Conquering Fatigue

Transcript of Dr. Michael Grossman discuss how you can feel energized and enjoy your daily life by overcoming fatigue. You may view the YouTube video here.

Transcript Start Here:

Welcome to the Age Gracefully Show with Dr. Michael Grossman, well known anti-aging stem cell and regenerative medicine specialist, bestselling author and founder of the OC Wellness Clinic in Irvine, California. Each week he shares the latest information to help you look and feel your best so you age gracefully. And here's your host, Dr. Michael Grossman.

Hi, I'm Dr Michael Grossman. I'm an anti-aging physician, and we're going to talk today about conquering fatigue. So as an anti-aging physician-medical doctor, I work very much in the arena of getting people to feel more energetic, enthusiastic, creative and youthful to be able to enjoy life and to be active in doing whatever it is that you love, whether it's exercise, whether it's working, whether it is being with your family and a foundational part of feeling youthful is having a lot of energy. So when we look at fatigue, there's a variety of things we have to think about. So I'm going to have you think out with me what's going on with fatigue. And for those of you who have fatigue or knows someone and your family who has fatigue, let's think out the issues of fatigue and you get a big picture of it, and then you can see what directions when we'll need to go in to resolve that problem.

This is a copy of my book, "The Vitality Connection." The subtitle is, "10 Practical Ways to Optimize Your Health and Reverse the Aging Process." So I wrote this book some years ago, but the general outline is really very appropriate for fatigue, So there are different kinds of fatigue. You may have your energy level that varies through the day. You may feel very tired, particularly after you exercise. You may feel tired every day or just maybe on the weekends. You may find certain foods you eat that make you tired. You may... sore muscles. But it's not due to exercise, and you may find your energy varies from day to day. Each of those issues release two different causes for fatigue.

So one of the courses with fatigue we're going to look at as it's written down here in my book, and we're going to go through this chapter on conquering fatigue. Mitochondria. Mitochondrial fatigue is fatigue that occurs because the energy packets within every muscle and within every cell are called mitochondria, and they are a little like a furnace that burns up your food, creates heat during the burning process, and then it is transferred into energy. There are many things that cause Mitochondrial injury. Every time you get a flu bug, you can get aches and pains and you tired, and you just have a few days of feeling terrible. Not because you've done anything, but because that process of getting that infection injures the Mitochondria. Mitochondria are like little cells in the body that are different than the cells that are in the nucleus. So all of ourselves in the body we have the DNA that's hidden within the nucleus and it's protected. Infection goes on so that the cell protects the DNA from injury, because that's what keeps you alive, that's what's going to help the next generation and it's super protected. Mitochondria, are kind of like little separate DNA that probably evolutionarily occurred because these little cells came into our body and symbiotically started to replicate and the cells of the animal cooperated with these other little baby cells of like a little bacteria, and the bacteria says, 'I'll make the energy, you take care of me.' So inside our bodies, we get all the DNA that's in the Mitochondria from our mothers. Everything else is 50/50, mother and father in the nucleus. The DNA in the mitochondria doesn't have that protection and very easily injured by infection, by injury, by foods, by viruses by all kinds of things. When the Mitochondria are injured, you get a lack of energy. You feel a lot of muscle aches and pains without even exercising. And if you do any exercise, it's enormously fatigue and the aches that you get. When you don't have energy produced by the Mitochondria, your body makes lactic acid, which builds up and creates this ache. It's not psychological, it's physiological. If you have injury in the Mitochondria, you're tired all the time - weekdays, weekends, night day - all day long, you're tired. If you tried exercise, you get extremely tired. If your fatigue is related to depression, you exercise. You feel a little bit better. You exercise and you say, 'Well, I feel better now that I exercise.' If you have mitochondrial fatigue, you tried to exercise all. You feel terrible. So that's one kind of fatigue - Mitochondrial fatigue. There are many different approaches to heal mitochondrial fatigue. I will talk about that in a little bit.

But first, let's go through different kinds of fatigue. Then we have fatigues that could relate to the adrenal glands. The adrenal glands, our glands that sit on a top of the kidneys and they produce adrenaline and DHEA and other hormones that give you energy. When you're under stress, you get a release of these hormones and you deal with the stress. So emergency happens. You want energy, you have to stay up during the night. Someone in the hospital, you deal with it and you use that adrenaline energy and you can handle it. If you get that adrenaline going on and on and on and on after, it doesn't matter how much adrenaline you get, you still are tired. Your adrenal glands don't make the adrenaline, and even if they do make adrenaline, your body turns it off and just doesn't work. And you're tired. If you have fatigue from adrenal fatigue, it usually is certain times in a day. Of course, the adrenal glands is supposed to go up in the morning and down in the evening. So when it goes up in the morning, you feel more energy and in evening time, you're ready for sleep, you're going to be tired, and you want to rest and relax. If your fatigue is related to times of the day, it's a good chance it's adrenal fatigue. The body deals with stress, from adrenal glands for a while, and then when it stays high after a long period of time - months - it just sort of poops out, and we have a variety of ways of approaching this. But this is a different kind of fatigue from the fatigue related to the Mitochondria.

So other kinds of fatigue, if your energy levels varies during the day related to meals, eating or not eating that's the fatigue that relates to blood sugar. If you have low blood sugar, you'll find that you skip a meal and you're really, really tired. You need something sweet and feel good for a while. Then you get tired again, and you constantly have to eat during the day or you'll get tired. That's a different kind of fatigue. That is a fatigue that relates to how much sugary things you're eating with enough protein. It relates to the adrenal fatigue because when the adrenal glance are pooped out, you tend to get more low blood sugar fatigue. So, there's a variety of nutritional approaches to deal with that low blood sugar issue. And if your energy level varies during the day a lot and it seems to relate to what you're eating. You may eat certain foods, certain meals and feel good, and you had other meals and feel really bad. Now it could be low blood sugar, but it could also be that you're having food allergies, fruit sensitivities and every time, even wheat, where every time you're eating dairy or every time you're eating a certain food, you feel really bad. Food allergy is very, very common, and you have to play detective with that to see which foods make you feel good. Which foods make you feel bad and there's a whole process that we do to help you with that. Now, if you're feeling tired all the time and it is constant, then you're dealing with different kinds of things, it doesn't seem to vary during the day and weekends, evenings; it's just you're tired all the time. Then we have to think about things like low iron, which is easy to test for the blood; low b12, again easy to test for in your blood. We have other things that will relate to being tired all the time. There are many different viral infections that you could have that cause - you just feel tired all the time.

One of the common kind of viral infections, we call it chronic fatigue syndrome, which is just a vague term for, 'You don't know why you're tired,' but it's probably some kind of a virus, and there's many different viruses that could do it. And these are not the simple things to treat because we don't have a magic pill that will get rid of that fatigue. But chronic fatigue, some can relate to the mitochondrial fatigue because when you have this ongoing virus in the mitochondria. And so we have many different kinds of fatigue that you can have in various ways to treat them ahead and think about that. So if you're going to treat low blood sugar. You got to avoid sugary things. You got to avoid refined carbohydrates. You got to eat small, frequent meals in the day and you got to take B vitamins that will help to support the adrenal glands. If you have adrenal gland weakness as the primary issue for your fatigue, you have to do a variety of things. One, we have supplements that are very helpful for adrenal gland fatigue, these are herbs of various sort that specifically support the adrenal glands to make them more robust and well balanced and help the body to recover the normal adrenal gland function that you want to have. Sometimes we use prescription medicine, but frequently we just use herbs. And reducing stress is really critical. You've got to sleep good with the adrenal gland fatigue. You've got to replenish your body's energy, and sleeping is real important. And there's all kinds of things to do to help sleeping from dealing with sleep apnea to dealing with, 'Why aren't you falling asleep? Do you need to take some herbs or nutrients or supplements that help you to sleep? Do you need to have a better routine for sleeping during the night?' There's a lot of things that are really critical to help you to sleep well.

Now, the food allergy issue is a big, complex issue. If you have this fatigue that relates to watching, eating and watching on specific foods, making you tired, you need to have a food diary and you need to play detective. And usually I put people on a rotation diet. Where you're eating very few foods and you rotate the foods in and you begin to see which foods can you eat and feel good and which foods you think might be a problem. And you begin to eat the foods that make you feel good, and little by little, you test out the foods that you're not sure about. So that's what we do for food allergies.

Now, for general fatigue, that's there all the time. We also have to consider low thyroid as well as mentioned from the things you wanted to get your thyroid, just a blood test and treat that some simple ways of giving you supplementation. The one that's the hardest to treat is the one that's the chronic fatigue. That is, the complexity because we don't have specific things that can reverse that process in an easy, quick way. But with chronic fatigue, we usually have to look at your overall health and physio, and we deal a lot with what goes on in the gastrointestinal track. So for both food allergies and for chronic fatigue and from mitochondrial injury, we need to be focused on your gastrointestinal tract. Is it healthy? Is it balanced with good bacteria? Are you absorbing your food properly? Our thing is leaking through the intestinal tract that sets up a whole allergic reaction in your physiology, and that takes a little complex approach. So this gives you a big idea of what goes on with fatigue, and I will tell you that 90% of the time, people come to see me who've had chronic fatigue for all kinds of reasons and for a long period of time and have been to many traditional doctors to come to see me neige of the time and I could be dramatically helpful. But it takes a cooperative patient. Someone who's willing to go through this process of playing detective and going through all these different arenas of what we need to do to bring your body back into balance.

So that's my job as an anti-aging doctor to make you feel youthful. Sometimes we have to get bioidentical hormones, which get your body feeling youthful again. Sometimes we have to do specific kinds of preparing physiology with different herbs and nutrients. Mainly, we're going to do what we described here today is to find out what is the cause of fatigue, which category you fall into, and which is the best approach for you. So that's the big picture of dealing with fatigue and conquering fatigue. It's a pleasure to talk with you if you or one of your family want to come and see me as a patient, call my office: 9492220232. You go to my website: ocwellness.com and there's lots of information on the website for all kinds of things that I do as an anti-aging physician. So it's a pleasure to talk with you today. I look forward to speaking to you again. Thanks so much.

Thank you for watching the Age Gracefully Show with Dr. Michael Grossman. Join us next week for another informative discussion to help you age gracefully. Be sure to visit us at ocwellness.com.

Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/ocwellness
Website: https://www.ocwellness.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/OCWellnessMD/