Nutrients Introduced In A Certain Order

I feel like a zombie because I don’t sleep well. It’s hard to focus and my memory has decreased. Is okay, in spurts. Then I get tired and feel like I need a nap. I wish my brain would work better, but I’m just so tired. Is better than that of others around me, but not perfect. I have to work hard or drink caffeine to keep focused. I often feel anxious or worried. I feel anxious or depressed in the morning or at midday. I wake up with a low mood and low motivation, or anxiety, and it can last all day. I think through what happened, or is about to happen, over and over. Often in a state of overwhelm, whether with things to get done or a low mood.

Live Another Day

I try to push my mood aside in order to get things done. Grumpy, because I didn’t sleep well, as usual. All right, but it soon wavers. I feel like I should be able to feel better, which causes me to feel frustrated and alone. I prefer to stay by myself, and I do better with a slow start to my day. Good, except that I feel anxious that I won’t have time to get everything done. I notice my heart racing or feel tightness in my chest during the day. I wake in the night with my heart and mind racing. I tend to gain weight around my waist and have digestive issues. I have cold hands and feet, and I feel worse after exercising. My blood sugar levels drop quickly. I have muscle tightness/tension.

Light Of The Life

Heartburn, heart pounding, and mood fluctuations. Weakness and brain fog, from not sleeping well. Joint and/or muscle pain and frequent infections. Fatigue, cold hands and feet, and lack of stamina. Heart racing and recurring infections. Now compare between the five sections. That number signifies your dominant stress type. I refer to this type of test as a stress test because it shows how your body has been affected by the stress you’ve been exposed to up to this point in your life. Keep in mind that these panels should be run in addition to the blood tests and imaging a conventional medical practitioner or endocrinologist would order. This likely won’t show up on a cortisol blood test, so you may be told that everything is normal when clearly you don’t feel normal or well. Knowing and addressing your neurotransmitter levels makes stress recovery more effective and efficient. I prefer to be able to refer to all of these levels in my practice so that I can precisely assess how stress has affected a patient’s body.

Wearing And Tearing

From there I am able to determine their unique response to stress and what is needed to help them recover from it. Cortisol can be reoptimized using specific nutrients and herbs. In addition to measuring cortisol, adrenaline, and neurotransmitters, practitioners can run additional tests to help you understand the effects of stress on your body. Because leaky gut and imbalanced gut bacteria are so common with stress exposure, I suggest doing specialty tests to determine how much of an issue they are for you. The best way to identify leaky gut is with a food sensitivity panel that checks for IgA and IgG antibodies to common foods. This is because our immune system tends to make immune responses to undigested foods that have leaked through the intestinal lining. While there are urine and blood tests to estimate the increase of leakage through the intestinal wall and identify proteins involved in leaky gut, I find that doing a highly accurate food panel provides the information we need about whether leaky gut is present and to what degree, while also showing us exactly which foods are currently triggering inflammation. This type of antibody response is different from that of IgE antibodies, which trigger immediate allergic responses that you’d find by seeing an allergist. Still, I believe the information we gain from them is essential for stress recovery. You need to know which foods are stressful for your body and therefore which foods to eliminate from your diet while you recover from stress and heal leaky gut. The intention is not to avoid the reactive foods forever. The goal is to heal your digestion so that you can go back to eating the foods you enjoy. Gluten is often the only exception, and that is because it is known to cause leaky gut and inflammation, which lead you right back to a stressed state. That means we don’t have to rely on a culture, in which bacteria are grown in a lab over a number of days and in multiple stool samples. With a single stool collection, you and your practitioner can find out what is living in your intestines and whether you are digesting your food well, too. To check your iron levels, ask for ferritin, which reflects iron storage. Vitamin D can also be checked at a regular lab, but for an accurate look at the rest of your nutrients, you’ll want to go to a lab that measures intracellular nutrient levels rather than what is floating through the bloodstream. By knowing my patients’ genetic susceptibilities, I can guide them to detour around them using specific nutrients introduced in a certain order. More than anything, it is important to understand that no matter what your gene variations, solving your health is a matter of knowing that various stresses cause your genetic susceptibilities to express, and that stress bogs down your metabolic processes on top of any genetic influence. By simply flipping that around, you can solve many health issues. As you recover from and master your stress, you’ll be able to lift the slowdowns caused by stress and reset your genetic expression. After all, without your health, what do you have in life? Now that you have identified your stress type, it’s time to dig into what can help you get out of stress mode and back to feeling good.