Understanding Hormesis: The Good Stress

Stress. We all know it and we all wish we could eliminate it. When you think of stress, you think of the chronic stressors in life: money, relationships, work, and lack of sleep. That kind of stress increases hormones like cortisol and epinephrine, which actually raises blood sugar, triggers fat storing hormones, causes imbalances in your sex hormones, and can have a detrimental effect on physical and mental health.

Negative Effects from the Wrong Type of Stress:

Unexplained Weight Gain

As your adrenals produce cortisol and epinephrine to manage the stress, your blood sugar increases and you will see unexplained weight gain without eating anything different. Typically you can start manifesting the typical Adrenal Body Type, including a loose mid-section weight with thin arms and legs, a buffalo back, puffy face and eyes, and constant bloat.

Brain Fatigue

Your mental energy won’t be able to keep up with your daily demands. Stress is inflammatory and that applies to the brain as well. You will have a hard time staying focused, finishing what you start, and escaping brain fog. Your eyesight may even become blurry.

Adrenal Burnout

The signs you have adrenal burnout include acid reflux, urinary bladder issues, high blood pressure, cravings for salt, inflammation, insomnia, feeling out of breath, vitamin D deficiency and more. Your adrenals sit on top of your kidneys, so as you chronically are producing cortisol from your adrenals, your kidneys become inflamed; this may lead to UTIs, kidney infections, or just water retention. Furthermore, you are so tired, but you can’t stop the racing thoughts from falling asleep.

Imbalanced Hormones

Typically if you are under chronic stress, testosterone increases in women and decreases in men. As a result, libido decreases, menstrual cycles may become irregular or missing, and you just don’t “feel good.”

Hair Loss & Facial Hair

Especially in women, excess stress hormones can lead to having facial hair and male-pattern baldness.

Acne & Round Face with Red Cheeks

This is due to weakened blood vessels and enlarged oil glands. You are producing what they call in Chinese medicine, “false fire”.  You also may see some unexplained rashes or bumps on your body.

Lowered Immune System

When your system is under chronic stress, your immune system becomes compromised, Leaky Gut becomes an issue and your gut is where 80 percent of the immune system lives. In a healthy body, your immune system is managing many viruses, bacteria and other foreign pathogens in the body; if it becomes compromised, those foreign pathogens have an opportunity to take over and express themselves.

What is Hormetic Stress?

Not all stress is bad! Hormetic Stress is the type of stress that increases longevity, improves health and strengthens the body, mind and spirit!

Hormesis is defined as “a dose-response phenomenon characterized by low dose stimulation and high-dose inhibition, and has been recognized as representing an overcompensation for mild environments.”

In other words, a little of a “bad thing” can be a “good thing!” There are good stressors in life! These are ones that improve our health, mentally, physically and spiritually in the proper doses. However, too much of a good thing can become a negative stressor.

Below are good hormetic stressors in the proper doses:

Fasting

Your body goes into repair mode and engages in autophagy, the cleaning up of diseased or cancer cells. It stabilizes blood sugar, balances hormones, improves mental and physical energy, reduces oxidative stress, and so much more. Additionally, you can see a rise in dopamine and your mood. Fasting will also heal Leaky Gut very quickly, which has a cascade of positive results including better skin health, reversal of allergies, reversal of autoimmune disease, and reversal of brain disease. However, by doing too much fasting, the body may start eating away at the muscle tissue and increase the stress hormones like cortisol and epinephrine. Also, women should be careful not to fast too much at the end of their cycle, as that is when the body needs to produce progesterone; fasting can inhibit that process, especially in women over 40.

Detoxing

If you don’t detox your body on a regular basis, your body will become inflamed, diseased and backed up. Proper detoxification is needed, especially in our modern day environment. Our livers, skin, and kidneys are the main detox organs, and they weren’t built to detox from the modern day lifestyle toxins in our environment or food supply. However, too much detox can hinder your body from taking in the proper minerals and vitamins needed. There needs to be a balance.

Exercise

When you engage in exercise you are stressing the muscles in small doses that activates the “repair” mechanisms to then create stronger, healthier muscles. It also increases your antioxidants to strengthen the overall immune system. However, too much exercise too quickly for someone who doesn’t exercise on a regular basis would have a toxic effect on the body. You risk injury, possible loss of menstrual cycle for women, and accelerated aging in addition to other negative ramifications.

Phytonutrients

These are compounds in vegetables that can be “poison” to the body. They include lectins, oxalates, sulfur, and night shades. When you consume them in a small amount, your body builds a resistance to them. In large amounts they can cause Leaky Gut, bloating, malnutrition, constipation, weight gain, brain fog, and arthritis.

Cold Plunge

Jumping into a cold pool or taking a cold shower activates the cold shock proteins and increases resistance and, therefore, longevity. However, staying in a cold lake for an hour would be “toxic” to the body.

Heat

Using a Far Infrared Sauna is very beneficial and detoxifying to the body. Your skin is the largest detoxifying organ and is a great way to expel toxins. On the other hand, jumping into boiling water would be a detrimental stressor to the body.

UV & Sunlight

You get your vitamin D from a health dose of sunlight, but too much can cause cancer.

Walking

Walking lowers cortisol and epinephrine naturally and is a great form of exercise.

How Do You Balance Good Stressors?

Take account of your chronic stress Level. If you are under severe stress from work, home life, or relationships, this isn’t a time to dive deep into a 5 day water fast, or train for a marathon. In fact, just focus on the steps below that improve your health, detox you gently, and don’t add additional stressors to your system.

Accelerated Fast®™

By starting your day with 3-4 pills, you kick yourself into fat-burning mode, telling your body you have thousands of calories to burn without adding any stress to the body. Simultaneously, you are able to engage in 12-20 hours of fasting with great physical and mental energy.

Low Carb Diet

When you stick to a Low Carb diet, your blood sugar becomes balanced, your inflammation throughout the body decreases, which decreases the “bad” stress in the body. If you suffer from pre-diabetes or insulin resistance, your body is chronically stressed, trying to keep up with the demands of controlling blood sugar.

Acceleradine®

This increases metabolism, thyroid health and the immune system, while gently detoxing the cells from heavy metals and radiation without a negative stress response.

Accelerated Silver®

Regardless of your health condition, taking Accelerated Silver daily will boost your immune system and relieve the chronic stress of a compromised immune system working too hard.

X39 Patch

The X39 patch increases the production of your body’s own stem cells. This can help with inflammation, recover from exercise, and reverse age-related damage to the body without causing any additional stress to the body.

MyVitalC

This boosts the immune system, reduces inflammation, and has anti-tumor and anti-aging properties. People report better sleep, more energy, reversal of arthritis and pain, and improved skin and hair. This will also help reduce the negative side effects to chronic stress.

Glutathione

Glutathione is the master antioxidant, and antioxidants combat the oxidative stress that chronic stressors produce in the body. Oxidative stress is what damages the cells, cause disease and lead to accelerated aging.

Genius Insight App

With this application on your smartphone, you can diagnose your stress level, what is causing your health issues, and how to negate them. You can then create a treatment program to balance out the disharmonies in the mind and body.

AmpCoil

Based on Tesla technology, you are able to run programs for detoxification, relaxation, mood enhancement, organ tuneups, nutritional supplementation, and sleep. All of the programs aim to put the body and mind back into balance, negating the chronic stress you are experiencing.

If you are under mild stress, then you can add the below hormetic stressors to the list above:

Extended Fasting

By using Accelerated Fast® you can prolong your fasting window to 20-72 hours and engage in a deep state of autophagy, which kills the diseased and unhealthy cells in the body. The longer the fasting period, the more healing that will occur. By extending your fast to 48 hours, you see an improvement in your dopamine receptors and enhance your “feel good” hormones. You will also see a gut reset and healing of Leaky Gut symptoms. Autophagy seems to peak around 72 hours and the mental clarity reaches a new level. You can extend the fast safely with Accelerated Ancient Salt and Wild- Lytes to stay properly hydrated with electrolytes.

Liver Cleanse

By cleansing your liver of stones, you increase your metabolism, the conversion of T4 to T3 for thyroid health, the ability to metabolize and process fats, and both mental and physical energy! It also will reverse fatty liver disease. You can see a huge benefit in overall health when you combine the Liver Cleanse with the rest of the Accelerated Accelerated Diet Cleanse.

HIIT Training

High Intensity Interval Training, or HIIT, consists of bursts of anaerobic training and breaks in between exercises, which increases growth hormone, testosterone, lean muscle and other anti-aging mechanisms while too much cardio training can accelerate aging factors.