high-nutrient density of the foods eaten on a Ketogenic diet often lend well to practicing intermittent fasting. It did in my case—I was only eating two main meals a day.
I always found it interesting, however, that most proponents of intermittent fasting are men. The male body appears to thrive in the fasted state, getting a boost of growth hormone and norepinephrine, both of which provide men with energy, motivation, and an improved sense of well-being.
This hormonal change may be a remnant of our ancestral hunter-gatherer days where it would be an advantage to feel motivated and energized to go out and hunt during periods of food scarcity.
I don’t think female bodies experience exactly the same effect. Some preliminary animal research tends to suggest that as well.
A few rat studies indicate that fasting may impair female insulin sensitivity, and induce amenorrhea, or missed periods. Female bodies rely on a consistent influx of calories and carbohydrates to stimulate insulin, which plays a role in stimulating thyroid hormones and estrogen, to continue to ovulate. Another study showed that fasting tended to “masculinize” female rats, lowering their female hormones, and increasing their levels of androgens, the male sex hormones, like testosterone.
Of course, these studies were done on fasted rats, which cannot be fully translated to the effects of Intermittent Fasting and Ketogenic diets on women. However, some of these findings did validate my experience, which certainly wasn’t being validated in the podcasts and blog posts I was exposed to, largely written and followed by men.
I did experience positive hormonal effects: the increased insulin sensitivity and lowered blood glucose. However, I was not happy about my irregular cycles and estrogen deficiency.
Therefore, I decided to increase my carbohydrate intake, returning to a more moderate Paleo diet that consists of some fruit, starchier vegetables and legumes. After a few months, my periods returned to normal, my skin cleared up, my hair stopped falling out, and my thyroid hormones, estrogen and progesterone levels all returned to their optimal ranges.
I have still have low fasting insulin levels, suggesting that the Ketogenic diet did help to reset my insulin sensitivity and that this effect may be lasting.
Metabolic Health:
After a year of doing the Ketogenic diet, and then a few months of returning to a moderate-carb paleo diet, I tested my cholesterol levels and inflammatory markers. My HDL cholesterol (the “good” cholesterol, to put it very simply) was high, my triglycerides (a risk factor for heart disease) were very low, and my LDL cholesterol (the “bad” cholesterol that statin drugs target) was also low. My inflammatory markers: C-Reactive Protein (CRP) and erythrocyte sedimentation rate (ESR), were also low.
While it is typically the monounsaturated fats, like olive oils and avocados, that are associated with increased levels of the heart-protective HDL cholesterol, even saturated fats from coconut oil can raise HDL. LDL is often lowered by these healthy monounsaturated fats, however saturated fats, even healthy ones, can raise LDL in certain individuals.
All else being equal, higher levels of LDL may not be as big of a problem as we think. Especially in the context of low risk factors, like low inflammation, absence of smoking and a healthy body weight. What’s more, the triglycerides and cholesterol/HDL ratio may be more important factors for determining heart disease risk. Further, assessing LDL particle size may also provide those concerned about their LDL levels with more information concerning their cardiovascular health. That being said, it is important to be aware that some of the fats present in a Ketogenic diet have the potential to raise blood levels of LDL in certain susceptible individuals, and that not everyone’s blood lipid results will look like mine.
Triglyceride levels are associated with liver function, and generally reflect dietary sugar, fructose and refined carbohydrate intake, rather than fat intake. Reducing refined dietary carbohydrates like white grains, flours and sugars is a good strategy for reducing triglyceride levels and reducing heart disease risk.
Some individuals can experience elevated levels of inflammation on a Ketogenic diet, depending on the quality of foods consumed. A Ketogenic diet low in fibre that fails to feed the microbiome; high in foods that a person may have an individualized sensitivity to (such as dairy, eggs, nuts or soy); or high in inflammatory fats like trans fats, and industrial oils like canola and corn oil, may all contribute to increased inflammation.
That being said, certain ketone bodies like beta-hydroxybutyrate may have anti-inflammatory properties. Many of the fats consumed in a mindful, whole foods Ketogenic diet, such as olives, avocados, seeds, salmon, and coconut, are also anti-inflammatory.
I found my blood markers a good indicator of the power of a high-fat, low-carb diet to, at least in my case, improve HDL cholesterol and lower triglycerides, fasting insulin and fasting glucose levels. Whether I needed an entire year in ketosis, or whether I even needed to actually enter ketosis to receive these benefits, isn’t clear. Perhaps I could have gotten the same results by moderately lowering my carb intake while increasing my dietary intake of healthy fats.
Modified Ketogenic Diets:
While I do think I benefitted from entering into ketosis, I would not necessarily recommend a Ketogenic diet to patients unless to achieve some sort of therapeutic goal, such as improved insulin resistance, or for adjunct cancer care, to reduce inflammation, or to improve severe depression, migraines, or narcolepsy.
However, there may be a benefit to cyclical Ketogenic diets for memory and cognition, and increased life span in mice. Cyclical Ketogenic diets involve entering ketosis on alternate weeks. On the other weeks, participants return to a normal, whole foods diet that contains higher amounts of carbohydrates. In this case, individuals gets the benefits of beta-hydroxybutyrate production and increased metabolic flexibility on their weeks on, while also being able to eat a high amount of fermentable carbs and fibres on their weeks off, essentially getting the best of both worlds.
Adding medium chain triglycerides to food may also confer health benefits, similar to being on a Ketogenic diet. One study showed that adding MCT oil to a high-carb breakfast (pasta), reduced appetite in men. This is likely because, after burning through the glucose in the pasta, the men’s brains were able to access the ketone bodies that were made readily available by burning the MCT oil. This kept their brains fuelled and their bodies satiated for longer.
The men eating pasta and MCT oil in the study had a ketone blood level of 0.3, which is similar to that obtained from a diet that derives 10% of its calories from carbohydrates, which is an essentially a very low-carb, if not Ketogenic, diet. This may indicate that simply adding MCT oil to a moderate to low-carbohydrate diet, may confer some of the benefits of having a slightly higher rate of circulating ketone bodies without having to follow a strict diet. Again, following this strategy, you can get the best of both worlds: consume a diet high in fibre, while also getting a steady flow of ketone bodies to the brain.
Other interesting areas of research are the use of supplemental, or exogenous, ketones for therapeutic use, however the area is new and not something I currently recommend in my practice (although this may change when more research begins to emerge and better supplements enter the market).
My Plan Moving Forward?
I’m happy that I gave the Ketogenic diet a try, but now I’m back to my more modified Paleo diet, aimed at promoting gut health, optimizing my micronutrient intake, regulating hormones, and supporting my energy levels. I now consume berries and apples, legumes, starchier vegetables and lean proteins more often and aim to get 10 servings of fruits and vegetables a day, with 8 to 9 of servings coming from vegetables, as opposed to fruit.
I currently start my day with a smoothie with berries, an avocado, spinach and protein powder. For lunch I have some sort of protein, fat, and tons of veggies. I eat more often than when I was in ketosis: about 3 meals a day with a vegetable and fat as a snack, or no snack at all in between, depending on my schedule.
My total daily carbohydrate intake falls around 100 grams a day with a net carb intake between 50 to 70 grams a day, depending on the fibre content of the vegetables, seeds, and legumes I’ve eaten that day. I try to get upwards of 30 grams of dietary fibre per day.
I avoid all sugar, including sweeter fruits like tropical fruits, and dried fruits, like dates. I especially stay away from refined sugars, even “natural” coconut sugars and agave. I avoid processed carbohydrates and flours. I mostly avoid grains, except when travelling or visiting someone’s house, getting my carbs from starchy vegetables and tubers, legumes and berries. I continue to avoid dairy (which I’m sensitive to), gluten, and processed industrial oils like canola, corn, and soy oil.
Right now, rather than focussing on macronutrient ratios, I’m directing my food intake towards obtaining the Recommended Daily Allowances of the micronutrients that run all of our cellular reactions, and the fibres that feed a healthy gut microbiota. I use an app called Cronometer to track this.
I definitely eat more fat than before, adding MCT oil to my morning smoothie, especially on days when I need to stay full and focused for longer. I also aim to do at least 12 hours of fasting a day, trying to get in 16-18 hour fasts where I can, ending dinner at 4pm, for example. I no longer do regular long bouts of Intermittent Fasting, particularly not when I’m feeling stressed and burnt out.
Would I Recommend the Ketogenic Diet to Patients?
One of the main tenants of Naturopathic Medicine is “Do no harm”. While it may seem like making diet and lifestyle recommendations are relatively benign therapies, I believe that they do have the potential to do physical and psychological harm, particularly if they are strict recommendations.
Following a strict diet may have health benefits, but it also may isolate us from friends and family, frustrate us and restrict our intake of certain nutrients, like fibre, vitamins and minerals. This is one of the reasons I do not ever advocate a Vegan diet, although if patients are following one already, I believe in guiding them to optimize their nutrient intake.
Furthermore, at least in my personal experience, the cure was stronger than the disease. I probably didn’t need to do the Ketogenic diet for so long; this was evidenced by the hormonal imbalances that I began to experience towards the end of my year on the diet.
However, particularly for patients who are suffering from metabolic syndrome, type II diabetes and insulin resistance or PCOS, there may be some powerful benefits to entering ketosis in order to dramatically reverse metabolic dysfunction. In this case, a modified regime combining Intermittent Fasting and cyclical Ketogenic diets could be beneficial.
Of course, it all depends on where patients are at in their nutrition journeys. Sometimes I meet patients who require, and respond well to, more heroic lifestyle interventions. Other times I meet patients relying on several sugary treats a day to get them through. In these cases, simply tweaking their diet in small ways, using baby steps may also have powerful disease-risk-reversing effects.
Since publising the original article about the Mirena IUD on this blog, thousands of women have come out of the woodwork writing to me asking for help.
When I originally wrote the article, I was spurned on by my observations of the women in my practice who had experienced a rise in estrogen dominance and low progesterone after the insertion of their IUDs (which were often inserted to treat hormone imbalances!).
At that point I never imagined that so many women would be affected by the IUD, or that even more were suffering from so many hormonal symptoms that drastically affected their lives and health.
It makes sense: our society does not set us up for proper hormonal function.
Our diets are carbohydrate-heavy, promoting insulin resistance and blood sugar dysregulation, which impacts our ovaries’ ability to make estrogen properly.
An excess amount of body fat produces more estrogen in the body and acts as a reservoir for the toxic estrogens in our environment.
We lack many of the micronutrients necessary to process our hormones properly, such as vitamin D, B vitamins, magnesium, zinc, omega 3 fatty acids, glutathione, and amino acids.
Many of us have impaired or suboptimal liver function, or sluggish digestion, which keeps hormones in our bodies around longer than they should be.
A dysbiotic gut has the tendency to turn estrogen in the gut back “on”, putting it back into circulation when it was otherwise on its way out of the body.
Stress alters our hormonal function, including our ability to make progesterone, DHEA-S, convert thyroid hormones, and process estrogen properly.
Xenoestrogens in our food and environment, from plastics, fragrances, pesticides, and processed soy products, contribute to overall body burden of the hormones in our body, throwing off our delicate balance, and contributing to symptoms.
The result of all this is that many women suffer from hormonal imbalances.
10% of women have some form of PCOS, or Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome, characterized by the body’s inability to properly make progesterone or estrogen, instead making loads of male hormones, like testosterone. PCOS alters fertility, promotes weight gain, and causes things like unwanted facial hair growth, acne, and missed periods. PCOS is often connected to stress and insulin resistance.
Many women in my practice suffer from PMS or PMDD, experiencing often debilitating symptoms sometimes even two weeks before their periods begin. They might get migraines, intense cravings for sugar, and massive mood changes, such as anxiety, intense irritability, or devastating depression. Panic attacks can occur at this time as well. Many of them comment that their mood and personalities flip once their hormones levels reach a certain point, causing them to act like different people. This can jeopardize their relationships with spouses and children, coworkers, friends and family.
Tender and painful breasts, or breast lumps, are also common in many of these women.
Acne, weight gain, stress, fatigue, disrupted sleep, depression and anxiety are all symptoms I see in women with hormonal imbalances.
Many women have horrific cycles, experiencing painful and heavy periods that often cause them to miss days of work every month. Many of these women struggle to keep their iron levels in the optimal range, suffering from hair loss, fatigue and weakness.
Many women are diagnosed with fibroids, or endometriosis, or are concerned about their risk of female cancers like breast, ovarian, uterine and cervical cancer.
All of these symptoms are often linked to relatively higher levels of estrogens compared to progesterone, sometimes termed Estrogen Dominance by functional medical practitioners who look at the underlying causes of bodily imbalances.
I feel terrible that I can’t help more of the women who write to me. My license prevents me from giving advice to those who live abroad, especially to non-patients over the internet. It’s a shame, however, because oftentimes the solutions are relatively simple, despite how complicated many of these symptoms might seem.
I’m hoping that this article can provide some direction to many of the women who suffer.
Firstly, I want to state that I am not against birth control or even the Mirena IUD (or other IUDs, for that matter). The vast majority of women with the IUD tolerate it. For many women with debilitating heavy periods and endometriosis it can be the only viable solution that makes life tolerable.
In my social practice at Evergreen, many of the women I see experiencing homelessness, drug addiction, or PTSD from relationship trauma, rely on the efficacy of IUDs to prevent unwanted pregnancies. Their lives often don’t allow for them to remember to consistently take pills every month.
Many women don’t tolerate combination birth control because of a history of blood clots, female cancers, or migraine headaches associated with their periods, and therefore the Mirena IUD, which is progesterone only, is a safe alternative for preventing unwanted pregnancy.
That all being said, many women do suffer on the Mirena IUD (or other forms of birth control). They were perhaps put on the Mirena to deal with some of the above symptoms of hormonal imbalance, or for contraception. Many of them noticed that their symptoms became worse after insertion of the IUD.
How the Mirena IUD and Birth Control Works:
The Mirena works by secreting small amounts of progestins, a synthetic form of progesterone, into the uterus and surrounding tissues. While it is not fully known how the Mirena works, the end result is a suppression of ovulation. This results in either very light periods or a complete cessation of periods until the IUD is removed (after 5 years when its hormones run out).
It is important to say here that, while birth control can certainly treat the symptoms of hormonal imbalances, it does not correct them.
All forms of birth control, with their synthetic versions of the hormones estrogen and progesterone, simply induce further hormone imbalances in the body. They introduce versions of hormones that may suppress or alter symptoms (such as heavy and painful bleeding, or acne), but the versions of hormones are not fully recognized by the body and therefore don’t fully replace all the hormones’ important functions, such as mood regulation, immunity, or blood sugar balance.
The effects of both altering the body’s natural hormonal balance, while ignoring the underlying cause of hormonal issues, is often what causes symptoms to continue or worsen.
For example, women with PCOS are prescribed birth control to manage acne or promote monthly periods. However, when women with PCOS miss periods, it is because they are not ovulating. The missed periods are not the problem; the lack of ovulation is.
Despite that, many women with PCOS experiencing amenorrhea (or missed cycles) will be prescribed birth control. However, birth control does not address the underlying cause of amenorrhea. It simply further suppresses ovulation (because its main purpose is to prevent unwanted pregnancy).
The periods you get while on birth control are not periods. Periods from birth control are withdrawal bleeds. After 21 days of taking hormonal pills, pills are stopped or replaced with placebo pills. The withdrawal of hormones in the pills induces a bleed that resembles a period, but is not one.
Hormonal contraception does not correct hormonal imbalance, it imposes further hormonal imbalance to manage symptoms. This is not always bad!
But it is an important difference.
Many women do require symptom suppression, particularly if their symptoms are severe. Many individuals in my practice experience periods so heavy that the only way for them to get through the month is with an IUD. Genetic variability in how our bodies process hormones can make us susceptible to intense hormonal symptoms, through no fault of our own.
In my opinion, however, it is important to attempt to address the underlying cause and to set our bodies up for better hormonal regulation, making as many changes as our lifestyles will allow.
What You Can Do About It:
If you are like any of the people I described above who seek my help, there are a few things that you can do to get started on correcting hormones.
Working With a Professional:
The first thing I advise is finding a licensed naturopathic doctor or functional medicine practitioner who understands hormones, can order lab tests, and will address the underlying cause of your hormonal imbalances by taking the time to fully understand your body and lifestyle.
This practitioner might be a naturopathic doctor (you can find one in North America by looking one up at naturopathic.org), or a medical doctor, a chiropractor, or a highly skilled nutritionist or nurse practitioner. Research this person well, read their articles, and perhaps book in with them for a complimentary meet and greet.
Testing:
I often test patients using simple blood tests, on day 21 of their cycles (or about 7-9 days before they expect their next period).
I will test their blood, looking for anemia, will test iron and B12 levels, homocysteine (to gauge their ability to methylate), vitamin D, cholesterol (to see if their diets are promoting proper hormone synthesis), estradiol, estrone (the more toxic, problematic estrogen), progesterone, free testosterone, a thyroid panel, fasting glucose and fasting insulin (to calculate insulin resistance using something called the HOMA-IR), HbA1C (to look a long-term blood glucose control), FSH and LH (two hormones made in the brain that talk to the ovaries and orchestrate the menstrual cycle), DHEA-S, to name a few.
Some women will require more testing. Others will require less.
These labs are interpreted from a functional perspective. Even though you are in the “normal” ranges (which take into account the entire population, many of which are not healthy—they are seeing their doctors, after all!), these blood markers may not be optimally balanced, giving us an opportunity to correct things before they go further.
Testing allows us to match symptoms to underlying imbalances and to be able to properly direct treatment protocols. Women with estrogen dominance may be experiencing high levels of estrogen and normal progesterone, which indicates a body burden of estrogen or impaired liver and digestive system clearance. Other women may be experiencing normal levels of estrogen but low progesterone, indicating a failure of their bodies to ovulate, due to high stress, and PCOS (or the Mirena IUD and birth control pill).
Other options for hormonal testing are month-long salivary hormone testing, or DUTCH testing, which looks at hormone breakdown in the urine. I sometimes run these tests, but find that blood testing is useful, accurate, and more cost-effective.
Treatment:
Once you understand your individual hormonal situation through testing (and through working with a practitioner who is putting the testing together with your symptoms and health history), your practitioner may recommend a variety of treatments.
I personally combine diet and lifestyle with key herbal and nutritional supplements, to target what is going on under the surface with my particular patients.
These treatments may include herbs that boost ovulation, aid liver detoxification, or regulate the stress response. I might recommend nutraceuticals that encourage methylation, or aid in hormone production.
My treatments take into account the individual’s symptoms, labs, diet, lifestyle, and any other health issues she may be facing like fatigue, digestive disturbances, or poor sleep.
What You Can Do Today:
Barring more individualized assessment and advice, there are some best lifestyle practices that can help most women balance their hormones better, whether they are still using birth control to control and address their hormonal symptoms or prevent pregnancy.
Diet:
When it comes to diet and hormone support, we need to ensure that we are balancing blood sugar, boosting liver detoxification pathways, promoting hormone synthesis, and supporting digestion, especially if experiencing constipation.
Consume more leafy greens: kale, spinach, collards, beet greens, arugula, etc. Eat 1-2 cups of these foods every day. Leafy greens contain active folate, which boosts methylation and detoxification. They also contain magnesium which is essential for hormonal regulation as well as 300 other important biochemical reactions in the body that balance mood and hormones.
Consume more cruciferous vegetables: broccoli, cauliflower, brussel sprouts, cabbage, bok choy, etc. Eat 1-2 cups of these foods every day. Crucifates help the body make glutathione, and contain indole-3-carbinole, which helps eliminate excess estrogens from the body. Broccoli sprouts are potent players in these pathways. Consume them as often as possible.
Ensure adequate dietary fibre intake: I often recommend ground flaxseeds or chia seeds in smoothies, avocados, fruits and vegetables and legumes (if tolerated) to make sure that women are having regular bowel movements to clear excess estrogens out of the body. 2 tbs of ground flaxseed (or more) every day can help balance estrogen levels and promote daily bowel movements.
Balance blood sugar: consume protein, fat and fibre at every meal. Avoid refined starches and flours. Avoid all sugar, even natural sugar like maple syrup, coconut sugar, cane sugar, honey, agave, etc. Try stevia or avoid sweets. Limit carbs (grains, legumes, root vegetables like potatoes or sweet potatoes, to 1/2 cup to 1 cup per meal). Only consume whole grains like quinoa, buckwheat, steel cut oats, millet, and teff. Cook them yourself!
Avoid soy, particularly processed soy, like vegan burgers, or soy milk.
Consume omega 3 fatty acids in fatty fish like salmon and sardines, or nuts and seeds like flax and chia seeds, walnuts, and pumpkin seeds. Get 2-4 tablespoons of these nuts and seeds every day and 3-4 servings of fatty fish a week.
Consume animal products: eggs contain choline, which is essential for liver function, meat contains vitamins B6 and B12, which are essential for hormonal regulation and production. Cholesterol in animal products are the backbones of our sex hormones. Iodine, found in animal foods, regulates estrogen balance in the body. If possible, try to obtain organic animal products from pastured or free-range animals to boost omega 3 intake, to lower your impact on the environment, and to promote animal welfare.
Other Lifestyle Practices:
Boost progesterone production by managing stress:
Establish a self-care routine: plan regular vacations, even small outings, do meditation or yoga, take breaks from work, spend quality time with family, have a plan to get your work done on time, ask for help.
Sleep! Aim for at least 8 hours of sleep, and try to get to bed before 12am. Practice good sleep hygiene by avoiding electronics before bed, keeping the bedroom as dark as possible, and setting a bedtime and wake time, even on weekends. Body scan meditations and some key supplements can be helpful for resetting circadian rhythms. Regulating blood sugar can have a major impact on improving sleep. Talk to your functional medicine doctor or naturopathic doctor for individualized sleep solutions.
Eliminate exposure to toxic estrogens and boost estrogen clearance:
Avoid exposure to xenoestrogens: whenever possible use natural body products, deodorants and shampoos, or “edible” body products for face and hair. Avoid plastic water bottles and plastic food containers. Use natural cleaning products around the house. Avoid fragrances and processed foods, especially processed soy.
Encourage sweating: get regular exercise or engage in regular sauna therapy. If you don’t have access to a sauna, epsom salt baths can also work—anything that helps you sweat. Heat therapy has also been shown to benefit mood and the stress response.
Heal your digestion: make this a priority with your naturopathic doctor, so that you can absorb the nutrients from the foods you’re eating as well as encourage daily bowel movements and optimal microbiome balance.
Maintain a healthy weight: body fat is metabolically active and can increase overall estrogenic load. Work with your naturopathic doctor to manage your weight. We often attempt to lose weight to become healthy, however I find my patients have far more success (and fun!) getting healthy in order to lose weight. Healthy weight loss often involves managing stress, sleeping 8 hours a night, avoiding sugar and processed foods, and regulating blood sugar, as well as encouraging proper sweating and liver detoxification.
Want to balance your hormones, energy and mood naturally? Check out my 6-week foundational membership program Good Mood Foundations. taliand.com/good-mood-learn
I often get emails like this, “Dear Doctor, please tell me your favourite natural cure for anxiety”, to which I often reply:
Dear, Anxiety,
Imagine you are a gardener, tending to your garden. You are a skilled gardener: you tend lovingly to your plants every day and you care deeply for their welfare.
You are the perfect gardener in every way, except for one: for some reason you don’t know anything about soil.
No one has ever taught you about the damp, dark soot that envelopes the roots of your beloved plants, kindly offering to them its protection, water, and nutrients.
You are a gardener, but are innocently oblivious to the fact that soil must be nurtured by millions of microbes, and that nutrients in the soil must be replenished. You have no idea that the other plants sharing the soil with your garden form a complex network of give and take, depositing nutrients into it, while greedily sucking others away.
Now, as this soil-ignorant gardener, imagine your surprise when, despite your care and attention, the plants in your garden wither and die, bearing no flowers or fruit.
Imagine your frustration when your efforts to prop up tired stems fail. You apply water and fertilizer to buds, leaves and stems. You stand by, powerless, as your garden dies.
Notice the weeds taking over your garden, which you lop off at their stems, unaware that their roots reside deep inside the earth.
When the weeds pop up again and again, you slash at them, burn them, and you curse the skies.
“Why me?”
Why you, indeed.
You are unaware of root gardening, soil gardening, just as many of us are unaware of root medicine—soil medicine.
You see, Anxiety, there are many natural remedies that can help.
However, tossing natural pills at twitching nerves, imbalanced blood sugar, unregulated stress responses, and various nutrient deficiencies, might be as naive a practice as spray painting your roses while they wilt in sandy earth, beneath their red paint.
It might be akin to prescribing anxiety medication or a shot of vodka to calm your trembling mind; you might feel better for a time, propped up with good intentions, before collapsing in the dry soil encasing you.
With no one to tend to your roots you eventually crumple, anxiety still rampant.
“Why me?” You curse the skies.
Rather than asking, “Why me?” it might help to simply start asking, “Why?”
While it is important to understand the “What” of your condition—What disease is present? What is the best natural cure for anxiety?—naturopathic doctors are far more interested in the “Why”.
As Dr. Mark Hyman, functional medical doctor, asks:
Why are your symptoms occurring?
Why now?
And why in this way?
Naturopathic doctors prescribe natural remedies for conditions such as anxiety, it’s true. However, naturopathic medicine is a medicine that first tends to the soil.
Naturopathic doctors first look for and addresses the roots of symptoms, working with the relationships that exist between you and your body, your food, the people in your life, your society, your environment—your soil.
Healing involves taking a complete inventory of all the factors in your life that influence your mental, physical, and emotional wellness. It requires looking at the air, water, sunlight, nutrients, stressors, hormones, chemicals, microbes, thoughts and emotions that our cells bathe in each day.
Healing means looking closely at the soil that surrounds us. It requires asking, What are the roots that this condition stems from? And, What soil buries these roots? Does it nourish me?
Do I nourish it?
The causes of disease can be interconnected and complex. Very often, however, there are common root networks from which many modern-day chronic health conditions arise.
Starving Gut Bacteria.
It was Hippocrates, the father of medicine, who first proclaimed that “All disease begins in the gut.”
Our digestive systems are long, hollow tubes that extend from mouth to anus, and serve as our body’s connection to the outside world. What enters our digestive system does not fully become the body until the cells that line that digestive tract deem these nutrients worthy of entering.
Along their 9 metre-long, 50-hour journey, these nutrients are processed by digestive enzymes, broken down by trillions of beneficial bacteria, and sorted out by the immune cells that guard entrance to our vulnerable bodies.
Our immune cells make the judgement call between what sustains us, and what has that potential to kill us. For this reason, about 70% of our immune system is located along our digestive tract.
Our gut bacteria, containing an estimated 30 trillion cells, outnumber the cells in our body 3 to 1. Science has only just begun to write the love story between these tiny cells and our bodies. These bacteria are responsible for aiding in the digestion of our food, producing essential nutrients, such as B vitamins and fat-soluble vitamins, and keeping our intestines healthy.
However, this love story can turn tragic when these little romantics are not properly fed or nurtured, or when antagonists enter the story in the form of pathogenic bacteria or yeast.
Our microbiome may impact our health in various ways.
Studies are emerging showing that obese people have different gut profiles than those who are normal weight. Our gut bacteria have a role in producing the hormones that regulate hunger, mood, stress, circadian rhythms, metabolism, and inflammation. They regulate our immune system, playing a role in soothing autoimmune conditions, and improving our ability to fight off infections and cancer.
Psychological and physical stress, inflammation, medication use, and a diet consisting of processed food, can all conspire to negatively affect the health of our gut. This can lead to a plethora of diseases: mood disorders, psychiatric illness, insulin resistance, cardiovascular disease, chronic pain and inflammation, obesity, hormonal issues, such as endometriosis, autoimmune disease, and, of course, chronic digestive concerns such as IBS, among others.
As Hippocrates long knew, one doesn’t have to dig for long to uncover an unhappy gut microbiome as one of the primary roots of disease.
Our gut has the power to nurture us, to provide us with the fuel that keeps our mood bright and our energy high. However, if we fail it, out gut also has the power to plague our cells with chronic inflammation and disease.
To be fully healthy, we must tend to our gut like a careful gardener tends to her soil.
This involves eating a diet rich in fermented foods, like kefir, and dietary fibre, like leeks, Jerusalem artichokes, and black beans. It also means, consuming flavonoid-rich foods like green tea, and cocoa, and consuming a colourful tapestry of various fruits and vegetables.
Healing our gut requires avoiding foods it doesn’t like. These may include foods that feed pathogenic bacteria, mount an immune response, kill our good bacteria, trigger inflammation, or simply those processed foods that fail to nurture us.
To heal ourselves, first we must feed out gut.
Confused Circadian Rhythms.
For hundreds of thousands of years, all of humanity rose, hunted, ate, fasted, and slept according to the sun’s rhythms.
To align us with nature, our bodies contain internal clocks, a central one located in brain, the suprachiasmatic nucleus, which is susceptible to light from the sun, and peripheral clocks located in the liver and pancreas, which respond to our eating patterns.
Our gut bacteria also respond to and influence our body’s clocks.
However, the invention of electricity, night shifts, and 24-hour convenience stores, means that our bodies can no longer rely on the outside world to guide our waking and sleeping patterns. This can confuse our circadian rhythms, leading to digestive issues, insomnia, daytime fatigue, mood disorders, and problems with metabolism, appetite, and blood-sugar regulation.
Dr. Satchin Panda, PhD, a researcher at the Salk Institute in California, found that mice who ate a poor diet experienced altered circadian rhythms. However, he found that when these mice were fed the same diet in accordance with their natural rhythms, they weighed less, had lower incidences of diabetes and cardiovascular disease, had better cognitive health, and lived longer.
These findings indicate that perhaps it is not what we eat but when that may impact our health.
Perhaps it is that an unnatural diet disconnects us from nature, or that this disconnection tempts us to choose non-nutritive foods, but the research by Dr. Panda and his team reveals the importance of aligning our daily routines with our bodies’ natural rhythms in order to experience optimal health.
According to Dr. Panda’s findings, this involves eating during an 8 to 12-hour window, perhaps having breakfast at 7am and finishing dinner early, or simply avoiding nighttime snacking.
For many of us, this may involve making the effort to keep our sleep schedules consistent, even on weekends.
For most of us, it involves avoiding exposure to electronics (which emit circadian-confusing blue light) after the sun goes down, and exposing our eyes to natural sunlight as soon after waking as possible.
Nature Deficit Disorder.
Nature Deficit Disorder is a phrase, coined by Richard Louv, in the 2005 book, Last Child in the Woods.
According to Louv, a variety of childhood problems, especially mental health diagnoses like ADHD, are a direct result of our society’s tendency to increasingly alienate children from nature.
With most of humanity living in cities, nature has become a place we visit, rather than what immerses us. However much modernization might remove us from nature, our bodies, as well as the food, air, water, sunlight, and natural settings they require to thrive, are products of nature, and cannot be separated from it.
A Japanese practice called Shinrin-Yoku, or “Forest Bathing”,developed in the 1980’s toattempt to reconnect modern people with the healing benefits of spending time in a natural setting. There is an immediate reduction in stress hormones, blood pressure, and heart rate when people immerse themselves in natural environments, such as a forest.
Whether we like it or not, our roots need soil. It is possible that the components of this soil are too complex to manufacture. When we try to live without soil, essential elements that nourish us, and the various relationship between these elements are left out.
When we remove ourselves from nature, or ignore it fully, we become like gardeners oblivious to the deep dependency their plants have on the soil that enshrouds them.
Connecting with nature by spending time outside, retraining our circadian rhythms, connecting with our food sources, and consuming natural, whole foods, may be essential for balancing our minds, emotions, and physical bodies.
A Lack of Key Building Blocks.
Our bodies are like complex machines that need a variety of macro and micronutrients, which provide us with the fuel, building blocks, vitamins and minerals that we need to function.
As I child, I would play with Lego, putting together complex structures according to the blueprints in the box. When I discovered that a piece was missing, I would fret. It meant that my masterpiece would no longer look right, or work. If I was lucky, I might find a similar piece to replace it, but it wouldn’t be the same.
After looking long and hard for it, sometimes the missing piece would turn up. I’d locate it under the carpet, my brother’s bottom, or lodged in a dark corner of the box. Often our bodies don’t get that lucky.
Nutrients like vitamin B12, perhaps, or a specific essential amino acid, or a mineral like magnesium, help our body perform essential steps in its various biochemical pathways.
These pathways follow our innate blueprint for health. They dictate how we eat, sleep, breathe, and create and use energy. They control how our bones and hair grow. They control our mood and hormones. They form our immune systems. These pathways run us.
Our bodies carry out the complicated instructions in our DNA to will us into existence using the ingredients supplied from food. If our bodies are missing one or several of these ingredients—a vitamin or mineral—an important bodily task simply won’t get done.
Dr. Bruce Ames, PhD, theorized that when nutrient levels are suboptimal, the body triages what it has to cove tasks essential to our immediate survival, while compromising other jobs that are important, but less dire.
For example, a body may have enough vitamin C to repair wounds or keep the teeth in our mouths—warding off obvious signs of scurvy, a disease that results from severe vitamin C deficiency. However, it may not have enough to protect us from the free radicals generated in and outside of our bodies. This deficiency may eventually lead to chronic inflammation, and even cancer, years later.
According to Dr. Ames’ Triage Theory, mild to moderate nutrient deficiencies may manifest later in life, as diseases that arise from the deprivation of the building blocks needed to thrive.
In North America, despite an overconsumption of calories, nutrient deficiencies are surprisingly common.
25-50% of people don’t get enough iron, which is important for the transport of oxygen, the synthesis of neurotransmitters, and for proper thyroid function.
One third of the world’s population is deficient in iodine, which affects thyroid health and fertility.
Up to 82% of North Americans are vitamin D deficient. Vitamin D regulates the expression of over 1000 genes in the body, including those involved in mood regulation, bone health, immunity, and cancer prevention.
Vitamin B12 is commonly deficient in the elderly, vegans and vegetarians. It is important for lowering inflammation, creating mood-regulating neurotransmitters, and supporting nervous system health. Deficiency in vitamin B12 can result in fatigue. Severe deficiency can lead to irreversible nerve damage, dementia, and even seizures.
Magnesium is an essential mineral involved in over 300 chemical reactions, including mood and hormone pathways. Over 40% of North Americans do not consume enough magnesium, which is found in leafy green vegetables.
Our bodies have requirements for fats, which make up our brain mass and the backbone of our sex hormones, and protein, which makes up our enzymes, neurotransmitters and the structure of our body: bones, skin, hair, nails, and connective tissue.
Our gut microbiota require fibre.
Our cells need antioxidants to help protect us from the free radical damage from our own cells’ metabolism and our exposure to environmental toxins.
We certainly are what we eat, which means we can be magnificent structures with every piece in place, thriving with abundance and energy.
Despite reasonably good intentions, we can also suffer from nutrient scarcity, forced to triage essential nutrients to keep us from keeling over, while our immune health, mood, and overall vitality slowly erode.
A Body on Fire: Chronic Inflammation.
When we injure ourselves—banging a knee against the sharp edge of the coffee table, or slashing a thumb with a paring knife—our immune systems rally to the scene.
Our immune cells protect us against invaders that might take advantage of the broken skin to infect us. They mount an inflammatory response, with symptoms of pain, heat, redness, and swelling, in order to heal us. They recruit proteins to the scene to stop blood loss; they seal our skin back up, leaving behind only a small white scar—a clumsiness souvenir.
Our inflammatory response is truly amazing.
One the danger has been dealt with, the immune response is trained to turn off. However, when exposed to a stressor, bacteria, or toxin, for prolonged periods, our immune system may have trouble quieting. Chronic issues can contribute to chronic inflammation.
Scientists argue that an inflammatory response gone rogue may be the source of most chronic diseases, from heart disease, cancer, and diabetes, to schizophrenia and major depressive disorder.
The gut is often the source of chronic inflammation as it hosts about 70% of the immune system. When we eat something that our immune system doesn’t like, an inflammatory response is triggered. This can cause digestive issues such as inflammatory bowel disease, celiac disease, and the more common irritable bowel syndrome. It can also lead to more widespread issues like chronic pain, arthritis, migraines, and even mood disorders like Bipolar.
Ensuring optimal gut health through nurturing the gut microbiome, and eating a clean diet free of food sensitivities, is essential for keeping the body’s levels of inflammation low.
Constant Fighting and Fleeing.
Like inflammation, our stress response is essential to our survival.
When facing a predatory animal, our body is flooded with stress hormones that aim to remove us from the danger: either through fighting, fleeing, or freezing. Our stress response is affectionately called our “Fight or Flight” response.
However, like inflammation, problems arise when our stress response refuses to turn off. Traffic, exams, fights with in-laws, and other modern-day struggles, can be constant predators that keep us in a chronically stressed-out state.
Chronic stress has major implications for our health: it can affect the gut, damage our microbiome, alter our circadian rhythms, mess with mood and hormones, and contribute to chronic inflammation. Stress gets in the way of our ability to care for ourselves: it isolates us, encourages us to consume unhealthy foods, and buffer our emotions through food, alcohol, work, and drugs.
We also know that stress has a role in the development of virtually every disease. Like chronic inflammation, it has been found to contribute to chronic anxiety, depression, digestive concerns, weight gain, headaches, heart disease, insomnia, chronic pain, and problems with concentration and memory, among others.
Discomfort with Discomfort.
To assess its impact on health, it helps to determine between two key types of stress: distress, the chronic wear and tear of traffic, disease, and deadlines, and eustress.
Eustress is beneficial stress—the short-lived discomfort of intense exercise, the euphoric agony of emotional vulnerability, or the bitter nutrients of green vegetables—that makes the body more resilient to hardship.
Whenever I feel discomfort, I try to remember the ducks.
Several years ago, on a particularly frigid winter day, I was walking my dog. Bundled against the cold wind, we strolled along the semi-frozen lake, past tree branches beautifully preserved in glass cases of ice. Icebergs floated on the lake. So did a group of ducks, bobbing peacefully in the icy waters.
With nothing to protect their thin flippers from the sub-zero temperatures, they couldn’t have felt comfortable. There couldn’t have been even a part of them that felt warm, cozy, or fed.
There was no fire for them to retreat to, no dinner waiting for them at home, no slippers to stuff frozen, wet flippers into. This was it. The ducks were here, outside with us, withstanding the temperatures of the icy lake. A part of them must have been suffering. And yet, they were surviving.
Far from surviving, the ducks looked down-right content.
I think of the ducks and I think of the resilience of nature.
We humans are resilient too. Like the ducks, our bodies have survived temperature extremes. Our ancestors withstood famine, intense heat, biting cold, terrible injury, and the constant threat of attack and infection, for millenia. You were born a link on an unbroken chain of survivors, extending 10,000 generations long.
Our bodies have been honed, over these hundreds of thousands of years, to survive, even thrive, during the horrendous conditions that plagued most of our evolutionary history.
Investigations into the human genome have revealed genes that get turned on in periods of eustress: bursts of extreme heat or cold, fasting, and high-intensity exercise. When our body encounters one of these stressors, it activates a hormetic responseto overcome the stress. Often the response is greater than what is needed to neutralize the threat, resulting in a net benefit for our bodies.
These protective genes create new brain cells, boost mitochrondria function, lower inflammation, clear out damaged cells, boost the creation of stem cells, repair DNA, and create powerful antioxidants. Our bodies are flooded with hormones that increase our sense of well-being.
It’s like the old adage, “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”
Our bodies were made for discomfort. In fact, we have entire genetic pathways waiting to kick in and heal us as soon as they experience hardship.
There are a growing number of studies on the healing power of small troubles. Fasting may have a role in treating autoimmune diseases, decreasing the signs of aging, and as an adjunct therapy for cancer; sauna therapy boosts detoxification and may prevent dementia; cryotherapy, or exposure to extreme cold, has the potential to heal arthritis and autoimmunity; and High Intensity Interval Training has been shown to boost cardiovascular health more than moderate-intensity exercise.
Plants may benefit us through flavonoids, which, rather than serving as nutrients, act as small toxins that boost these hormetic pathways, encouraging the body to make loads of its own, powerful antioxidants to combat these tiny toxins.
Mindfully embracing discomfort—the bitter taste of plants, the chilly night air, the deep growling hunger that occurs between meals—may be essential for letting our bodies express their full healing potential.
Not Minding Our Minds.
Our ability to withstand powerful emotions may have healing benefits.
Many of us avoid painful feelings, allowing them to fester within us. We buffer them with excess food, or drugs, leading to addictions. Mindfulness can help us learn to be with the discomfort of the emotions, thoughts and physical sensations that arise in the body as inevitable side effects of being alive.
Research has shown that mindfulness can help decrease rumination, and prevent depressive relapse. It also helps lower perceived stress. How we perceive the stressors in our lives can lower the damaging effects they have on us. Research shows that those who view their life stressors as challenges to overcome have lower stress hormone activation, and experience greater life satisfaction.
According to Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT), our thoughts create our emotions. Becoming more aware of our thoughts, through CBT or mindfulness, allows us to identify which thoughts may be limiting us or exacerbating our reactions to stressful situations.
When we learn to observe our thoughts, we create some distance from them. We become less likely to see the dismal thoughts in our minds as absolute truths.
Practicing mindful meditation, CBT, or cultivating positive thoughts, such as engaging in a daily gratitude practice, may improve our resilience to chronic stress.
Inattention.
According to Stephen Cope, yoga teacher and author of The Great Work of Your Life, “You love what you know deeply. Get to know yourself deeply”. We get to know things deeply by paying attention to them.
Georgia O’Keefe’s admiration for flowers, or Monet’s adoration of landscapes, is apparent to anyone who sees their work. In order to commit images to canvas, the artists gets to know their subject matter deeply. Their art celebrates what they took the time to pay attention to, and eventually came to love.
As a naturopathic doctor, I believe that healing begins with attention. When we become aware of our bodies, we begin to know them deeply. Awareness allows us to respond to symptoms lovingly, the way a mother learns to skillfully attend to her baby’s distinct cries.
When I first meet a new patient, the first thing I have them do is start to pay attention.
We become curious about their symptoms, their food intake, their sleep patterns, their habits and routines, the physical sensations of their emotions, the thoughts that run through their heads.
Through paying attention, with non-judgmental curiosity, my patients start to understand their bodies in new ways. They learn how certain foods feel in their bodies, how certain sleep habits affect their energy levels the next day, and how specific thoughts contribute to their feelings.
Once we begin to open up this dialogue with our bodies, it becomes impossible not to answer them with love. It becomes hard not to eat, sleep, and move in ways that convey self-respect.
A gardener who pays deep attention cannot ignore the obvious—her plants have roots, embedded in soil. The gardener quickly learns, through careful observation, that the health of this soil is vital to the health of her plants.
And so, back to the original question, “What is your favourite natural cure for anxiety?”
My favourite remedy isn’t a bottle of pills we reach for, it’s a question we reach for from within:
“What do I need to heal?”
After asking the question, we wait.
We wait for the answer to emerge from some primal place within, just as a gardener waits for new buds to rise out of the mysterious depths of the dark, nutritious soil.
Like many people I see, Sandra was experiencing debilitating exhaustion.
Completing her PhD, she was working all day and collapsing on the couch at 8 pm.
She stopped going out in the evening. She ceased spending time with friends, engaging in activities outside of her studies, exercising, and having sex.
Her motivation and zest for life were at all-time lows.
Her marriage, and her life, were being sidelined in the service of her fatigue.
Her family doctor met her complaints with a defeated shrug. “You’re just getting older,” he offered by way of explanation.
Sandra was 27.
My patient is not alone. At least 20% of patients approach their family doctors complaining of fatigue.
Lack of energy is a problem that can arise from any body system. Fatigue can be an early warning sign that something has been thrown off balance.
I frequently see fatigue in patients suffering from hormone imbalances, including suboptimal thyroid function, insulin resistance, and low estrogen, progesterone, or testosterone. But also in chronic stress, depression, and anxiety.
Fatigue is often connected to mental health conditions, digestive issues, lifestyle imbalances, chronic inflammation, chronic stress, and lack of restful sleep. It’s no wonder, then, that most of the people I work with experience some level of low energy.
Conversely, I see improvement in energy as one of the first signs that someone is moving towards more robust health. Some of the first signs of healing are a clear mind, bright mood, and vibrant, buoyant energy.
There are a few steps you and your naturopathic doctor can take to identify and remove the cause of fatigue, while optimizing your health and energy levels.
Differentiate between sleepiness and fatigue.
It is important to determine if low energy is fatigue or sleepiness.
Sleepiness is characterized by the tendency to fall asleep when engaging in non-stimulating activities like reading, watching TV, sitting in a meeting, commuting, or lying down.
Sleepiness:
Is often improved by exercise, at least in the short-term
Is improved with rest
Fatigue is characterized by a lack of energy, both physical and mental. Fatigue is often worsened by exertion.
Those who are fatigued:
Suffer from mental exhaustion
Experience muscle weakness
Have poor endurance
Typically feel worse after physical exercise and take longer to recover
Don’t feel restored after sleeping or napping
Might experience ease in initiating activities but progressively experience more weakness as they continue them (e.g.: engaging in social activities, movement, working, etc.)
To determine between sleepiness and fatigue, your naturopathic doctor will ask you a series of questions about the nature of your low energy.
2. Assess sleep.
Assessing and optimizing sleep is essential for beginning to treat all low energy and, in particular, sleepiness.
Assessing sleep involves looking at a variety of factors such as:
Bedtime and waking time
Sleep onset: how long it takes
Sleep routine and sleep hygiene habits
Sleep duration: how many times you wake up, how quickly you can fall back asleep after waking
Causes of interrupted sleep such as sleep apnea, chronic pain, frequent urination, children/pets/partners, etc.
Nap frequency and length
Ability to wake up in the morning
Perceived sleep quality: do you wake feeling rested?
The use of sleep aids
Exercise routines, how close to bedtime you eat or exercise.
And so on.
Using a sleep app or undergoing a sleep study are two additional tools for assessing the quality and duration of your sleep cycles that may be useful.
3. Address sleep issues.
Whether the cause of fatigue is sleepiness or not, restful sleep is essential to restoring our energy levels. Optimizing sleep is an important foundational treatment for all health conditions.
Restorative sleep regulates hormones and balances the stress response, called the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis (HPA axis). It improves cell repair, digestion, memory, and detoxification.
Mental and emotional stress, artificial light, blood sugar dysregulation, inflammation, and hormone imbalances can interfere with sleep.
To address issues with sleep, it is important to:
Maintain a strict sleep schedule. This means keeping bedtime and waking time consistent, even on weekends.
Practice good sleep hygiene by avoiding electronics at least an hour before bedtime, using blue light-blocking glasses if necessary, and keeping the bedroom as dark as possible.
Avoid stimulating activities like exercise in the hours before bed.
Keep the bedroom cool and dark.
Reserve the bed and bedroom for sleep and sex only.
Balance circadian rhythms by exposing your eyes to sunlight immediately upon waking and eating protein in the morning.
In addition to sleep hygiene and balancing circadian rhythms, sleep aids can be helpful. I start my patients with melatonin, a non-addictive antioxidant, to reset the sleep cycle and help with obtaining deeper, more restorative sleep.
It is important to take melatonin in a prolonged-release form a few hours before bedtime and to use it in addition to a dedicated sleep routine.
Determine whether the fatigue is secondary to an underlying medical condition.
Secondary fatigue is defined as low energy, lasting from 1 to 6 months, that is caused by an underlying health condition or medication.
With your medical or naturopathic doctor, be sure to rule out any issues with your immune system, kidneys, nervous system, liver, and heart, and to assess the side effects of any medications you’re taking.
Ruling out chronic infections, pregnancy, anemia, and cancer may be necessary, depending on other signs and symptoms that are present, your individual risk factors, and family history.
While the vast majority of fatigue is not caused by a serious health condition, ruling out more serious causes is an essential part of the diagnostic process.
Remember that this is not a job for Dr. Google! Because fatigue is a sign that something in the body is not functioning optimally, it can be implicated in virtually every health condition, alarmingly serious ones, but also more benign conditions as well.
Taking into account your entire health history, risk factors and particular symptoms, as well as assessing blood work is a complex job that a regulated health professional can assist you with.
Get blood work done.
Assessing blood work is necessary for ruling out common causes of fatigue.
Blood tests are used to rule out anemia, infections, suboptimal iron, B12, and folate levels, under-functioning thyroid, inflammation, insulin resistance, and hormonal imbalances.
To evaluate the cause of fatigue, your doctor will look at:
A complete blood count (CBC) that looks at your red and white blood cells.
inflammatory markers like ESR and hs-CRP
TSH, to assess thyroid function, and occasionally free thyroid hormones and thyroid antibodies, if further investigation is indicated
B12, iron and folate
Other tests such as fasting insulin, fasting blood glucose, liver enzymes, and hormones like estradiol, testosterone, estrone, LH, FSH, and progesterone, depending on the health history and the constellation of symptoms.
Your doctor may take further measures to assess your heart and lungs, or to rule out chronic infections.
6. Identify physiologic fatigue, or burnout.
Once sleepiness and any underlying health conditions have been ruled out, your doctor may determine whether you have physiologic fatigue.
Physiologic fatigue, also commonly called “burnout” or “adrenal fatigue”, is the result of an imbalance in sleep, exercise, nutrition intake, and rest.
It is by far the most common category of prolonged fatigue that I see in my practice. Two thirds of those experiencing fatigue for two weeks or longer are experiencing this type of fatigue.
Feeling a lack of motivation, low mood, and increased feelings of boredom and lethargy are characteristics of this kind of fatigue.
Physiologic fatigue can be confused with depression, leading to a diagnosis and subsequent antidepressant prescription, which may fail to uncover and address contributing lifestyle factors.
To tell if you might be experiencing physiologic fatigue, or burnout, see if you answer yes to any of the following questions, adopted from the Maslach Burnout Inventory:
I feel emotionally drained at the end of the day.
I feel frustrated with my job.
I feel I’m working too hard.
I feel fatigued when I have to face another day.
I have a hard time getting up in the morning on weekdays.
I feel less sympathetic and more impatient towards others.
I am more irritable and short-tempered with colleagues, my family, my kids.
I feel overwhelmed.
I have more work than I can reasonably do.
I feel rundown.
I have no one to talk to.
Fortunately, there are many solutions to improving low energy and mood caused by burnout.
Balance the HPA Axis
Balancing the stress response, otherwise known as the Hypothalamus-Pituitary-Adrenal (or HPA) axis, is an important component of treating physiologic fatigue.
Our HPA axis becomes activated in the morning when the hormone cortisol is released from the adrenal glands. Cortisol suppresses inflammation and gives us the motivated, focussed energy to go about our day.
Towards the end of the day, cortisol levels naturally fall. In the evening, cortisol is at its lowest, and melatonin, our sleep hormone, rises.
Those with HPA dysfunction have an imbalance in this healthy cortisol curve.
They commonly experience sluggishness in the mornings, a crash in the afternoon (around 2 to 4 pm), and restless sleep, often waking up at 2 to 4 am as a result of nighttime cortisol spikes and an impairment in melatonin release.
These individuals often experience cravings for salt and sugar. They may have low blood pressure and feelings of weakness.
It is common for those experiencing burnout to get sick when they finally take a break or experience prolonged healing time from common infections, likes colds and flu.
They may suffer from inflammatory conditions like chronic migraines, muscular tension, and report feeling depressed or anxious.
In this case, balancing the HPA axis is a treatment priority.
Treatment involves:
HPA axis balancing through adaptogenic herbs
Optimizing adrenal nutrient levels
Regulating blood sugar
Improving circadian rhythms
Reducing workload and perceived stress through addressing perfectionism, practicing setting boundaries, and developing mindfulness, among other skills.
Improving sleep
Engaging in regular, scheduled exercise
Reducing inflammation, improving digestion, or regulating hormones
Being proactive about mental health and emotional wellness
Improving self-care and stress resilience
Cognitive Behaviour Therapy can be used to teach healthy coping skills while balancing sleep and stress. Studies show it can be more effective than medication for the depression and anxiety related to physiologic fatigue.
Of course, from a holistic perspective, the above strategies are the foundations for improving general health and wellness for all fatigue-related conditions, regardless of whether the fatigue is due to sleepiness, secondary fatigue, physiologic fatigue, or chronic fatigue syndrome.
Talk to your naturopathic doctor about adaptogenic herbs.
Adaptogenic herbs are an important natural tool for improving mood and energy.
Adaptogens help the body “adapt” to stress. They up-regulate genes involved in boosting the body’s natural stress resilience.
Because of this, adaptogens not only improve energy and mental and physical endurance, they also improve attention and concentration, immune system function, and mental work capacity.
They can treat depression and anxiety, and regulate circadian rhythms.
Common adaptogens are withania (or ashwaghanda), rhodiola, holy basil, the ginsengs, like Siberian gingseng (or eleuthrococcus), schizandra, liquorice, and maca, among others.
My two favourite adaptogens are ashwaghanda and rhodiola, however your naturopathic doctor can work with you to pick the best herbal combination for your individualized needs.
9. Rule out Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.
Chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) is characterized by fatigue that lasts 6 months or longer, is not improved by exercise and rest, is not related to an imbalance in lifestyle, and is not caused by a primary health condition.
Those with CFS often have signs of an activated immune system such as enlarged lymph nodes, a low-grade fever, or a sore, inflamed throat. Sufferers may experience generalized weakness and pain.
CFS can be an extremely debilitating condition that results in a 50% reduction of daily functioning.
The cause of CFS is not known, however balancing HPA axis function, improving nutrient status, reducing inflammation, healing the gut, reducing toxic burden, boosting mitochondrial functioning, and promoting self-care are all useful treatment strategies.
Our gut is the seat of the immune system, sampling foreign substances from the external environment and activating an immune response, if it finds any of those substances pose a threat to the health of the body.
If our immune system comes into contact with something doesn’t like, even if that something is a benign food substance, an inflammatory reaction can be triggered. Chronic inflammation can exacerbate fatigue.
To test for food sensitivities, your naturopathic doctor will either order a blood test, or recommend an elimination diet where suspicious food is removed from the diet, the gut is healed, and foods are later reintroduced.
Common foods to eliminate are gluten, dairy, sugar, eggs and soy. Stricter Autoimmune Paleo diets involve the removal of all dairy, eggs, grains, legumes, and nuts.
Mind your mitochondria.
Our mitochondria are the “powerhouses” of the cell, responsible for making ATP, our body’s energy currency, out of the carbs, protein, and fats from our food.
Research has shown a link between mitochondrial dysfunction and chronic fatigue.
The mitochondria need a variety of different nutrients to function optimally. These nutrients include B vitamins, magnesium, Coenzyme Q10, and certain amino acids.
When the mitochondria are unable to produce sufficient ATP, fatigue may result. Similarly, a problem with antioxidant production can result in the buildup of reactive oxygen and nitrogen species, otherwise termed “free radicals”, in the mitochondria.
Free radicals can trigger inflammation and immune system activation in the entire body, causing us to feel ill and fatigued.
B vitamins are also important for a process called “methylation” which is essential for energy and hormone production, immune function, detoxification, mitochondrial function, and DNA repair.
Balance your blood sugar.
Insulin resistance, hypoglycaemia, type II diabetes, and metabolic syndrome are all common conditions that reflect the body’s inability to regulate blood sugar.
All of these conditions can cause frequent energy crashes, fatigue after eating, brain fog, and lethargy.
Even those free of the above conditions may still struggle with blood sugar imbalances. Signs of blood sugar dysregulation are craving sweets, feeling hungry less than 3 hours after a meal, getting “hangry”, feeling weak and dizzy if missing meals, waking at night, and snacking at night.
Balancing blood sugar by eating enough fibre, fat and protein at every meal is essential to maintaining the endurance to get through the day.
Your naturopathic doctor can help you come up with a diet plan that keeps your blood sugar balanced and your energy levels stable throughout the day.
Support your immune function and eradicate chronic infections.
Chronic infections can result in prolonged activation of the immune system, resulting in chronic fatigue.
Viral infections, like mononucleosis and Epstein Barr, and gut bacteria imbalances, such as SIBO, C. Difficile, and candida overgrowth can be implicated in chronic fatigue.
Supporting the immune system with herbs, balancing the HPA axis, and using natural remedies to eradicate the infection are all courses of action you may take with your naturopathic doctor to eradicate infectious causes of fatigue.
Uncover and treat hormone imbalances.
Our hormones, the messengers of the body, regulate how our cells talk to each other.
Hormones are responsible for blood sugar control, the stress response, ovulation and fertility, sex drive, metabolism, and, of course, energy production and utilization.
It is possible that those who suffer from low energy have an imbalance in the hormones cortisol, insulin, estrogen, progesterone, DHEA, testosterone, or thyroid hormones. Directly addressing hormones is then the main treatment goal for improving energy.
Uncovering other signs of hormonal imbalance, such as the presence of PCOS, endometriosis, or symptoms of hypothyroidism, as well as ordering blood tests, can help reveal if an imbalance in hormones is the main cause of your fatigue.
Encourage detoxification.
Our body has the powerful ability to process and eliminate the 500 chemicals and toxic substances we come into contact with daily, as well as the hormone metabolites and immune complexes produced as a result of normal metabolic functioning.
Our livers, kidneys, colon, and skin regularly filter hundreds of harmful substances from our bodies. This process happens naturally without the aid of outside support.
However, it is possible that an increased toxic burden on the body paired with a sluggish liver and digestive system, can increase the body’s overall toxic load.
Toxic overload can contribute to fatigue by increasing inflammation and immune system activation, as well as impairing energy production pathways, and disrupting hormonal function.
Reducing contact with harmful toxins, while supporting kidney, liver and colon function can help restore optimal energy and health.
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Treating fatigue first involves developing a relationship with your healthcare provider: finding someone who takes your concerns seriously.
Conducting a thorough assessment of blood, lifestyle factors, sleep, hormones, and digestion, and as many other factors as possible, is essential to uncovering the cause of fatigue.
Treatment involves removing obstacles to healing, supporting energy production, balancing lifestyle, and using herbs to boost energy and stress resilience.
When we consider fatigue as an important sign that something in our body is functioning sub-optimally, we can use our energy levels are important indicators for health.
Is your multivitamin or B-complex making you sick?
Take a look at the label on your multivitamin or B-complex and see if it contains “folic acid”.
Folic acid is often used interchangeably with “folate”, which is a vitamin needed for DNA synthesis and repair.
Every time our bodies make new cells (which is all the time), we need folate to move that process along.
Because very few of us North Americans get enough folate from leafy greens, folic acid, a synthetic precursor to folate, has been added to grain products, to “fortify” them.
Folate deficiency in pregnant women can lead to neural tube defects. Therefore making sure that your body has enough folate, especially if you’re pregnant or planning to conceive, is essential.
However, folic acid, the synthetic vitamin is NOT the same as the folate (look at the bottom of the chart below, another word for folate is 5-methyltetrahydrafolate, or 5-MTHF) that our bodies use for cell division and DNA synthesis.
As you can see by the picture, folic acid needs to go through several stages of transformation before it can be of any use to the body.
All of us are really poor at converting folic acid to DHF (first step in the pathway). This step is faster in rats. In humans, it’s abysmally slow.
This means we take folic acid from supplements and fortified grains and slowly pass it through the narrow DHFR sieve that all of us are born with. This slowly transforms our synthetic folic acid into DHF.
The same DHFR enzyme must take DHF and turn it into THF. Two steps: folic acid –> DHF –> THF. So far, none of these products is useful.
3 steps and 2 enzymes later, our body makes a product called 5,10 methylene THF, or folinic acid, which can be used for DNA repair and synthesis.
After that, an enzyme called MTHFR turns folinic acid into folate (5-MTHF). And yes, MTHFR does remind you of the word you’re thinking of!
About 40-60% of us are poor at the last step, making 5-MTHF, which results from a slow or completely impaired MTHFR gene which has trouble producing a fully functioning MTHFR enzyme.
Slow enzymes mean very few of us are going to take the folic acid from foods and cheap vitamins, and turn them into methylfolate.
Methylfolate (remember, NOT folic acid), is needed for important chemical reactions called “methylation” reactions.
Methylation is needed for with detoxification, liver function, managing inflammation, hormone production and recycling, and producing neurotransmitters. Research is establishing a connection between MTHFR gene mutations and mental health conditions, autoimmune conditions and heart disease, among other common health complaints.
Folic acid, when added to supplements isn’t just useless, however.
When it can’t be broken down (and remember, all of us are slow at the first stop, some of us just plain can’t perform the last step), it builds up in tissues, and can block ACTUAL methylfolate action.
It can also trigger inflammatory reactions.
Not good.
Most multivitamin and B complex brands at health food stores contain cheaper forms of B vitamins. Companies use folic acid and a cheaper, synthetic form of B12, called cyanocoblamin, when making products to cut costs.
This doesn’t mean you have to shell out a lot of cash for quality B complex vitamins, it just means you need to be smart about the B-complexes you buy.
B-complex vitamins can be useful for those who experience inflammation, hormone imbalances and chronic stress. We tend to use more B-vitamins, which are water-soluble, when stressed, and when on certain medications, such as birth control pills. Supplementing in these cases can be extremely helpful for boosting energy and mood, while lowering symptoms of PMS and inflammation, among other things.
Most of the patients who come into my office already on a B complex are on a form that contains folic acid. At best, their body is working harder than needed to convert this synthetic vitamin into something useful. At worst, this product may be causing them harm.
The first thing you can do, is check your multivitamins and B-complex products and see if they contain “folic acid” or “cyanocobalamin”. If so, you can toss them.
You can also consider getting tested to see if you have an MTHFR mutation. Keep in mind that naturopathic doctors who are registered in Ontario, Canada cannot recommend or interpret genetic testing.
Next, you can reassess your diet. Folic acid is also added to enriched grains. Those who are particularly sensitive to folic acid, may experience a worsening of inflammatory symptoms and mental health issues when consuming high amounts of these foods.
Also, eat plenty of leafy green vegetables, which DO provide your body with a useable form of folate, among their many other health benefits.
Finally, if you’re considering getting pregnant, have a naturopathic doctor assess your prenatal vitamins to tell you if the form of folate you’re taking is appropriate for you.
For breakfast, I would typically eat a high-fat smoothie containing coconut milk yogurt, gelatin, and avocado, and topped with pumpkin seeds and cacao. Sometimes I’d make fat bombs or homemade unsweetened chocolate.
