Adrenal & Immune Health: Master Your Histamine Balance

Introduction to Adrenals and Histamine 0:00

Welcome back to our reversing mast cell activation syndrome and histamine intolerance summit. I'm your host, Dr. Meg Mill And today I'm joined by my esteemed colleague, Dr. Tricia Pingel. Dr. Pingel is a naturopathic physician and known as the Adrenal whisperer. So we're going to talk about all things adrenals today and how your cortisol and your adrenals affect your histamine levels, about how they affect your immune system, about what starts to happen when you're living in that fight or flight all of the time.

And how that does start to dysregulate the immune system You know, we're really need to work on nervous system regulation all the time in relation to what we're dealing with when it comes to both histamine intolerance and mix. So we're going to talk with her about the dynamics and what we can do about it today. So I am so glad to have you with us, Dr. Tricia. I am so excited to be here. Thank you so much for having me today. Well, I'm excited to talk about all things adrenal stress. Everybody has issues here in our world.

But before we get started, can we just talk a little bit about, you know, how you really got to where you are today? Because I know so many of us have personal stories. I love to just share. Oh, absolutely. And I think many of the listeners can relate. I'm a type A personality, and I kind of, always want to fix it and I always want to take control of it and always want to, you know, be doing everything that I can. And so that's what I did with everything in my life from the time I was little. It's like something would happen and I just power through, and then something else would happen and I would just power through.

And eventually that catches up with you. And I was at a point, I had lost my dad and my 20s didn't grieve it, because I had to get my degree, you know, I had to power through. I had to work. I had things to do. And it wasn't. And, you know, after all these little hits that come along over the years,

Personal Adrenal Burnout Story 2:06

my mom had passed, of cancer when I was 40. And right after she passed, it was like every single thing I had powered through from the time I was little till that point all came to a head. My adrenals were stressed. I felt like crap. My hair was falling out, my nails were poor. I was getting sick all the time. I really didn't feel a whole heck of a lot of joy if I'm honest in my life. And engaging with people and being with people, and I got to a point where I was like, oh my gosh, I'm a naturopathic physician that treats adrenal fatigue and I have adrenal fatigue.

And here I was helping all these people overcome their stress and balance their hormones and whatever. And I was just powering through and it was happening to me right under my nose. And I think that happens to so many of us. We just we're good people. We work hard. We do what we can, especially women and moms. We just power and we power and we power, and we open our eyes one day and we're like, oh my God, I am not okay. so I took my advice and once I started to take my own advice, I've turned my health completely around.

And now every day I wake up, it's with joy and excitement. I feel good, you know, I want to I want to dance. I want to, you know, spread joy to everyone that I come in contact with. And I want people to understand that you actually can get that back. You can get yourself back through all this stress, despite the fact that it keeps happening around us. We're actually very much in control of it. Yeah. That's great, I have I have to admit, I have also been there myself. Times are like, you know, you do.

You just push and push and and then you realize, oh, wait, I'm crashing. And so a wake up call often to what we need to change. It is I know it's to our fault, I guess, but sometimes we just it's good to not have control over some things and just accept and be okay with that. It's it's okay. And I think a lot of us need to hear that it's okay to not be perfect all the time. I actually embrace that now. I think we need to be perfectly imperfect. and so yeah. And I and I think that's a real key to turning stress around as well, because obviously, there's a lot of stress in our society right now coming at us from all different angles, and I don't see it going anywhere.

but you can change the way you look at it and the way you interpret it. And in turn, completely change your health. Yes. Yeah. Well, let's get into some of the the sciencey stuff behind it, because that's always fun too. So, you know, I think not everyone knows about the adrenal glands and cortisol and kind of what that is. So can we could you just give us a little bit of sort of adrenal one on one. So I can indeed. So, the adrenal glands sit on top of your kidneys. And the way I like to describe it is, if you were in the woods and you see a bear, you kind of start to panic, right?

Your blood pressure goes up, your heart starts to beat, you freak out, your body freezes, it doesn't know what to do. And in that moment, you're almost into paralysis that are your adrenal glands at work. That's a fight or flight response. It's diverting everything in your body to get away from the bear. That's all it cares about. You're not going to stop and have sex. You're not going to digest your food. You're not going to take a nap, right? You're going to run. Okay. So our bodies are designed through our adrenal glands to do that periodically, not consistently.

So when we have bears that keep appearing, the body will continue to adapt to stress. And so these things that happen when we see a bear become normal increased blood pressure, rapid heart rate, lack of sleep, poor libido, poor thyroid function, poor hormone function, weight gain. Like all these things that we do when we're supposed to be resting, kind of get put on the back burner to save our lives. It's a survival of the fittest response. the interesting thing with adrenal glands, though, is that physiologically, they don't really know the difference in the type of stress.

So it could be a bear, or it could be your cell phone ringing. Your body doesn't really know the difference. It just knows there's a stimuli that it needs to react to immediately. And then our brain interprets the next stimuli and the next stimuli and the next stimuli. So imagine you're in those woods and you walk up to a tree and you're like, man, I'm tired, I'm going to take a nap. So you lay down and you take a nap. And then in your brain it says, what was that? And you wake up, right? So your body start to anticipate that there's another stressor coming.

How the Adrenal Stress Response Works 6:30

So when we start doing that we are definitely in adrenal dysfunction. We are definitely in adrenal fatigue. And our bodies are spending more time in that fight or flight than they are doing what they need to be doing in the rest and digest. So that's kind of the overview of what our adrenal glands do. And they're actually in control, in my opinion, of everything else. when we talk about immune system, for example, you're that you're whether you're not you see a bear determines whether or not your body's going to react.

Right. It has to make a decision in that moment. Oh shoot. Am I going to kill the flu or am I going to run from the bear? Oh man, what am I going to do? And it has to make that decision. So we start to see a lot of health declines slowly of little symptoms over the years that are due to stress, that will pretty much be dismissed by your traditional doctor because they're not going to see a clinical change. You're just going to feel the change and you're going to have small symptoms, and it's going to be dismissed, unfortunately, as stress, when I really feel we need to pay a stronger look at that stress response, because I actually believe it's causing pretty much every health condition that we have in our society right now.

And there's literally no treatment, you know, in the conventional society for stress. It's not recognized as a treatable item at all. And it's it's something that when we're looking at something like mast cell activation, we need to be working on the whole time that we're working on identifying the root causes, because, you know, your body is in that hypersensitive place where it's just reacting to everything. So until we can get that calmed down, some of the other things won't actually be working as well either.

So, so so I feel like it's always that parallel. We need to be working on the response and the and the other things at the same time too. Yeah, you have to look at it holistically and it is interesting on the immune system even with mast cell and otherwise is there's different phases of this. If you're in an acute cortisol response, how it's supposed to be back in the day when you saw a bear once every six months, the body will actually not allow that histamine response or that mast cell response in that moment.

But if you are consistently seeing bears all the time, the body gets confused. It's overworked, it's tired. and we start to then overreact to every single threat, whether it's small, big or otherwise. And that's where we see a lot of histamine issues, mast cell issues, autoimmunity, a lot of problems in the gut because the body's just at that point just firing at everything. Right? It's it's just there's an invader. Let's get rid of it. And it's your body working overtime in response to that stress.

yes. Yeah. Let's talk about the move into histamine a little bit, because I actually think histamine and cortisol are sort of alike in the fact that they get a bad rap because there's a lot of negative effects, but there's purpose. So it's like there's purpose for cortisol. We need to run from the bear. There's purpose for histamine. We need to get rid of the allergens. But when they're you know, over firing then we have a lot of different symptoms. So can we discuss a little bit about the relationship actually between cortisol and histamine.

Yeah. Maybe a a metaphor. An example would be good for this. If you imagine the immune system like an army on the front lines. Right. And so you have an invader, let's say the flu for example. And when they're on point and they're rested and they're ready to go, they can attack it and take care of it, right? So they all go and they kill off whatever it is. And the immune system essentially can overreact, kill it off and get it out before it becomes a problem. But imagine that they're having just a constant influx of stuff.

And the their whoever's running the show back there is yelling at them, and they're stressed out and they don't get enough sleep and they're standing hours on end. There's not enough people to replace them at some point. First of all, things are going to get past them that maybe they would have caught before. And secondly, they're going to overreact to everything at some point because they don't have the energy or the time to determine, is this normal or is this not. And that is where the cortisol, when it has been constantly stimulated.

It's like that person yelling, hey, you need to get everything. You're not doing your job, get working, get working, get work. And so they just start shooting at everything. And at that point you have this overreaction of the immune system to things that maybe you never reacted to before. Maybe you didn't used to have a history and response when you, you know, drank dairy and now you do. Right and you can't figure it out. Or maybe it happens sometimes, but not other times to that same food. And so you're trying to do food allergy tests and figure it out when it's not about the food, it's about the reaction.

And when I see that, I usually find that there's that this cortisol back there saying, just get everything at this point. Just kill everything, you know. And it's our body trying more than anything to help us. And it does get a bad rap. It's a normal response to a problem. We're just adapting to it over time because we're constantly being stimulated.

Cortisol, Histamine, and Immune Overreaction 11:30

So by addressing the adrenal glands and the cortisol and really learning how to shift your body into a non hyper reactive state, you can actually, I guess, make the arming workers work with more precision on threats that are real versus not real. Does that make sense? Yes. That's that is great. And I love how you brought that. You brought something up that not a lot of people have said. And I want to just highlight this because you're you're saying how sometimes you react to food and sometimes you don't, making it so confusing.

And I think that can be confusing for people because exactly what you're saying it's and then they'll say, well, okay, I don't it's not that food because I don't always react to it. But sometimes you are having a reaction to it and it you get in this cycle and it's really food confusion. Then a lot of times. 100, 100% and I think we spend you know, I know the clients I've worked with that have histamine issues. They're avoiding every single food. And they're, they're living on this tiny little diet and they're still having reactions.

And then sometimes it happens and then other times it doesn't. And I can see that frustration in like how frustrated they are that there's no solution. And sometimes when someone like me comes in and says, well, hey, we're looking at the wrong thing, we really need to address this stress response. you know, it's hard for them to hear because they're like, well, I'm looking at these little details and it doesn't have to always be that tiny. Sometimes it is a bigger picture thing and training, retraining the immune system when to react and what and not so much what's coming at you, if that makes sense.

It may not be the things that. You're going above, kind of when we're saying we're getting to the root of the problem rather than addressing the the specifics. Yes. So when you're starting to work with someone on adrenal health and supporting your adrenals, where do we begin? Yeah, I really look at it from four different approaches. So the four little tiers are I look at the nutrition and we should definitely talk about that more. That plays a huge role in the immune system as well. I look at exercise that not only strengthens the body, but also puts you into a parasympathetic state or a calming state, a rest and digest state, rather than a run from a bear state.

Number three, there's supplements that absolutely can help with those imbalances that go up and down. And often when we're looking at histamine issues or immune system issues, though, those include some gut support supplements and additional to nutritional and adrenal. And then lastly, there is a huge mind body aspect to this. The brain is 100% connected to our body and what we think does actually relate. And so I think sometimes even when we get stuck in that food thing, even that we were just talking about, we get so hyper focused on it and our brain says, oh, we're going to react to this, we're going to react to this, we're going to react to this.

We're going to react every time we reacted. Are we going to I don't know if we're going to react. And it goes back to that. We're in the woods and we're falling asleep, and we hear the bear and our brain just starts going and it causes a cortisol response, which then causes the hyperactivity reaction and not necessarily the item. Does that make sense. So there's a huge portion in there as well. Yes. Because you become you start to not trust your body. You start to not trust your food. You start that you actually feel like it's working against you.

And so that rewiring the thought patterns, working on the nervous system, regulation, all of the mind body stuff is a huge component along with gut health. I agree. And you mean like getting the gut back so that you're, you know, everything you're able to process? That has to mean everything like that. Well, let's go into some of the the adrenal specific nutrition. Yeah. So when we are I'm just going to keep up the running with the bear example because we can all just run with it. when we're running from a bear, we're focused on bringing out cortisol to run and epinephrine and norepinephrine to survive.

Right. So in order to do that, we burn through directly many nutrients and then indirectly. So let's talk about the directly first vitamin C and B vitamins are highly utilized in order to have that response in the first place. So you definitely see deficiencies in that as your body runs through it. In particular B6, B12, folate, B5, and vitamin C indirectly, though if you think about it, if you're running from a bear, you're not digesting your food, you're not absorbing nutrients, you're not handling your microbiota, you're not doing the things.

You're not creating the amino acids that you need to create serotonin or melatonin and or all these things that keep us regulated happen when we're in rest. So indirectly, if you've run from too many bears, we start to see a ton of deficiencies, particularly in minerals. magnesium, zinc, selenium, I see quite a bit. And that in turn has problems on the immune system. Right. Because they also use a lot of those nutrients as well as thyroid also uses a lot of those nutrients. Hormone pathways use B vitamins.

They also use a lot of those nutrients. So we start to see, inconsistencies in symptoms over there. and then obviously, the gut flora, you know, there's a lot of studies on stress and the impact to our good bugs and our bad bugs. it also indirectly changes how we eat. And I don't know if you've ever been under a lot of stress, but you don't tend to take the time to meal prep, right? So you lose a lot of nutrients from what you eat as well, and you start to lose

Adrenal Support: Nutrition, Supplements, and Mindset 17:00

a lot of sleep all of these things play into nutrient load. So I always say we need to look at vitamin C, methylated B vitamins, minerals such as magnesium, zinc, selenium, sometimes even some of the other micronutrients in there as well for bone health. vitamin D, probiotic K, those are the nutrient ones. And then using some herbs to help with the response in the adrenals, such as Rhodiola, ashwagandha, the coppa holy basil. I use some of these in combination. And I love the amino acid, fatty amino acid phospholipid of sorts for a little serum to help calm the brain down from cortisol response, to help us sleep l-theanine.

To help with our mood and sleep, and help keep the body in a calm state more than a hyper state. Yes. Long answer to a. That's. Really sorry question. Yeah. No, that's really all. That's all wonderful. I do have to bring something else up with, with regard to and get your opinion as an expert here. You know everyone's talking about fasting and we are talking about the benefits of fasting, intermittent fasting. But when it comes to adrenals, that's not always the best thing. So we I feel like we have to we have to address this a little bit.

Yeah. Yeah. We're going to go there. I am not a fan now. I, I'm an adrenal doctor. I am not a fan of fasting with adrenal fatigue, because if you're running from a there you need fuel. If you don't have fuel, you're going to burn through your own resources. Will you lose weight in an acute phase of stress if it's just a bear every six months? Yeah, you will, because you're going to burn through your reserves. But guess what happens if you continue to see a bear and you continue to see a bear? Your body starts to raise its insulin levels and store fat.

And it does this to protect you. If you see a bear and you don't have any fuel, you will die. That is what the adrenal glands think. So it says, I don't care if she's that. I don't care if her hair is falling out. I need fat here for her to run. So the less fuel you give the body, the more fat storage I see in people with adrenal fatigue. So I have actually done some trials on this with patients that challenged me and I said, okay, let's do it intermittent fast for three months. Let's see what your labs look like. Let's see how you feel.

Let's see how you do. And every single one of them about six weeks and says, Doctor Pingel, I am not okay fasting. I'm gaining weight. My insulin levels are going up. I don't feel well. I'm not sleeping well, I'm irritable. I don't think this is the right choice for me. And I go, you're right, it's not. But sometimes you have to experience it. So if you're someone out there that has tried intermittent fasting and you're not signing the benefits that are being touted out there, I would really suggest that you look at your adrenal system because you're needing fuel, so don't starve yourself, right?

I see the same thing that you're saying. You agree. All right. I was like, oh. No, I do, because I see it. People getting like in that they're in that fight or flight, they're in this adrenal hyper state, and then they're fasting and not giving themselves food, and then it's actually backfiring. But it's really hard because there's so much, you know, and I'm not knocking some of the benefits that people are saying about fasting. But there's just so much out there about fasting, fasting, fasting.

And it's not right. You know, I feel like that with all foods plans. They're not right for everyone. They're right for certain people at certain times. But then it gets to be like, this is the answer for everyone, everywhere. And then it's a it can be a mind game for sure. It can. And I mean, think about it. We naturally fast eight hours. I mean, I don't get up and eat at 2 a.m., so it's not like we're not fasting. I mean, when you look at the data of it, I mean, most of us go at least eight hours, maybe ten, maybe even 12 without eating, right?

I mean, I eat dinner at 6:00. I don't eat again until 7:00 in the morning. So, I mean, it's not like you're not fasting, but having to do this prolonged fasting for long periods of time, our bodies will adapt to stress. So it's going to adapt. If your body doesn't think it's going to have fuel for that bear that it knows is coming, it's going to store more fat. That is absolutely documented. And that's very different than the practice of fasting. Sometimes like twice a year as a religious practice or doing a three day fast every six months is very different.

We're talking about intermittent fasting, right? Which is a chronic, which is every single day starving your body for periods of time when it needs that fuel. And I definitely find that it backfires. Absolutely. Especially in the weight loss arena, which is why most people go to do exactly. by the way, on the weight, if you are running from a lot of bears, you will store fat around your abdomen. You will. It is it is a it is a cortisol and insulin response. And I firmly believe and I've said this so many times and I don't know how much endocrinology is even consider this.

But I do believe that a lot of our diabetes epidemic, of course, is food based, but it's also very much a stress response. because we're developing an insulin resistance and that is triggered by cortisol, and it could be from yo yo dieting, it could be from internet fasting, it could be from the use of drugs that change the blood sugar. you know, balance in order to lose weight. there's a lot of things going on. Scrolling on our phone is one of the worst ways. I mean, that's a bear every one second.

Bing bing bing bing. Me. Right, right. so we're actually creating a lot of problems, and it's causing a lot of weight loss, and we're looking for a quick fix. And the funny thing is there kind of is one, if we address our adrenals, but we feel like that's going to be too much work. So we don't. Yeah. We don't want to take that time. It's you know, you're looking for the fix outside. Yes, yes. Yeah. Let's jump into the next pillar because I, I like going through these are they're very inside the exercise pillar.

Right. So how many people out there feel like if you need to lose weight, you have to workout at the gym multiple hours per day, starve yourself and push yourself. How many? So many. We were taught that. I was taught that. Right. I have a I grew up in the entertainment industry and I was taught if you want to stay skinny and book jobs and do whatever you need to do, you need to starve yourself and work out every single day. what a horrible way for us to be raised, right? It's actually quite the opposite.

Your body cannot repair, it cannot build muscle, it cannot repair is it cannot rest. So there's been numerous clients over the years that I've worked with where they're doing Orangetheory every day. They're eating like a thousand calories a day and they're like, doctor painful, I don't understand. I cannot lose a pound, I don't understand, I used to be able to lose weight right prior to adrenal fatigue. Might have worked right, but now the body is in survival mode, right. So we don't want to push the body that hard.

with that said, can you do cardio when you have adrenal dysfunction or adrenal fatigue? Yes, but there needs to be a recovery period as well. And there needs to be some exercises that really focus on the calming nervous system, which is the parasympathetic nervous system. I really love Pilates. Pilates is great. Not only does it improve your figure, these are what the ballerinas do, right? It slims your finger figure down really well, but it also puts you in a mindset that connects your brain to your body.

When you're trying to engage a muscle, that's like this big in the deep

Why Fasting Can Backfire with Adrenal Fatigue 24:30

part of your core, you have to actually visualize it in your brain, which means you can't be thinking about your to do list in that moment. Right? Because you have to be visualizing what you're trying to do. And there's a very powerful moment that happens there in the adrenal glands. Because the adrenal glands are not focusing on the they're they're focusing on where they are. They're focusing on the flowers and the pretty lake that they're sitting by as they're waiting for the bear. Right. yoga does something similar.

Tai chi. you know, me personally, I'm a dancer. I love to dance. Dance saved my life. One of the things that I did when I was all down and out and I was not feeling like myself is. I said, what did I really love to do when I was a kid? What was one thing that just brought me joy? My dad was a musician. I dance from the time I was little, I love music, I love movement. So I went back into dance class and yes, it was hard. Working out with adrenal fatigue was hard. But what I will say, the difference between doing dance versus going to like Orange Theory and Pumping Iron was it forced me to learn a routine.

It forced me to be in the moment. It forced me to 100% my brain to say, you need to move your foot to the right on this beat. At this time. I have to focus on that. To do that, I can't be thinking about my to do list and that was one of the best things. It actually saved my life. It brought joy back in my life. It reconnected my head with my body, and it helped reduce the adrenal fatigue. So I do think it's a myth that you can't do cardio when you have adrenal issues. I think the type of cardio you pick needs to be very mindful, and I think the the strength work you do needs to be very mindful, even simply walking every day.

No headphones, no phone calls while you walk, smelling the air, listening to the birds, feeling your feet on the ground, whatever it may be to put you in. The present moment is really where I see people thrive when it comes to the exercise. Yeah, that's those are great points. Yeah. Because that's another I mean, that is like you said, a lot of us were raised with you got to work harder. You got to workout harder, eat less. And it's hard to rewire your brain in some of those ways because you feel like, well, that's what I was told.

That's what I was trained to do. And so, you know, pulling it back and finding and I love how you said finding joy in it, too. So what can you do that's connecting your mind and body, but also bringing you joy. And you're you're actually and you're going to be so much more likely to do it if you're actually enjoy doing it too. Absolutely. I'm not a gym person. I do not like going to the gym. Right? It doesn't mean I don't love exercise. I just don't love going to the gym. I don't love it. So I don't go there.

I try to stay away from it and I do things that I really love. And dance was a great thing for me to incorporate back in. And nowadays with the technology we have, there are so many different workouts available, even online, that you can do in your home. If accountability is a problem, get a friend you know, even if that friend is virtual. set reminders as I do always say, with adrenals in general, set reminders on your phone as if it's an appointment for mindfulness exercises. Stuff to nourish your body, exercise.

we tend to live by these things. So if you're going to utilize it, utilize it to also promote self-care, right? And take care of yourself. But don't miss an appointment with yourself. Yes, have to schedule them. Sometimes you got to schedule slowly. Yes. And then we have to talk about the mind bug. You know, really some of those mindfulness exercises and getting some of that in because that's a big piece of this too. Yeah. And I think part of it is just that we're talking about it's prioritizing it.

I'm a mom. I have two, two boys, 13 and 15. And a husband and dogs and a job and life. And I in the past always took care of everyone else before I took care of myself. So it's like, oh, I'm supposed to go do Pilates this morning at 9:00, but my son can't find his shoes. And my husband, you know, can't be home till later. And someone's calling from work. I'll just do it later. The first thing that needs to change is no, no, you may not do it later. You may do it now because it's on your schedule.

It is an appointment. You are just as important as everyone else in your life. And by prioritizing yourself, you do a better job with them. I kept thinking that if I just keep taking care of everyone else, soon I'll be able to take care of myself. I'll just get through this problem, and then I'll take care of me. And I do a kind of crappy job, right? But when I started taking care of me, not only was I taking care of me, I was doing a better job with my family. A better job was managing my business and setting boundaries.

And I think it creates an energy that's a little bit higher up, a little bit higher frequency. And when you tap into that, you're able to meditate better. You're able to be in the zone better. and a lot of us spend a lot of time down here, and we're responding to all the external stimuli. Here's a reality check. Here is we can blame all this stress and the stimuli around us, but there's only one person who actually makes the choice to react to it. And that's that's. So I could have a thousand demands all day and I can choose to give in to it, or I can choose to say, nope, not right now.

I'm going to do this and then I'll be back. Right? And I think with the as type A personality tend to serve everyone else and people please everyone else and who we really need to be pleasing is. So it sounds kind of selfish, but it allows you to actually do more in your life. So that's the first mindset shift. And I do think that's one of the hardest is prioritizing. and I see men and women and I see both struggle. I see moms and really, like, highly professional women that run large businesses are responsible for a lot.

Those are the two that really struggle the most with this, because they're people pleasing everyone else. Yeah. So start with you. Yes. Yeah. That's and and another thing that goes along with this is your body's responding to your perceived level of stress too, which I think is like a point with this because a lot of people will say to me, well, I can't control all of these things, and there's always going to be more things that come on, you know, whether it is the health struggles you're dealing with or, you know, relationship things are things in your family or finances are all like, you know, life has stresses.

So the more you can actually teach yourself to regulate yourself and be able to respond stress better as you're going to be better off well. And you use the word control, right? Which I think is a powerful word. You're right. We can't control it.

Exercise for Nervous System Regulation 31:00

So why the heck are we letting it bother us? Why do we sit and worry about it. They. We have literally no control over most of it. And that's one of the first questions. When I feel stressed out I ask myself do I have any control over the outcome? And if the answer is no I let it go because I can't control it. I just have to work with it and that's okay, right? And I can work with it on my terms. It's a perceived stress. How important it is, is how I perceive it 100%, or how someone else precedes it.

Someone else may say, this is really urgent, but when I look inside, is it really urgent? Is it anything that I really can control? Not really important to me, might be urgent to them. That seems like their problem. Not particularly my problem. I'll do what I can do within the boundaries of what I can do. And I think it goes back to we just don't say no. Well, we just don't set our boundaries well, and we actually have like starting right now. Everyone out there can change their adrenal health right now in this exact moment.

And the only thing you have to do is change the way you look at stress, instead of seeing it as a stress, seeing it as an opportunity for growth and setting boundaries on how you want to deal with it. And it sounds simple. It's not any honest idea. It's hard. It's work. But when you figure it out, your health takes a total dramatic turn. and I think we need to talk about that more. You know, in general, like in our health, we need to talk about that. We actually have the power to do this. It's not this amazing protocol of 40 different supplements.

I mean, you can take all these supplements. You can here's what you can eat, right? You can exercise. You can take all the things you can follow all the protocols you can do all the testing. And so many out there do this. But until you actually have a proper mindset around it and control the energies that you allow to affect your being, you won't get anywhere as far right. You'll get so far, and you'll hit a wall. And that's where a lot of people come to me, doc, I've done everything. I've done everything.

Nobody can help me. Nobody knows, you know? And but when we really dive into it, there's a mindset block there. Yeah. Either they're worrying about being sick all the time or they're worried about what's going to come up next. And these are things that are out of our control. I mean if I'm honest I mean I lost I lost my hope. My whole immediate family's gone. They've they've all passed. When I was young, they did things right. They didn't know they were going to die. My dad went downstairs that morning.

I was 24 years old. He was 59. He went downstairs to the kitchen that morning to make himself breakfast. He didn't know that in three minutes he was going to have a stroke and go into a coma. He did not know, and we spent so much time worrying about everything. What can we do to make our lives longer? What can we do to prevent this, to change that, to lose weight, to do this or that, when we don't know, we have literally no control over when we go and we can make positive steps, we can put healthy food in our body, we can have mindset shifts and our quality of life will be significantly better.

But we don't know the length ever. Right when my mom was dying, she said she had one regret she had cancer and she had lost all this weight. She couldn't even go to the restroom by herself. I had to carry her. And they had said to her, you know, you're just a really thin woman like that. Those the thinner you are, the poorer the outcome. And I asked her about a month before she died, I said, do you have any regrets in your life? Anything you want to get out? And she said, I have one I wish I wouldn't have spent so much time worrying about that 10 pounds I couldn't lose because I would give anything in this moment right now to have that 10 pounds.

And I actually had to stop for a second and like, just sit in that because I think and many of you out there maybe were relate how many things do you worry about that maybe if you were really if it was the end of your life, you wouldn't worry about, you know, we try to control these little things and all that worry about those little things might actually be causing the symptom in the first place, right. Important. And that some of the mindset stuff I think about, you know, I want to go out if today's my last day, I hope that whoever watch this and say, wow, doctor Pingel was really insightful.

I enjoyed spending time with her. I'm like, I don't I don't care if they say, oh gosh, she should be 10 pounds lighter. I wish she would have got her histamine response under control. Like they're not going to say that. They're going to say, wow, she was a really cool chick and I'm happy to have met her. So I think as we go into health, we have to look at it as this is a process and any symptom that you have is your body trying to communicate with you about what you need to do. And a lot of the times it's the adrenal gland saying woo hoo!

I'm here, pay attention to me. And I've never seen anyone treat their stress response and not had a positive outcome. Yet to this day, not one. It's always going to help know that. Is so important. I want to think that I want to piggyback off what you said when you were talking to your mother, because I think that as such, thank you for sharing that. I think that's such an impactful story and and vulnerable for you to share it as personal. So I think thank you. And I was working with someone who we've been working together for almost six months, maybe about five months, and we met and she was saying she was being hard on herself about like what she could do.

And so, you know, we I had to take a lot of, you know, it's a very detailed intake questionnaire

Mindset, Boundaries, and Reframing Stress 36:30

and we do a very thorough history and all the symptoms. When she started and I said, well, what's bothering you? And she said, I can't, you know, I just can't. I had been actually working with someone else that was a friend of hers. So these two friends, both were working with me, and one of the friend, the other friend was actually had a lot of histamine issues and was losing a lot of weight. And so she said, well, I'm just not losing the weight that this other person basically that was losing.

And and I said, oh, okay. So when you came to me, you could only eat, you know, ten things. Okay. Yeah. You're right. I can eat so many more things. Okay. You could you couldn't get off the couch. Oh, yeah. Because I just ask her how her energy. Oh, you know her? She said her. Oh, my energy is great, but you're going to get off the couch. Oh that's right, I forgot at you know, we're having digestive issues all the time. You were riddled with anxiety like so all but but we forget like, all of those things were just getting better.

And she's like, thank you for telling me that. That blows my mind because I those things have all resolved and I just now they're they felt normal. And so I it's an important point though just because like you're saying we're focusing sometimes on the one thing that we can't, you know, and sometimes, you know, it's that one thing we still are focusing on rather than when all these other things are going around. So it proves we've been taught that if you lose weight, you'll feel better. We've been taught that I know many people who are of perfect body weight and are miserable.

They're miserable because there's other things going on. Your weight will balance out when your body feels good, so when you have better energy, you're going to want to go work out. When you feel happier, you're going to meal prep better. Like there's different things that happen when you feel better. And so it is a great point because I think there's a lot of advancements that we really need to focus on those little small wins, especially when it comes to something like histamine response, mast cell response, where there's so many different factors going on at one time.

Sometimes our body's not ready to let go of the weight yet. That's okay. It's a protective mechanism. It's our body saying, I'm a little stressed out right now and I don't want you to die. So I'm going to hang onto this weight so you can figure this out so that if a bear comes, I can get you away from the bear. I mean, and when you internalize it different, you say, wow, thanks, body. Like you're actually protecting me. Instead of saying, oh, I hate you. You know what I mean? Like, we have to have a love relationship with our body.

I mean, when I was pregnant, I kept thinking, what the heck is going on? And I had to keep telling myself, okay, yes, I'm growing a baby. You know? And somehow we can do it during that time. But then when the baby's out, we just beat ourselves up because our body looks different. And we think that if we just fixed our body, if we just looked different outwardly, we would feel better inwardly. And I do not that that is not the case. So my most successful, healthiest people with the longest lives look at life from the inside more so than from the outside.

So and I do find great health benefit by doing that. So I'm with you on that. And focusing on those little wins. Yes. Well thank you. So you've given us such helpful information. This is great. Can you tell everyone where they can find you? Absolutely. well, you can find me at drpingel.com and has all my links to my social media channels. if you do love energy and dance and little tips and something fun, I definitely do that all over social media. I think the more we can spread joy, the better. the links to pretty much everything I ever do will always start at drpingel.com If you do follow me on social media, shoot a hello.

Like say, hey, you know, I heard you. I heard you on the summit and just wanted to introduce myself. I love to meet new people, so make sure you say hello. Well, thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you.