Thanks for joining us for episode 19 of The Ancestral RDs podcast! If you want to keep up with our podcasts, subscribe in iTunes and never miss an episode!

Today we’re going to be talking about how a paleo diet and lifestyle could actually be causing you to develop adrenal fatigue syndrome, which is also referred to as HPA axis dysregulation in the medical community.

Remember, if you’d like to submit a question for our podcast, or suggest a guest that we should host, CLICK HERE.

Here’s what Laura and Kelsey will be discussing in this episode:

1. What is adrenal fatigue?
2. How your diet might cause adrenal fatigue syndrome?
3. Overtraining and how that taxes your adrenal glands
4. Why lifestyle might be even more important than diet and exercise when it comes to your adrenal health
5. How an overly restrictive diet can actually lead to adrenal fatigue syndrome

Links Discussed:

• Sign Up For The Adrenal Fatigue Email List

TRANSCRIPT:

Laura: Hey everyone. Welcome to episode 19 of The Ancestral RDs podcast. I’m Laura and over there is Kelsey.

Kelsey: Hi everybody.

Laura: Today Kelsey and I are going to be talking about how a Paleo diet and Paleo lifestyle could actually be causing you to develop adrenal fatigue syndrome, which is also referred to as HPA axis dysregulation in the medical community.

There’s been a couple of articles that have come up. I’m thinking specifically of the one on PaleoForWomen.com about how adrenal fatigue is not a real thing, which that article as we know actually kind of said that it was a real thing, it’s just the terminology is not appropriate for it.

Kelsey: Right.

Laura: Unfortunately, I feel like it’s one of those terms that has stuck. We call it adrenal fatigue because that’s what the common term for it is. But I just want to make sure everyone knows that when we talk about this, we’re actually talking about HPA axis dysregulation.

Kelsey, do you want to explain to our listeners first of all what adrenal fatigue is and why we call it HPA axis dysregulation instead of adrenal fatigue?

Kelsey: Yeah, sure. First it’s probably a good idea to talk about what the heck the HPA axis is because if you haven’t heard of that before, it kind of sounds elusive and scary. The HPA axis, basically it stands for Hypothalamic Pituitary Adrenal axis. It’s basically the connection between the hypothalamus, the pituitary, and the adrenals because they all really work tougher to activate the stress response when we come into contact with any kind of stressor.

You can think about this like let’s say something jumps out and scares you. Your body goes through this whole process, and I won’t dive really deep into this, but your body goes through this whole process where it secretes a bunch of different hormones that eventually cause the release of cortisol from our adrenal gland. This happens normally. It’s a very normal response, it’s supposed to happen. But what can happen for us kind of in the modern world when we’re exposed to stressors pretty much all day long. Even just thinking about waking up from an alarm clock going off, that’s a little jolting. You should try to maybe pick some soothing music to wake up to instead of a blaring alarm going off.

Laura: I know. I have an alarm, it’s very soothing and there’s birds chirping and stuff. There’s been a couple times in the last couple weeks, specifically after daylight savings time, where I slept through that. That’s the one downside is that’s so soothing that it doesn’t wake me up.

Kelsey: I used to have the Jawbone Up, it’s one of the fitness wristbands.

Laura: Oh yeah, kind of like the Fitbit.

Kelsey: That would vibrate to wake you up and it was so awesome. Yeah, it’s like a FitBit. That was a much better way to wake up. But mine broke unfortunately and I haven’t gotten around to getting a new one. But that’s the best alarm out there I feel like. It’s like nothing to wake you up, but it still does the job.

Laura: I’ve literally gotten to the point where I have a real alarm that’s my emergency wake up. I try to wake up at 7 or 7:30 with the birds chirping alarm. Then if it gets to be the emergency alarm, it’s like at least I’m getting up at least early enough that my whole day is not completely screwed.

Kelsey: There you go, you have to have a backup if you have a really soothing alarm clock.

Laura: Yeah, seriously. Anyway, I didn’t mean to interrupt.

Kelsey: Laura misses her first one and she wakes up to her blaring alarm clock.

Laura: My adrenals are super stressed at that point because that means I missed my first alarm.

Kelsey: Exactly. You have double whammy of stress there.

When that happens, if we get scared, or our alarm goes off, any kind of stressor sets off this cascade reaction of these hormones being released, and traveling through the HPA axis, and eventually getting to the adrenals and releasing cortisol from the adrenals. Cortisol is our main stress hormone. Like I said, it’s what gets released when we get stressed.

Normally, like if you think about our ancestors, they didn’t have much stress going on. Maybe if they were getting chased by some kind of predator or something in the wild that was scary popped out, sure they’re going to get stressed. That whole process is going to happen. But they didn’t have all these little tiny stressors like we do now where we’re getting woken up by an alarm, work is stressful, you are fighting with the spouse maybe, you are sitting in traffic, you’re sitting at your computer all day which is just kind of draining on the body in a different way than physical activity is. All of these little tiny stressors add up over the day and basically we’re just constantly activating the HPA axis and causing this stress response to start.

That can be problematic over time. Usually it starts to become more problematic if there’s kind of an overarching big stressor that’s going along with all these little tiny stressors. That could be not getting enough sleep for a period of time, maybe a month or two where you’re really not getting enough sleep. Sometimes you can get a respiratory infection that’s really severe, that’s a pretty common one for a factor in developing adrenal fatigue. That in combination with all these little stressors like we’re talking about can cause this. Then more in our world, going on a Paleo diet where you’re on a really low carb diet which ends up being kind of calorie restricted and you’re stressing out because there’s certain foods you’re not allowed to eat, that in combination with all the other stressors in our life can overtime cause what we call adrenal fatigue syndrome.

What I would prefer to call it is HPA axis dysregulation or dysfunction because what happens is that the HPA axis kind of is just overworked. It’s constantly going off, it’s constantly sending out lots of cortisol, and we start to get somewhat resistant to cortisol. We talk about insulin resistance with metabolic issues. It’s sort of the same idea where your body’s producing all this cortisol and you’re just not really responding to it anymore. The HPA axis kind of gives up. Then you’re producing lots of cortisol, and that’s the beginning of adrenal fatigue.

Overtime, once you’re in stage one of adrenal fatigue and you’re producing too much cortisol and the body is not really responding to it, then you start to just be able to produce less and less because the adrenals sort of give up. They’re like I can’t keep up with this, the body’s not even responding to the cortisol that I’m sending out, so I’m just going to kind of stop producing it. You’ll see your cortisol just start to get lower and lower.

That’s why we call it adrenal fatigue because really what we’re referring to there is kind of this stage two and three where you’re cortisol starts to get low, because when you’re cortisol is low, you don’t have energy. You can kind of think of cortisol as energy. You wake up with the most cortisol in the morning and it slowly dissipates throughout the day until it’s night time, it’s time to sleep where we’re not really producing much cortisol. Then the whole cycle starts over again when we have enough cortisol that it wakes us up in the morning.

Laura, I know this is kind of difficult, so tell me if that made sense to you so that it hopefully makes sense to our listeners.

Laura: Oh gosh. Yeah, it’s always something that’s kind of complicated to explain just because the human body has so many different systems that are in place to address these kind of issues. Like you said, it’s too much cortisol, it’s cortisol resistance, it’s the adrenal glands stopping producing as much. Then the question is, is it just because they just ran out of cortisol? I don’t think it’s that obvious as far as why the cortisol drops.

Kelsey: Right.

Laura: Maybe it’s a survival mechanism that the cortisol just goes low. But yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense. It’s interesting, I find that people with high cortisol, they can kind of run on high cortisol for  a long time until something happens that kind of tips them over the edge into the low cortisol situation.

Kelsey: Yeah.

Laura: I’ve seen a lot of people with some kind of major life event, maybe a death in the family, or a loss of a job, or a major move, or something that’s like kind of a single event that kind of tips the person from high cortisol into low cortisol. Not that that’s required to happen, but that’s typically what I see in patients.

A lot of people actually feel okay when they have high cortisol because like you said, cortisol is kind of like an energizing hormone. It kind of keeps you alert and keeps you kind of focused, and if you’re working really hard and your cortisol’s high, it’s actually probably going to help keep you really mentally alert for a period of time.

Then like you said, over time as you become more resistant to the effects of cortisol, that kind of good feeling that cortisol gives people will go away pretty quickly. I think a lot of people, especially in Paleo or low carb circles, they often call it a 6 month honeymoon period where if you’re giving your body a lot of stress from either a major diet change or if you suddenly go from an American diet with not much exercise to a low carb Paleo diet with a ton of exercise, you feel really awesome for the first couple months because you’re running on adrenaline basically. I shouldn’t just say Paleo, that kind of happens with a lot of different diets. I think that happens in a strict vegan diet as well, or a super low calorie diet like Weight Watchers or something.

Kelsey: Right. Anytime you’re sort of jumping on some kind of bandwagon and you’re following all these specific rules, it just kind of comes with the territory.

Laura: Yeah, and that’s not guaranteed to happen, but for a lot of people that is that honeymoon period they experience where everything is awesome and then all of a sudden it starts to kind of fall apart. I think a lot of that is that high cortisol period where you may not feel poorly, you may not be tired, you may actually feel wired instead of tired. Or maybe you feel wired at night and a little tired in the morning, but you just have some coffee to get through that fatigue in the morning, and it’s fine.

Kelsey: Mm hmm.

Laura: It’s interesting because I feel like we think of adrenal fatigue as being this situation where you’re always exhausted, and you can’t exercise, and that kind of thing. Actually the first stage like you mentioned is not necessarily going to present as fatigue, or exhaustion, or anything like that.

Kelsey: Right, which is why HPA axis dysregulation actually describes the condition so much better because it sort of includes that first stage that we just forget about, or we push it off to the side when we really refer to adrenal fatigue.

Laura: Yeah, definitely. Like we said earlier, we’re going to use the term adrenal fatigue to describe this condition because it’s what we’re all familiar with colloquially.

Kelsey: Because HPA axis dysregulation is not sexy sounding I guess.

Laura: It does not roll off the tongue super easily. Hopefully people understand at least the bare bones. There’s a lot of information about adrenal fatigue as far as what causes it, what actually happens from a physiological standpoint, and the various stages. But I think we just scratched the surface with a little bit about what actually happens in “adrenal fatigue.”

Kelsey: Yeah.

Laura: We started taking a little bit about how the diet that somebody’s following could cause adrenal fatigue. Obviously our listeners typically are either on a Paleo diet or what we call an ancestral diet, which is a little bit vague, but that’s how we like it. What we want to talk about now is why a Paleo diet that’s overly restrictive, or any diet really, like I said before, if somebody’s vegan or doing a super low calorie diet, they could potentially cause this same response from their body. But I’m going to focus a little bit more on the typical low carb Paleo diet because I would say that’s what I see most often as being that diet that people are on when they get into adrenal fatigue. What about you?

Kelsey: Yeah, probably just because that’s the mostly the people I see coming from those circles to begin with. But, yeah.

Laura: Gosh, I always get a little bit nervous about this because I feel like every time we talk about carbohydrates, there’s people that come out of the woodwork and basically call us crazy for saying that glucose is essential, which really is very frustrating because honestly I think a lot of the people that say that are either the type of person that does very well on low carb. Because there are people that do thrive on low carb, I don’t think it would be as popular as a diet if there weren’t people that do really well.

Kelsey: Right.

Laura: Unless they’re just the kind of person that’s willing to just blatantly lie to everybody, and I don’t think that’s the case. I really think that people who promote a low carb diet do believe that it’s better and that it makes them feel good. I mean I hope it makes them feel good because if it’s not make them feel good, then they shouldn’t be promoting it.

Kelsey: Right.

Laura: But honestly, just based on clinical experience, and I know you’re in the same boat, we tend to see a lot of people who went really low carb for whatever reason. Maybe they wanted to lose weight, maybe they were trying to deal with some gut issues, maybe they thought it would help with their mood or something. Sometimes a little bit of a lower carb diet can be helpful, but when you drop down to that sub 100 grams of carbs per day, that’s where I at least start to see the problems.

Kelsey: Mm hmm.

Laura: It really depends on the person’s activity levels if it’s going to be whether a 100 grams is the problem, or if it’s 200 grams is still too low based on how active they are. But I do see a lot of people that are aiming for that like 50-80 grams per day of starch or carbs, which half the time they’re counting like spinach, and tomatoes, and stuff as part of that 50 grams.

Kelsey: Right.

Laura: As we’ve talked about before, non-starchy vegetables hardly count for carbs at all because it takes glucose to digest them so I almost never consider that as part of a person’s starch recommendations or carbohydrate recommendations.

But anyway, we tend to see people who, again, this honeymoon period is really common. People will go on a very low carb diet and get a bunch of really good results. They’ll say oh my gosh, this is the best diet ever, let me be on this forever. And anytime that anyone says that low carb could be a problem, I’m going to freak out and tell them that they’re wrong.

Kelsey: Right.

Laura: I feel like maybe I’ve talked about this before, but I actually did do a pretty low carb diet for a while in college, and then I guess…I’m trying to remember the last time I really did a low carb diet. I really think it was in college. I think I lost like, I want to say it was like 15-20, no it wasn’t 20 pounds. How many pounds was it?

Kelsey: I think mine was about 15. It was pretty significant.

Laura: I don’t how fast you lost that, but I think I lost that in like a month or so, a month or two.

Kelsey: Yeah, it was really quick.

Laura: Yeah, so obviously when that happens, you feel pretty good about yourself, you feel pretty good about the choices that you made if you’re goal is to lose weight. And again, there’s that honeymoon period where you’re kind of running on adrenaline and running on stress hormones that make you feel more energized than what you felt before you started the diet.

That is the situation that both Kelsey and I have been through where we did the low carb thing and we felt good for a while. And I can’t speak for Kelsey, but after a while I started having issues. I would say my main issues were with anxiety and mental health when it comes to low carb dieting. Also more so lately I think because I’ve been under stress from grad school, and running a business, and all that. I’ve developed some additional symptoms when I go too low carb or if I don’t get enough food in during the day. We recently talked about this with Lilly on one of our interviews for our program, so our listeners don’t have access to that. But I had mentioned on that interview that I get really cold, and cold hand and feet when I haven’t eaten enough carbs.

Kelsey: Yeah.

Laura: Whereas if I eat carbs, it’s weird, I almost get not hot, but I feel really warm and like I’m radiating heat. I feel like that feels to me more healthy than being really cold.

Kelsey: Right.

Laura: It’s certain things like that I personally experienced. What kind of symptoms did you experience when you realized that low carb wasn’t working?

Kelsey: Well, I mean for me my story kind of goes like I was doing low carb for a while and then actually I got like a really bad respiratory infection. Like I was mentioning before, that’s actually really common with getting adrenal fatigue in the first place. I think it was a combination of those two things together, so too low carb plus my body was really stressed out with this really bad infection. After that for me, I definitely had low cortisol at that point, and so it just made no sense to be on a low carb diet. It took me a little while to realize that I think, but once I started adding the carbs back in, I just felt so much better.

My symptoms for adrenal fatigue/being too low carb were more things like brain fog, like cognitively I didn’t feel as good. If I went too long without eating, I just really didn’t feel good. It was more like a blood sugar issue that I was noticing as well. That just goes to show that you can get kind of a range of symptoms for what you feel when you’re too low carb or when your cortisol starts to get a little bit off.

Laura: Yeah.

Kelsey: It definitely shows up differently in different people.

Laura: I’ve had some patients where I’m pretty sure they’re…I’m sorry if there’s a train in the background, I live right next to a railroad.

Some of my female patients that I believe were dealing with adrenal fatigue or maybe they had gotten a cortisol test and it showed low cortisol, a lot of them developed hormonal issues like maybe they stopped getting they’re period, or they had really bad PMS symptoms. That’s something that I see a lot in the women that I work with. Maybe they’re not having blood sugar control issues or brain fog. But like I said, I’ve had some clients with severe PMS where it’s like they can’t function the day that they get their period.

Kelsey: Right.

Laura: It’s really crazy how many different ways HPA axis dysregulation can manifest. Honestly, I feel like everyone is different and it really depends on the reason that it is developing because not everyone develops this issue because of their diet. I just think that the diet can kind of exacerbate it, or maybe it’s the starting point of developing the issue and then something else happens.

Kelsey: Right.

Laura: Like you said, that respiratory infection that kind of is the straw that breaks the camel’s back.

Kelsey: Exactly. I have a lot of people that say to me like, well why can’t we eat really low carb? Our ancestors, at least some of them could do it and they were fine, which it’s a valid point.

Laura: If you’re an Eskimo or something, right?

Kelsey: Right. But they also did a lot of other things to kind of make up for being low carb. And if you think about the kind of stress that they were probably exposed to versus what we’re exposed to, we just have this whole other level of stress that we need to deal with and the body is not necessarily kind of equipped to deal with that for a long period of time in addition to also being stressed out by dietary kind of restrictions that we’re talking about now.

Laura: Yeah, and I think one of the main reasons why diet affects the propensity for adrenal fatigue syndrome is because of the whole blood sugar control thing. Ironically, I know everyone thinks that going low carb should help with blood sugar control, which again, it really just depends on what you consider low carb. Because we might consider low carb like 10% of calories, but the average person in America would probably consider low carb like if you’re eating 20-30% of your calories from carbs, that’s actually low carb to most people.

Kelsey: Exactly.

Laura: Ironically, when you say 20-30% in the Paleo community, it’s like oh my gosh, that’s so many carbs. You’re getting 150 grams per day, you’re going to get diabetes, and Alzheimer’s, and blah, blah, blah.

Kelsey: Right.

Laura: Ironically, I find that I’ve had a lot of patients come to me with severe blood sugar dysregulation because they were not eating enough carbs.

Kelsey: Oh yeah, I think that’s super common.

Laura: Yeah, and it’s just weird because I feel like I don’t know if I feel like everyone talks about that kind of stuff. I almost feel like most of my clients try to go lower carb because they think if they can get into ketosis or something that their blood sugar control will improve.

Kelsey: Yeah.

Laura: But the main reason why it becomes a problem from a biochemical standpoint is because your body has to create glucose if you’re not eating it, which is the big explanation as to why people say you don’t need to eat glucose, which is kind of BS in my opinion.

Kelsey: Mm hmm.

Laura: But your body uses cortisol, and adrenaline, and all the stress hormones to help kick off that new glucose production process. If you’re not stressed out, and you’re not doing any sort of hardcore exercise, or if your life is kind of low stress in general, then yeah, maybe having a little bit of increased stress hormones to have you be able to create the glucose that your brain needs is okay. You can handle that, no problem.

But then if you’re in that first stage of adrenal fatigue where you’re kind of high cortisol all the time, you’re becoming cortisol resistant, when you’re blood sugar drops to that threshold where your brain will actually start to suffer from low glucose, that’s when your body kicks into that overdrive releasing all the stress hormones. And that’s actually what causes the symptoms of hypoglycemia, all that shakiness and kind of jitteriness, and maybe fatigue, or dizziness, that kind of thing. I mean it’s a combination of low blood sugar and excessive stress hormone release.

But basically what happens is if you don’t have any sort of stored glucose from even a moderate carb diet, every time your blood sugar drops, which is essentially anytime that you haven’t eaten for a couple hours…your blood sugar is not an endless supply, your brain will use it and it needs to be replenished… your body is just constantly just kicking into that gluconeogenesis process.

So for whatever reason, maybe you have a liver issue, if you’re liver is not doing so well, if you’re already kind of cortisol resistant, if you’re just the kind of person that for whatever reason doesn’t have the gluconeogenic capacity…and I think that could potentially be an issue that actually determines whether or not someone can handle a low carb diet. Now I don’t know how to figure that out or to test for it, but that’s kind of a hunch that I’ve developed overtime is that some people are just really effective at creating glucose and other people aren’t. That’s really what I believe to be the big difference between people who can tolerate a low carb diet. Like I said, I don’t know how you figure that out besides trial and error.

But long story short, essentially having a little bit of starch in your diet…and when I say a little bit, we usually like to say around 100 grams of starch or starchy carbohydrates as part of your diet, which again is not super high, but it’s a lot higher than what most people on Paleo diets eat…that will be enough to keep your glycogen stores somewhat replenished assuming you’re not doing sort of crazy exercise. That way when you do get that blood sugar dip, instead of having to create new glucose, which is a somewhat stressful process, all your liver has to do is breakdown the glycogen that’s already there and release it into the blood. It’s actually a pretty easy process. It doesn’t really require any stress hormones and it won’t cause you to have that same anxiety type low blood sugar reaction.

Kelsey: Right, because then your blood sugar is low and you have to go through gluconeogenesis, that in and of itself is a stress on the body. If you’re talking about having all this other stress in your life anyway, and then your body has to deal with multiple times a day having to dip in and go through this gluconeogenesis process, that is just an extra stressor on top of everything else.

Laura: Yeah, and like I said, I mean 100 grams of carbs is kind of like the bare minimum and we didn’t even necessarily talk about people who are doing hardcore exercise. That’s something that unfortunately in the Paleo community is really common to be doing low carb Paleo and something like CrossFit, so super high intensity exercise. The type of training that they do in CrossFit is called glycolytic. Essentially what that means is it’s an anaerobic type activity, so sprinting, or heavy weight training, that kind of thing. It’s a process that doesn’t use oxygen because you just can’t get enough oxygen to fuel that activity because it’s happening so fast or it’s just using up so much fuel at once. But basically…actually the type of fuel that your body prefers to use to support those really fast high intensity exercises is glucose.

Kelsey: Right.

Laura: If you’re doing that, then you’re going to be depleting your glycogen stores even faster. And then if you’re eating a low carb diet and not having any glycogen stores in the first place, then your body has to do that gluconeogenic process probably twice or three times as much as it would have had to do if you had just been walking, or doing yoga, or something like that.

Kelsey: Mm hmm.

Laura: In my opinion with the Paleo lifestyle, I think that’s kind of one of the major recipes for adrenal fatigue is a combination of a low carb Paleo diet with CrossFit. What do you think about that?

Kelsey: Oh totally. You have to kind of think about it. I say this which maybe makes it sound a little bit mean, but you have to think about it logically. To me, it’s just dumb. I mean truly, to be exercising like a crazy person and then not fueling yourself appropriately, it just doesn’t make any sense to me.

I think it’s just important to kind of remember that as your thinking about any kind of diet that you’re going to do. Like does this sound reasonable? Is this calorie amount reasonable? Am I fueling what I’m doing reasonably enough? I think a lot of people don’t think about that and they just sort of go with the cookie cutter sort of diet that’s not personalized to them, or their sort of activity level, or the things that they’re currently dealing with. That can you into trouble, you know?

Laura: I think it probably comes from a lack of even understanding. We as dieticians, we go through a lot of biochemistry as far as our education is concerned, and that’s where we learn all about how your body uses different macronutrients…macronutrients are things like protein, carbs, and fat…and what happens when one’s low, or one’s high, and how the body stores it, how the body uses it, and what kind physical activity uses one….they call it a substrate…so one type of fuel substrate over the other.

Like I said, if somebody is doing something like long distance bike riding, which is not too intense, or if they’re even running, if they’re doing long distance running, sometimes doing a lower carb diet could potentially be helpful in that situation because they’re going to end up burning fat anyway at some point. Cardiovascular type exercise is more of a fat burning exercise anyway as far as fuel sources are concerned. Not that I’m suggesting that people do either long distance running or low carb on top of that.

Kelsey: Right, probably not a good idea.

Laura: Certainly not anyone that’s concerned about adrenal fatigue. If somebody’s an athlete and they’re thinking about playing around with that technique, there are other athletes that do that. But my general understanding that any athlete that requires some type of explosive movement, or sprinting, or jumping, or heavy weights, or anything like that that the major fuel source in those type of activities is carbohydrate. There’s really no way around that. I know people tend to say well, just eat more fat if you feel like you’re not having good energy on a low carb diet. It’s like completely missing the point of what you’re body actually needs.

Kelsey: Right.

Laura: It just kind of drives me nuts when I see these recreational athletes that are potentially overtraining. Every person has a different threshold for overtraining, but let’s just assume that they’re probably doing a little bit more than they should and then combining with a low carb diet. I’ve had so many patients that they come to me and they’re in stage three adrenal fatigue where they’re cortisol is just flat lined. It’s really unfortunate because honestly that kind of stage three situation takes so long to recover from.

Kelsey: Yeah.

Laura: I had one patient that he was doing that kind of low carb Paleo, CrossFit combo and he was doing fine for like 2 years or something, and then all of a sudden all broke loose essentially and he developed stage three adrenal fatigue. We were working together for I think like 3 or 4 months and by the end of our time together he just got to the point where he felt like he could do a little bit of short weight training like once or twice a week.

Kelsey: Yeah.

Laura: Otherwise if he did any sort of exercise, it was like he would wake up the next day feeling like he’d gotten hit by a truck.

Kelsey: Exactly. It’s just so sad to see this sort of stuff recommended, and that’s what I was referring to when I say I think it’s dumb. I not saying people who follow it are dumb. I’m not calling our listeners dumb.

Laura: No.

Kelsey: But I am saying that I think it’s just kind of like irresponsible to be recommending something like that because like you were talking about, just physiologically it just doesn’t really make sense. I’m sure there are probably some exceptions to the rule. I actually really agree with that. I think that just for reasons kind of unknown right now, there are certain people out there that totally thrive on a low carb diet. They can handle it, no problem. But I think a lot people don’t. I guess what I think is that maybe it’s not the norm to do well on it. It’s just like there are this certain subset of people that can do well on it if they want to.

Laura: Yeah, well a least not in our modern society.

Kelsey: Right.

Laura: Like you were saying before, there are so many stresses that we’re under that are chronic and even something like staying up too late and not sleeping enough is a chronic stress. If you work inside in an office building that you’re not getting sunlight, that’s a chronic stress.

I work at Paul Jaminet’s health retreats and so much of what he talks about has to do with circadian rhythm entrainment and the way that circadian rhythms actually affect hormone release. Actually, I don’t know if this is something that he taught us or if it’s just a theory that I have. I’ll assume it’s a theory. Please don’t take this as fact. It may be fact, but I can’t remember what the source was, and the source could potentially be my own brain. Knowing what I know about how circadian rhythms affect all hormones and how that’s actually how our cells communicate with other cells. Basically say your cells in your legs are so far from the cells in your arms, or your head, or whatever that the only way that they can kind of function as a unit is using circadian rhythms. Essentially they all have a clock that they follow for releasing hormones. Most hormones have a cyclical pattern. Cortisol has a cyclical pattern. I’m pretty sure insulin has a little bit of a cyclical pattern.

Kelsey: Interesting.

Laura: Melatonin has a cyclical pattern. Most hormones have some kind of cycle. Even sex hormones have maybe not a 24 hour cycle, but they have that 4 week cycle.

Kelsey: Right.

Laura: There’s such a thing as men having a 28 day cycle too, so it’s not just women. But long story short, I do think that circadian rhythm issues could potentially lead to adrenal fatigue simply because if your cortisol is getting released on a circadian schedule and you’re screwing up your circadian rhythms by not going outside during the day, exercising at the wrong times, eating at the wrong times, staying up late watching TV at 1:00 in the morning, staring at your phone in bed, that kind of stuff, that in itself could potentially be throwing off your HPA axis. Now again, I don’t know if that’s an established fact, but I would not be surprised if that was the case.

That’s something else that people don’t even realize. Like oh I love my job, or they don’t think their life is stressful. But when you actually look at what their lifestyle is like just based on the way modern society operates, most people are under stress.

Kelsey: Yeah.

Laura: It’s just really hard to avoid it unless you live in like Hawaii and you’re a yoga instructor or something, which that might be my next career path.

Kelsey: Yes, seriously. Even if you do have, like we were talking about, just pretty much any kind of modern lifestyle is more stressful than let’s say our ancestors would have dealt with doesn’t necessarily mean you’re bound to develop adrenal fatigue.

I do want to clarify that adrenal fatigue, if you go out and say that to your doctor, they are going to look at you like a crazy person because conventional medicine, it doesn’t really exist there because really what they’re looking for in terms of the adrenals is something a lot more a lot more serious, potentially life threatening is something like Addison’s disease where the person just simply can’t produce enough cortisol and it’s way lower than the kind of levels that we talk about when we refer to adrenal fatigue or HPA axis dysfunction.

Laura: That would be adrenal insufficiency, right?

Kelsey: Yes, exactly. That’s what they’re looking for. A functional medicine doctor will definitely know what you’re talking about when you talk about adrenal fatigue. But it’s good to know because you probably wouldn’t want to go into your doctor and say I think I have adrenal fatigue. Because if they’re willing, they might test your cortisol, but they’ll only look at the cortisol in the morning or they’ll do an ACT stimulation test, both of which will only show up if your cortisol is insufficient like Laura was talking about. What we are talking about HPA axis dysregultation is when you have basically not perfect levels of cortisol. They’re off enough that it can still cause symptoms, but it doesn’t need medical attention. That’s probably the best way to put it.

Laura: Yeah, like it wouldn’t be like a fatal situation.  I think the best way to describe it is it’s like comparing pre-diabetes to type one diabetes. Pre-diabetes you’re still having problems, you’re still at risk for long term complications because your blood sugar is too high, but pre-diabetes isn’t going to kill you outright. Whereas if you have type one diabetes and you don’t have insulin replacement, then you will die. That’s a fatal disease if it’s not treated.

Kelsey: Right because your body need cortisol.

Laura: Right.

Kelsey: If you have no cortisol or super low cortisol, you’re in trouble.

Laura: Right. Adrenal insufficiency is more of a life and death medical situation. That usually, like you said, usually comes from things like Addison’s disease. I think also like adrenal tumors can cause that.

Kelsey: Sometimes if you’re on a corticosteroids for a long time, you can get some issues there too.

Laura: Right. We’re talking more about either the cortisol rhythm is off, so aybe it’s the pattern is messed up so it’s not high in the morning and it’s high at night. Maybe it’s just high all the time and that’s a problem, or maybe it’s low all the time. When I say flat lining, again it’s not that you’re not producing any cortisol, it’s just it’s basically no change in the amount that you’re producing and it’s a very low level.

Kelsey: Right.

Laura: That is the end stage. End stage does not mean that you’re going to die.

Kelsey: It just sounds like that.

Laura: I mean, end stage just means it can’t get any worse essentially. You hit the end of how bad it can get.

Kelsey: Right, unless you went into actual adrenal insufficiency from there.

Laura: Yeah, anyway I don’t want to scare our listeners too much. You’re not going to get adrenal insufficiency.

Kelsey: Right, and that’s the reason I brought this up because I think if bring this up to your doctor, they’re going to start talking about adrenal insufficiency potentially and that’s a very, very different thing from what we’re talking about. And that’s to say that just because you’re stressed out or your modern lifestyle is more stressful than your ancestors, it doesn’t mean you’re going to develop adrenal fatigue. But you want to kind of look out for the symptoms, especially if you’re doing a low carb diet, maybe you’re exercising a lot, and potentially if you have some significant stress in your life currently or in the past.

Laura: Right.

Kelsey: Just keep an eye out for those kind of symptoms. But know that there is a lot that you can do about it if you if you end up having adrenal fatigue like what we’re talking about here.

Laura: Yeah, so I think we should give our listeners a little bit of take home advice because I feel like all we’re doing is telling them you’re going give yourself adrenal fatigue by doing CrossFit and low carb Paleo. Not necessarily, but you might. Let’s put the brakes on anything like that that is blatantly leading in that direction.

As far as what kind of changes would be helpful, we have the diet changes. Like we said before, potentially eating more carbohydrates. Like I said, 100 grams of starches, that’s like sweet potatoes, white potatoes, potentially white rice if that’s on the menu, fruit, honey, any of those Paleo carbs, and potentially non-Paleo carbs if people tolerate them, so things like oats, or beans. It really just depends on the person. But getting a minimum of 100 grams of starchy carbs per day, and potentially more if somebody’s super active, would be probably one of the main things to focus on. Then also getting adequate calories.

Kelsey: Yeah.

Laura: That’s something that we both, I’m again speaking for you, but I know I see it a lot that people are just literally just not eating enough food.

Kelsey: Yeah, and that happens really easily on Paleo diet, or really any kind of diet that you’re restricting one macronutrient. Because your body, if it doesn’t have any options for that macronutrient, you’re not going to eat a ton more protein because you’re not eating carbs. Your body pretty much decides how much protein it’s going to eat and that’s about it. Fat, you can deficiently kind of stuff yourself full of fat if you want to. But you just kind of don’t eat as much when you’re restricting a whole macronutrient. It’s really common not to eat enough when you’re on some kind of diet that’s restricting one, or more I guess, of macronutrients

Laura: Or if they’re just restricting a certain type of food. Someone like on a low FODMAPs diet, sometimes I see a lot of people on the low FODMAPs that end up accidentally going low carb because they just kind of assume that most carbs are high in FODMAPs, which actually isn’t the case at all. That’s a situation where something like white rice is an awesome food to eat.

Kelsey: Right.

Laura: Because it doesn’t contain FODMAPs, and that is a whole other topic. But anyway, that’s another example of if somebody’s on a low FODMAPs diet, or an autoimmune protocol, or I’m trying to think of some other examples, like SCD or GAPS. I mean GAPS diet is asking for adrenal fatigue if you’re on that for too long.

Kelsey: Yeah, and that’s really common. I’ve had so many people come to me after being on GAPS for like a year or more and it’s just like you can tell without even testing their cortisol, I can just tell form them talking that they’re probably in some kind of HPA axis dsyregulation because all of their symptoms just point to low cortisol. They’re totally wiped out.

Laura: Yeah, and Kelsey and I have as we’ve mentioned are actually working on an adrenal fatigue program that should be ready to go in the next couple weeks as far as the full program. But I was reading a paper on how people on a restrictive diet, it was mostly looking at high school and college age students that were actively trying to lose weight and they were on a restrictive diet for weight loss. But they were saying that the symptoms that the ones that felt the restricted, so it wasn’t specifically that they were actually restricting the most, but they just felt restricted in their diet.

Kelsey: Mm hmm.

Laura: They actually had very similar symptoms to the men that they had studied in, I think it’s the Minnesota Starvation Experiment. Have you heard of that before? It’s one of Ancel Keys old studies.

Kelsey: No, I haven’t. But that’s so interesting.

Laura: Again, this could be a whole other topic. It was back in the 30’s or 40’s or something. I guess they wanted to figure out what happens when you starve people, which I feel wouldn’t pass an IRB review at this point.

Kelsey: Right.

Laura: That would not be considered ethical. But anyway, they did it back in the day when ethics for research were not as stringent. Basically they put these men on a “semi starvation diet” for 6 weeks, which I don’t even remember what the calorie intake was. But I’m pretty sure it was only like 1500 or 1600 calories, so it wasn’t even that low. There’s people that are on like 1200 calorie diets every day, so it’s like 1600 might sound like a lot to them. But this was considered a semi starvation diet back then.

The kind of symptoms that they developed were actually almost identical to the adrenal fatigue symptoms, so things like mood issues, exhaustion, poor recovery from exercise, joint pain, all this stuff. It’s really amazing because it’s like these kids that were just on a weight loss diet, the degree to which they felt restricted kind of correlated with the degree to which they were experiencing those symptoms.

Kelsey: Wow.

Laura: I don’t know if it’s because of the calorie restriction, or because it’s just a mental impact of self-restriction when it comes to dieting, but I’m pretty confident that in some way or another that just the actual restrictiveness of the diet can actually potentially lead to adrenal fatigue syndrome.

Kelsey: Yeah.

Laura: That’s another reason why Kelsey and I are always kind of doing our best to get our clients on the least restrictive diet possible.

Kelsey: For a lot of people, when you talk to them and they’re on a restrictive diet, there are certain people that can restrict all day long and it makes no difference to their mental state. But then there’s a lot of clients that I talk to who they’re on restrictive diet and you can really tell that it does affect them. That’s interesting you bring that up that it’s kind of more how they view the restriction, and what that means to them affects how they feel.

Laura: Like a perceived restriction.

Kelsey: Right.

Laura: Then it’s ironic because some people…you could look the way I eat and consider it to be restrictive because I don’t eat a lot of the stuff that my friends eat. But I actually feel like it’s a lot less restrictive than most people eat because I try to not be too crazy with that kind stuff.

But it’s just funny because it’s like when I worked with patients who are on an overly restrictive diet and we add in foods again that they had been restricting for no reason, if you look at the diet that they end up on, yeah, maybe they still aren’t’eating gluten, or maybe they aren’t eating dairy, or maybe they’re on a semi autoimmune Paleo diet which could still be considered from an objective perspective that it’s a restrictive diet. But they feel so much less restricted because we’ve added so many foods back in that perception of how restrictive it is much less, and they feel better, and they don’t feel the same kind of stress response to what they’re eating because they feel less restricted. It’s really interesting.

Kelsey: Exactly.

Laura: I really wish there was like some kind of explanation. The mind/body connection I feel like is completely not understood enough.

Kelsey: It’s so fascinating.

Laura: Yeah.

Kelsey: It’s so amazing.  This study, I think I originally heard about from Chris Kresser, but it just like blew my mind at the time, which was that I think it was some study where they blindfolded people and they rubbed them with poison ivy on one side, but they also rubbed on the other side with something else. And they told them that the side they didn’t put poison ivy was the side that they did, and they developed poison ivy on that side. I was just like, wow. That is crazy.

Laura: Oh my gosh, that is crazy.

Kelsey: Yeah so it just goes to show that there’s this huge connection there that first of all yeah, we totally do not understand it as much as we probably should at this point. But it’s also just so powerful that if you recognize it and you really believe that that is true, which it is as evidenced by a lot of different studies, that can really help you in your recovery too. Because the more you believe in your own recovery, the more you try to open up your mind and put a positive spin on things in your mind, the better outcome you’re going to get too.

Laura: Yeah, definitely. I mean they don’t study the placebo effect for nothing. It’s really an actual thing that happens where if you tell someone that something’s curing them, then they’ll believe it. That kind of could send us down into a rabbit hole about like if we tell people to eat a certain way and they feel 10 times better, it’s like well is because the food is really helping them or is it just believed that it was going to help them and it did?

Kelsey: Right.

Laura: Either way it ends up helping them, so I don’t care if it’s complete BS and all we’re doing is helping them with the belief power. But either way, it’s just kind of funny to think about.

Kelsey: Yeah.

Laura: I think there’s a lot stuff as a component of lifestyle that can help prevent or help people heal from adrenal fatigue. Having positive thoughts about your body, positive thoughts about your health, believing that you’re eating in a way that is supporting your health, and making you feel good, and enjoying your food, and all of that kind of mind/body stuff that some people don’t really put too much stock in, but I honestly think it could potentially actually have more of an effect on person’s recovery or adrenal health in general than just objectively looking at their diet and exercise routine.

Kelsey: Yeah, I totally agree with that.

Laura: It’s kind of crazy because there’s so many factors that can play in, and I think for as much as we’ve learned over the last…what have we been working on this project for like six months or something? Five months. For as much as we’ve learned from doing that plus seeing patients, I still feel like I’m always surprised when I discover more information about how much our perception and our attitudes can actually impact the outcomes of our health.

Kelsey: Absolutely.

Laura: So be happy, love your body, blah, blah, blah. All that fun stuff.

Kelsey: All that fun stuff. I know we touched on over-training somewhat in this episode too, so I wanted to just give people a little bit of a sense of what to do to kind of prevent developing adrenal fatigue if you feel like you’re exercising a lot now.

First of all, it depends on the person. But if you can handle the amount of exercise that you’re doing right now and you don’t already have adrenal fatigue that’s developed at this point, you just want to make sure that you’re fueling properly. Like Laura was talking about, getting enough carbohydrates, getting enough calories, that’s really what it comes down to. Because if you’re fueling yourself properly, you’re getting enough recovery time, which is another important factor, but you can still do pretty intense exercise, that’s probably okay.

Laura: Yeah, if you’re going to train like an athlete, you need to live like an athlete as well.

Kelsey: Exactly.

Laura: You need eat a ton of food, the right types of food, get the macronutrients that you need and not just be like I’m just going to have a steak and broccoli with coconut oil on it and that’s enough to fuel me through five workouts a week.

Kelsey: Right.

Laura: Like you were saying with resting and recovery, I feel like professional athletes spend half their day on the recovery end of things.

Kelsey: Exactly.

Laura: Don’t try to train like a professional athlete if you’re not going to take the whole package.

Kelsey: Yep, I think that’s really, really important to remember because it’s so easy to just think oh well, I can just work out really, really tough, and I’ll go to work, I’ll be stressed at work, and I’ll do all this other stuff that’s stressful, I won’t really give myself enough time to recover, and I’ll just eat like Laura was saying a really low carb meal, and fine. Nope, that’s probably going to get you to adrenal fatigue. It may not be tomorrow, but it’ll be eventually. It’s going to catch up to you.

Laura: Yeah.

Kelsey: If you already have adrenal fatigue and you’re exercising pretty hard, you just really want to cut back. Do things that are easy, do things that are really rejuvenating. We will dive mulch more into this in our program, but you just really want to take it back a notch.

Laura: Or maybe 100 notches.

Kelsey: 100 notches is certainly possible.

Laura: Maybe take it to zero notches for a couple weeks.

Kelsey: Yeah.

Laura: Honestly, I’ve had some patients that in order to fully heal, if they were in stage three I mean it was basically they didn’t feel up to exercising, and even if they did I was like no.

Kelsey: Right.

Laura: Maybe go on a walk, that’s it.

Kelsey: Yeah.

Laura: You’re sleeping, you’re hanging out, you’re resting, like no exercising.

Kelsey: Exactly.

Laura: That can be really hard. Like I was saying with that once client, he would go rock climbing, not real rock climbing, indoor rock climbing. To most people, you wouldn’t think rock climbing is some super stressful, intense exercise, but he couldn’t function the next day and he would just feel terrible.

Kelsey: Yeah.

Laura: It’s like even if you don’t think something’s hard, you just have to kind of assume it’s harder than your body can handle, and take it really slow, and then slowly work back up to exercise.

Kelsey: Exactly.

Laura: That’s a topic we’re actually going to cover in our program as well. I think we’re actually a little guest expert on that topic, so that will be exciting. Maybe do you want to talk about a little brief overview of what this program is going to be and how people can get more information about it? It’s obviously not available quite yet, but there’s some options for getting involved and staying up to date with when the program is available and what kind of opportunities we have.

Kelsey: Yeah. First, I’ll say that if this topic is at all interesting to you, you should definitely sign up for our newsletter. We’ll link to that in the show notes. But that’s a really good place to just learn more about the program. We’ll definitely be sending out some emails there. We’re opening up a beta program soon on Monday actually. Monday the 16^th at noon we’ll be opening the beta program which means that you’re going to be getting a discount on the program. I think it’s about a 50% discount on the program itself. You’ll be getting some extra bonuses because we want to hear from you, like what you think about the program. We’ll be doing some Q&A calls as well to just talk to you about any questions you have about any of the topics that we talk about in our videos and things like that because we want to make this the best program possible.

We definitely want your feedback and we are giving you a really great discount and some extra group time, sort of one on one with us where you can ask your questions. That’s just to make the best program out there on adrenal fatigue. Laura, do you want to run through the modules maybe? Should we do that, or what do you think?

Laura: Yeah, sure. Well just to let people know if you do sign up for the beta program, obviously it won’t be the complete program because that’s what a beta is. It’s basically a test program. But, the good news is once the real program is available, then you’ll still have access to that.

Kelsey: Right.

Laura: Once you buy the program you’ll have access to it forever essentially as long as it exists. Then any upgrades we put on it, you’ll get access to that as well.

Kelsey: Yeah.

Laura: Buying the beta program is actually a really good deal because you get everything that the normal price would provide and it’s like you said, about 50% off.

Kelsey: And you get earlier access to the information. If you are looking to dive into this right now, maybe you already know you have adrenal fatigue, or you have a very strong suspicion you have adrenal fatigue and you just want to get started, this is the perfect way to do that.

Laura: Yeah, just to kind of go over briefly what we’re going to be including in this program, basically the first module is going to cover what adrenal fatigue is. Kelsey’s done most of the videos for that, so basically just covering not only what we talked about today, but kind of getting into a little bit more of the nitty gritty about what HPA axis dysregulation is and how that plays out from a physiological standpoint.

Kelsey: I’ll talk about testing options there too so if you’re not sure how to test your adrenals, we’ll definitely be touching on that.

Laura: Yeah.

Kelsey: It’s also a good point in the program where we prepare you for the rest of the program and implementing the changes that we’re going to recommend too.

Laura: We will actually be providing an opportunity to order testing. Even if you’re not working with someone who can order testing for you, we’re going to partnering with an online testing dispensary that will be able to…hopefully most people at least in the United States, I’m not sure about other countries, maybe Canada as well, but in the United States you’ll be able to order tests if you need them. That way you actually can get some data about what’s going on with your cortisol.

Then module two is all about the diet. We talked a little bit about diet today kind of focusing on the carbs and the calories thing. I go into a lot more detail about that kind of explaining the physiology of things and showing diagrams of your liver, and your adrenal glands, all the kinds of hormones that they produce to regulate each other and to keep your blood sugar stable. I also talk about how to determine what your ideal calorie intake is and we actually put together this fun little calculator that can help you get your recommended calorie and macronutrient intakes.

Kelsey: Which is so useful if you’re not working with a nutritionist. People ask that question all the time. I don’t know about you Laura, but for me definitely it’s like how much should I be eating? Like I don’t know. So this calorie calculator is an awesome tool if you’re not sure about that question.

Laura: Yeah, and I would say 80% of the time when I run that…I use a different program to get my clients’ recommendations just because sometimes their macronutrients will be specific…but most of the time they’re like, are you serious I can eat that much? That’s crazy. Usually people are shocked to hear how much that they could be eating and be healthy. Then we also talk about adrenal super foods. There’s a bunch of foods that we think are really important to get in your diet on a regular basis to stay healthy and keep your adrenals healthy to make sure you’re getting the nutrients that you need. I’m sure there’s other things.

Kelsey: Well there’s meal plans, we’ve got meals plans too.

Laura: Oh yeah! I was going to say like I swear I’m missing something. We put together two weeks of meal plans where there’s one that’s a strict Paleo meal plan and there’s one that I would just call it an ancestral meal plan where it’s got some of those non-Paleo foods.

Kelsey: Gray area foods.

Laura: Right, like dairy or white rice. Whereas the strict Paleo one we wanted to be mindful that some people doing the program do need to actually need to restrict things like rice or dairy, so we make sure to get a meal plan that could fit that person’s needs.

Kelsey: And just to clarify, so that’s one week for each of those.

Laura: Right.

Kelsey: Not two weeks of meal plans. It’s one week meal plan for the strict Paleo, and one for what we call Paleo plus.

Laura: Right. Then we also have a snack guide which gives some recipes and ideas for snacks. And eating more frequently can sometimes be helpful, so we want to make sure you guys know what to eat for snacks. Kelsey, you recorded the supplement module, so do you want describe that briefly?

Kelsey: Yeah. In module three, we talk all about supplementation. We have a general supplement guide so you’ll learn for any stage of adrenal fatigue that you’re in, these are the supplements that are really going to just help support the adrenals, let them function the way that they’re supposed to function.

Then from there, we actually split up depending on what stage you’re in, what exact supplements you should be taking. You get a whole supplement schedule. We actually have a whole page where you can buy the supplements right there. We make it super easy for you because I know that that is something that my clients are always really grateful that I just hand them a sheet, say this is what you need to get, this is when you need to take everything, and it just makes it so much easier to follow through with supplementation recommendations when you have it all written down and ready to go. Because I’ll tell you that when you don’t have that plan, and you’re not aware of the plan, and you’re just like oh I have these supplements, I should take them on a regular basis, it doesn’t happen.

Laura: Right.

Kelsey: We give you the exact time of day that you should be taking everything depending on what stage you’re in and the exact supplements you should be taking there.

Laura: Right. Then module four is focused on lifestyle stuff. We’ve gone into recommendations on exercise, and sleep, and stress management, and social connections. We’ve also included some guest expert information in there.

Again like I said, I think we’re going to have someone pretty well known in the fitness community talking about how get back into exercise if you’ve taken a lot of time off for adrenal fatigue, and also ways to start exercising that are appropriate for someone that’s in adrenal fatigue.

We’ll also be talking to someone who is going to explain how she decided to change her career path because of her issues with adrenal fatigue, which can be a really difficult decision for a lot of people if their career is kind of what’s causing the major issues. That’ll be fun.

I know Chris Kresser is actually contributing some meditation guidance, so we get to have him help with that as well.

Kelsey: Very exciting.

Laura: A bunch of different people helping out with the lifestyle stuff. Then we also have some resource guides for that. So you’re actually going to get information about if we make recommendations about a type of meditation style to do and we want to give you some resources for mediation, that’s going to be available, and exercise routines that we think are more appropriate. We’re not going to just going to leave you on your own to figure out how to do all that. We actually give you resources to implement that stuff.

Then we have a special bonus module which I think I’m going to keep that a secret.

Kelsey: Yeah, I like that idea. You guys will find out. But it’s such an important topic, so you do not want to miss it.

Laura: Yes. I’ve been even just today, I’ve been doing some work on it, and the more I do on it the more I’m just like wow, this is so important and I can’t wait to share it with people.

Kelsey: Yeah.

Laura: Honestly, I feel like it’s something that does not get talked about nearly enough in the Paleo community.

Kelsey:  It doesn’t

Laura: And honestly, I would say like 8 out 10 of my clients have issues with this particular topic and it’s probably what’s causing at least 50% of their issues.

Kelsey: Yeah. Absolutely.

Laura: It’s important, so you don’t want to miss that. Like you said, we’ll be launching the beta test on Monday, March 16^th at 12pm Eastern, so that’s noon.

Kelsey: We have 30 spots open. I don’t know if I said that.

Laura: I don’t know. But basically we are limiting it to 30 because we want to make sure that whoever signs up for the beta will actually get to share their thoughts with us, and get to ask us questions, and help us develop the program to make it even better that what it already is.

If you are interested in being a part of the beta membership, make sure you get on the email list because we’re going to send out an email once the sign up is available, and the first 30 people that sign up are going to get in, and then we’re going to close enrollment. If that’s something you really want to get involved in, if you’re budget is kind of tight and you want to get this information for half price, then we strongly recommend getting on the list so you know when we’re going to be launching stuff. Kelsey and I will be letting people know on our Facebook pages and that kind of thing as well, but the email is probably going to be the first thing that gets sent out.

Kelsey: Exactly. If you’re really into it, get on the email list. I’ll also say that if you’re considering doing the beta, for us we would love it if you are really, really committed. If you really want to do this program and you’re willing to go through the whole program with us and kind of give us your feedback, like any questions you have like if any of the material isn’t clear, if you have some specific question about whatever stage you’re in that we don’t answer in the program, that’s the stuff that we want to know.

If you’re someone who just wants to kind of have access to this, you’re not really ready to do it quite yet, I would urge you to wait just because we really want to give this opportunity to people who want to do the program now because that’s what’s going to help us to make the program even better for everybody who gets it later.

Just out of mutual kindness, we would appreciate it you would sign up if you’re ready to start the program on Monday.

Laura: Yeah, because we are going to get in touch with people and there is going to be some level of accountability from us if you’re not participating. We’re not going to do anything, but hopefully people would have some level of…what’s the word…consciousness if we’re asking the questions and they’re not answering them, or if they’re not participating in the questions and answers. Not that we expect that. We love you guys, so I think it should be fine.

Kelsey: Yeah.

Laura: But just come prepared to work, and make some changes, and to learn a lot, and to share your experience with us, and hopefully make this even better than what we’ve already done so far. I think it’s pretty great so far, so I don’t know how much better it can get, but it could. So we’ll see what happens.

Kelsey: Yeah. We’re so looking forward to seeing you inside the program. If you have any questions about it once we send some more information to you, feel free to reach out to us via that email newsletter too.

Laura: Yeah, or if you want to leave a comment in this particular podcast recording, then that’s fine as well.

Kelsey: Yeah.

Laura: Either way, we’ll see it, so don’t hesitate to get in touch with us.

Kelsey: Alright. Well, I’m very much looking forward to this and I’m sure you are too, Laura.

Laura: Yes.

Kelsey: We’ll leave it here for today. And we are really happy to have everybody on board, and we hope you join us the in program, and we will see you there.

Laura: Yeah. Well, talk to you soon, Kelsey.

Kelsey: Bye.