I was in the book store the other day with my daughter. While she was looking around I was in the health section. I was just looking at 100’s of books selling a promise of feeling better. I probably have had 30 or more of those kinds of books- selling health and happiness. Even cookbooks, especially the paleo ones. They say I found health through food. Food is medicine… etc.
I certainly don’t disagree that food is medicine and that it can heal but what do you do when the food you eat isn’t enough. You turn to supplements because they too offer a promise of feeling better and sometimes they do help you feel better because your body is deficient in something and giving it that particular nutrient helps it work better. Sometimes they work.
I get an email almost daily from a company selling gut health supplements. That is all they do- they tell a story in their emails and then sell you a $60 bottle of digestive enzymes because they will cure it all. They probably work for some people or they wouldn’t keep selling them.
But what happens when you do all the things and you still don’t feel better?
Do you start to feel bad and blame yourself? Do you double down and work harder and buy more supplements?
Curcumin maybe, because everyone says that is going to help everything? But as one of my professors from school has said, “You can’t have a curcumin deficiency” meaning there are no biochemical processes in the body that require curcumin to function.
It does help inflammation but it is a bandaid, which may be needed, but it isn’t a cure all. I think I had an epiphany in the bookstore just staring at all those books promising a better life.
We can read all the books in the world and take all the supplements but if we are not doing the work to fix what got us sick in the first place then we will only get so far.
This is your friendly reminder to give yourself some grace when you are doing all the things right, or even when you are not.
Thyroid disease is complicated.
There is a lot of research on this disease but sometimes I don’t think the right things are being studied- like finding a way to measure how we feel or recognize that lab values are sooo wrong when the upper limit of a normal TSH is 10 and should be 2.5.
Some of you feel like a sloth at that number.
Remember that you are a cellular being- you are made up of cells the basics of which are carbon, nitrogen, and hydrogen and a few other elements in smaller amounts. Those are atoms.
When you put some atoms together you get a molecule. Glucose or sugar is a molecule, amino acids are molecules that make proteins (the kind you eat and the kind you are made of), B vitamins are molecules.
I mentioned protein- when you put a bunch of molecules of amino acids together you get a protein which is a macromolecule (macro meaning big). If you hear a nutritionist talk about macros, they are talking about macronutrients which means big nutrients (protein, fat, carbohydrates).
So further on down the road, macromolecules eventually come together to make a cell and cells come together to make tissues like skin, vessels, your gastrointestinal tract, muscle and more.
Those tissues will come together to form organs like your stomach, pancreas, liver, heart and organs make systems like the cardiovascular system, endocrine system etc.
All of this comes together to make an organism like a human.
This is where the books promising health fail you.
They are not digging deep enough, partially because it is a lot of work and has to be done one on one but also because it doesn’t sell a lot of books. And the problem with figuring out what is causing your Hashimoto’s or hypothyroidism, is there are a lot of things that can cause it to go wrong.
The thyroid regulates your metabolism which is involved in weight but it regulates the metabolism of everything else in the body too which affects energy levels and everything else.
If you are not losing weight with hypothyroidism, it is because of this metabolic function not working but even after doing all the things you might still be struggling with this and those books don’t know why.
The blame might even be placed on you. You didn’t follow the program close enough, you missed a step, you didn’t do this or that. I paid over $1000 to a chiropractor one time who said they had the answers and they said they had a doctor on staff but never offered me to see him for my medication (and I never asked because I was too scared) but they had a protocol that they used on everyone.
They hooked my fingers and toes up to a machine that read something- I can’t even remember. They put me on the RepairVite diet for 3 weeks (which I followed strictly because I am a good patient), they had me on oxygen while I used a hand bike to exercise and increase my oxygen) and when after going there weekly for 12 weeks I still didn’t feel better he told me I should go have my thyroid levels checked again, he just didn’t know what to do.
I paid thousands to a naturopath who sold me hundreds of dollars in supplements each time I saw her and told me to lay off the sugar, eat flax seeds and coconut oil and my energy still suffered.
To be fair, I desperately needed many of the supplements she suggested because I was deficient in a bunch and my gut was a mess and those supplements helped me get to a certain point. She then tried to get at my emotional well being and that is when I ran for the hills. She knew my energy levels went beyond physiology and I wasn’t ready to deal with that. I searched for a practitioner that didn’t know I was so screwed up emotionally that they would keep throwing supplements at me and I would keep throwing money at them.
I think the big problem with how we are treated by doctors is the science can only take you so far - at least the physiology part of it. Some of us who have struggled to feel better have some emotional work to do.
Maybe even, if you dare go there, some past life stuff. This is woo woo and not for everyone and I recognize you may think it is all BS. I respect that and I hope you can hear me out. I’m sure I spoke of this before. Therapy never got me where I needed to be and I’m game for trying anything except eating organ meats and fish.
I hired someone to help me with this emotional stuff and the work we did together has helped me tremendously. I’ve seen another energy healer of sorts that came to the same conclusions as her so I felt it had to be legit.
I’ve discussed before that my mothers side of the family all has one form or another of thyroid disease. I’m positive they all have some kind of autoimmune thyroidits but my mother and grandmother were only ever diagnosed with hypothyroidism.
My one aunt has Graves for sure, my other aunt has Hashimoto’s I believe, my uncle has Graves, but my grandfather had no thyroid disease. He was domineering and emotionally abusive to his family - they didn’t have a voice. I don’t want to get too personal with this because there are people involved that deserve to have their privacy.
I will say, looking back on my life I grew up without a voice- very shy, very quiet, very afraid to speak up because I was afraid of being seen and made fun of or something. I kept my circle of friends small. When I did speak up as a kid it seemed to backfire and I was very sensitive, still am, to other peoples energy.
I never felt good enough. I never felt smart enough, I was never brave enough to speak up. That carried over in to my young adult life and I made life decisions that were safe that kept me small and silent. I let fear keep me small with no voice. That eventually led to, you guessed it, hypothyroidism.
I was repeating the familial cycle.
These two energy workers dug deeper than that and found there was some really dark stuff keeping my energy levels low. My first energy person tried to fix it but he missed something and this darkness came back. The other energy worker described the darkness as chords attached to me that were dragging me down. She cut them and sealed them and she had to do it twice because they kept wanting to come back.
We did some other work on my inner self too that changed the game for me. I had some hole in me I was trying to fill with food, people, things and that wasn’t working. She was able to help me fill that hole with what was missing and I can’t articulate in to words what that is exactly but for the first time in my life I feel like a whole person.
I still take supplements, I am less crazy about my diet (but when I go too far off the rails, my body reminds me to get back on), and more sure than ever of myself and my ability to help others.
You see rather than covering up why I can’t help you get further, I refer out to others who can fill in those missing pieces and let you get there when you are ready. And that is just it- you have to be ready to do the emotional work that may be tied to thyroid disease.
It is okay if you are not ready, you will do it when the time is right. It is a big step to take because it means being vulnerable.
The books don’t talk about that and the supplements don’t fix emotional vulnerability. You have to be willing to go after that for full health and well being to be a part of your life. There is research on this but not in relationship to thyroid disease. Bottom line is that if you are still not feeling well after doing all the things the books and programs and functional medicine superstars are telling you to do then you may just have to dig a little deeper because as I say time and time again.
There is no one size fits all protocol for everyone. Those generic protocols will help a lot of you but for those of you that it doesn’t help, don’t fret. Your biochemical make up needs a little more than a generic protocol.
My goal is to be able to help you figure what is missing. I have the tools to do that, It just takes time. You didn’t get thyroid disease overnight and it won’t get better overnight either.
I am here to help you before you are ready and after. I don’t push you to do anything you are not ready for. You got this. You can feel better. I will walk along side you as you do the work.
Thanks for listening and being patient as the episodes have been few and far between.
If working with me one on one is not something you can do or are ready for, you can take my Nutrition for Hypothyroidism course. It is a 4 week self paced course diving into the basics of thyroid health that gives you ideas on how to support your thyroid, recipes and cooking demos, access to my meal planning software for 75 days and a bonus lecture on understanding what your thyroid labs mean. You can check it out at helpforhashimotos.com and then look for the GET HELP tab and then programs.
The Nutrition for Hypothyroidism program gives you access to a library of 4 culinary nutrition lessons to gain knowledge and confidence in preparing simple, delicious meals and snacks you can count on to deliver big health benefits.
Upon completion of this program, you will...
Evaluate hypothyroidism within the context of common conditions associated with thyroid function
Propose how nutrition affects thyroid health
Identify dietary considerations for taking thyroid medications
Learn how to prepare nutrient dense meals and snacks that support thyroid health
👉 Access to 4 lessons that you can complete at your own pace.
📚 Nutrition lessons to learn about different foods and their health benefits
🔪 Culinary lessons to learn about key kitchen tools and how to use them to create simple, delicious meals and snacks
🧑🍳 Cooking demonstrations that illustrate nutrition and culinary lessons learned [no cooking skills required - just the basics here!]
📝 Lesson-specific materials and guides to support you in applying what you have learned
🍽 Access to 1,000s of recipes so you can practice weekly skills with recipes that meet your preferences
👉 Resources to support you in building a kitchen with tools and ingredients you need to get nourishing, delicious meals to the table fast
Thanks for joining me. Please leave me a rating or review on apple podcasts so more people can find the show and if you have not already, please sign up for my newsletter and get The Definitive Guide to Hashimoto’s.
Until next time.