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i got a request to share what i've heard about reducing stress.

i mean physiological stress, how can you deal with life calmly.  the
obvious you problably know -- exercise, B vitamins, good nutrition.
Here is some of the non-obvious.

How this relates to gluten intolerance -- stress is said to cause gluten
intolerance, along with your genes.  Reducing stress might help you get
over food intolerances and help you recover on a gluten-free diet.

Also for people who've been abused -- apparently the stress of that can cause
biochemical problems -- like gluten intolerance and "hypoglycemia" -- that
have
psychological symptoms.  So you can spend decades interpreting everything
psychologically and maybe it's not true.

I put "hypoglycemia" in quotes because i don't mean true hypoglycemia, like
diabetics get if they inject too much insulin -- but rather the blood glucose
problems / hormonal problems that commonly get called hypoglycemia, which
usually do not involve really low blood sugar.

One person gave me a whole lot of info, she's obviously done a lot of
looking into stress research.  And some from other people.

i put lines of dashes to separate different people's contributions.

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Heidi:
ANY stress can cause high cortisol, though job stress etc.
doesn't seem to be really an issue for me ... lack of sleep
might be. Food allergies decidedly raise my cortisol though!
BTW high cortisol also makes you jittery and anxious.

The "extra" cortisol causes unpleasant symptoms,
such as the shakes, dizziness, anger, that people
associate with "skipping a meal type low blood sugar".

There is also a book called "The Cortisol Connection" that
talks a lot about how cortisol works. And the November issue
of Health magazine talks about the Feast/Fast method in general
and the research behind it.

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me:
>it is interesting what you say about cortisol, it makes me hope that i
>will feel less stressed if I manage to get my metabolic problems taken
>care of.  i do feel chronically stressed, it would be so nice to be able
>to do more.

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Heidi:
I think this is true ... I feel sooooo much calmer now, even
though my life is more hectic. Yoga helps too
though, and TaiKwanDo, and lifting weights. All
of those get rid of excess cortisol.

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me:
Stress relates to what people commonly call "hypoglycemia" -- the excesses
of insulin and adrenal hormones that cause people to get upset after eating
carbohydrates.

I get tense, driven, can't settle down, irritable, hostile, "geared up for
battle" after really getting a jolt of glucose -- it doesn't matter much from
what, an orange,a lot of dried fruit.  that happens within minutes of eating
the food.  i have seen these reaction associated with adrenalin in other
places,
not cortisol.  i think adrenalin also raises your blood sugar.

If i eat something less glucose rich but still carbohydrate,
i don't feel bad right away but i get hungry
a half hour/hour later.  Like an apple or a carrot.

I've felt a lot kind of spaced out, like humans are alien, a lot of anxiety,
when generally eating a high carbohydrate diet, not a specific reaction to
eating a particular food.

I did  a lot of binge eating when i was a teenager and i stopped completely,
my food cravings stopped when i started being careful about sweets other than
fructose and eating fructose freely.  And i got a great deal less anxious.

But, i never had those immediate reactions to high glucose foods when i was
binge eating.  They started only after i started using a lot of fructose.

Fructose is used a lot to cause hyperinsulinism and insulin resistance in
rats, There are dozens of studies of Syndrome X using fructose fed rats.  It's
a pretty good guess it's likely to do the same to me (a human), and that my
reactions to high glucose foods might be related to hyperinsulinism and
making adrenalin to compensate.

i ate something like 150 calories/day of fructose for years and i have been
wondering if it's made my "hypoglycemia" worse.  Americans eat huge amounts
of sugar, most of the sugar products are about half glucose, half fructose;
so they get a lot of fructose.  So it's possible a low-sugar diet will reduce
the adrenalin and cortisol and so help you cope with stress.  One of the
symptoms of "hypoglycemia" is nervousness.

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Heidi:
A lot of it has to do with the fact that we eat CONSTANTLY and are
always pushing food into a system where the glycogen levels
are already overloaded. This causes high insulin (because of
insulin resistance). You also get high cortisol from allergies,
which tends to cause high insulin (cortisol makes you constantly
hungry, for one thing).

The Warrior Diet method ... eating only once a day, does WONDERS
for hypoglycemia by using up the glycogen and training the body
to use stored fat.  details on the warrior diet available at
www.warriordiet.com

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i asked about connection of gluten to the blood glucose problems
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Definitely. If I have a food reaction (which I presume is gluten,
though obviously I don't eat it on purpose ... I seem to react
to butter sometimes too), then the next day my blood sugar
goes all haywire. What I've read is, that it is from cortisol.
An allergy causes you to produce more cortisol. Cortisol
makes your blood sugar go to pot for various reasons, one
of them being that it blocks you from using your own
fat stores for energy. Also cortisol and insulin are antagonistic,
meaning, your body might try to balance cortisol with insulin
and vice versa (though I'm not clear on all that).

in people who are "hypoglycemic", they produce way
TOO MUCH cortisol, somewhat like T2 diabetics
produce too much insulin.

However, the research also says that intermittant fasting
makes the body more stress-resistant, which is why I
tried the Warrior Diet ... it seems to work, the allergy-stress
doesn't cause as much of a reaction as it used to. Sugar
doesn't cause as much of a reaction either now (I pigged out
at Christmas with various desserts, but didn't get any
low-blood-sugar post reaction from them).

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another person:

I have all the same symptoms you do, and have yet to
find a cure. All of this was caused by my post
traumatic stress disorder.

The books that have given me some useful information
are The road to immunity by DR. Bock....explains
adrenal function and how it is linked to the other
parts of your body fairly well...but its only 3 pages
so maybe just go read those pages in a book store.

Molecules of Emotion also helped me understand the
connections in my body some...but didn't really help
me in knowing what to do.

To tell you the truth, the things that have helped me
most with all these symptoms hava been the things that
got my emotions out.  Reading Tao of Equus by Linda
Kohanov. Talks a lot about emotional processes, and
the fight or flight survival instinct and how that
affects your body after sexual abuse or trauma.

* Visit the Celiac Web Page at www.enabling.org/ia/celiac/index.html *