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.

What do I eat for Type 2 Diabetes? Episode 41.

Welcome to episode 41. We have a listener question so let’s get started. 

Hi there. Thanks for your easy to understand information in your podcast. I have Celiac disease, Hashi's and now Diabetes! Do you have a sample simple diet plan? I just got diagnosed with the Diabetes..  I have no clue what to do about this. 

Misty

Hi Misty, 

Thanks for listening to the podcast! Sounds like you have a lot going on. I am going to assume you were diagnosed with Type II diabetes. 

A sample diet plan would look something like removing all processed foods, eating real whole foods. Meats, ideally from pastured animals, good quality fats like grass fed butter, coconut oil, olive oil and consuming lots and lots of veggies. 

This type of diet is very helpful to reset the body so it can reduce inflammation and your cells can become less resistant to insulin again. 

Often, having issues with insulin means you also have trouble with your weight. It is estimated that more than ⅔ of adults in the US are overweight. I am not saying that you are overweight Misty. 

Each year about 45 million Americans go on a diet and spend around $33 billion on weight loss products and programs. 

Let’s get something straight right now.

Diets don’t work.

Weight loss programs might work while you working them but they don’t work once you stop. This is why I am constantly preaching and teaching my clients that it is not about a diet. It is about changing your diet and lifestyle.

A diet is the kinds of foods that a person, animal or community habitually eats according to the dictionary definition. So we have a diet. We don’t go on a diet for a short time to get a result that we can’t keep when we go off a diet. 

Digging ourselves out of our chronic disease states is a JOURNEY and not necessarily a destination. 

You almost have to just make a decision to start doing the right thing by your body. Give it what it needs and craves to keep it in balance. Choose your health. 

When you are dealing with Type II diabetes, refined carbs are not your friend. 

Here is what happens to your cells when you consume too much sugar in the form of sugar itself or refined carbs like bread, pasta, cookies, cakes etc. 

Our cells need energy and they store in the form of something called ATP (adenosine triphosphate). Cells need glucose (sugar) to create ATP or they will die. 

Plants make glucose through photosynthesis, we do not. We have to get it from our diet. 

If your blood glucose or blood sugar gets too low, not enough glucose will get to our tissues and organs, leaving our cells unable to make enough ATP to work properly or function. 

Now too much glucose in the blood will make blood thicker (think of molasses and how slow that flows) and it won’t flow as well or as quickly which means nutrients, especially oxygen does not get delivered to cells and they will eventually die. 

When we eat something and digest it, glucose enters our bloodstream. Our cells need to adjust to that shift in sugar pretty fast so the cells can get the glucose they need to create energy.  

How does this happen?  Insulin. It is a hormone produced by the pancreas and it gets released just before we eat and while we are eating. It tells the liver, muscle and fat tissues to take the sugar out of our blood which lowers our blood sugar levels. 

Insulin goes to the receptors on our cells. I always think of receptors on our cells as little satellite dishes waiting to receive a signal.  When it gets to the receptor and attaches itself to it, the cell it is on (muscle, liver, fat) gets a signal to absorb the glucose/sugar molecule and store it as a form of glucose called glycogen which is a stored form of glucose or sugar. 

As your blood sugar level drops, insulin release will slow down or stop. Our body doesn’t want this level to get too low though so it will also stimulate the cells in muscle, fat and in the liver to to break down that stored sugar, glycogen, by releasing glucagon and sugar will be released. 

This is how the body maintains balance or homeostasis. 

Our body gets ready for the barrage of sugar we consume by releasing insulin before we even take the first bite. Just by us smelling some delicious food or drooling over the dessert tray at a restaurant, our body releases insulin. 

Let’s use a candy bar as an example. You eat it, it is broken down in your stomach and absorbed as glucose right into the bloodstream.

Your body will then release insulin and in a few minutes your insulin level will be pretty high so it can bring all that sugar to the cells and lowering your blood sugar levels. 

What you ate the meal before the candy bar will affect how much insulin is released- usually means more insulin is released to respond to the candy bar if you are eating a meal made from the Standard American Diet- processed, refined carbs. 

If your blood sugar is regularly high, the pancreas continues to release insulin until blood sugar levels return to normal. 

The brain needs glucose and can make its own insulin. How crazy is that. That might be why when your blood sugar gets too low, you can’t think. 

Stress will affect your blood sugar too. Noradrenaline, a fight or flight hormone, will keep the body from producing insulin because it thinks we need to hang on to the sugar in our blood to flee danger. 

In Type II Diabetes the problem is that you have insulin being released but the receptors on your cells are not taking it in. This shows up as consistently high blood sugar levels on a blood test. 

It starts out as insulin resistance. Think of insulin as a key to a door. The cell is the door and the receptor is a lock on the door. Using that key too much can wear out the lock and it just doesn’t work anymore so you can’t get the door open. Your body might try to make more keys (insulin) to try to get the door open. 

The more refined carbs and sugar you eat, the more insulin produced by the pancreas. This can wear down the receptors causing insulin resistance but if not managed with diet and lifestyle it can also wear out the pancreas to the point of it not being able to make insulin as well or make enough or make any at all. 

This is when you become insulin dependent and need to inject yourself with insulin. 

Again, the best foods for managing Type II Diabetes are going to be proteins like meat, seafood, poultry, lamb, bison, wild caught fish, pastured eggs. Always buy the highest quality protein that you eat the most of and for the rest, trim the fat and do your best. 

Full fat dairy products will slow down the absorption of the milk sugars keeping your blood sugar stable. Most people with hashimoto’s should not be consuming dairy but you can do full fat coconut milk in place of many dairy products, except cheese sadly. 

Veggies in large amounts. Avoid some of the starchier veggies for a few weeks like sweet potatoes, squashes, beans and things like that. 

Grains will cause your insulin to spike so are not recommended. 

I hope this helps. 

If you have a question about your health you would like me to answer, send it to me at helpforhashimotos@gmail.com or go to my website and fill out the contact form. 

Please leave me a rating and review on iTunes and share this podcast with anyone you think could use the help from it. I would really appreciate it. 

You can also get my ebook Five Things Your Doctor Won’t Tell You About Hypothyroidism by heading over to HelpForHashimotos.com. 

You can join my facebook group Help For Hashmoto’s and while I am on a social media break I do check daily to see if anyone has asked to join. 

I’m currently taking new clients. If you need help figuring out just how to feel better with Hashimotos, thyroid problems or other chronic illness, I’m your girl! 

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