Research shows that you burn more stored fat for energy when you do aerobic exercises on an empty stomach. You burn more stored fat when you exercise late in the day rather than in the morning. The best time to exercise to lose weight is in the late afternoon/early evening before dinner. Doing this will not only burn off stored fat but increase your metabolism for about two to three more hours just when it was starting to slow down. This produces a significant increase in fat burned off, even after the exercise is over. Second best time to exercise is in the morning before breakfast. 

If your taking corticosteroids, the best way to avoid side-effects associated with them is to excercise because you will use up any excess and it won’t be sat around doing damage.  When people take steroids for anti inflammatory reasons such as arthiritis or asthma etc, they can avoid the side effects by excercising more to burn off any excess cortisol as cortisol is expended when we exert ourselves.  

If your not taking med’s to treat your CAH and excercise or do too much, you will be in deficit where cortisol is concerned--and especially after exertion and excercise-- and as we know that is where your likely to make large amounts of androgens instead.  So excercise in that case would make your situation worse not better.  In pregnancy your cortisol levels are higher and they increase throughout pregnancy.  In the first 12 weeks of pregancy the reason so many women feel nauseous, or have morning sickness and feel so tired is because it takes so long for hormones and everything else to adjust to the changes that pregnancy brings.  Eventually your adrenals pick up the pace and then everything else starts to settle down because your cortisol levels have adjusted to the pregnancy.  If your tired in the afternoons, but energetic in the mornings, this is because naturally everyone makes less cortisol, but locah folks would make even less.  Possibly this is too low in the afternoons if your not treating your Locah--hence feeling drained and tired.  It’s hard to tell when your pregnant as this naturally happens anyway.  I always had to have a nap in the afternoon from around 1am as I was so tired---but then when you have other children it can be very tiring.  Having said that I felt like this with my first pregnancy anyways.  If a locah person  excercised at this point, you’d be heading into much lower cotisol levels and making androgens in much larger amounts than if your made them in the morning in my opinion.  

If your still feeling tired after 12th week of pregancy and not feeling any better, I would look at your cortisol levels and either upping the dose or starting med’s if your not already taking those.  You will really need them not just for energy levels but to avoid over exposure of androgens to baby and possibly premature labour.  I wasn’t sure if you were treating your Locah so not able to really advise much more.

Regards

Anne-Marie