Sugar Surge and Spike
Eating high amounts of simple sugars and carbohydrates, such as donuts, crackers, white bread, pastries, and sweets causes spikes of glucose in your blood. This forces your body to produce high amounts of insulin to remove the glucose from your blood and store it in your tissues as fat, or in your liver as glycogen. When insulin levels surge, your adrenal glands are forced to make high amounts of hormones to bring your insulin levels back to normal. Putting too much sugar into your system literally raises the level of stress hormones in your body.
Nutrition Affects Hormones and Hormones Affect Emotions
These continuous hormone surges exhaust your adrenal glands and create unstable blood-sugar levels, leading to less energy reaching your brain, which in turn causes foggy thinking, fatigue, poor concentration, anxiety, depression, irritability, and other mood disturbances. Eating proteins such as chicken, fish, nuts, seeds, or tofu, which are digested much more slowly than simple carbohydrates, with all your meals, ensures a steady and slow release of nutrients into your bloodstream. This minimizes insulin and cortisol spikes and prevents adrenal fatigue. Nutrition affects hormones, and hormones affect emotions. It really is that simple.
Every Time You Eat You’re Choosing to Nourish or Tax your Adrenals
Sugars and simple carbohydrates also lack essential healthy nutrients such as vitamin B5, vitamin B6, vitamin C, and zinc, which nourish your adrenal glands. Therefore, eating these foods provides no nourishment to your adrenal glands but merely pushes and exhausts them. Similarly with coffee, caffeine is a stimulant that pushes your adrenal glands to work harder without nourishing them with nutrients. Every time you eat and drink you have the opportunity to help stabilize blood sugar and hormone levels or wreak havoc with them.
I often find that after removing coffee and replacing simple carbohydrates with more protein and green vegetables, many of my patients with anxiety and depression see remarkable improvement in less than 3 weeks!
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Dr. Ameet Aggarwal is a naturopathic doctor and psychotherapist (Gestalt, Family Constellations, EMDR) with years of experience treating physical issues, anxiety, stress, depression, abuse, relationship issues and also working with UNICEF, UN Staff, and other large organizations. Dr. Aggarwal focuses on healing the gut, liver, adrenal system and emotions together to optimize health and happiness. His online course (free videos on health.drameet.com/p/intro) has been approved in the highest category for continuing education for naturopathic doctors. Dr. Aggarwal was voted as one of the top 5 speakers on 2 world summits, which earned him recognition as one of the top 43 naturopaths to follow. He practices in Kenya and lectures around the world, teaching students how to treat anxiety and depression holistically. His book “Feel Good” (free videos on https://health.drameet.com/p/mindbodybook is considered to be one of the most comprehensive guides to anxiety and depression.
