Welcome to episode 80. This break from school has been the longest break in the history of breaks. haha. I don’t normally leave the house to do much but now because it is kind of mandated that we stay home I am feeling really cooped up. I am grateful there is no snow though so I can comfortably walk outside and get some fresh air. My dogs are loving the daily walks my daughter and I take them on.
I was looking through one of the many note books I use for journaling- I have notes here and there in about 4 or 5 different notebooks and I came across one as I was going to use it for some self improvement journaling and the entry was from July 18 2015. This was the summer where I decided I could handle working out at a gym so I was driving about 30 minutes to a strength and conditioning gym in Minneapolis and working out twice a week. I was 8 months graduated from my Nutritional Therapy program, my blood sugar was still not managed well, hormones were a mess, I was not eating enough vegetables and this is what I wrote-
I cleaned the house. I finally had the energy but ended up exhausted by the end of the day. I’m so tired of being tired. I have so much guilt over the lame summer we have had because I am too tired to do anything . I am frustrated with myself and my body for not working well. I just wonder what it would feel like to feel good. And happy. I’m beginning to wonder if I will ever be happy or feel great again. I feel like I am dying very very slowly. Like each day a piece of my future is being taken from me.
Pretty sad and I bet many of you can totally relate to that. I have always been high strung and carried on conversations in my head with myself that lead me to become more agitated and stressed. I had to work really hard at stopping that and I can tell you that right now, with being cooped up with my family, a lot of that negative self talk is rearing its ugly head. The difference now is that I am able to stop it in its tracks sometimes right away, sometimes after a couple of days.
Either way, I put a stop to it so I don’t become a complete emotional disaster. Things are hard right now. My husbands business is very very slow- almost slow enough to close. We have cut our pay from our business completely. His regular job is tied to the industry that our business is in so there have been layoffs, and talk of people giving up one paycheck to help keep more people from being laid off. That is stressful. We have savings we can dive in to which we are using to cover some expenses from the month before all of this virus stuff happened. We will be okay but it is still stressful. And we don’t talk about it with each other because he tends to be kind of gloom and doom and that raises my anxiety through the roof so I avoid talking to him- more isolation within the already isolating circumstances of the last few weeks.
I’m meditating, doing Wim Hof breathing, I did a workout with Marie Forleo on Instagram along with a meditation with her partner after. I’m avoiding the news and staying off social media to avoid all the crap being put out there as well. And I’ve come a long way since that journal entry from five years ago. A really long way. But I am a work in progress and learning new things every day. I’m eating more vegetables, I am working on managing stress, daily. Managing autoimmune disease is a daily task- always needing to be mindful of so many things to avoid flare ups.
I just signed up to take a course specifically on Hashimoto’s and new treatment strategies. I was reading materials in preparation for the class which is in May and learned that the top prescription in the US is levothyroxine with 114 million prescriptions being written every year. That is nuts. How many of you feel your best on that medication? I know some people do but I am not one of them. I’m loving my compounded NDT medication. A lot. But that means there are 114 million people with thyroid problems. That is insane.
I’ve been reading also about how our hormones, and I’m speaking specifically to women here, play a very specific role in inflammation of the immune system. PMS and periomenopause can cause inflammation in the body which can exacerbate food intolerances and autoimmune flares. There are different kinds of estrogens in the body and certain forms can wreak havoc if not metabolized or detoxified properly in the body.
Have you heard of estrogen dominance? It is quite common with symptoms like:
low libido
thyroid problems
menstrual problems, PMS
breast swelling/tender breasts, breast fibroids
brain fog
insomnia, fatigue
fat accumulation at hips and abdomen
mood issues
slower metabolism
What contributes to estrogen dominance?
stress
overweight
poor digestion
crappy diet
oral contraceptives
hormone replacement therapies
environmental toxins (plastic, perfume, nail polish, pesticides….)
When your thyroid isn’t working well or not being managed well, it can affect your body’s ability to make the right kinds and amounts of estrogen along with proper levels of progesterone. These two need to be in balance and estrogens need to be detoxified properly in the liver. If not, you can get a recycling of estrogens which causes higher levels of the “bad” estrogens that lead to inflammation.
So we are back to basics- what is your diet like, how is your digestion, are you keeping your blood sugar stable? All systems in our body are connected. When one is off, many others will be affected. Not everyone will feel great by just making diet changes and taking medication. Some of you will need to do a little more work.
Now let’s talk about bugs- it is one more thing that affects thyroid health but affects all the body systems. Having a very diverse population of microbes in your gut is important in maintaining good health. The less diverse your gut bugs are, the more prone you are to chronic conditions like Hashimoto’s. The more diverse, the healthier you will be. It is thought that your genes play a pretty big role in your gut bugs or microbiome to the tune of about ⅓ of the bugs being linked to genetics. That doesn’t mean you are screwed if your genes dictate that much of the microbiome. It might mean you may struggle a bit more or a bit longer than someone else though.
What can you do to positively impact your gut microbiome?
-Avoid eating animal products that were raised with antibiotics. This means going as organic and local as possible. The majority of antibiotics sold in the US go to livestock operations.
-Eat a lot of veggies and fruit- a wide variety too.
-Avoid taking anti-biotics if you can. Sometimes they are necessary so don’t feel bad about that.
-Don’t drink a lot of alcohol
-Avoid chemicals like pesticides, herbicides and the like. Those chemicals kill the bugs in your gut too.
It appears that research on the microbiome shows it is even more complicated than the liver when it comes to how it works and what it does for our health. The gut is where we get around half of our vitamin K (important in blood clotting, bone health and preventing insulin resistance). It also helps our body use all the great nutrients in the plant foods that we eat. Certain compounds in things like green tea extract, for example, will not be used by the body unless they are first processed by the bugs in our gut. The microbiome helps our metabolism work better and helps us better use insulin. This last part is important for us because many people with thyroid issues will also have trouble regulating blood sugar.
One thing I read from Dr. Kharrazian was that if you grew up with a gut microbiome that was not great from the start, your goals may be more suited to having more good days rather than bad days instead of searching for perfect health. This is sad to think and based on other information from people like Dr. Bruce Lipton who wrote Body Belief and Dr. Joe Dispenza who literally changed his cells to heal an injury that left him unable to walk, I’d like to believe that this is just not 100% true for everyone. I don’t want to limit my healing ability by thinking that I may just have to settle for more good days than bad. I’m also not living in a fantasy world so I understand it may not work for everyone.
Eating a lot of plants and a wide variety of plants along with avoiding processed foods and sugar will go a long way to improving your gut microbiome and thus your health in general.