Thank you Council For Responsible Nutrition for sponsoring this post. I am proud to be one of the 170 million Americans who take dietary supplements each year!
The end of the summer and early part of fall can be a crazy mess – for me, between moving twice, going to conferences, traveling, and running my own business (which happens to be insane in September!). I’ve frequently talked about adrenal fatigue before, about having an active, stressful lifestyle as an entrepreneur, and how I aim to manage those things both for myself and my nutrition clients to avoid getting back into hormonal dysregulation. Lately, I’ve also been talking a lot about self-care as a preventative measure to burnout (and giving myself adrenal fatigue again). This applies not only for entrepreneurs, but parents and kids, and grad school or college students, now that we’re in the full swing of back to school season!
Going back to school can be really rough, and extremely stressful on the body, both physically and mentally! One of my good friends is just starting the graduate school program I did a few years ago, and I can just feel the stress oozing off of her. I feel the same thing coming from my swim team kids – after having a few weeks off in the summer from training, then getting right back into hard practicing every day (sometimes two practices a day) and getting back into the swing of school and homework can be a lot to deal with.
Let’s talk about the best ways to manage your stress, to help chase optimal health and maintain a healthy, balanced lifestyle.
It starts with food. A healthy, real foods-based, balanced diet is the key to any healthy lifestyle – it’s also extremely important for helping manage your physical stress and anxiety, to make sure you can perform and feel your best – whether that’s in school, in the gym, or in life in general. Next on that list is sleep! As Robb Wolf famously said, “If you want to kill someone quickly, take away their sleep.” Sounds extreme, but it’s true. Sleep is extremely important for recovery for the entire body, especially for growing kids and athletes, and sacrificing sleep can be extremely detrimental to your health, your hormonal balance, your recovery, your waistline, and cutting back on sleep can greatly increase your stress levels as well.
I do a lot of work on stress management with my nutrition clients, whether they’re dealing with hormonal imbalances like adrenal fatigue, cortisol dysregulation, or the stress in their life is causing other health problems to become worse (like anxiety or GI conditions). One of the biggest things we work on is figuring out where the stress is coming from, and then putting it into two categories: 1) stress that can be eliminated (unnecessary stressors you may be putting on yourself – like stressing out about a project that’s due in four weeks, getting stuck in traffic, being late to school every day because you can’t get out of bed on time, excessive hard training sessions), and 2) stress that can’t be eliminated (like the actual fact of having lots of homework, practice, or having to go to school/work). Once we’ve done that, we figure out how we can eliminate as many stressors as possible, and how to manage the stressors we can’t eliminate.
Supplements are a very important tool in helping manage stress and promote overall health.
It’s essential to note that they aren’t an end-all-be-all; if you’re not sleeping enough, you’re super stressed out and not doing anything to be proactive about it, if you’re not eating well, supplements aren’t going to do much for you. But if you’re taking care of the sleep, your lifestyle, and the stress, and you still need a little extra help? Supplements can be a great tool to use to supplement these other healthy habits, but not as a substitute for those healthy habits. They can act as a little insurance policy to make sure you’re getting all the daily nutrients you need – to make sure you don’t get sick in times of high stress, to help manage that stress and replace the nutrients that are depleted by stress, to keep your gut bacteria in a healthy balance, or to help replenish those nutrients that are lost in something like training.
For athletes, there are a supplements to take in addition to a healthy diet that supports their training (and not as a shortcut to achieve peak performance) – remember, it starts with food. Omega 3’s are fantastic for anti-inflammatory support, extra protein if they are a particularly hard-training athlete with muscle-building goals for recovery and repair, and for my swimmers especially, electrolytes support training sessions over an hour to replace the sodium, potassium, and magnesium lost in training.
For general health, most importantly during times of high stress (or cold and flu season!), a high-quality vitamin C supplement every morning helps support fending off any sickness around you. Both vitamin C and magnesium are essential in times of high stress, since the adrenals (where cortisol, your primary stress hormone, is produced) love vitamin C, and because the more stressed out your body becomes, the more it uses up magnesium – meaning you become more depleted the more stressed out you are. Magnesium is also very helpful for sore muscles and to instill a sense of calm – I frequently use a magnesium supplement. It helps people relax and fall asleep at night! Finally, a multivitamin can act as a great insurance policy to make sure you’re covering all your bases for daily dietary nutrient intake. For example, someone who doesn’t eat a lot of animal products might have trouble getting in their recommended daily intake of B vitamins, which are essential for energy production, so grabbing a high-quality multivitamin would ensure they are fulfilling their body’s needs.
A crucial note about supplements is that it matters what kind of supplements you take and where you get them.
The worst thing you can do is just grab any vitamin or supplement off a drugstore shelf without any research. Do your research and look for research-based brands that give a potency and purity guarantee, with no added fillers (and if it’s important to you, hypoallergenic ones as well) to make sure you’re getting the highest quality supplements that will give you the best bang for your buck.
What do you think? What are your best tips for self-care and staying healthy throughout the year?
I was selected for this opportunity as a member of CLEVER and the content and opinions expressed here are all my own.
