Why am I not getting better?

Why are you not getting better?

Do you focus on your strengths or on your deficits? It is easy to get stuck in a negative mindset  about our health and our thyroid health in particular. When your thyroid is not working optimally, you are stuck in a bit of a depression already. You probably don’t look sick and you may feel like total garbage.

You might be critical of yourself or someone else is critical of you. Either way, it’s not good for your body or your mind. When we focus on the negative aspects of this disease too much, you probably will feel more pessimistic, lose confidence, motivation, and you may just walk around feeling just generally bad about everything in your life. This is no way to live.

It is hard to be sick and it is also hard to be well and you do have a choice. Both take work.

Women especially tend to be critical of themselves, their appearance, and their abilities. We live in a culture of body shaming and we have all been exposed to images while growing up of what society believes to be the standard of health and beauty and that is a woman who looks like a coat hanger. I’m not a fan of the body positivity around extremely overweight people at the moment. Being obese is not healthy and there is a lot of science to back that up so don’t come after me. If you want to be heavy, go for it. You don’t see a lot of obese people that are 80 or 90 years old.

Aside from that, what do you think would happen if you focused on your strengths? If you looked at yourself in the mirror and found something good to say about yourself? Having a positive attitude is important for happiness, for general well being, and also for health and fitness.

When we focus on our strengths, what we have, what we are already doing well, then it helps us choose healthier behaviors more often, we have better exercise habits, better eating habits, and we will feel better overall.  Self criticism is not a good motivator. Shaming, judging, and pointing out your flaws actually gives us a physiological stress response which makes us feel worse and we are generally less motivated. When we feel emotionally attacked either by ourselves or someone else, we are less able to solve problems, less willing to try new things, and less likely to stick to those things we need to do to get and feel better.  Self criticism also activates the inflammatory response.

If you are trying to get better and you are walking around with a negative attitude about your body, you are perpetuating inflammation that is keeping you sick. How crazy is that. Our minds are very powerful. The good news is, when you can begin to think differently, you feel inspired, empowered and motivated and you start to get better.

I’m not saying your Hashimoto’s is all in your head- not at all. I’ve been there with the doctor and it is super frustrating. What I am saying is ask yourself what the story in your head is. What do you say to yourself on a daily basis? How do you think all day? Are you focusing on the negative of everything? Catch yourself doing it- hit the stop button and eject that negative tape and start to work on putting in a positive tape.

Instead of ‘I hate my body’ try ‘My body gets me where I need to go’. Instead of ‘why can’t I get better’ try ‘what is my body asking for?’. You get the idea. Just try to reframe what is going on in your head and little by little you will make new pathways in your brain and the positive thinking will get easier and easier.

When you work with me, we focus on fixing the problems of nutrient deficiencies, dietary needs, inflammation reduction but we also focus on developing your strengths and successes because you can do the hard work it takes to be well.

Doing this will allow for more happiness, more confidence and you may even feel more powerful and you will become more resilient. We have to unlearn all those negative messages we have been given throughout our lives whether from people we know or from the media. This takes time and it takes persistence because your brain is going to fight you on this tooth and nail.

If you are not aware of what your strengths are you can find assessments online such as the strengths finder to start with a list of your strength of character. You can just journal what you are good at. It feels weird at first but soon enough the good will start flowing. You can even just ask people you know what traits you have that they find positive. This one is hard for a lot of people, including myself, but I once did this as an anonymous survey so people who responded didn’t have to say who they were, and it was the best thing ever. I felt so loved and so good after reading all the responses. You can ask things like “what do you think I am good at?’ or ‘how am I most reliable?’

Once you find those strengths, then we need to ask how we can use them to get to my health goals. This will make getting better more enjoyable and your progress towards health moves forward instead of staying stagnant or moving backwards.

We all know the typical symptoms of hypothyroidism- low energy, cold hands and feet, fatigue, high cholesterol, muscle pain, depression, brain fog, memory issues, etc. Thinking positive can be hard when you feel this way. Start by thinking of something to be grateful for. When I am feeling really down, I will go for a walk and just start saying to myself “I am grateful for eyes that can see the blue sky, I am grateful for ears that hear the birds, I am grateful for feet that I can walk on, I am grateful for legs that take me where I want to go, I am grateful for a house that is warm and cozy….” and on it goes until I feel better and the things I am grateful for get a little deeper. It works.

In order to age well and be healthy in to old age, we need good thyroid function. Lower antibodies to your thyroid means a longer, healthier life. And you can reduce those antibodies. One of my current clients told me her endocrinologist told her high antibodies is just a fact of the disease and they will always be there. We have reduced her antibodies in half over a 4 month time period. She looks happier, her skin looks beautiful and she is doing the hard work it takes to get those antibodies down.

When you have hypothyroidism and hashimoto’s we need to not first say that you need medication. You may, but if your labs indicate your thyroid is working and it might be an issue in your brain, then taking a functional medicine perspective can prevent damage to your thyroid and keep you from needing medication.  We want to look at what FM calls your antecedants and your triggers that are causing a high TSH. What is going on in your hypothalamus or your pituitary? Those to are paramount to getting your thyroid to produce thyroid hormone and remember that TSH is a hormone put out by the brain to tell the thyroid to make more hormone. If that signal is off, we need to ask why.

In particular, these symptoms are associated with a dysfunction at the hypothalamus and pituitary glands:

• fatigue that is always there, especially when waking

• depression or melancholy

• extreme cold feeling

• high LDL cholesterol

• muscle cramps, pain in calves, thighs, upper arms

• constipation

• joint pain, arthritis like

• prolonged achilles tendon reflex time

• easy bruising

In order to assess what is going on here, we need some basic tests like blood chemistry from your doctors office. I would usually add a bit more on to what your doctor would order as they would not consider it relevant. In addition, what is your cortisol doing? Are you stressed? Stress increases glucagon levels and lowers T3 while increasing RT3. Glucagon is a hormone that raises blood sugar (read higher blood sugar, more insulin, cell resistance, fat storage). T3 is the thyroid hormone that your cells use and RT3 binds that T3 so the cells can’t use it.  This will create hypothyroidism that doesn’t need medication. I discuss what your labs mean in pretty good detail as a bonus lecture in my Nutrition for Thyroid course offered on my website.

When you are dealing with chronic stress such as what I have talked about here today with the negative thinking cycle, your cortisol can rise and that will inhibit the pituitary’s ability to produce TSH while also keeping the thyroid hormone you do have from being transported through your blood. So thyroid hormone is becoming depleted but your TSH may read as normal. This is when your doctor says you are fine and you definitely don’t feel fine.

That chronic stress not only suppresses the brain from releasing hormones that tell the thyroid to produce hormones, it increases inflammation that blocks the conversion of T4 to T3 or prevents T4 from being made at all. It promotes an overactive immune system resulting in more antibodies to your thyroid being made. It can bind up the free hormone so it doesn’t get to your cells. Chronic stress also depletes your magnesium levels which will lessen your body’s ability to relax and get that deep sleep your body needs to repair itself. Taking thyroid hormone replacement therapy when this is the issue will make you feel better for a week or two and then you will feel worse.

A normal functioning cortisol response is needed so the liver and kidneys can convert T4 to T3. Low cortisol levels will result in less cortisol available for that conversion to happen leading to higher T4 and lower T3 and excess cortisol will cause more T3 to be converted to RT3. If you become anxious when you get your blood drawn, that alone can cause a temporary increase in thyroid hormone levels.

If you have a story in your head about not being able to change your diet, you may be missing critical nutrients needed for good thyroid function. You need all the B vitamins, vitamin A and E, iodine, zinc, selenium, vitamin C. This is not to say you need to supplement- you need them from your food first and foremost because all of those nutrients also supply other processes in your body and when you get them from food you get them in the proper ratios. These nutrients complement one another and supplementing with a mineral like selenium or zinc can throw off other things. And it is really quite rare to be selenium deficient. Food first.

If you have a story in your head about why you can’t exercise know that exercise stimulates your thyroid to produce thyroid hormone. It increases your cells sensitivity to thyroid hormone meaning your cells will take it in and use it. It relieves stress which would be caused by the negative tape in your head.

We all need community, support and most of all love and the love part starts with us. We need to learn to love ourselves if we don’t already. Look in the mirror and smile at yourself. If you have the type of family that is supportive of you, put little post it notes around the house to remind yourself what kind of wonderful human you are and that you deserve to feel not just good, but great!  Chronic stress, if unmitigated by an inner spiritual harmony that assigns a positive meaning will disrupt your thyroid function at every physiological level.

From the textbook of functional medicine: “A 2002 review of celiac disease in The New England Journal of Medicine showed that gluten sensitivity can cause anemia, osteoporosis, autoimmune diseases, thyroid dysfunction, schizophrenia, psoriasis.

Our daily behaviors are fundamental to the production of our internal and external environments, they represent the most powerful influences upon our physiology. Our daily choices directly affect the chemicals in our body and how they function which includes: the kind of diet we eat, how much exercise we get, how the HPA- Adrenal and thyroid axis work, toxic or infectious exposures, emotional experiences of joy, fear, hostility, connection, etc. Negative influences include using chemicals on our lawns, consuming poor quality fats (trans fats), skipping meals, chronic stress. Positive influences are the opposite.”

You can do this. I can help you.

Thank you for showing up for yourself by listening. We all want to do better and when we know better we can start to do better. It just takes one healthy choice at a time whether it be a food or a new thought.

Sign up for my newsletter on my website and get The Definitive Guide to Hashimoto’s. You can also get your free 3 day anti-inflammatory meal plan when you go to my site and click on the meal plans tab.

If you are ready to start tackling your thyroid health, schedule your discovery call on the work with me tab on my website and if you want to just start on your own you can start with my Nutrition for Thyroid course available on my site under work with me, then choose programs.

Thanks for being here. I appreciate each and every one of you!

Losing weight after menopause

Hello

I just started listening to your podcast and love it! I heard you mention menopause and how you gained weight and lost it. I would love to hear you elaborate on this subject. Menopause and Hashimotos and weight gain and what to do. I feel desperate with trying to lose and so many different ideas out there from intermittent fasting to keto and I don’t know what to focus on that will work. Please consider doing a podcast show about this.

Thank you

Beth Axxxxxxxx

Thanks for this question Beth.

Weight loss in menopause while also having Hashimoto’s can be a bit challenging. There are a lot of things to consider.

It’s not about calories in and calories out. Calories do matter and what kind of calories you are eating matter but what matters more is what is gong on in your body hormonally.

If you are struggling with weight loss, you could be dealing with a hormonal imbalance of some kind. Maybe your thyroid medication isn’t optimized well. Maybe some other hormone is off, like cortisol, insulin and/or leptin.

Maybe you have estrogen dominance or low testosterone. These things will determine how fat you get from the calories you do consume.

Most of the time the weight loss struggle, when not thyroid hormones, might be an issue of cortisol. When cortisol is high over a period of time it can create lower levels of serotonin affecting mood (depression), keep you from sleeping well (increasing sugar cravings) and can cause you to store fat.

Too much cortisol can create that dreaded muffin top and this needs to be fixed before much of anything else can be taken care of. Higher cortisol can give you that wired but tired feeling, make you quick to anger and make you feel irritable. It also is a cause of fat gain. I spent years like this though the weight gain in my late 30’s and all of my 40’s was really minimal because I was still cycling so estrogen was helping to keep me thinner.

When dealing with low cortisol you can get tired easily or have poor stamina and low cortisol can cause you to look at things in more negative ways, you might find you get sick more often, and of course it contributes to thyroid dysfunction.

Cortisol is 100% related to stress and how you react to it which will sabotage your fat loss. When high, cortisol increases blood sugar which leads to higher insulin levels which can increase fat storage.

Remember stress can be mental/emotional, strained finances, toxic relationships, infections, poor or little sleep (even shift work), food allergies/sensitivities and over exercise.

Bottom line, working to lower stress and manage cortisol will help reduce body fat.

When cortisol is high it will also decrease conversion of T4 to T3 which causes a slowed metabolism which will probably lead to fat gain.

I mentioned leptin before. This hormone tells your body when you are full so if leptin is blocked, you don’t get the full signal and you may end up eating more calories than you need/want leading to poor blood sugar regulation, higher insulin, and fat storage.

Gut health is also important. Many of you know a large percentage of your immune system lies in your gut aka GI tract aka intestines. If your gut is unhealthy, so are you, and this includes your ability to lose fat.

GI dysfunction very simply can look like gas, bloating, undigested food in your stools, terrible smelling gas, constipation and/or diarrhea, bad breath, nausea.

If the bacteria in your gut are out of balance, this can affect the conversion of thyroid hormone from T4 to T3, slowing metabolism. It can also affect the body’s ability to excrete estrogen creating a recycling of the hormone and cause you to gain fat.

If you are not properly breaking down the foods you are eating then you are not absorbing nutrients either. You need adequate protein to be digested and absorbed in order to make neurotransmitters, repair tissues and build a healthy immune system. If you have poor digestion this can lead to anemia which causes muscles to fatigue easily and can make it difficult to exercise and will decrease your ability to lose fat.

Inflammation in the GI tract can cause a stress response in the body which will increase cortisol production which can cause immune system problems in the gut itself leaving you susceptible to infections which will cause more inflammation and more cortisol leaving your body in a cycle of inflammation.

Eating foods you are sensitive to can cause a stress response in the body leading to release of cortisol and, you guessed it, fat storage.

Now you all know that when your thyroid is sluggish it means difficulty losing weight and easy gain of weight. All the stuff I’ve talked about can affect thyroid function and poor thyroid function which can include being on medication that isn’t fully supporting optimal function can affect all the stuff I’ve already discussed.

Sex hormones like estrogen and progesterone, when out of balance, will definitely cause you to hold on to fat as well. These hormones impact your ability to feel emotionally well, have will power and have any kind of motivation. In order for your sex hormones to be in balance, you have to have balanced blood sugar, balanced adrenals, and a healthy GI tract. If your testosterone levels are high you will have trouble losing fat. In addition, if you are dealing with any kind of toxicity at all from xenoestrogens, fat loss will be difficult.

All of this needs to be corrected before fat loss happens and fat loss should not happen if you are not reasonably healthy because you don’t want to be losing fat tissue which will mobilize toxins from that fat tissue and if you are not eliminating them, they will redistribute in other tissue. Not good.

Think if you have some of this stuff going on and then you hit menopause. Our estradiol is lower in menopause and estradiol helps us be more sensitive to insulin. So now we are at higher risk for insulin resistance.

Insulin resistance means your blood sugar levels could be normal but you might have too much insulin in your blood. High insulin with no where to go means fat storage. This means that for some of you for the first time in your life, what you eat will greatly effect your weight. Sugar and anything that converts to sugar will be a problem for you in excess. This means less dessert, less treats, avoiding sugary drinks and for some of us it might mean quitting these things altogether. It just depends on how important getting rid of the belly fat is to you. And it isn’t forever. Just long enough to give your body a minute to get insulin levels regulated and then you can figure out what you can enjoy and how much of it. It’s called finding your carb tolerance. This doesn’t mean you need to go low carb either because that is a problem for hashimoto’s but you might need to reduce the amount of bread, white potatoes and rice until you get things regulated. This is something I can help you with and I recommend having some labs done to see just where your biggest problems lie with this. There are some extra markers you should ask your doctor for but before you do, I recommend meeting with me to figure out what might be going on, then you can go to your doctor and get your labs done with what ever add ons I think you need.

Now, a topic all on its own is detoxification and I’m giving a talk at an online summit in January. Sign up for my newsletter at outofthewoodsnutrition.com for info in that in the coming weeks. There is a fair amount of research tying pesticides to fat gain and to poor liver health. Some in the scientific community suggest that our body creates more fat to handle the load of toxins we get exposed to. I have a couple of different questionnaires you can take to asses your toxin level when you work with me. It is the best and cheapest way to determine toxic burden because most testing is not reliable.

There is an immune system marker called Interleukin-6 or IL-6 and when that is increased due to inflammation of some kind, it can make it difficult to lose weight and keep it off and it may be a trigger for fat gain. Fat tissue is now considered to be an organ in the endocrine system and it likely causes inflammation while inflammation causes us to store body fat. Another vicious cycle.

Decreasing inflammation through diet is a great first step in beginning to lose fat. Cutting sugar, processed foods and eating real whole foods is important. If you need meal plans, I can help you with that. If you are a client in my 6 month package, you get meal plans for free. If you just want a meal plan consult, we can work something out.

All of this is tied to your brain health which I won’t go into detail here but what’s going on in your brain physiology impacts sex hormones, thyroid hormone, neurotransmitters like dopamine, serotonin, GABA and more.

Dopamine helps to keep our metabolism going and when we have low dopamine we have low energy and the worst part- sugar and junk food binges. Don’t let anyone tell you this is about will power. They can seriously suck it if they do. If you are low on GABA, it can also cause cravings for fat and carbs. This is not to say you should supplement with GABA because you can do that but that won’t fix why you are low on it in the first place.

I’m not about bandaids for problems unless they are needed to get your body on the right track while we figure out what problems you are dealing with.

Most of this info really applies to anyone but this question was about dealing with menopause. I went in early. I think I was 46 or 47. Either way I was super happy to not have a period anymore because my periods were horrible my whole entire life. I’m reading a book about hypothyroidism that was written at least 40 years ago and thinking back on my childhood and my first periods- I had so so many signs that my thyroid might not be functioning well all the way back to 13 years old. Sometimes this makes me so mad because I feel like a huge part of my life was just subpar. It’s really why I worked so hard to get my masters and my nutritionist license. I have so much to offer you guys in the way of experience and knowledge around these topics so that you don’t have to suffer like I did. It’s the only way I can not just sit and wallow in losing so many years of well being. I’m so glad I woke up and fought for better health. Some days are still a struggle but those are fewer and farther in between as long as I manage my stress and diet. In all honesty, I’ve gone off the rails a bit with my diet. Sometimes eating super healthy all the time just gets old. And, I’m paying for it a bit. My digestion sucks right now and today my energy level is in the tank but I think that is mostly due to getting up too early, working out too hard and a couple crappy things in my personal life.

I really need to start meditating and journaling again. I have a locked document on my computer where I write out things I would never say out loud or want anyone else to read. It’s where I get all the anger off my chest and just let it go. I highly recommend it for a release, especially if you don’t have anyone you can talk to regularly or you don’t want to always be complaining about certain people.

Anyway, back to menopause. As I said, I was around 46 when it hit for me. The average age is around 51. And let me just tell you- life is not over once you hit menopause. Before you hit it though, you might be having some crazy symptoms- even if you are fit and your diet is dialed.

Anxiety, racing thoughts, heart palpitations, hot flashes, insomnia, depression and so on. You can even have these symptoms in your thirties if your body is going to go into early menopause. If you are fit, these may be milder than someone who isn’t but very few of us make it through perimenopause without some symptoms. Peri-menopause occurs because your hormones, estrogen and progesterone, are all over the place.

Abdominal fat gain in menopause is real and so is loss of lean muscle. This is due to decreased sensitivity to insulin as I mentioned earlier. Your blood sugar is likely higher and there is likely some insulin resistance which lead to fat storage.

Any high cortisol, again, also leads to fat storage. We also become less able to build muscle and you are losing bone mineral density. It becomes pretty imperative at this stage in life to start exercising if you don’t already, and lifting weights is the most beneficial.

Let’s talk estrogen, specifically estradiol or E2. This form of estrogen declines in menopause. It promotes muscle growth and muscle strength- you need to lift heavy weights to make up for loss of estradiol.

You have to watch inflammation and blood sugar too. When estradiol declines but estrone or E1 might be a little higher and progesterone is low, it can cause sore joints.

The average weight gain in menopause is 5-8 pounds. As I mentioned before it was 28 pounds over a couple of years for me. It didn’t help I was mostly sedentary for 2 ½ years sitting at my desk doing homework and not changing how I ate much at all. In fact, I probably ate more sugar and crap due to stress in school which contributed to my weight gain. The change in estrogen levels and cortisol make us gain fat in our stomach which puts us at higher risk for heart disease. If your fat is in your thighs however, you are less likely to be at risk for heart disease.

Exercise and a dialed diet are going to be key to fat loss in menopause. I’m not a trainer so I can’t speak well to exercise but Stacy Sims in her book Next Level recommends sprint interval training for fat loss along with lifting heavy.

Her book gives you plenty of ideas on what kinds of exercise you can do but if you are new to exercising, buy the book and ask a trainer to help you work out based on the principles in the book.

It might take you some time to find a trainer willing to do it- I hired a guy who agreed to read my copy of Next Level and he never did. He told me he knew enough that he didn’t need to after he had the book for a few months.

Then, when I got it back it looked like he spilled water or something all over it. I was slightly annoyed over the whole situation- also I didn’t speak up for myself- still a work in progress there!

Alright- so sprint training and lifting heavy. I use an airdyne bike at my gym and do 8 rounds of 20 seconds high intensity and then 10 seconds off. I also lift heavy using a program from the book Hangry by Sara Fragoso and Dr. Brook Kalinak. I’ve definitely gained muscle and lost some fat but the biggest change has been body composition. My thighs are smaller and the dimples on my behind are getting smaller.

This has been two years in the making for me. In order for this to be sustainable and enjoyable I go to the gym 3 days a week and I foam roll, warm up, lift heavy, sprint and then stretch. I hate working out but after 2 years, it feels good to go. I feel stronger and more confident and the weight is coming off slowly which in my opinion is the only way to do it.

I’ve been more mindful of what I eat but that needs to get more dialed in as well. Like I said, I’m kind of off the wagon which for me just means eating more gluten free bread and too many nuts. I’ve also cut back on chocolate and rarely drink coffee.

By the way, lifting heavy as defined by Stacy Sims is lifting six reps or less of the most weight you can of things like deadlifts, chest press and squats. Get the book, read the book and then find someone to help you write a program from the recommendations in the book. Don’t try to figure it out on your own unless you are well versed in the gym already.

Doing this will help increase your metabolism, help you lose fat, improve your stability so you don’t fall and break a hip and improve your body composition.

Let’s talk diets.

If you are exercising, it will be super important to fuel yourself before you exercise otherwise your body will be stressed which messes with your muscle gain and fat loss. Eat a little protein and a carb like banana and nut butter, toast and nut butter, or something like that.

I tend to forget to do a carb in the morning but I do cold brew and protein powder before I go to the gym and I eat as soon as I get home. Sims states in her book that women specifically need to eat within 30 minutes of a workout in order to build muscle and keep our body from further breaking muscle down.

If you don’t eat right after your workout, your body is in a stressed place, blood sugar is likely high and you are more likely to store body fat. So working out while intermittent fasting is a big big no no. Eat some protein- whey protein is ideal, animal protein is also good. Chicken, eggs, nuts, fish, greek yogurt, cottage cheese. Any of these before or after are good.

Then do your best to get around 100 grams of protein per day or around 30 per meal.

If you google Stacy Sims and Intermittent fasting you will find a good article on why you should not do it. A very brief summary of why you shouldn’t intermittent fast or the ketogenic diet is because both of these diets mess with a neuropeptide called kisspeptin which, when it is disrupted will make our brain think we are deficient in nutrients, especially carbs leading to increased appetite and increases insulin resistance which leads to fat storage.

Fasting and exercising leads to higher cortisol which leads to fat storage. Short term, the keto diet might be great- long term it can mess up your endocrine system and increase fat gain. The article is called Yes! You are an athlete. No! You shouldn’t practice intermittent fasting. It’s a quick read and pretty easy to understand.

Bottom line- no to dieting, yes to exercising. Yes to figuring out your carb tolerance. Yes to looking at your blood work. Yes to joining me for 6 months every other week to help you get and stay on track with all of this. If you are sick and tired of being sick and tired. If fatigue is winning at keeping you on the sidelines of life more than you are winning at having the life you really want, then we need to talk.

You can schedule a discovery call at outofthewoodsnutrition.com under the work with me tab. Let’s see if we are a good fit. I know I can help you get your life back! Let’s do this together! I am compassionate and I have a real passion for helping people just like you get rid of their fatigue!

If you haven’t signed up for my newsletter you can do so on my website as well and get 5 things your doctor won’t tell you about hypothyroidism. I send out recipes almost every week in my emails.

Thanks to Beth for sending in this question. I love when you guys do that. If you have a question, please email me at stephanie@outofthewoodsnutrition.com or fill out the contact form on my website. It’s so much more fun to answer your questions than come up with content or guess at what you might be interested in.

Thanks for tuning in. Until next time.

Why balanced blood sugar matters for thyroid health.

Every organ or gland in the body uses sugar (glucose) for energy production. If you don’t have glucose getting into your cells, you will suffer with low energy. Low energy for your cells but also low energy for you. If your cells can’t be fueled, that will definitely affect your overall energy levels.

If you have low blood sugar, either from not eating enough or from being on a blood sugar roller coaster with the dips of low blood sugar, then your thyroid will not have enough energy to do its job creating a sluggish thyroid.

If you are dealing with insulin resistance at all, (and many people are and don’t realize it) which is when your cells are resistant to the insulin trying to bring in glucose for energy use because there is too much glucose in the blood, then your thyroid will suffer. This is because it too will not be getting the glucose it needs for it to work properly.

In addition, having regularly high blood sugar causes damage to the lining of your blood vessels, your organs, your brain, and causes you to store fat.

High blood sugar causes inflammation throughout the body, including your thyroid so it can’t get all the nutrients it needs to produce thyroid hormones. This will lead to an increased TSH but it might not be high enough for your doctor to say, ‘Oh, you have hypothyroidism’. That said, you also might not need medication for a situation where your blood sugar is affecting your thyroid. You can make some diet and lifestyle changes and get things working better and then retest your thyroid labs. If they get better, then you know what you were doing is right.

Aside from diet, the things that can contribute to blood sugar imbalances are poor sleep. Even just one night of poor sleep can cause short term insulin resistance including in otherwise healthy people. I think of all the nights I slept poorly because my husband snored so loud that I was awake much of the night and if it wasn’t him waking me up, I was waking up because my blood sugar was so low in the night that my body used cortisol to raise it and that cortisol caused me to wake with a start and a racing heart.

Sometimes it still happens to me although very rarely and when it does there is some kind of dream involved that creates the racing heart to wake me up. Only now I can fall asleep pretty quickly rather than when my kids were younger and I was up half the night because of either the snoring or low blood sugar or a combo of the two. My poor kids. They took the brunt of my awful moods due to lack of sleep. Thankfully they have forgiven me and we have pretty good relationships. My life was a huge mess for years because of blood sugar. I don’t want that for you.

When you don’t sleep well, you get no growth or repair which is what is supposed to happen while you are sleeping. This is when your body fixes itself. With blood sugar problems like insulin resistance, you are dealing with a vicious cycle when you are not sleeping.

Stress is another issue related to blood sugar imbalances and poor thyroid function. I feel like a broken record because stress is huge. Again, emotional stress, physical stress, environmental stress. All of it is a problem if it is chronic. Cortisol is a stress hormone. When it rises temporarily, it triggers the liver to make glucose and it can even cause a breakdown of muscle tissue and there is some storage of fat.

If you have chronic stress in your life for whatever reason- it may not be in your control but it will affect you. Your brain senses stress, the pituitary gland sends a signal to the hypothalamus to tell the adrenal glands to secrete cortisol to manage the stress. The pituitary and the hypothalamus are also involved in thyroid hormone secretion. Do you think if the brain is dealing with stress, it can tell the thyroid to release just the right amount of hormones? The adrenals and the thyroid gland are very closely tied together when it comes to function and dysfunction. Very important that the adrenals are not having to deal with chronic stress whether it is from external sources or from imbalanced blood sugar.

When you eat in relationship to when you go to sleep is also very important as well as when you eat in relationship to exercise.

Eating right before bed, especially something that will spike your blood sugar which can raise cortisol which will then inhibit growth hormone (for repairing tissue while you sleep).

If you are not eating protein right away in the morning then your body will take it from your muscle. Protein in the morning is important for stable blood sugar all day long. This is a big deal as we age too because the older we get the easier it is to lose protein. Lifting weights is super helpful, especially as women enter menopause.

How many meals are you eating in a day? Not even meals though, it could just be a problem if you are a chronic snacker. Every time you eat, insulin is released. If you are eating/snacking every hour or two, you are releasing insulin. If you are insulin resistant, that glucose can be stored as fat. Your body needs a break in between meals to burn fat.

A lot of practitioners will tell you to eat 4-5 smaller meals throughout the day to deal with blood sugar imbalances. This is not necessarily helpful. It really depends on what is going on with you and what your blood chemistry says. There are a few different reasons why your blood sugar might be out of whack. Let’s figure that out so we know how to deal with it.

So you have all this imbalanced blood sugar, maybe insulin resistance. This has caused inflammation in the body. You are stressed which can also cause inflammation. Your diet is poor because you are stressed which can also cause inflammation. See how this works?

All of this can lead to gut issues like leaky gut aka intestinal permeability which can lead to food sensitivities and more inflammation and can also create the perfect storm for Hashimoto’s to occur.

Let’s review this quickly.

Blood sugar goes up, it can’t get into the cells because of insulin resistance. Your body senses that the sugar is still in the blood so it raises insulin even more. This leads to glucose to be stored as fat. In addition, when the blood sugar is reduced because of insulin you can get those crashes of low blood sugar which triggers cortisol to try to bring your blood sugar back up but the adrenals release too much which brings your blood sugar up too high and the cycle starts over.

It is vicious.

If you have leaky gut, we need to fix that, figure out what is causing it and fix that inflammation in the body.

You can get a glucose monitor relatively cheap. The strips for it are the expensive part but if you want to really see what foods set off your blood sugar, a glucose monitor is a good tool. You can even do a continuous glucose monitor that you hook up to your phone so it is monitored all the time. You will be able to see some really good trends in how your body responds to sugar. Normal blood sugar hovers around 80-90, 80-100 depending on who you talk to. If your blood sugar is higher than that first thing in the morning, then you have a bit of a problem with insulin resistance. There are other tests that are helpful for looking at blood sugar as well and when you work with a practitioner like myself, they can be good tools to see what kind of blood sugar problems you are having. You can be insulin resistant and depending on what your labs say will determine how you fix it. Even blood sugar issues are not once size fits all.

Other things to consider when looking at your blood sugar dysregulation:

1. Cortisol - is it low? I’m not talking about Adrenal Fatigue because that doesn’t really exist. What I’m talking about is low cortisol. Do you crave salt? Is your blood pressure low? Do you wake during the night- usually around 3am?

2. Are you deficient in certain nutrients? There are things needed to allow your cells to use glucose properly. If you have fatigue or weakness, poor cognitive function, insomnia, muscle cramps, inflamed and scaly skin, hair loss, pale skin tone.

3. Do you have stomach pain, nausea, no appetite, bloat?

4. Maybe you have antibodies to insulin?

5. Frequent need to pee? Hungry after meals? Frequent infections? Fatigue? Gaining weight around your waist? Higher blood pressure.

6. Excessive sweating? Tremors, palpitations? Mood disorders?

7. Body pain, joint pain, muscle pain, fatigue, insomnia, depression, anxiety, mood issues.

Any of these can be causing blood sugar dysregulation issues and should be fixed with a practitioner. I can help you figure out just what might be going on and give you the tools you need to fix these issues with ongoing support. I’m no longer doing one off appointments because this does not help you work through the overwhelm that sometimes comes with diet and lifestyle changes. When working with me you get bi weekly appointments for six months to help you overcome your chronic health issues. If you just need one appointment to send you in the right direction that is available too. This would be for someone who can take the info and run with it. I have found that longer term, having support over 6 months to a year is way more helpful in setting you up for success. If you are ready to figure out what is going on with your blood sugar or your thyroid problems, reach out. Book a discovery call to see if we are a good fit at www.helpforhashimotos.com.

If you wouldn’t mind leaving a review on iTunes, I would really appreciate it. Reviews help boost my visibility so others can find the show. I’m eternally grateful for those of you that tune in. It is my sincerest hope that you find value in each one of these episodes and I work really hard to provide you with good information. This is my job. I’m working for you. Now that I have all of my 1000 client hours needed to get my nutritionist license I am taking on a full load of clients. If you need help, please reach out. If you know someone suffering silently with a thyroid condition, please share this with them. Have them sign up for my newsletter. There is a lot of work to be done to take control of chronic illnesses like thyroid disease and that starts with you taking the first steps to want to feel good again. You are here and listening and learning. You have what I didn’t have when I was first diagnosed. You have a world of information on the internet, a lot of which is crap, some of which is good. As I am learning and growing I will fix what mistakes in information I have talked about in the past. I’m always trying to do better so you have the latest information to get you feeling better.

Wishing you a wonderful week. Thanks again for being here.

At home thyroid testing.

An out of whack thyroid means inflammation, chronic mental and/or emotional stress, diet, and our modern lifestyles are walking us right into a hormonal (thyroid and otherwise) nightmare.

Our hormones and the glands that produce them are all connected and all of our body systems are connected. When one is not working well, the others will not be working well.

But you go to the doctor and they check your thyroid, right?

And they usually only check TSH and they tell you everything is fine, and then maybe they offer you an anti-depressant as a solution. Or maybe they tell you to exercise more. All the while you are walking around with a slow functioning thyroid and no one is willing to do anything for you.

You might be feeling a little blue and maybe you are the only one in the room with a sweater or coat on because you are cold. Side note, this has been a family member of mine for her whole life….

My bones used to be cold. I was so cold at night it would take me an hour to fall asleep because the second I took my socks off, my feet were ice. Now, I sleep with a window cracked in the winter and it feels great.

Maybe you are feeling tired, putting on weight or cannot lose it no matter what, maybe you don’t sleep well or your skin looks unhealthy (dry, not glowing, etc). All of this is tied to how well your metabolism works and if your thyroid is working slowly, your metabolism is working slowly.

Anyway, whatever your symptoms are, you are not alone and you can fix them.

And there is a very basic test you can do at home to help you figure out if there is more to your story than what your doctor is telling you.

There is a medical doctor named Broda Barnes who came up with this at home method as he had made it his life’s work to study the thyroid all the way back to 1940.

With this test, the assumption is that your doctor has done a thyroid test and told you it is normal but you still have symptoms.

All you have to do for this test is take your temperature. Full disclosure, I have not tried this because I am lazy and you need a mercury based thermometer called a basal thermometer. The reason for this is that a slow thyroid (hypothyroid) causes your overall body temp to drop and that is why you feel cold.

For men and women in menopause, all they do is take their temp but for women still cycling you have be mindful of doing the test in relation to your cycle and ovulation because your temperature will naturally rise at that time.

Here are the instructions:

1. Shake down a basal thermometer and put it on your nightstand, within reach, before you go to bed.

2. When you wake up in the morning before you do anything else, and try not to move too much, put the thermometer under your armpit which is the most stable place to take your temp for this. No getting up for any reason whatsoever, just take the thermometer and put it under your arm and lay still for ten minutes. Do some deep breathing and do your best to do some kind of meditation so that you are not even thinking about anything - especially anything that might stress you out. No looking at your phone, no texting, no tv, no music, nothing. Just lie there and breathe.

3. After ten minutes, write down your temp. You might want to make a little chart of the day and time you took the temp.

4. Do this for five days in a row- If your temp is normal (above 97.8 to 98.2) then you can stop and we need to do some digging to figure out why you still have symptoms.

5. After five days, you are going to take a thyroid supplement: either Thyrotrophin PMG from Standard Process or Thyroid Synergy from Designs for Health, or GTA Forte from Biotics Research. GTA Forte is the supplement that took away my cold hands and feet.

6. You take these for the next 2-3 weeks and continue recording your temperature. Give it a few days before you even see any kind of changes.

   1. You can get either of these from my dispensary for 10% off at https://us.fullscript.com/welcome/hfh Please don’t buy from Amazon- there are a lot of counterfeit supplements on that platform and buying from a practitioner helps support their small business. It helps me pay for the podcast streaming service.

   2. If you are doing Thyrotophin PMG take 6 capsules in the morning. These can be stimulating so don’t take after 1 or 2pm.

   3. If you are taking Thyroid Synergy then take 4 in divided doses (2 in am and 2 at lunch)

7. You want to be watching for a trend of your temperature rising while you are on the supplements. This will be an indication there is a problem with your thyroid.

8. If your temp goes above 98.2, cut back on the supplements by maybe 1. This should not make you feel hyperthyroid. Obviously if it does then you want to be sure to stop the experiment.

As you work on your health, which you can do with me in my 6 month program meeting bi-weekly, and your overall health improves, your thyroid may start to work better. This of course depends on where you are in the whole thyroid gland breakdown. Working on emotional stress, inflammation, reducing toxins, cleaning up your diet, fixing nutrient deficiencies, and so on will change some things for the better and then you may not need the supplements anymore.

I want to say a word about emotional stress and thyroid too because there is a clear spiritual/emotional/energetic component to this disease. If you want to heal your body and your thyroid, you will eventually have to deal with this component. Thyroid problems are often about communication, the throat chakra if you are in to woo woo. Do you have no voice in your marriage or other relationship? Is there something your are not being honest with yourself about? Are you not speaking your truth? Are you not saying what is on your mind?

You cannot heal your thyroid without dealing with this stuff. They are so tied together it isn’t even funny. We can look at your labs and give you all the tools you need to get better but this stuff also has to be addressed.

I have personal experience with the need to heal this kind of stuff. I grew up not really having a voice and continued being in relationships where I didn’t have a voice my whole life. I am finally to the point where I feel like I can speak freely and use my voice. This stuff is real. And it matters.

But if you are not ready to deal with it, that’s okay too. You can work on all other aspects of your life and deal with it later. There was a time I wasn’t ready to deal with it and I waited until I was ready. It’s okay.

I also don’t want you to blame yourself. You didn’t know what you didn’t know and that is okay. All that matters is that you are here now and even if you are just letting this sink in, I’m proud of you for that.

You can feel better. I can help you do that. I can be your voice for now until you are ready.

You’ve got this.

AIP diet and vacation; feeling apathetic and tired all the time.

Hi, 

I am two weeks in to the AIP diet and am planning a vacation in December to an all inclusive resort. Will I undo all my hard work on this diet if I go off plan for a week? What if I have a glass of wine? How much damage will it do? 

Sarah,

Hi Sarah. Thanks for your question. You will be three months in to AIP which is a good amount of time on the diet. Some people only need that long to see a real benefit. The trick will be reintroducing foods while you are there. Your body will have had a good amount of time to heal which means your body will have the ability to give you a proper response to your reintroductions while on vacation. OR you could do a few reintro’s a week before you go in case you have some major digestive, skin or emotional reaction. This way you will be able to deal with it before your trip. Otherwise I would not really stress out too much about it because you want to enjoy your trip and sometimes stressing about what to eat is worse than eating the actual foods you want to. I would be mindful of not eating gluten and dairy since they are often a problem for autoimmune thyroid patients and if your symptoms before the diet change were not too terrible then you might be just fine. Just take it one meal at a time and play it by ear while on vacation. Make sure you are eating a lot of vegetables and fruits and enjoy an occasional glass of wine.  Have a great vacation. 

How do you know if your Hashimoto’s is the cause of your apathy (lack of interest, enthusiasm, or concern) and fatigue?  I know others who do not have any problem. My husbands wife has it as well and is thin, walks, does yoga, stays up past 10, etc. I am getting worse. I am tired and now apathetic about not getting anything done. I am eating anything because no matter what, I will gain weight. Is it hashimoto’s or something else? My doctor can't find any reason for me to be so tired. I just want to do nothing all day. I do work, so Monday-Friday I have to get up to the alarm, and then plant myself on the couch when I get home. This is existing, not a life.

I found a study linking major depressive disorder (depressed mood, low self esteem, loss of interest or pleasure in activities you used to find enjoyable) and the hypthalamic-pituitary-thyroid (HPT) axis. The amount of dysfunction in the HPT axis was related to how severe the depression was. Lower T3 and TSH was an indication of thyroid dysfunction in major depressive disorder. This study found a correlation, not causation but is still something to consider (1). 

Some other things to consider with apathy are your hormones. If you have an imbalance of estrogen, progesterone, or testosterone this can affect the neurotransmitters in your brain. Estrogen imbalances will have an effect on serotonin receptors in the brain. Serotonin is a neurotransmitter that gives you a feeling of well being and happiness as well as helping you learn, have memory and more. Estrogen imbalances will mess with dopamine too (a hormone and neurotransmitter related to motivation in reward-motivation behavior) and thyroid hormone is needed for all neurotransmitter receptors in the brain. 

Some questions you should be asking yourself and your doctor: 

• Is my medication doing it’s job?

• Do I need more T3, am I converting enough T3?

• What is my diet like?

  • Are you on a gluten free, dairy free diet?

  • Are you sensitive to any other foods?

• Is my cortisol high in the evening and low in the morning?

• How is my stress level?

• How is my sleep?

• Am I on a blood sugar roller coaster?

Something is not right, obviously you know that- the way you feel is no way to live and let me say to you that it is not your fault, you cannot just push through it and I hope you have some good support. You don’t deserve to feel this way. I have been there. My first inclination is to ask if you are on natural desiccated thyroid hormone like Armour or if it is a T4 only medication like levothyroxine because it sounds like you need T3 and if you are not eating a healthy diet, that needs to change. 

(1) Jia Y, Zhong S, Wang Y, Liu T, Liao X, Huang L. The correlation between biochemical abnormalities in frontal white matter, hippocampus and serum thyroid hormone levels in first-episode patients with major depressive disorder. Journal of Affective Disorders. 2015;180:162-169.

Six types of thyroid dysfunction. Episode 39.

Welcome to Episode 39. I’m so happy you are here. 

I spend a good couple hours cooking several things last night so I would have food to eat over the next week or so. I’ve been trying to double up on meals when I cook so we have stuff to freeze for nights I don’t want to cook. 

I made two whole chickens on Sunday night so I had leftover meat for making soup and for putting on salads. I made a double batch of chili on Monday and Tuesday was a big batch of Thai Beef Stew, braised cabbage and I tried out a meatless dish of grape tomatoes, garlic, basil, chickpeas and spaghetti squash. If you tolerate legumes it was an okay dish. I was hoping for more flavor from the chickpeas. I just sautéed the tomatoes in olive oil, smashed them, added the garlic and chickpeas and sautéed a bit longer. Then I added the spaghetti squash and basil and mixed it through. 

We are having venison chops tonight with sautéed mushrooms and roasted cabbage. 

What are you making for dinner these days?  Head over to my website and comment on this post to let me know what your cooking. Look for Episode 39. 

Today we are talking about the six types of thyroid dysfunction that cause or result in hypothyroidism so let’s get started. 

The thyroid gland is super sensitive to any changes in the biochemistry in our body. It’s job is to perceive even the tiniest of changes in the body and make up for that by changing how much thyroid hormone is released in the body. 

This is one reason you can see such different lab values over time. 

When these changes in our biochemistry become something that is chronic or constantly happening in the body then there begins to be problems with the thyroid gland and the communication between the hypothalamus and the pituitary gland. 

Things like constant blood sugar dysregulation, constant or chronic inflammation in the body, deficiencies in nutrients, poor liver function, toxic burden, low stomach acid, intestinal permeability, poor eliminations and even the use of hormones including thyroid hormones can cause thyroid problems. 

Hypothyroidism or low thyroid function can fall into six different types. Some of these may occur at the same time, and it may be that only one of these will require permanent hormone replacement. 

1.Primary Hypothyroidism. 

This is when there is decreased hormone production by the thyroid gland. So it isn’t making enough T4 or T3. One cause and the most common cause in the US is Hashimoto’s. Worldwide the most common cause of Primary Hypothyroidism is iodine deficiency. (ref)  It is also caused by removal of the thyroid gland. 

This is a dysfunction of the thyroid gland and this is the one type of hypothyroidism that needs to be treated with thyroid hormone replacement. 

If you have Hashimoto’s, you may need medication due to the destruction of your thyroid gland but you also need to understand that this condition is an immune system issue first and a thyroid issue second. 

If you catch Hashimoto’s before too much damage is done, you might be able to support your thyroid nutritionally. Sadly, for me, I am still in need of medication.  If you do not have success bringing TSH down with diet and lifestyle changes, you will likely need hormone replacement. 

Your labs might look like this if you have primary hypothyroidism: 

• high TSH

• normal or low Total T4

• normal or low Free T4

• normal or low Free T3

• normal Reverse T3

2. Secondary Hypothyroidism

This deals with your thyroid not putting out enough thyroid hormone due to an issue in the pituitary gland. Remember that the thyroid is regulated by the pituitary gland and the hypothalamus. When these two glands are not communicating and the pituitary doesn’t secrete Thyroid Stimulating Hormone (TSH) like it is supposed to. You may find your TSH at or around 1.8 but still having symptoms of hypothyroidism. 

Chronic stress in the body is usually at the heart of this one. Stress fatigues the pituitary and it can cause a failure to signal the thyroid to produce thyroid hormone. 

Stress: too busy all the time, not enough sleep, living off of coffee and processed foods, inflammation, viral or bacterial infections. All of these will mess with your adrenal function and your thyroid function and remember those two go hand in hand.

You can also have low thyroid function after pregnancy. This is a stressful time for women who tend to be the ones suffering with most thyroid conditions. Pregnancy in and of itself will put a high demand on the pituitary gland. 

If your blood tests come out normal but your doctor puts you on thyroid medication anyway, it can help you feel better for a couple weeks but then you might start to feel worse. You can develop thyroid hormone resistance at your cells much like insulin resistance. 

So your cells are refusing thyroid hormone because there is too much in the blood and you might be given a higher dose making things even worse. You have all this hormone running through your blood so your pituitary gland gets a message it can stop making TSH or it just stops talking to the thyroid altogether. 

You might need medication after enough damage has been done between the communication of the pituitary and the thyroid.  

If you have Hashimoto’s but it doesn’t get addressed, this can become you.

Your labs might look like this: 

• 1.8 or less TSH

• 6 or less T4

• symptoms of hypothyroidism. 

3. Your T4 is not converting to T3

This happens when you have tons of chronic stress and high cortisol. So you are making T4 but your body isn’t converting it to T3 which is what your cells need. When cortisol is high, you will likely have some of this going on. 

If your body is dealing with infection or inflammation your cell walls can be damaged by that which also affects T4 to T3 conversion. 

You need to damper the inflammation or infection and support your body in dealing with cellular stress (free radicals). 

T3 levels won’t affect your TSH so your labs might look like this: 

• Normal TSH

• Normal Total T4

• Normal Free T4

• Low T3

• Low Free T3

• Low or normal Reverse T3

4. Your conversion of T4 to T3 is too high.

This would mean you have too much T3 being made and you also have less thyroid binding globulin (TBG). 

Too much T3 will overwhelm the cells and you find yourself in thyroid hormone resistance again. It is common in women with insulin resistance and PCOS. It is often caused by too much testosterone in the body.  If you have developed Type II Diabetes and are taking insulin for this, you may also find yourself in an over conversion of T4 to T3.

If you are using a testosterone cream you can over convert T4 and T3. 

You will have hypo symptoms with this one. 

A big help here will be to reverse the insulin resistance to reverse the thyroid hormone resistance and begin to feel better. 

You may have labs that look like this: 

• Normal TSH

• High or high normal Free T4

• High or high normal Free T3

• Normal Reverse T3

5. High Thyroid Binding Globulin

Thyroid Binding Globulin is a protein that carries thyroid hormones to the cells so they can use them.  You can develop antibodies to this protein in Hashimoto’s. 

You can find yourself in this situation if you take hormonal birth control or estrogen replacement therapy. 

If you are on birth control, you may have high levels of estrogen you will make too much TBG and thyroid hormones are carried to the cells on TBG so if you have too many TBG proteins in the blood bound to them, you can have less thyroid hormone getting to your cells. 

You have to work to get the excess estrogen out of the body. 

Your labs might look like this: 

• Normal TSH

• Low Free T4

• Low Free T3

• Normal Reverse T3

6. Thyroid Hormone Resistance

Again, similar to insulin resistance with a root cause being stress. Your pituitary gland and thyroid gland may be making just the right amount of hormone but it just isn’t getting into the cells. It feels like hypothyroidism to you and it is the high amount of cortisol in your body that is causing your cells to resist the thyroid hormone. 

You absolutely must manage your adrenals with this one. 

Your labs might look like this: 

• Normal TSH

• Normal Free T4

• Normal Free T3

• Normal Reverse T3

You have to make sure your labs are being tested regularly in all cases. 

Ok. That’s it for me. 

I want to remind you all that I have openings in my practice for a few more clients right now so if you are needing help navigating diet and lifestyle changes head over to Help For Hashimoto’s and fill out the contact form. You can also get my report on Five Things Your Doctor Won’t Tell You About Hypothyroidism. 

One last thing, part of the diet and lifestyle changes are to look at what you are putting on your skin. I found Beautycounter to be a trusted source for skin care and make up for me. They ban over 1300 chemicals in their products while the US only has a ban on around 30 ingredients. So, you don’t have to think about safety with their products and I really like that so I became a consultant last year. I don’t work too hard at selling it because my focus is really on nutrition but if you have any interest in checking them out go to beautycounter.com/stephanieewals to shop. I would sure appreciate your support. 

I’m still on a social media break and have no desire to get back on anytime soon. I’m checking the Help For Hashimoto’s facebook group once a day. You can join that if you would like but all the action is in the newsletter which you can sign up for on my website. 

I’m grateful to you all. Please leave me a rating and review on iTunes so more people can find the show and get help. 

Until next time. 

Can Hypothyroidism affect your heart? Episode 37.

Welcome to episode 37. Thanks for joining me. Today I am diving in to our heart health and what it means to our heart health when we are dealing with hypothyroidism. 

Do you have: 

High or low blood pressure?

Fast or slow pulse?

Irregular heartbeat?

Heart skips a beat?

Palpitations

High cholesterol?

Heart Disease, plaque buildup, heart attack?

These are all things that can be affected by thyroid disease. 

Our heart uses thyroid hormone. Our heart is affected by changes in our medication or by the amount of medication we are taking. It is affected by low levels of T3. How many of you have a doctor that will only test TSH? 

This could be affecting your heart. 

When you don’t have enough thyroid hormone your heart can beat too slow or it can beat irregularly meaning it can flutter or miss beats. Long term consequences of this is that your tissues don’t get enough oxygen or nutrients which will make you feel physically bad. Our heart and the entire cardiovascular system is dependent on adequate levels of T3 for proper function. T3 helps improve how the heart contracts so when you are low you will have less cardiac output. Cardiac output means the amount of blood the heart pumps through the circulatory system in one minute. 

You can also end up with plaques developing in your arteries and high blood pressure. Hypothyroidism can effect how blood is pumped in and out of the heart, how the lining of the arteries functions, cholesterol levels in the blood and more. Low T3 can increase the amount of cholesterol and fat circulating (technically called lipids) in the blood.

T3 is the main regulator of gene expression in the heart muscle. Gene expression means how genetic information is transferred in the cells of the body. It is the effect of a gene on the body.  It is thought that low T3 levels are associated with increased death in patients already dealing with heart disease. 

Hypothyroidism is associated with higher cardiovascular risk factors. This means that we have a higher chance of cardiovascular disease. The heart cells do not convert T4 in to T3 very well if at all so if T3 is low then the heart tissue feels the effects and doesn’t function as well as it should. 

Treatment with thyroid medications is supposed to improve all risk factors but the problem is if you are treated with T4 only medication and you are not converting T4 to T3 for whatever reason, you may be at higher risk for issues with your heart. 

There are not a lot of randomized controlled studies in this area but hopefully some will be done soon. 

Bottom Line:  Hypothyroidism affects the whole body. It has a negative impact on the heart and almost everything else when it isn’t treated. 

You might hear from your doctor that NDT like Armour or Westhroid etc will cause a high heart rate. If this is the case for you then you must look at your adrenal health and/or iron levels. If you have high reverse T3 which is usually the case with cortisol or iron problems or even chronic inflammation you can see an issue with your heart rate.  You could have a high heart rate if you are having a flare up of Hashimoto’s where tissue is being killed off and thyroid hormone is being released. 

If you think your medication is causing heart palpitations, discuss it with your doctor and you may also want to try to take it in smaller doses. I am currently on Armour which my body doesn’t love as much as the compounded thyroid powder so when I take one whole pill I get palpitations throughout the day. I have to take half a pill 4x a day to get my body used to it. I also have adrenal issues and low iron which is not super responsive to iron supplementation so once those things are fixed, I should be good. 

OK.  I want to explain more about heart disease so you know what you are dealing with and how you can optimize your life choices so you can give your heart a fighting chance. 

Heart Disease or Coronary Heart Disease are conditions that affect the heart muscle, valves or rhythm. 

Cardiovascular Disease are conditions that affect blood vessels- usually that they are narrowed or blocked which can lead to a heart attack. 

Heart disease is caused by atherosclerosis- a disease of the arterial wall that leads to the narrowing and obstruction of the artery. The narrowing is because of sclerotic deformation of the artery and the development of raised patches called atherosclerotic plaques in the inner lining of the arterial wall. Depending on which organ in the body the artery feeds, atherosclerosis in those arterial walls will impair blood flow to that organ. 

The two major types of Coronary Heart Disease are angina pectoris and myocardial infarction (heart attack). 

AP happens when the space inside the coronary artery is narrowed but not closed off completely.  At rest your body will be able to deal with less blood flow but any physical activity will cause the heart to have to work harder, the artery with the build up can’t supply enough blood to feed the heart muscle which can result in a gripping chest pain that can radiate to the neck and usually the left arm. 

Heart Attack or MI happens when the coronary artery closes up all the way and blood flow to the heart muscle stops. This causes a portion of the heart to die or causes death. 

About half the people who have a heart attack die in the first 2-3 hours and if you make it through a heart attack will take some time to recover and may suffer complications such as an abnormal heartbeat. 

How do we prevent these conditions?

We first prevent the build up in our arteries- the atherosclerosis. 

We avoid: smoking, obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, physical inactivity, stress, anxiety, anger and the big ones- poor sleep and the standard American diet (SAD). 

For 60 years or more we have been told to avoid fat and cholesterol in our diet. To eat margarine and cook with vegetable oils. That we need to be on statin drugs to manage our cholesterol. 

We can thank the Diet Heart Hypothesis which states that dietary fats, including cholesterol, cause heart disease. A correlation was shown in a diagram of 6 countries (carefully selected out of 22 countries that had the same data available) that fat consumption and death from heart disease were related. When all 22 countries were put in the diagram the correlation between fat and heart disease wasn’t plausible. It actually shows there is no correlation at all between fat consumption and dying from heart disease. 

A lot of money was thrown at scientific research in the US to prove this correlation to be true. The data that did not support the hypothesis was thrown out and the data that did was promoted and advertised. Studies in other countries that were done were proving this hypothesis to be wrong. 

Many of the studies proving the correlation between dietary fat and increase in heart disease or death were funded by companies that proved to benefit from this idea that fat is killing us. We were being sold a false bill of goods and we have been believing it and paying for it with our health for years. 

Is cholesterol really a bad thing?

The short answer is no. 

The longer answer-  We will die without cholesterol. Our bodies are made of billions of cells and almost every one of those cells produces cholesterol all the time. Why is this? Every cell uses cholesterol for structural integrity. 

Saturated fats and cholesterol are used by our cells to make the cell walls firm. If they are flabby and fluid we would be structured like a worm. 

Cholesterol is needed in different amounts all over the body depending on the purpose or function of the cell in that area. 

Protective barriers like our skin will have much more cholesterol because we need a strong sturdy barrier to protect us from any invasion. If a cell needs to be softer and more fluid it will have less cholesterol. 

Our cells communicate with each other and and transport molecules in and out of the cells-they need cholesterol and fats to do that. 

Our brain uses about around 25% of all the cholesterol in our body. 

Most of the cholesterol in our body does not actually come from the food we eat. Many studies have been done to show that dietary cholesterol does not have a huge effect on the cholesterol in our blood. 

Our body was made to make it on its own. It makes about 85% of our cholesterol and the rest comes from food. When we eat more foods containing cholesterol our body makes less of it. We eat less of it, our body makes more. 

Low cholesterol has been shown to produce emotional instability,  problems with behavior, aggressiveness, violence, low self control and more.

Sex hormones are made from cholesterol too- low libido, adrenal issues, high or low estrogen etc. 

Our liver produces much of our cholesterol and regulates its levels. 

When our skin is exposed to sunlight, we make vitamin D from cholesterol. 

Why do some people have high cholesterol and others don’t? Why will it be higher when we are under stress or have surgery? Why is it higher in winter and lower in summer?

Cholesterol plays a healing role in our body. It goes up when we need something to be healed. It’s higher in the winter because we have less sun exposure. 

Damaging molecules end up in our blood stream and we have this layer of cells in our blood vessels that can be damaged by things going through our blood. These cells send a message to our liver that there is damage. The liver makes cholesterol and sends it to the damaged area in the form of LDL cholesterol to repair the damage. Once the damage is repaired/the wound is healed it goes back to the liver in the form of HDL.

If you have high LDL cholesterol you should be asking, what is causing damage in my body instead of how do I lower my cholesterol. Get to the root of the problem and the cholesterol will take care of itself. 

Atherosclerotic plaques in your body are sources of inflammation in the body. Inflammation is the way our body responds to any injury. It is there to get rid of whatever is causing the problem so the body can begin to repair itself. 

Plaques in your arteries are the body's attempt at dealing with chronic, never ending damage that has been done to the blood vessels. The body is basically forming scar tissue in your arteries. 

What causes all of this?

Processed foods is a big one, poorly managed blood sugar and sugar in the diet in large amounts. Remember that women should only have around 22grams of sugar per day and men should only have 24 grams per day. High blood sugar on a regular basis creates an inflammatory environment within the body. 

Really quickly- some other things that cause inflammation in the body are the chemicals in products we use everyday- personal care products, household products, prescription drugs, exposure to smoke and pollution, pesticides, chlorine, microbes and parasites and even disrupted gut bacteria. Certain nutrient deficiencies, lack of sun exposure, no exercise and high stress are also big problems for our health in general but also in managing inflammation in the body. 

How do we manage to have good heart health and good cholesterol?

Consuming high quality healthy fats: 

Note it is NOT any particular fat that is good or bad but the way it is processed that makes it bad for us. 

The types of fats we need to know and understand: 

Saturated fat: a stable fat, doesn’t go rancid easily and our body can make it so it is considered non- essential. It is usually solid or semi solid at room temperature. 

Monounsaturated fat: pretty stable fat, won’t go rancid easily, our body can make it so it is considered non essential. Liquid at room temperature but if refrigerated should become somewhat solid. Found in olive oil, olives and oils from almonds, pecans, cashews, peanuts and avocados. 

Polyunsaturated fat: very unstable, goes rancid easily, never heat them or cook with them. Always in a liquid state, even if refrigerated. Two of these are considered essential meaning we have to get them from the diet. Flax and other seeds, nuts and fish and fish oil. Omega 6 and 3 are from these types of fats. 

All fats and oils are a combination of these three types of fats. They are categorized by which fat is most prevalent. 

We need all three types of these fats in order to have proper function in the body and to make sure that we can manage any inflammation in the body. 

We must have good digestion, proper liver function, zinc, magnesium, vitamin B6, vitamin E and C in order to have proper repair of inflammation in the body. 

Consume a mixture of about 30% saturated fat, 10% polyunsaturated fats (Omega 3 and 6) and 60% monounsaturated fats like olive oil as a very general guideline: 

• Animal fats from pastured, well raised animals if possible

• High quality butter such as Kerry Gold, Organic Valley or a locally made butter

• Ghee which is the butter fat with the whey removed- used in Indian cooking a lot

• Coconut or Palm Oils

• Cold Pressed extra virgin olive oil

• Other cold pressed oils from nuts or seeds

Cold pressed oils are expensive and more difficult to make. They are the most fragile oils as they are easily damaged by light and heat. They are the seed oils and oils made from nuts. Canola oil is a seed oil and is processed with high heat, chemicals and is a rancid and damaged oil before it hits the grocery store shelves where it then sits on a shelf exposed to light all day long- remember seed oils are polyunsaturated and are damaged by light and heat. 

Avoid hydrogenated fats, partially hydrogenated fats and those highly processed “vegetable” oils and of course trans fats. 

Other things that can be helpful: 

Vitamin C can help the body repair itself when under stress or when other factors are present that might otherwise cause damage to the lining of the blood vessels. Best choice is whole foods that are high in vitamin C (listed in order from highest amount of vitamin C per serving to lowest) like papaya, bell peppers, broccoli, brussels sprouts, strawberries, pineapple, oranges, kiwi, cantaloupe and cauliflower. 

Staying well hydrated will keep your blood free flowing and thinner. The thicker and more viscous your blood is, the more damage can be done to the lining of your blood vessels because there is more friction. Aim for about half your body weight in ounces a day but no more than 100 oz a day. That is a lot of water and even I find it tough to get that much water in each day. 

Cardio Protective Nutrition: 

• Consuming and digesting animal proteins which are the best source of vitamins A, D and the B vitamins. 

• Again, vitamin C

• Potassium- helps us maintain healthy blood pressure. Fruits and veggies in general but Swiss Chard has 1000mg of potassium per serving. Recommended amount is 4700mg per day. 

• Fill your dinner plate (and lunch and breakfast plate) with vegetables, especially cruciferous veggies like broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, brussels sprouts

• Consume wild caught fish, pastured eggs

• Fermented foods like sauerkraut, kimchi, fermented pickles, miso or natto

Lastly, high cholesterol in the elderly population is associated with longer life and life expectancy in general increases with higher cholesterol. Cholesterol is protective against infections, lower cholesterol levels associated with memory issues. 

Okay. That is it for today. Thanks for listening. Please leave me a rating and review on iTunes so more people can find the podcast. Let’s get as many people as possible the information they need to heal. 

Have a question or comment about today’s episode? Head on over to helpforhashimotos.com and ask it on this weeks episode blog post. Search for Episode 37 and you will find a transcript of todays episode. 

Need help figuring out how to navigate your thyroid condition? I am taking new clients right now and would love to help you out. Go to my website and fill out the contact form. 

I’m taking a facebook break. I will be checking in to see if anyone wants to join the Help For Hashimoto’s facebook group but beyond that I am trying to stay off it. I’m not a fan of putting out a bunch of content there when Facebook owns it all. 

I am focusing more of my energy on putting really good content out in my newsletter and here on the podcast so if you have a topic you want covered contact me through my website. 

I forgot again to send the lunch ideas in my newsletter. I’m so sorry about that. I was pretty stressed out last week with lack of sleep and worrying about passing the grad school entrance exam. I got a middle of the road score which is what my school was looking for so it looks like I’m going back to school at almost 48. Am I crazy? I don’t know. I am little scared though. it is kind of daunting to be a student at my age. I am also freaking excited to learn about functional medicine! More excited than scared the more I think about it. Maybe it will be fun for you all to learn along side me! 

Go sign up for my newsletter. For sure each week you will get a new recipe to try and so far the feedback on the recipes I’ve sent out has been really good. 

All right, see you next week! Take care! 

https://endocrinenews.endocrine.org/hypothyroidism-and-the-heart/

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17923583

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5512679/

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17093250

How does blood sugar dysregulation affect the thyroid? Episode 31.

Welcome to episode 31 and Happy New Year. 

I spend a lot of time between Christmas and New Years reflecting on my year and always being really hard on myself for not accomplishing more than I did. 

I had a great year, I have good relationships with people in my life that matter and while they are not perfect and not always great, I am working hard to show up better in those relationships. So here is to a new year full of health and great possibilities in all areas of my life and in yours too. 

I am really grateful you are here. 

I teach a class called The RESTART Program as a Nutritional Therapy Practitioner and it falls right in line with the subject matter of today’s podcast. I am discussing managing blood sugar in relation to thyroid health. They go hand in hand and one out of balance puts the other out of balance. 

My class is all about managing blood sugar and about Restarting with a new outlook on food and nutrition. It is a real food sugar detox where you learn how to eat real food to manage your blood sugar, you get nutrition education and you get support from me and from the members of the class. We have a private facebook group and we meet each week for five weeks with the detox starting on the second week.

There are no shakes, no pills- just real food. This class has been life changing for so many people and I really love teaching it. Learn more at www.outofthewoodsnutrition.com/restart 

Susan O.  “RESTART® gave me the tools to reverse pain, lose weight, increase energy, and best of all, the common sense of how we should be living and eating. Thank you for helping me make a difference in my life and my family.”

Tina T.  “I came to the RESTART® class just wanting to learn how sugar affects the body. I left class feeling better and with a ton of knowledge. It’s a lifestyle change I can do. Stick with this class, you won’t regret it.”

Melissa M.  “I now understand what I need to heal myself and my family. This class changed my attitude towards food and health. If you are sick and tired of being sick and tired all the time, I highly recommend taking RESTART®.”

You can register for class now at www.outofthewoodsnutrition.com/restart  Cost is $147 for the entire five weeks and will be taught via zoom which is free for you to download. 

Okay- on to the show. 

Why is maintaining healthy blood sugar levels or keeping your blood sugar balanced so important for your thyroid?

Most if not every organ and tissue in the body needs glucose or sugar. It is what helps us make energy in our cells so if you are lacking in sugar your cells are not getting the materials they need to produce energy so your cells will not have energy, your organs won’t and you definitely won’t have any energy. 

When you have a low level of glucose, your blood sugar is low and your thyroid won’t be getting enough energy or enough sugar to turn into energy to function. It will be sluggish and not able to produce enough hormone for you. 

When you have higher levels of glucose in the blood or high blood sugar on a regular basis, you end up with something called insulin resistance. Say you eat a meal that is pretty carbohydrate heavy of maybe pasta or bread or pizza and that gets broken down into little particles of sugar. It will cause your blood sugar to rise and your body says “I’ve got to get rid of this sugar in my blood. There is too much in here and it can damage my blood vessels. So it releases the hormone insulin which is supposed to lower blood sugar in the blood by bringing the sugar to the cells so it can use it for energy production. 

The problem when we eat all that refined carb garbage is that you are eating too many carbs for your body to handle so you are dealing with this higher blood sugar issue with the quick rise of insulin to help manage the levels of sugar in your body. It’s not good and your body- your cells eventually get tired of receiving the sugar from insulin so they become resistant to it. They are like- “No more. My cell door is closed. Go away!” 

So you have this sugar with no where to go because the cells don’t want it. It is just floating around in your blood stream. But it has to go somewhere so what does your body do?

It stores it in your fat tissue or creates fat tissue to store it. 

Now your thyroid is looking for nutrients but the cells are resistant because of the insulin resistance. The cells are refusing the sugar being transported by insulin.  No fuel for the thyroid means it isn’t going to produce enough hormone for you and you feel sluggish. You might have the TSH of 5 or 7 or 9 that your doctor says is fine when you know it isn’t fine because you feel like crap. 

Now keep in mind this is a very simplified explanation of things because I want you to be able to get the idea. 

When your blood sugar is high either from insulin resistance or because you are constantly eating all day long or because you eat the Standard American Diet then you probably are experiencing some inflammation.  We are all bio individuals- where you experience inflammation may be different than someone else.  If you have inflammation in your thyroid due to autoimmune attacks or because of something else- your thyroid cells are not able to take in the nutrients they need to function well. 

Two important nutrients are iodine and the amino acid tyrosine.  If you have an inflamed thyroid, that doesn’t mean you should supplement with these two nutrients. That is a band-aid. The root cause might be the mismanaged blood sugar and you should be able to get both of those nutrients from your diet.  

Missing these nutrients through mismanaged blood sugar is one way you can get  to an autoimmune diagnosis. 

Here is the kicker. People with high blood sugar levels in their blood and insulin resistance tend to have low thyroid hormone production which will increase your TSH. When TSH goes on the rise it can make insulin resistance worse. 

I think I can attest to this- when I experimentally went off my medication I felt and actually still am pretty puffy. I ate three cheesecake flavored M&M’s last Saturday and a couple hours later had a small patch of psoriasis on my palm and the back or nape of my neck is itchy. It can mess you up. It is a vicious cycle. 

When you have a high TSH because your body can’t make enough on it’s own, as your blood sugar lowers the cells in your thyroid are affected. We need the proper amount of T3 and T4 to maintain healthy blood sugar. The more out of control our blood sugar gets, the more our thyroid can’t function properly. It is sluggish and that contributes to insulin resistance even more. 

The best way to fix this is to fix your blood sugar balance. To keep it balanced and reset things. So obviously diet is a huge factor and that is what the RESTART Program is all about. There are other things you can do as well. 

Sleep is huge. One night of bad sleep, loss of sleep can create insulin resistance in a healthy person so for those of us suffering from insomnia, you are in that vicious cycle again and so having diet dialed in will be really important. We repair our body at night and cortisol is supposed to be low at night- if you are not sleeping both of those things are going to be messed up. No repairing of tissues, and cortisol can be high which means insulin resistance and fat storage/creation. 

Exercise. When your muscles are worked or exercised and trained, if you will, they become insulin sensitive which will lower your insulin resistance. For many of us with autoimmune disease we need to go slow and I can’t recommend enough the Get Autoimmune Strong Program. Please go to the show notes and use my link to check it out so I get credit for sending you. It helps me pay for the podcast. 

A lot of experts will recommend burst training where you do something intense for 30-60 seconds and then rest for a few minutes and do it again. I am not in the place where I can handle that so if you get exhausted from working out- autoimmune strong is for you. 

You can also use a standing desk instead of sitting desk. I got one on Amazon that sits on top of my cheap Craigslist desk for about $80-$90. It was a good investment. 

Manage stress. This along with sleep is sometimes more important than eating well. That’s not to say you shouldn’t eat well but these other two are really really important. When you are experiencing a lot of stress- mental/emotional or physical, your cortisol levels go up. When the cortisol is high, your liver will create sugar to increase your insulin and again we have a cycle we don’t want to be in. 

Cortisol is in our body to give us a burst of energy to escape danger. Our primitive mind doesn’t know the difference between actual physical danger and what goes on in our mind, or even between a close call on the road and running from a bear. It is all the same to our body. So chronic stress- not good for our body fat and our blood sugar. Unfortunately, our body prefers to get its energy or sugar from our muscle rather than our fat so we end up losing muscle and getting fatter in this scenario of unbalanced blood sugar.  

So we have this high blood sugar because of high cortisol and we have resistant cells, they don’t want any more sugar so more and more sugar gets released either through you eating something because your body has told you you need more energy so you crave some kind of sugary carb food or because you are stressed so the blood sugar levels are higher and higher- your body thinks there isn’t enough sugar because the cells are refusing it and so the levels get higher and higher in the blood and that gets shuttled to fat because it needs to get rid of it. 

When you eat matters and what you eat at night matters too. When you eat before bed, if it is a carb heavy food like a cookie or a bowl of cereal, your blood sugar will be high when you go to bed and you will have a crash around 1-3 am when cortisol is released to raise your blood sugar. Ever wake with a start or have heart palpitations at that time and then you can’t get back to sleep? That is a blood sugar issue. Then you pile on lack of sleep because you couldn’t fall asleep and you have more insulin resistance. 

Eating protein at breakfast or your first meal is important to keeping your blood sugar stable all day long. If you aren’t eating protein and you have insulin resistance and issues with cortisol, your body will take what it needs in the form of sugar from your muscles- creating less muscle and more fat. 

You may need to eat every 3 hours for a short time to get your blood sugar balanced, but don’t eat a bunch of carbs every 3 hours. Eat some healthy fats and proteins with veggies to keep your blood sugar stable and then eventually you will be able to make it from meal to meal without needing a snack. Eating all the time, snacking all the time will keep your insulin levels high all day long which means more fat storage, inflammation and stress on the body and on your thyroid. 

All this stress affects your pituitary gland and TSH is secreted from the pituitary gland. When your adrenals and cortisol are working hard to manage stress and blood sugar, there isn’t much room for your thyroid to be helped out so it takes a hit and becomes sluggish or you develop autoimmune disease.  Cortisol inhibits production of T4 and of TSH (will show up as a high TSH on a lab). 

So we have a thyroid that isn’t working. This causes a decrease in the rate the cells take in sugar (glucose). The receptors on your cells don’t know what is going on so they can’t take in the right amount of anything.  Your blood sugar is out of whack and T4 and T3 are not being secreted from the thyroid like they are supposed to either. You are dealing with inflammation because insulin overproduction will also produce inflammation. 

You are dealing with a blood sugar rollercoaster here. Sometimes too high blood sugar due to a meal you ate or stress or whatever and then low blood sugar because of the rise in insulin, too much insulin which causes a crash- when you get really tired after a meal or after a bunch of sugar. Cortisol gets involved to try to fix the problem and it starts all over again. Not good. You crave the sugar to get you out of the crash. 

The solution here- besides taking my class is to heal your gut, remove some of these foods that are causing your blood sugar to be so out of control. Figure out if certain foods are causing you inflammation, get some good nutrients in to your diet. Get some omega 3 fats, fiber and protein in your diet.  You might need chromium, magnesium, cinnamon can be really helpful in lowering your blood sugar and testing your blood sugar. I am working on getting someone on the podcast who is an expert in finding your carb tolerance. It involves pricking your finger- I’m not so good at that. I have to have my daughter do it for me so I don’t mess with it- I really need to do that though. I know there are certain foods that really spike my blood sugar and the thing of that is- it can be different for everyone. You might really react to an apple whereas someone else won’t be affected at all. I’ll work on getting a good guest to help us figure that out. 

Ideally you want your blood sugar levels to stay somewhere in between 80-100. This would be on a blood glucose monitor. You can get a good picture of your blood sugar from a Hemoglobin A1C test. This will measure the sticky proteins of sugar that are attached to your red blood cells. This causes your red blood cells to become brittle and cause damage to your blood vessels. This is how we end up with plaques in our veins. 

In The RESTART Program we don’t use any sweeteners on the sugar detox. Some safe alternatives if you are going to have sugar keeping in mind that sugar is sugar and will affect your blood sugar the same -are honey, maple syrup and maybe coconut sugar. Again- these all will do the same damage if you eat too much of it. You shouldn’t be having any more than 22-24 grams of sugar a day according to the world health organization. That is not a lot when you figure 4 grams of sugar is = to 1 teaspoon of sugar. 

Stay away from aspartame, splenda and other artificial sweeteners. Some people think stevia in green powder form or the liquid drop forms are okay- I don’t care for the taste and I don’t know that my body loves them either. Some people do okay with erythritol or xylitol- they can cause bloating and irritate your gut. Avoid agave as it is pure fructose. It will for sure spike your blood sugar. 

The bottom line here is that you cannot address your thyroid without addressing your blood sugar and your diet. 

Diet changes alone can result in weight loss, more energy, better sleep, lessened cravings, better skin, and a better functioning thyroid. 

I’d love to have you in my class. Learn more or register at www.outofthewoodsnutrition.com/restart

Check out autoimmune strong here. 

Thanks so much for joining me today.  I’m glad you are here. Please leave me a review on iTunes and share this podcast with anyone you know who might be helped by it. 

I’m sending out a recipe for breakfast soup in my newsletter next week so go sign up for the newsletter on my website if you want that. It is really good. You will also get an ebook called 5 things your doctor won’t tell you about hypothyroidism. 

Join the Help For Hashimoto’s facebook group to get ongoing support from other members and from me. 

You can find me on instagram at stephanieewalsntp but all the action will soon be in the newsletter. 

See you next week! 

Study on blood sugar and hypothyroidism

Oops! I forgot to take my medication. Plus, how’s your poop? Episode 17.

ITunes Review: 

Stephanie, Thank you so much for a wonderful podcast. I love that you keep it real while answering difficult questions for us. You have a very calming and peaceful voice and I am always so encouraged listening to your podcasts. Keep them coming. We are listening and learning. 

What do you do if you forget to take your medication? 

Half life- a half life in the world of medications means the amount of time it takes for the concentration of the medication in your blood plasma to reduce by half.  Said another way- it is how long a drug stays in your system or the amount of time it takes for the effectiveness of a drug to reduce by half. 

If you are taking levothyroxine, the half life is 6-7 days and up to 9 or 10 days if you are dealing with hypothyroid conditions. If you have hyperthyroid conditions then it can be as little as three days. Nothing seems to be easy with this disease. 

Levothyroixine is a common treatment and most likely what your doctor will prescribe unless you have a doctor open or more knowledgeable in thyroid health. 

For practical purposes we will go with a 7 day half life for levothyroxine. When you take this medication, around 80% of it goes through your system over a longer period of time, like several hours. 

According to the Williams Textbook of Endocrinology, missing a day shouldn’t have a big effect on you. They also say that T4 is absorbed very well by the body so waiting an hour to take your medication before eating might not necessarily be required. Taking it on an empty stomach will give you a more stable TSH reading though. But since we all know that TSH should not be the gold standard, that maybe shouldn’t matter. 

The reason you usually have to wait 6 weeks to have your labs tested is because of this long half life. It takes about 6 weeks before your body has adjusted to a dose. 

However, if your digestion is not working well and we are going to talk about that in a minute, then you may have issues with absorption and of creation of T3 from your T4 only medication. 

There can be an issue in concentration of medication between manufacturers which can mess with your body. So, be proactive and let your pharmacy know that you do not want them to switch your medication without your knowledge. Remember that getting this dose right is like goldilocks- it needs to be just right. 

This same textbook also says that NDT is not a good choice for treatment and that TSH is the gold standard so- take it for what it is worth. 

A NDT like Armour has a half life of 2-7 days with the T3 having a half life of 4-6 hours. So if you take your medication with T3 in it at 8am then sometime between 12pm and 2pm you have about half of the original dose of medication in your system. Your cells will have used the rest of it. But it should last you about a day. This means half is gone in 4-6 hours, another half of the half (a quarter more ) will be used in another 4-6 hours and so on. 

T3 is used up faster because your body doesn’t have to convert it like it does T4. This is why it is a good idea to take a partial dose in the morning and a partial dose in the afternoon. 

Now let’s talk about what happens when our digestion isn’t working well because this is very important for our thyroid to work well. 

Thyroid peroxidase is an enzyme. It makes thyroid hormones by cleaving off an iodine molecule and adding it to the amino acid tyrosine on thyroglobulin which then makes T4 and T3. In order for this to happen, we need to have available to us: selenium, copper, magnesium, B vitamins, zinc, vitamin A. 

You should not just go and willy nilly supplement with these vitamins and minerals. There are many factors involved here and supplementing with some of these may make things worse in the long run. So it is a good idea to either do a lot of your own research or work with someone who knows how to work with your condition. 

Our gut or gastro intestinal tract is an important factor in our thyroid health but even before that, what we eat and how we break it down in our stomach is a key factor. 

Before we even talk about what you are eating, let’s talk about how you are eating it. Are you running through the drive through before or after your kids activities? Are you eating in the car or eating while you are doing something else?  Are you relaxed or stressed while you are eating?

Any of those scenarios will mean you are going to struggle with breaking down your meal before it even gets to your small intestine where most of the nutrients are absorbed. 

Digestion actually starts in the brain. We smell our food cooking and our brain signals the production of saliva so we can break down some of that food in our mouth while chewing. Are you chewing your food well? Like 20-30 chews per bite? Really breaking it down so the enzymes in your saliva can begin digesting the carbohydrates in your meal?

Once you have chewed well, you swallow and that ball of food goes in to your stomach and stomach acid and pepsin get to work digesting or breaking down proteins. 

Do you have acid reflux after eating? (there is more about this in the audio)

Once it is broken down in the stomach and reaches the right pH then the valve between your stomach and your small intestine opens and fats are broken down by the release of bile and nutrients are extracted in the small intestine and absorbed in to the blood stream. 

Here is where your gut health comes in to play since leaky gut or Intestinal Permeability are what contributes to autoimmunity. 

We need a balance of gut bacteria in our intestines to help us convert T4 to T3 there. If we are not eating right or digesting well then we will have an imbalance of bacteria and intestinal permeability. 

We can end up with parasites, overgrowth of candida and constipation- all with their own contributions to our failing health. 

When we have hypothyroid- we have a sluggish gallbladder which means we might struggle to digest our dietary fats and then we are making thick and viscous bile which further messes up the gallbladder function. When this is not working well, we are not detoxifying as well either. so we can’t break down hormones or toxins from our environment. 

How are you pooping? No one wants to talk about it but you must be moving stool through your body and going every 16-24 hours. Your BM should be the size of your forearm from your wrist to your elbow, it should come out with ease and you should feel relieved when you are done and not like you still have to go. 

Being constipated further contributes to the “bad guys” overgrowing in your Small Intestine and causing bacterial infections, you may experience chronic pain, inflammation, digestive issues, food intolerances and Hashimoto’s. 

With all of this happening, we can also have issues dumping estrogen and so it can accumulate. This can cause hypothyroidism that you won’t see on a blood test according to Datis Kharrazian in Why Do I Still Have Thyroid Symptoms. This excess estrogen will keep the thyroid hormones from getting to the cells- causing hypothyroid symptoms. 

So you see, taking supplements without first healing the gut is pointless. It is a band aid at best. The only supplement you may need at this point is some stomach acid- Betaine HCl so you can start to break down your food and get those nutrients to your cells, kill off some of the bad guys and bring things back in balance. 

You will see improvement in chronic inflammation from changing what you eat and the way you eat it. Start with your plate. With breakfast. Make some bone broth. That is the next recipe to go out in my newsletter so sign up for that. 

So reduce inflammation by cutting out gluten, dairy products, eggs, most other grains, soy products and yeast. Yeast can feed an already out of control candida overgrowth. These are some of the big allergens, in other grains it is best to avoid corn for sure. 

This gives your body a chance to calm down so it can properly react to foods. 

You need to be on an elimination diet for 3 weeks to 3 months depending on how sick you are, how inflamed, or how long you went untreated for Hashimoto’s. In addition to this, you can do something called a FIT test

What can you eat?  There are no notes for this. It’s only on the audio. 

Why Do I Still Have Thyroid Symptoms?

Against All Grain

Meals Made Simple

How do you push through the fatigue? Episode 13.

Q.  How do you push through the fatigue? I just want to get my life back on track.

Q.  I’ve got hypothyroidism/Hashimotos. Around noon I start getting tired and it can get to the point of dozing off. I've had every thyroid level possible checked and it's within normal range. We've actually checked it numerous times. I've had my b12 and folic acid checked along with my hormone levels, vitamin levels, and had a CBC done. Everything is good. I'm wondering if maybe we are missing something. Could I have something that we haven't checked for yet. I've also got bipolar2, depression/anxiety and ptsd which I take Topamax for. I also take Levothyroxine for my hypothyroidism.

First let’s talk about Topamax. I want you to know what you are on.  Your doctor should be testing your kidney and liver function and your blood should be tested to be sure you are able to process the drug well. They can become toxic very quickly.  

You should not drink alcohol while on this medication as it interferes with the effectiveness and it can make you sleepy as well as slow your heart rate. 

Antacids will keep you from being able to absorb this medication as well as any nutrients from your food. 

Fiber supplements can reduce the effectiveness of this medication. 

This drug will cause you to be low in folate or deficient in it. 

It has not been approved to treat PTSD but is endorsed by the National Alliance on Mental Illness to treat bipolar disorder and other mood disorders. 

Common side effects: 

Diarrhea, Dizziness, Double vision, Fever, Hair loss, Loss of appetite, Mood changes, Nausea, Reduced perspiration, Sinusitis, Stomach upset, Taste changes, Tingling or prickly skin sensations, Tremors, Uncontrollable eye movements, Urinary tract infection, Weakness, Weight loss.

With that being said, let’s move on and talk about fatigue. 

This is a super common issue for those of us dealing with thyroid issues and there are a number of reasons why fatigue could be your issue. 

Anemia.

You can have anemia from a deficiency of B12, Iron or folic acid. Your doctor may check your iron levels but do they check B12, folic acid and ferritin? Any one of these can contribute to fatigue.  And just because your lab says you are in the normal range doesn’t mean you are in the optimal range. j

Normal ferritin levels are between 12 -150 ng/mL. Mine is currently at 17 and I struggle with energy often. Some thyroid experts would say that optimal ferritin levels should be at 90-110 ng/ml for good thyroid function.  If you are still losing your hair- it could be an iron deficiency. 

And B12 values from your doctors lab may include values from people who were deficient in B12 so you can’t always rely on the lab values. “normal” is between 200-900 pg/mL but under 350 can give you neurological symptoms.  

Food sensitivities, not food allergies which is when your immune system reacts to protect you like when someone’s throat closes off in a nut allergy.  This alerts the IgE part of your immune system and happens as soon as a food is ingested. The IgA and IgG sections of the immune system will react to foods in what I would call a sensitivity or intolerance. These can cause us to be fatigued. 

IgA reactions happen in the intestinal tract which can cause inflammation there each time we consume a particular food. This will damage the intestines and can cause us to be unable to absorb nutrients from our diet. You may have symptoms like diarrhea or looser stools, constipation, reflux or you may not have any symptoms at all. You can end up with conditions like IBS, gas, rashes on your skin, acne, asthma, headaches, irritability and fatigue.  Celiac disease is in this category. 

If your T3 is low and you have high Reverse T3, this will affect your energy. T3 helps our cells make more energy. Reverse T3 makes T3 ineffective so that we are slowed down a bit. If Reverse T3 is high, we will not have any energy and one of the biggest reasons this might be high is due to stress. Another problem could be that you are not converting T4 into T3. This can be due to stress, or even nutrient deficiencies either due to low stomach acid or a compromised gut. You might find you need to be on a medication that has T3 in it. 

If your TSH is high, you will not have energy. Not all lab values are created equal here. You need to make sure that you are in a good range. Lab values for TSH are made up from a population of all kinds of people- those who are seemingly healthy and those who have undiagnosed thyroid problems and even the elderly who often have lower functioning thyroids.  The best reference range for most people is to have a TSH around .5-2 uIU/L. Personally,  mine is lower than .5 and I feel pretty good on that.  If you are taking NDT you can have a TSH that might look hyper and if your T3 is in normal range you probably feel pretty good. This can cause alarm with your doctor but try to have a conversation with them about it. 

How is your blood sugar?

This is a really really big one because it affects our adrenal glands which also have a role in energy. The good old blood sugar roller coaster will cause your adrenals to become weaker or cause the signaling between your brain and your adrenals to not work well leading to what is called adrenal fatigue or HPA axis dysfunction. For people like us with Hashimoto’s we may not tolerate those refined carbohydrates very well at all. Sometimes we get a big release of insulin when we consume sugary or refined “white” foods that others might not. So our blood sugar goes up really fast and we may have too much insulin in our blood which causes us to crash with fatigue and even anxiety or nervousness. This stresses our adrenals and leads to more fatigue.

Adrenal health is important for energy. If you are suffering from Adrenal fatigue you likely don’t have much energy to speak of even if this is the only thing you are dealing with. This is such a big deal and it takes some time to bring your adrenal health back in good standing. You need to avoid caffeine, keep your blood sugar balanced, make sure you are sleeping well and resting when you can, managing stress and probably supplementing. You can listen to Episode 7 of this podcast for more on adrenals. 

Having good digestion is key to energy. 

Many of us will be nutrient deficient and usually deficient in those nutrients that help our thyroids to function well. Just having hypothyroidism makes it harder for us to get our nutrients out of the food we are eating. This means the digestive system has to work a little harder to break down our foods and this can cause a lot of fatigue. We often have lower levels of stomach acid and most of us don’t eat when we are relaxed and we certainly don’t take the time to chew our food well. Right there is three strikes against us in the energy department. 

When we are not relaxed when we eat, we are not in “rest and digest” mode or what is called parasympathetic mode. This means we are in fight or flight mode which is not a good environment for good digestion. We already are not making enough stomach acid because we have symptoms of hypothyroidism, then we are not relaxed so we make even less. Then we are not chewing our food well- like 20 chews per bite to break it down. So, we have all this food in our stomach, not enough stomach acid and it is not being broken down. Our digestive system is working extra hard to try to break this stuff down- using all kinds of extra energy and that makes us tired. Then you have undigested food going through your intestines. You have leaky gut or intestinal permeability and these undigested food particles are then getting in to your blood stream causing your immune system to go on alert and inflammation occurs in the body. Fatigue is going to be a factor here. 

If you have low vitamin D, you can have fatigue. Get some sun. Lay in the sun for 10-15 minutes or go for a walk on a sunny day and expose as much skin as possible. Take a supplement of D3 if needed and make sure to have your levels checked by your doctor. Low D is a factor in autoimmune diseases like Hashimoto’s. 

A good diet will go a long way to helping you with your energy problems. High quality proteins and veggies along with a small amount of fruit. The big foods to eliminate for us are going to be gluten, dairy, eggs, nuts and I would try to eliminate nightshades to see if you feel better. This is basically called an elimination diet and is important for you to start to feel better, have more energy and bring your body back in to balance. 

You can find Hydrozyme at www.getbiotics.com use code DFILC163 to access. 

Acid blockers, digestion, and elimination. Episode 8.

Terrible heart burn !!What helps? Has anybody had any issues with Omeprazole or any acid reducer.

OMEPRAZOLE: aka Losec, Prilosec, Prilosec OTC and Zegerid

classified therapeutically as antiulcer agent and pharmacologically as a proton-pump inhibitor

Used for maintenance of healing in erosive esophagitis, duodenal ulcers with or without H.Pylori. Short term treatment of active benign gastric ulcer. The OTC or over the counter is for heart burn occurring more than or equal to 2x a week. 

What does it do?  it binds to an enzyme on gastric parietal cells in the presence of stomach acid. It diminishes the accumulation of acid in the gastric lumen with lessened gastroesophageal reflux and helps heal duodenal ulcers. 

Binds 95% of protein and is metabolized by the liver with a half life of 30 min to an hour. Half life means how long it takes for half of a medication to be eliminated from the blood stream.  

It says to use cautiously in liver disease, in geriatric patients due to increased risk of hip fractures in patients on high doses for longer than one year and in pregnancy, lactation or children. 

Acid blockers like the ones mentioned and also things like mylanta, maalox, tums alka-seltzer, tagamet, pepcid, zantac etc all will lessen the amount of stomach acid you have in your stomach. So how will you break down your food? That is what it is there for.  The acid blockers change the pH of your stomach which is supposed to be very acidic at around 3 I think. This low pH is how we break down our food, especially protein. Protein gets broken down in to amino acids which become neurotransmitter. Stomach acid breaks down our food so we can extract the nutrients we need from it. 

Low stomach acid, which happens naturally as we age and most of us with hypothyroidism don’t make enough of it can lead to anemia, candida, fatigue, constipation/diarrhea, tooth decay, hair loss, and a higher risk of developing food sensitivities. 

So you have less acid when you take an acid blocker but you also have a deficiency of good bacteria, calcium, coq10, folate, glutathione, iron, magnesium, melatonin, niacin, potassium, B vitamins, selenium, vitamin A, C, D and zinc. 

Hypothyroidism can lead to hypochlorhydria or too little stomach acid. This is what often causes acid reflux. When food is not digested well by the acid in your stomach it will putrefy, ferment and become rancid in the stomach. Our small intestine doesn’t like to let undigested or poorly digested food from the stomach enter there so it backs up in to the esophagus, irritating the tissue there and causing heart burn. 

Coffee and nicotine reduce the pressure on the esophageal sphincter so you end up with more reflux.

The food is not as acidic as it should be it doesn’t stimulate the gallbladder to secrete bile to emulsify fat and the pancreas doesn’t get signaled to release digestive enzymes to further digest the food. So you have this rotting food moving through the intestines which will eventually cause inflammation, maybe even an infection and likely leaky gut or intestinal permeability. 

The fat in the food isn’t being broken down by bile from the gallbladder so your cells are not getting any minerals. Zinc is a mineral which helps us produce enough stomach acid. Having hypothyroidism messes with our gallbladder function and it can cause it to become sluggish and it won’t release enough bile. Combine that with the SAD and you have the perfect storm for gallbladder attacks.  When the gallbladder isn’t working well, the liver also becomes sluggish and backed up so it can’t detoxify our hormones, toxins or other things. 

So as you can see, having less than good digestion is a real big problem for those of us with sluggish thyroids. Along with zinc, we end up depleted in tyrosine, selenium and vitamin A and D. When it is not working well it plays a role in autoimmune disease as well. Perfect. Look at all we have going for us!  We have a large amount of our immune system in our gut- around 60-80%. If our digestive tract is out of wack, inflamed, or if we are dealing with parasites then our adrenal glands will end up depleted. This will make your thyroid sluggish as well. 

It just keeps getting better for us. 

Ideal elimination from the time you eat a meal to the time it leaves you in the form of a bowel movement is between 16-24 hours. This is slower with hypothyroidism.  Constipation is anything longer than what your normal elimination would be. You can end up with malabsorption issues and toxins  and hormones get recycled which add fuel to the fire. There is a good chance you will be growing more of the harmful bacteria putting your good guys at risk for being taken over by the bad guys. Remember that we convert some T4 to T3 in the gut but we won’t do that as well when there is an imbalance of bad to good bacteria. 20% of thyroid function relies on the right balance of bacteria. 

Another biggie mentioned briefly earlier is the elimination of hormones, particularly estrogen. I am not a hormone expert but I do know that poor digestion means you can end up with higher amounts of estrogen that can lead to hypothyroidism that doesn’t show up on a blood test. This information came from Why Do I Still Have Thyroid Symptoms from Datis Kharrazian. He says that “excess estrogen binds the thyroid transport proteins so that thyroid hormones cannot get to the cells to do their jobs, causing hypothyroidism symptoms”

There are a lot of things you can do to eliminate acid reflux and keep things moving along smoothly. 

Food sensitivities or allergies can cause reflux or silent reflux which often has a cough with it. 

Look at your diet. As per usual, gluten free, dairy free and an elimination diet are the first place to start.  Remove also, eggs, corn, soy and yeast. This will give your immune system a break. A chance to calm down and your gut can repair itself.  These foods should be eliminated for 3-4 weeks. The longer the better.  Typical food reactions can look like skin rashes, eczema, acne, fatigue, joint pain, bloating, gas, heartburn, constipation, diarrhea and even nasal congestion. You can have anxiety, irritability, headaches and more. 

Manage your blood sugar. 

Stress. Don’t eat when you are stressed, take a minute to calm down, sit at the table without a phone, book or anything else. Take a few deep breaths, say grace if you like or whatever. Then take a bite of your food and chew it really well. Like 20-30 times per bite. 

Don’t drink a lot of water and avoid anything bubbly with dinner. The phosphorus in pop can put you in to sympathetic or fight or flight which will automatically turn off stomach acid production. 

You can take digestive bitters about 20 minutes before dinner and if that is not enough you may need to supplement with stomach acid. Something called Betaine HCl. I like a product called Hydrozyme from Biotics Research. I recommend buying it from a practitioner, not off of Amazon. 

To find out how much you need you take a bite of food, chew it well, swallow it and then take an HCl supplement with a small amount of water. Take another bite of food, chew it well and take another pill. Keep doing this until you feel a little burn, kind of like heartburn or like you just took a shot of alcohol. If you felt the burn at 3 pills then you know you only need 2 at each meal. Eventually you can get enough healing of your body done that you will start to make more stomach acid and you won’t need to take as much of the supplement. 

You can check in on your digestion by keeping a food journal. Write down everything you eat and drink and how you feel afterward. Keep track of your bowel movements. Look at them. Do you see undigested food in your stools?  What shape are they?  You can google the Bristol Stool Chart and see where you are at and where you need to be. Your eliminations should be solid, about the length of your forearm from your elbow to your wrist. It should come out with no straining, you should not feel like your elimination wasn’t complete and you should not have much on the toilet paper after you wipe. 

If you want to test your transit time you can take some activated charcoal pills, like 5 of them or you can eat about a cup of beets, or take 2 tablespoons of sesame seeds. Take them first thing in the morning, don’t chew the seeds if you use them, just swallow them. You want to be able to see them when they come out.  Write down what time you take them and what day you take them. Then keep track of your bowel movements. Write down the first time you see the seeds, beets or charcoal (your stool will be black with charcoal and reddish with beets) and write down the last time you saw them in your stool. The difference between the time you swallowed them and the last time you saw them is your transit time. Remember we are looking for anywhere from 16-24 hours.  Also, ideally you might go two times a day. 

That is it for me today. If you have any questions about this episode or you would like to submit a question for the podcast, please feel free to leave a comment on my website, www.outofthewoodsnutrition.com or www.helpforhashimotos.com or email me at helpforhashimotos@gmail.com

You can find me on facebook at www.facebook.com/outofthewoodsnutrition or on instagram at stephanieewalsntp. 

Thanks so much for listening. I really appreciate it. If you enjoy listening to this and want others to have access to it, I would appreciate it if you left a review on iTunes for me. My goal is to help as many people with thyroid problems and Hashimoto’s or other autoimmune diseases and I can’t do that without your help. Please help spread the word.

The first step to getting your life back is believing that you can!

Thanks again. See you next time. 

Do you have symptoms of worn out Adrenal glands? Episode 7.

Today we are going to be talking about the adrenal glands. I had a question from someone asking me what the adrenal glands were so here you go! 

Adrenal fatigue symptoms: 

Being a night person, hard time falling asleep, slow starter in the morning: 

All signs that your cortisol rhythm is out of balance causing cortisol to be high at night and low in the morning. It should be the opposite. 

Do you tend to be keyed up and have trouble calming down?

This is a sign of increased adrenal output or hyperadrenalism. Having high cortisol with low DHEA can cause this. In the beginning stages of adrenal breakdown, the body’s response to stress is to increase the cortisol output from the adrenal glands. If the stress never stops, this process doesn’t stop and you will eventually have adrenal fatigue. 

Do you get a headache after exercising?

This means your adrenals are slow to put out cortisol. Chronic stress will cause the cortisol levels to drop leading to a decreased ability to control blood sugar and eventually low blood sugar, irritability, headaches and so on. Exercise can cause your blood sugar to drop and if cortisol output isn’t there then blood sugar won’t be regulated properly leading to symptoms of low blood sugar. 

Do you feel wired or jittery after drinking coffee?

This may mean you have issues with high cortisol output, you need liver support or you just have a sensitivity to coffee. Caffeine is an adrenal stimulant though and it can contribute to excess cortisol output. 

Do you clench or grind your teeth? This is a classic sign of increased stress and high stress levels lead to an increase in your sympathetic nervous system or the fight or flight response. This will increase your total cortisol output. If the stress isn’t resolved, adrenals will start to break down and adrenal fatigue comes to visit. 

How about chronic low back pain that gets worse when you are tired? Our pelvic supportive muscles are neurologically related to the adrenal glands. You maybe need some connective tissue support. 

Do you get dizzy when you stand up quickly or feel dizzy in general?

This is a sign of low adrenal function. Our adrenal glands are responsible for keeping blood pressure in the normal range for those few seconds it takes us to go from lying down to standing up. Having a drop in blood pressure by 10 or more indicates a need for adrenal support. 

Do you have arthritic tendencies? Achy joints and there is no sign of arthritis? Consider your adrenal health and your gut health. Both can be responsible. 

Do you crave salty foods or do you salt your food before tasting it?

You may have a possible need for electrolytes. Our adrenal glands help manage stress but they also help keep our minerals balanced. Aldosterone is a mineral corticoid which causes our body to reabsorb sodium and chloride. When aldosterone levels are compromised, we excrete more sodium and chloride than is needed giving us a salt craving. I often tell my clients to salt their water if they are having adrenal issues. 

How about afternoon yawning? This can mean adrenal insufficiency, and slow or hypo functioning adrenals glands. It is also a sign you need B1 or thiamine and an indication of low thyroid function. 

Pain on the inner side of your knee? Tendency to have shin splints or sprained ankles? Adrenal dysfunction causes weak ligaments in the body. Ankles are most affected in a lot of us. 

Do you need to wear sunglasses even when it is cloudy outside? The ability of our pupils to constrict in bright light is partially related to adrenal functioning. When the adrenals are tired, they won’t constrict easily or at all. 

The purpose of the adrenals is to help us cope with all kinds of stress including the stress caused by blood sugar dysregulation.

The hormones secreted by your adrenals affect the way our body uses carbohydrates and fats, the conversion of fats and proteins in to energy and how fat is distributed in our body (especially around our waist and the sides of our face). They play a role in heart health and in digestive function. Adrenal hormones are anti-inflammatory and anti-oxidant which helps minimize reactions to things we are allergic to from things in food to our environment.  After menopause they make our sex hormones. 

How is your ability to respond to chronic illness? Adrenals have a hand in that too. 

Again, blood sugar dysregulation/erratic blood sugar levels is closely related with low adrenal function. You might have a tendency towards allergies, that arthritic pain and get sick more often.  You might even find yourself with fears you can’t explain, anxiety and depression, inability to concentrate and tougher time recalling memories.  Find yourself less tolerant of things or get frustrated easily? Insomnia? 

Things that affect the adrenals: 

• Financial problems, loss of job

  1. Death of loved one

  2. Stress, chronic, repeated, psychological, fear

  3. Poor food choices, SAD diet

  4. Perpetual negative thinking loop running in your head

  5. No relaxation time

  6. Lack of sleep

  7. Chronic or acute infections

  8. Allergies, environmental or food (do you eat something you are sensitive to?)

  9. Lack of exercise OR too much of it

  10. Caffeine

More signs and symptoms of adrenal fatigue: 

• Hard time getting up in the morning

  1. Fatigue not relieved by sleep

  2. Lethargy or lack of energy

  3. Everyday tasks take a lot of effort

  4. Low sex drive

  5. Can’t handle stress well

     • road rage, anxiety all the time, yelling at your kids for no reason, compulsive eating, smoking, drug use

  6. Takes you longer to recover from being sick, injured or going through a traumatic event.

  7. Mild depression- seems pointless to make an effort at anything

  8. Less happiness or feelings of enjoyment

     • you don’t feel interested in much, don’t do much for fun

  9. Worse than bad PMS

  10. You cannot skip a meal, need snacks all the time

  11. Less tolerant of others

  12. Slow to wake in the morning- by 10am or so you feel better, slow down around 3pm and feel alive after 6pm

  13. You are not very productive

You have to look at these symptoms together. You probably have more than one which will suggest you are dealing with adrenal dysfunction. Having more than three of these is indicative of a problem. 

How do you recover?

Take a look at these symptoms on my website under this podcast and see where you can make some changes. You absolutely will have to make some changes in your life if you want to recover from adrenal fatigue. Supplements can help and you may need to supplement to kick start your adrenal recovery but they will only be a bandaid if that is all you plan to do. 

We all have stress and those of us with chronic illness have that on top of our every day stress. Remember that chronic illness, autoimmune disease, with an overactive immune system is stressful in and of itself to our adrenals. Then add on the standard American diet and you have more stress in the form of blood sugar dysregulation and digestive distress. Do you have food allergies or sensitivities? Probably if you have autoimmune disease. 

Look at your lifestyle: 

Remove the stressors: 

• What robs you of energy? People in your life, food sensitivities, no sleep

  1. Are you getting fresh air?

  2. Do you drink alcohol? Eat junk food? Smoke? Caffeine/coffee?

  3. Chemicals in your environment?

     • laundry

       1. skin care

       2. household cleaners

       3. clean water

Learn some deep breathing techniques, meditation and just do it. Even one minute a day to start will be helpful. Notice the stories you tell yourself in your head. Are you having an argument with your spouse or friend in your head? Your stress response will be the same whether it is in your head or actually happening. 

Sleep- the big big issue us Hashimoto’s sufferers deal with. We need to sleep to recover our adrenals. If you want to heal your adrenals, you need to go to bed and be asleep before 11:00 hits. Go to bed or start getting ready for bed at 9:00. No joke. Let the dishes go, let everything go and just work on healing your body for a while. If you can, sleep until 8:00 or 9:00. This is not always possible but do the best you can.  Normal adrenal function allows for cortisol to rise from 6:00-8:00 in the morning. With adrenal fatigue the rise isn’t as high and the drop in cortisol is faster. Lower cortisol means it takes longer to really feel awake. 

If you can’t sleep and are waking up between 1:00 and 3:00 in the morning, then you have a blood sugar issue. Your adrenals have kicked in to raise your blood sugar which causes you to wake up and it takes awhile for you to get back to sleep. 

Eating a protein/fat and unrefined carb type snack before bed can help you to stay asleep. You can also include some starchy carbs in your evening meal which should help you to fall asleep and stay asleep. 

Get some exercise. Low intensity to start. Walk for an hour as many days a week as you can. Yoga, especially restorative yoga can be very helpful. Wear the blue blocking glasses at night starting around 7pm. This will block the blue lights from TV and other screens which will aid in melatonin production. 

Eating: You must eat within an hour of waking up in order to prevent the adrenals from getting involved in raising your blood sugar. Even if you don’t feel like eating, eat something. Protein, fat and a small amount of starchy carb will help significantly. Maybe something like some chicken or turkey, a couple slices of avocado and a couple bites of sweet potato and maybe a small pile of veggies like cucumbers or carrots. 

Supplements that might be helpful in recovering your adrenal health. Remember, if you are only doing supplements they will be a band aid. You need to change your diet and lifestyle and use supplementation to help you along the way. 

• Vitamin C- very essential nutrient to the whole adrenal process. Ascorbic acid along with bioflavonoids. Look for a C complex. Go for highest quality of any supplement that you can afford. Buy from a reputable source.

• B Vitamins- A B complex with methylated folate- important in energy production

• Magnesium Glycinate- is like a spark plug for the adrenals. Very helpful with energy production.

• Trace Minerals and Electrolytes

• Essential Fatty Acids- fish and fish oils.

• Adaptogenic herbs and other herbs-

• Licorice Root- anti-stress, increases energy. Very helpful in many ways to the adrenals. Avoid in the late afternoon and evening.

  1. Ashwaganda- a nightshade but a great adaptogen. It will help the body function more in the normal range no matter if you have high cortisol or low cortisol. Can be stimulating for some people.

  2. Korean Ginseng- helps with energy.

  3. Siberian Ginseng- take no later than lunchtime- is stimulating

  4. Rhodiola- prevents stress induced adrenaline activity

  5. Holy Basil- gives us a sense of well being, helps normalize blood sugar

This is not an overnight fix. It didn’t take you overnight to tax your adrenals. Plan on 6 months to 2 years of recovery. You will see improvement over time unless you don’t change things in your life that got you here in the first place. You can get your life back but you have to put in a little work to get there. 

What does all of this have to do with the thyroid?

Chronic immune stimulation as in the case of unmanaged Hashimoto’s causes long term high cortisol (stress). You have to manage the autoimmune disease in order to also manage the adrenal gland stressors.  Low thyroid function or hypothyroidism is often the after affect of adrenal stress. Chronic adrenal stress will affect the communication between the brain and the adrenal glands. They hypothalamus and the pituitary gland are less effective with chronic adrenal stress and therefore cannot communicate with the thyroid as well.  The thyroid hormone also won’t be able to get the cells like they need to to do their job. T4 will not convert to T3 as well. The cells won’t be as sensitive to the thyroid hormone when it reaches them and the immune system cannot regulate itself as well. 

Obviously diet is a big part of this. You have to be eating high quality protein, fat and carbs in the form of veggies and a small amount of fruit. There are blog posts on my website for each of those topics as related to health in general so you can go over there to read more. Just search protein, fat, or carbohydrate. You have to keep your blood sugar stable and eat every 3 hours or so if you need to until your adrenals and blood sugar become more stable. Have protein and fat based snacks and avoid all juices for now. Don’t eat any higher glycemic foods/ food higher in sugar without eating protein or fat with them. Avoid artificial sweeteners, partially hydrogenated fats, any foods you are sensitive to, refined sugar and the other things mentioned earlier like alcohol, smoking/nicotine and caffeine. 

This week, tell yourself each day: “everyday in every way, I am getting better and better”.  You have got this and I have got your back. 

Thank you so much for listening. Your support means a lot. Please share this podcast with anyone you know dealing with thyroid problems, autoimmune issues or chronic illness. Much of the information here can help more than just those of us with Hashimoto’s. 

If you haven’t already, you can get my free ebook, 5 Things Your Doctor Won’t Tell You About Hashimoto’s on my website. You can also find me on Facebook at www.outofthewoodsnutrition.com or helpforhashimotos.com and on instagram at stephaniewalsntp.  

I would love to answer your questions about Hashimoto’s or other chronic conditions. Please send your questions to helpforhashimotos@gmail.com or go to my website and fill out the contact form and put podcast in the subject line. 

Thanks for joining me, see you next week. 

Introduction: Help For Hashimoto's Podcast. Episode 1.