Good afternoon everybody and welcome to episode 88 of the podcast the official podcast from Shemaeens model health for those looking to optimize their long-term health and weight goals. I am Shemae Lenny. I'm a biohiker and fitness and nutrition expert and I'm super grateful to have you back with me another day. I hope you're all keeping well.
And this week's podcast, we're going to do something teeny tiny little bit different and kind of look at the anatomy. So I'm a big believer that when people really understand how their body works, kind of what it looks like, internally, not in a gross way, what kind of have this kind of mental image or blueprint of where different parts of the body are, the organs, the tissues, how they work, then people can tend to be more committed on their health journey, whatever that may be. So someone understands, hey, I eat this food and it does this, this and this to me. They have a better understanding of why they're making that choice, why it is a good idea to make that choice or if someone wants a specific outcome, let's just say they want to optimize liver function, then we want them to understand where the liver is in the body, what it looks like, what exactly it does and not them too complicated, just the basics to help people along and then they have a better understanding of when they do this, this is what's going to happen in support of their say, liver goals.
Anyway, so this week I wanted to look at the adrenals and I've done a podcast on adrenal fatigue before and people talk a lot about adrenal fatigue and most of the time to be honest, I get the impression that when people talk about adrenal fatigue, they don't actually understand what it is, where the adrenals are, what adrenal fatigue even means. So we're going to start very basic and just kind of look at the anatomy. So the adrenals, they're kind of like these little beans that sit on top of your kidneys and there's one on top of each kidney and this is kind of in your low back area just below some of the muscle tissue there. And their adrenals, they do a loss like they're super important.
They manage our stress response, our blood sugar control, our blood pressure, how our body uses say our hormones including our thyroid and reproductive hormones, how our immune system is doing, they even help manage electrolytes and how they get chiral through our blood into our cells. And in some cultures, the adrenals are considered a source of our life force or vitality. The adrenals are so relevant to our everyday life, like they really do, they affect our mood sleep energy, how we manage energy throughout the day, how well we recover and heal, be that from training or an injury where we have good blood sugar levels and everything like that. It's all related to the adrenals.
So they do so much more than stuff was from having fatigue, that makes sense. So as I just mentioned, one of the main jobs of the adrenals is to create hormones. And these hormones can fluctuate throughout the day. And this fluctuation of course can change our state or how we feel as we go through the day, makes sense hormones change, we change.
When we are in a stress state or survival mode, the adrenals will cause us to shut down certain processes in the body, like our reproductive system, they will shut down part of our immune system that cause our metabolism to slow right down because remember now your adrenals think that you are running away from a dinosaur. So they are going to slow everything down and shut down all unnecessary functions. They really just, if you are running from a dinosaur, your adrenals just want you to run like hell. So they want to make sure you have energy for your legs to move as fast as they can.
And that's pretty much it. So they slow everything down and they will also cause your body to store fuel because they are like hell, I don't know when I am going to get my next meal, I am running from this dinosaur and for all I know he is at every other animal on the planet. So in times of famine, that used to be useful of course, but nowadays not so much. And nowadays we have got a lot of external stressors and those I speak about in other podcasts, I don't want to get into it too much, I did a quarter of all part one and two a few weeks ago.
So go check that out. The adrenals, they are super important. And quite a while ago many moons ago, Dr. Weston Price noticed that back in our ancestral times with early settlers of the Yukon and British Columbia, it was commonly practiced that if a big wild animal like a moose was killed, they would take the animals and share it amongst the tribe because they believed that this was what prevented the tribe or everyone from getting scurvy.
And of course at certain times of the year, there was little or no produce at all. So there was no fruit or anything like that for them to get any essential nutrients or vitamins or antioxidants. So they would take the adrenals off the animal and they would then share it between the tribe to help prevent curvy because they believed that it was very rich in antioxidants and vitamin C. And as we know now, what those settlers believed and practiced all that time ago is now what we have seen through science and everything that the adrenals have, some of the highest amounts of vitamin C in the body and they also store vitamin C too.
So I say all the time, a lot of what was practiced a long time ago was coming full circle and we're seeing that we weren't too far off in our ideas back then. And for those of you that didn't know, scurvy is a disease caused by a deficiency in vitamin C where one we get bleeding gums, bleeding noses, just wounds popping up everywhere. And in some cases it could lead to death. So they try to prevent this by eating the adrenals.
So you can kind of see the importance that these little tiny tissues have. So although the adrenals being small in size, they have a big part in making or breaking our health, we want to support them as much as possible. We want to give them some love and we know this gets more and more important as we age in our environment changes. Some of the things that are very supportive of the adrenals is keeping a good routine.
The adrenals like their routine. They're used to flow in a certain way. So keep a good routine. I try to enforce morning and evening routines into all of my clients' lifestyles.
I really will enforce this. And the same like when we have babies and kids, routines are super important. It's one of our most basic blueprints that we know what we're doing and when. Right from birth.
So try to keep a routine where you can, like I said morning and evening, keep your body in sync. Keep your body in sync with the earth's circadian rhythm too because the signals we get off the earth are the signals that get sent to us into our internal adrenals and our HPA and all our other functions. So we get those external signals and they kind of keep us ticking nicely. And of course keeping bad stress to a minimum, that's going to be important because you don't want to be constantly telling your adrenals, run, run, run, dinosaur, run.
You don't want to do that either. So there's some kind of understanding. You get an idea of where the adrenals stay as in the body, how important they are and what it is they do. I hope you found it super helpful.
Nothing too in the app, nothing too complicated. Just enough so you have an understanding of what your body looks like and how it works. Okay everyone, have a fantastic rest of the week, end of the week, whatever you have time, stay safe and we'll chat to you soon. Bye bye.