Continuing to heal, Adrenals, Sleep Apnea, Back Pain etc.

A lot has happened since I last posted in some ways and in others, nothing has happened at all!  Nothing has happened on the job front for my husband.  We are still waiting to hear back from the camp, as the folks have been on vacation.  In our bodies, though, a lot has happened.  Aaron has not had a single migraine or even headache since that night we were prayed for by the minister at his home.  I've not had any radiation sickness, either.  Also, my shoulder has greatly improved, as has my back, especially my lower back.  Praise God!

I've been struggling, though, with sleep apnea issues.  I've got many of the classic symptoms, some of which are:  

• You consistently take more than 30 minutes each night to fall asleep.  (I don't have this one.)
• You consistently awaken several time each night and then have trouble falling back to sleep, or you awaken too early in the morning.
• You often feel sleepy during the day, you take frequent naps, or you fall asleep at inappropriate times during the day.
• Your bed partner says that when you sleep, you snore loudly, snort, gasp, make choking sounds, kick, and punch or stop breathing for short periods.
• You have creeping, tingling, or crawling feelings in your legs or arms that are relieved by moving or massaging them, especially in the evening and when trying to fall asleep. (I don't have this one.)
• Your bed partner notices that your legs or arms jerk during sleep.

I thought I'd list them because someone else might be having the same issues.  This list came off the "mysnoringsolution" site.  I looked into one of those sleep chin-straps, but they want $70 for them.  I've looked at the mouth guards, too, but they are really expensive as well.  My friend loaned me some straps and I fashioned my own chin strap.  What I found was it was either loose enough that I could open my mouth, so I still snored, or it was tight enough that I didn't snore.  When it was that tight, I couldn't breathe, either!

I was pretty frustrated -- I felt like I was in a catch 22.  The sleep issues cause me to be exhausted, and ,also, as I learned from several articles, influence appetite adversely.  Specifically, two hormones that control hunger and satiety, ghrelin and leptin, are messed up when our sleep is disturbed.   Here's the quote from the "mysnoringsolution" site:

In 2004, University of Chicago researchers restricted a group of men to only 4 hours of sleep per night. After just 2 nights, the men had an 18 percent decrease in leptin, a hormone that tells your brain when you are full, and a 28 percent increase in ghrelin, a hormone that triggers hunger.

That's some nasty stuff when you are trying to lose weight!  The number one recommendation for people with sleep apnea is that they lose weight.  How can I lose weight when my body is crying out for me to eat via ghrelin?  Just a nasty, viscious cylce, and I couldn't figure out how to break it.

I did go get some 5HTP because it was recommended by several sites to help with deeper sleep.  I'm not sure it is making any difference -- none that I notice anyway -- I'm still up and down a lot and not feeling rested in the morning and snoring like crazy.  I'm doing some exercises for my snoring that I got off a dental site.  They say it takes about a month for real change.  I don't know how they'll do, but I'm doing them at least twice a day.  Here they are with the links:

We're all aware of various devices which can be worn to prevent snoring , but there may be a simpler alternative that is worth a shot too. Exercises can make a significant difference to a tired snorer and their partner. The following patient information sheet can be printed to give to your patients.

Tongue and throat exercises, if practiced diligently over a period of time, may be of great benefit in reducing snoring. Repeat each of the following exercises 5 times each, twice daily: 

1) Slowly open and close your mouth to its full extent, making sure the lips meet when closing. 
2) Pucker your lips (as if about to kiss). Hold for a count of 10. Relax. 
3) Spread your lips into a big, exaggerated smile. Hold. Relax. 
4) Mix Exercises 2 & 3: Pucker-Hold-Smile-Hold. 
5) Try to pucker with your mouth wide open, without closing your jaws together. Hold & relax. 
6) Close your lips and press them tightly together. 
7) Close your lips firmly, then make a slurping noise, as if sipping a drink. 
8) Open your mouth and stick out your tongue. Be sure your tongue comes straight out of your mouth and doesn't go off the side. Hold, relax and repeat several times. Work toward sticking your tongue out farther each day, but still pointing straight ahead. 
9) Stick out your tongue and move it slowly from corner to corner of your lips. Hold in each corner, relax and repeat several times. Be sure your tongue actually touches each corner each time. 
10) Stick out your tongue and try to reach your chin with the tongue tip. Hold at the farthest extension. 
11) Stick out your tongue and try to touch your nose with the tongue tip. Hold at farthest extension. 
12) Stick out your tongue. Hold a spoon upright against the tip of your extended tongue and try to push it away while your hand holds the spoon in place. 
13) Repeatedly stick your tongue in and out as fast as you can. 
14) Flick your tongue from corner to corner as quickly as you can. 
15) Move tongue all around your lips in a circle as quickly as you can, making sure you stay in constant contact. 
16) Open and close mouth as quickly as you can, making sure your lips close each time. 
17) Say Ma-Ma-Ma-Ma as quickly as possible, ensuring there's an em and an ah sound each time. 
18) Repeat with La-La-La-La. 
19) Repeat with Ka-Ka-Ka-Ka as quickly and accurately as you can. 
20) Repeat with Kala-Kala-Kala-Kala. 
21) Gargle loudly with warm water. 
22) Sing through the vowel sounds (A-E-I-O-U) as loudly as you can (or dare). Songs like Old McDonald Had a Farm are also good. 

Further information 
Further advice for patients can be found in Scott E. Dr. The Natural Way to Stop Snoring 
Talkaboutsleep.com
britishsnoring
snoring.com

Then I started looking at adrenal fatigue because it had been linked to some of the sleep remedies I had looked at on my favorite health site EarthClinic.com.  Years ago I was diagnosed with Adrenal Exhaustion.  My "adrenal stress panel" showed the highest adrenal output I had during the day was like a normal person at 3AM!  The rest was just barely on the register.  I was a mess.  I'm not that bad now, but I would guess that there are a couple of times during the day that I'm probably like that 3AM output.

Anyway, it seemed like there was maybe a connection with this whole adrenal / sleep apnea / weight gain cycle and that maybe, just maybe, it could be broken?  I continued to search and stumbled upon this website.   The fellow, Kalidasa, who wrote these articles is a natural healer and has suffered with the effects of tired adrenal glands and back pain himself.  I don't know much about him, but what I did read put many of the pieces to my puzzle back in line.

See, several years ago, I started low carbing -- back in January of 2001.  Shortly after starting, I discovered I had candida, so did the candida treatment described in Dr. Atkins New Diet Revolution and the strict diet he recommended.  In addition to that, I studied a lot about several other low carb approaches, the most noteable being Dr. Weston A. Price's approach.  Dr. Price was a dentist who discovered there was a link between the introduction of simple carbs into a society and the onset of terribly aligned teeth and back pain.  I tried to eat as naturally as possible in the light of his studies.  Finally, I discovered The Water Cure by Dr. F. Batmanghelidj.  I was impressed with the claims and had a lot of sucess myself when I took 1/8 teaspoon of unrefined sea salt with every quart of water I drank.  I had great energy.  I stopped snoring completely within 10 days of starting the Atkins diet.  My back didn't hurt, and I lost 90 pounds!  I looked good and felt good.   

Then I had a doctor rail at me for an hour about how "dangerous" the Water Cure was.  I stopped it, even though I knew it was helping me.  Can't explain it.  Bad judgement, I guess...  Anyway, I, also, had to come up with more desserts because people were asking for them, which increased my carbs...  I then had several very debilitating injuries in a row, till we get to where we are now.  I need to lose about 75 to 100 pounds, my back is "toast," (multiple disk herniations, severe arthritis, pulled muscles, and on and on...), I'm snoring worse than I ever  have, I'm exhausted most of the time, and I'm not really sleeping at night.  I'm up every 45 minutes to at the most 3 hours.  The longest sleep I get is about once a month I have a 4 or 5 hour stretch of continuous sleep.

Last night I stumbled upon that site about adrenal fatigue and back pain I mentioned earlier.  I read several of Kalidasa's articles, and what he says makes a lot of sense.  This article in particular reminded me about the connection between my diet and how I felt.  Like I said, I read a number of articles on his site last night, along with his free book download, and I think I understand what has been happening and how to help my body, (and my son's), to heal.

From my reading last night and my previous knowledge, this is what I understand:  The body has basic survival in mind at all times.  It will feed the primary systems first then the rest has its own pecking order.  The brain gets fed first, then the heart, and so on down the list.  The adrenal glands are pretty high on that list.  The spine, ligaments and connective tissue are low priority.  One can survive without a leg, but not without adrenal glands.  Apparently, the nutrients needed for spine health and adrenal health are THE SAME.  See the problem here?  If we are deficient in nutrients at all, our adrenals and other primary systems get first choice.  If there's nothing left, then the spine and connective tissues don't get fed.

What happens when you don't feed and water a plant?  It whithers and eventually dies.  I imagine our spines are pretty similar.  If they don't get what they need, all sorts of maladies can creep in.  If our spines are in trouble, that tells us several things:  1. We aren't getting the proper nutrients in the proper quantities, 2. Our adrenal glands are in trouble.  Apparently, the state of our spine is a pretty good mirror for the state of our adrenal system.  My back is a mess; my adrenals are probably a mess, too.

Ok, now what to do about it?  Thankfully, Kalidasa has some good, clearly written advise, and it's so cool because it goes right along with what I had learned years ago from Dr. Atkins, Dr. Price and Dr. Batmanghelidj.  

Kalidasa recommends a avery strict low carb plan, though he doesn't call it that.  He says to eliminate sugar because sugar stresses the adrenals.  Evidently, sugar acts on the adrenals in a very intense way.  When we consume sugar, the adrenals send out the hormone cortisol to act on that sugar -- they find out if the body is in some crisis or other for which it needs to use the sugar immediately.  If there's no crisis, and usually there isn't, then in women it tells estrogen to pack that extra sucrose onto the liver as fat, aka hydrogenated glucose.  If you are a man, you aren't as likely to get the fat.  You're more likely to get hyper and then crash and burn.  Either way, not a pretty picture.  So, when we consume sugar in any form:  Bread, pasta, honey, bananas, etc., it stresses out the adrenal glands.  They keep sending cortisol out "to the rescue" only to find there's no crisis, and it has to call on other hormones to work in this ongoing cycle.  The adrenals get more and more fatigued causing more and more sugar cravings because we do feel better at least for a little bit after eating the sugar, don't we??   Thus on goes the cycle.  It explains why I haven't been able to stick with any kind of a "plan" diet-wise for more than 5 days, tops.  

Not only do we need to get rid of the sugar, but we need specific nutrition to help our adrenal glands to heal.  Kalidasa has some specific recommendations about supplements.  I know that Pantothenic Acid (B5) is specific for the adrneal glands and that licorice is good, too.  They say not to use licorice root if you have high blood pressure, though.  In addition to those he recommended B6 (a special type I couldn't find), Selenium, Nicacin (-amide, but again, I couldn't find that type),  B-12 (I found a sub-lingual) and Vitamin C.  We started on all these today.

Also, sodium is a biggie for the adrenals, according to Kalidasa, and my own personal experience. When I was doing the Water Cure, complete with sea salt, I felt great.  I've added back the sea salt into my routine.  I use Trader Joes unrefined sea salt.  It is rather clumpy and gray looking, showing it still has its minerals intact.  

Finally, he mentions some herbs which I just happened to have a product called Calm Tabs which contains many of them.  The list is in this article.  We, also, started on these today.

Thus, it is my hope that with the right nutrition and supplements my adrenal glands will heal and I'll be able to lose the weight I need to lose.  Not only that, I hope to feel good again!!

Food-wise today, I tried to make the best choices available to me at each meal.  Kalidasa says potatoes are OK in small amounts, which I've, also, found to be true.  Another thing he suggested was frequent, small meals and to not let oneself get overly hungry.  If we go past hunger, to not hungry then to nausea, we're in a bad place adrenal function-wise.  I've been trying to eat something every couple of hours for a while.  Now I have even more motivation because I know WHY.

I hope this helps someone.

Blessings,

Sharron