The Promise of Health

I was in the book store the other day with my daughter. While she was looking around I was in the health section. I was just looking at 100’s of books selling a promise of feeling better. I probably have had 30 or more of those kinds of books- selling health and happiness. Even cookbooks, especially the paleo ones. They say I found health through food. Food is medicine… etc.

I certainly don’t disagree that food is medicine and that it can heal but what do you do when the food you eat isn’t enough. You turn to supplements because they too offer a promise of feeling better and sometimes they do help you feel better because your body is deficient in something and giving it that particular nutrient helps it work better. Sometimes they work.

I get an email almost daily from a company selling gut health supplements. That is all they do- they tell a story in their emails and then sell you a $60 bottle of digestive enzymes because they will cure it all. They probably work for some people or they wouldn’t keep selling them.

But what happens when you do all the things and you still don’t feel better?

Do you start to feel bad and blame yourself? Do you double down and work harder and buy more supplements?

Curcumin maybe, because everyone says that is going to help everything? But as one of my professors from school has said,  “You can’t have a curcumin deficiency” meaning there are no biochemical processes in the body that require curcumin to function.

It does help inflammation but it is a bandaid, which may be needed, but it isn’t a cure all. I think I had an epiphany in the bookstore just staring at all those books promising a better life.

We can read all the books in the world and take all the supplements but if we are not doing the work to fix what got us sick in the first place then we will only get so far.

This is your friendly reminder to give yourself some grace when you are doing all the things right, or even when you are not.

Thyroid disease is complicated.

There is a lot of research on this disease but sometimes I don’t think the right things are being studied- like finding a way to measure how we feel or recognize that lab values are sooo wrong when the upper limit of a normal TSH is 10 and should be 2.5.

Some of you feel like a sloth at that number.

Remember that you are a cellular being- you are made up of cells the basics of which are carbon, nitrogen, and hydrogen and a few other elements in smaller amounts. Those are atoms.

When you put some atoms together you get a molecule. Glucose or sugar is a molecule, amino acids are molecules that make proteins (the kind you eat and the kind you are made of), B vitamins are molecules.

I mentioned protein- when you put a bunch of molecules of amino acids together you get a protein which is a macromolecule (macro meaning big). If you hear a nutritionist talk about macros, they are talking about macronutrients which means big nutrients (protein, fat, carbohydrates).

So further on down the road, macromolecules eventually come together to make a cell and cells come together to make tissues like skin, vessels, your gastrointestinal tract, muscle and more.

Those tissues will come together to form organs like your stomach, pancreas, liver, heart and organs make systems like the cardiovascular system, endocrine system etc.

All of this comes together to make an organism like a human.

This is where the books promising health fail you.

They are not digging deep enough, partially because it is a lot of work and has to be done one on one but also because it doesn’t sell a lot of books. And the problem with figuring out what is causing your Hashimoto’s or hypothyroidism,  is there are a lot of things that can cause it to go wrong.

The thyroid regulates your metabolism which is involved in weight but it regulates the metabolism of everything else in the body too which affects energy levels and everything else.

If you are not losing weight with hypothyroidism, it is because of this metabolic function not working but even after doing all the things you might still be struggling with this and those books don’t know why.

The blame might even be placed on you. You didn’t follow the program close enough, you missed a step, you didn’t do this or that. I paid over $1000 to a chiropractor one time who said they had the answers and they said they had a doctor on staff but never offered me to see him for my medication (and I never asked because I was too scared) but they had a protocol that they used on everyone.

They hooked my fingers and toes up to a machine that read something- I can’t even remember. They put me on the RepairVite diet for 3 weeks (which I followed strictly because I am a good patient), they had me on oxygen while I used a hand bike to exercise and increase my oxygen) and when after going there weekly for 12 weeks I still didn’t feel better he told me I should go have my thyroid levels checked again, he just didn’t know what to do.

I paid thousands to a naturopath who sold me hundreds of dollars in supplements each time I saw her and told me to lay off the sugar, eat flax seeds and coconut oil and my energy still suffered.

To be fair, I desperately needed many of the supplements she suggested because I was deficient in a bunch and my gut was a mess and those supplements helped me get to a certain point. She then tried to get at my emotional well being and that is when I ran for the hills. She knew my energy levels went beyond physiology and I wasn’t ready to deal with that. I searched for a practitioner that didn’t know I was so screwed up emotionally that they would keep throwing supplements at me and I would keep throwing money at them.

I think the big problem with how we are treated by doctors is the science can only take you so far - at least the physiology part of it. Some of us who have struggled to feel better have some emotional work to do.

Maybe even, if you dare go there, some past life stuff. This is woo woo and not for everyone and I recognize you may think it is all BS. I respect that and I hope you can hear me out. I’m sure I spoke of this before. Therapy never got me where I needed to be and I’m game for trying anything except eating organ meats and fish.

I hired someone to help me with this emotional stuff and the work we did together has helped me tremendously. I’ve seen another energy healer of sorts that came to the same conclusions as her so I felt it had to be legit.

I’ve discussed before that my mothers side of the family all has one form or another of thyroid disease. I’m positive they all have some kind of autoimmune thyroidits but my mother and grandmother were only ever diagnosed with hypothyroidism.

My one aunt has Graves for sure, my other aunt has Hashimoto’s I believe, my uncle has Graves, but my grandfather had no thyroid disease. He was domineering and emotionally abusive to his family - they didn’t have a voice. I don’t want to get too personal with this because there are people involved that deserve to have their privacy.

I will say, looking back on my life I grew up without a voice- very shy, very quiet, very afraid to speak up because I was afraid of being seen and made fun of or something. I kept my circle of friends small. When I did speak up as a kid it seemed to backfire and I was very sensitive, still am, to other peoples energy.

I never felt good enough. I never felt smart enough, I was never brave enough to speak up. That carried over in to my young adult life and I made life decisions that were safe that kept me small and silent. I let fear keep me small with no voice. That eventually led to, you guessed it, hypothyroidism.

I was repeating the familial cycle.

These two energy workers dug deeper than that and found there was some really dark stuff keeping my energy levels low. My first energy person tried to fix it but he missed something and this darkness came back. The other energy worker described the darkness as chords attached to me that were dragging me down. She cut them and sealed them and she had to do it twice because they kept wanting to come back.

We did some other work on my inner self too that changed the game for me. I had some hole in me I was trying to fill with food, people, things and that wasn’t working. She was able to help me fill that hole with what was missing and I can’t articulate in to words what that is exactly but for the first time in my life I feel like a whole person.

I still take supplements, I am less crazy about my diet (but when I go too far off the rails, my body reminds me to get back on), and more sure than ever of myself and my ability to help others.

You see rather than covering up why I can’t help you get further, I refer out to others who can fill in those missing pieces and let you get there when you are ready. And that is just it- you have to be ready to do the emotional work that may be tied to thyroid disease.

It is okay if you are not ready, you will do it when the time is right. It is a big step to take because it means being vulnerable.

The books don’t talk about that and the supplements don’t fix emotional vulnerability. You have to be willing to go after that for full health and well being to be a part of your life. There is research on this but not in relationship to thyroid disease. Bottom line is that if you are still not feeling well after doing all the things the books and programs and functional medicine superstars are telling you to do then you may just have to dig a little deeper because as I say time and time again.

There is no one size fits all protocol for everyone. Those generic protocols will help a lot of you but for those of you that it doesn’t help, don’t fret. Your biochemical make up needs a little more than a generic protocol.

My goal is to be able to help you figure what is missing. I have the tools to do that, It just takes time. You didn’t get thyroid disease overnight and it won’t get better overnight either.

I am here to help you before you are ready and after. I don’t push you to do anything you are not ready for. You got this. You can feel better. I will walk along side you as you do the work.

Thanks for listening and being patient as the episodes have been few and far between.

If working with me one on one is not something you can do or are ready for, you can take my Nutrition for Hypothyroidism course. It is a 4 week self paced course diving into the basics of thyroid health that gives you ideas on how to support your thyroid, recipes and cooking demos, access to my meal planning software for 75 days and a bonus lecture on understanding what your thyroid labs mean.  You can check it out at helpforhashimotos.com and then look for the GET HELP tab and then programs.

The Nutrition for Hypothyroidism program gives you access to a library of 4 culinary nutrition lessons to gain knowledge and confidence in preparing simple, delicious meals and snacks you can count on to deliver big health benefits.

Upon completion of this program, you will...

• Evaluate hypothyroidism within the context of common conditions associated with thyroid function

• Propose how nutrition affects thyroid health

• Identify dietary considerations for taking thyroid medications

• Learn how to prepare nutrient dense meals and snacks that support thyroid health

👉 Access to 4 lessons that you can complete at your own pace. 

📚 Nutrition lessons to learn about different foods and their health benefits

🔪 Culinary lessons to learn about key kitchen tools and how to use them to create simple, delicious meals and snacks

🧑‍🍳 Cooking demonstrations that illustrate nutrition and culinary lessons learned  [no cooking skills required - just the basics here!]

📝 Lesson-specific materials and guides to support you in applying what you have learned

🍽 Access to 1,000s of recipes so you can practice weekly skills with recipes that meet your preferences

👉 Resources to support you in building a kitchen with tools and ingredients you need to get nourishing, delicious meals to the table fast

Thanks for joining me. Please leave me a rating or review on apple podcasts so more people can find the show and if you have not already, please sign up for my newsletter and get The Definitive Guide to Hashimoto’s.

Until next time.

How to Fix Hashimoto's

Can you reverse Hashimoto’s?

Is it fixable?

I’ve talked about this before in episodes 52 and 55 but that was a long time ago for me so I am revisiting this topic again today.

I’ve said before that you will never not have Hashimoto’s so I don’t like the word remission. You can fix the reasons why you have it though.

If you are going to have any autoimmune disease, this is the one to have. It is one of the most common and probably the least destructive to your body and you can control how bad it gets once you know you have it. And if you manage it, your likelihood of having other autoimmune disease will be less.

The biggest problem with having hypothyroidism and Hashimoto’s or any thyroid issue really, is that the standard of care just completely sucks most of the time. Doctors often don’t listen, you can’t try a different medication because they won’t prescribe it and you are often told your labs are fine when you feel horrible.

I was perusing a thyroid facebook group that I could access without having a facebook account. If you are on those groups- get off them. I find zero people who are interested in fixing their problems and are just there to agree with everyone else how terrible this disease is.

I’m here to tell you it is terrible if you let it be and it is manageable if you want to manage it. And this is where I come in because I can help you figure out just what you need to do to manage it.

In order to lower your antibodies which is really what remission would be there are several things that need to be considered.

1. You have to remember that Hashimoto’s is first and immune system problem. What does this mean exactly?   Autoimmune disease occurs when the immune system attacks your own tissue.  When immune cells called B cells and T cells are made in bone marrow and they are specific to self tissue, they will destroy themselves.  It is said that some of these cells escape. There are some more complicated biochemistry things that happen that I won’t go into that lead to how things go wrong with this.  One of them is what is called the bystander effect where the immune system is attacking a foreign thing and our tissue gets attacked too. The other is molecular mimicry where a tissue looks like a foreign thing and the body attacks the tissue by mistake.  It is also thought that mental and/or emotional stress can be a trigger for the immune system attacking our tissue and neither the bystander effect or molecular mimicry have to be at play.

1. classic example of this is from my own life when I had an extremely stressful pregnancy and lost my baby in a thyroid storm. I had so much stress and worry and anxiety for a lot of reasons in that pregnancy and I didn’t know how to manage my emotions. I didn’t have to tools to deal with stress and I didn’t have a partner who had the tools to deal with my stress. It was a really terrible situation that resulted in tragedy. Not managing stress and having high cortisol just screws up your immune system.

2. we know a major cause of autoimmunity is genetics plus some kind of trigger like infections, toxin exposure, stressor, plus leaky gut

1. functional medicine tools are really helpful in figuring out triggers and figuring out the root cause of your hashimoto’s. We look at predisposing factors like genes, environment; triggers that caused the symptoms as just mentioned; mediators that will maintain the disease like nutrient deficiencies, cycles of inflammation in the body.

2. we further dig into lifestyle habits that can be changed, look at whether you can assimilate the nutrients you are taking in. Do you have floating stools? low iron? Do you have high CRP, Ferritin, or low albumin? Do you have poor exercise tolerance? Are you sensitive to jewelry, perfumes, air fresheners? Do you have issues with rashes? What about fear, anxiety around your thyroid condition? Really doing a deep dive with these things is super helpful to figure out where to start with YOUR condition. This is why there is no specific Hashimoto’s Protocol that is going to work for everyone because not everyone has the same triggers, predisposing factors, or mediators.

2. Second we need to consider gluten sensitivity. There is a clear association between autoimmune thyroid disease and sensitivity to gluten, unfortunately. This is an easy first step that seems overwhelming and hard to do. It’s not that hard. Take it one day at a time, one meal at a time even. I can put together simple meal plans with shopping lists for you to follow and I have a guide for by clients on how to easily go gluten free. Consider also gluten cross reactivity. Things like dairy, yeast, oats, corn, rice, millet and instant coffee all have been shown to cross react with gluten. This just means the proteins in these are similar enough to gluten that they might cause the same issues for you as gluten when you eat them.

3. We also have to consider if you have any infections. There’s a ton of bugs causing infections associated with Hashimoto’s. Do you have an infection? Good way to know is to start with a CBC with differential that I read for you. It is also helpful to know if you are lacking in the fat soluble vitamins A,D,E,K. If you have infections, it can be remediated pretty easily.

4. Is there inflammation? If your antibodies are high then you have inflammation somewhere in your body. Inflammation can be from poor diet, infection, toxins, trauma. We can stop inflammation by avoiding those triggers mentioned earlier and choosing a healthier lifestyle and diet.

5. Do you have blood sugar regulation issues or insulin resistance? This is common in PCOS and there is a connection between it and Hashimoto’s.

6. Do you have leaky gut or intestinal permeability? This is when molecules from inside the GI tract move across the lining of the gut or the gut wall through tiny openings. Leaky gut greatly contributes to the immune system attacking our tissue. If you have food intolerances other than gluten, migraines, gallstones, chronic fatigue syndrome or an autoimmune condition then you likely have some form of leaky gut. And if you have an autoimmune disease, you likely have to manage leaky gut long term meaning- every so often do a protocol to heal leaky gut. This can be lab tested but is expensive so I start with how you present clinically (inflammation, food sensitivity etc). Do you drink alcohol? Take corticosteroids? Have excessive stress or eat a lot of sugar? Other triggers for leaky gut are things like the standard american diet, an imbalance of gut bacteria, medications, and toxins.

7. What are your other hormones doing? Cortisol, DHEA, testosterone, progesterone, estradiol. If these are out of whack, your thyroid will be affected at some point. A common time for onset of Hashimoto’s is during pregnancy and postpartum. If you already have Hashimoto’s are want to get pregnant- it typically doesn’t get worse in pregnancy though it seems my stillbirth might be the exception to the rule. It also could have been that my doctor took me off my medication and that is why my baby died. I will never know and can’t dwell on it. That is not a good place to live- the wondering why.

8. Emotional Health- stress. Remember that I said stress was a trigger in me losing my baby. Stress increases our susceptibility to infectious disease (think colds, flu, etc), seasonal allergies, bacterial and yeast imbalances, poor sleep, leaky gut, decreased oral tolerance and more. Something as simple as listening to classical music has been shown to reduce hives. So we need to have an outlet to our frustrations and stressors. Hobbies, a sense of control, change the way we interpret stress and most importantly a sense of community and social connectedness. In person- not online. Something we all have been lacking in. I have been listening to The Life Coach School Podcast while I work out. It has been really insightful so far! Controlled breathing is also quite helpful- you can learn from a yoga practice, meditation apps, Wim Hoff method or whatever floats your boat. The relaxation response is very powerful in its ability to regulate gene expression, metabolism, insulin secretion. We all need to work on practicing that more. I definitely do.

9. What about toxin exposure. We are exposed to chemicals every day and they accumulate in our fat tissue so the older we are the more toxins we have in our fat. There are many negative health consequences to toxins including consequences to our hormones and thyroid. Teaching you how to minimize your exposure to toxins and safely eliminating them as you lose weight is part of working with me. Fasting, juice fasting, water fasting and other ways of fasting may make your toxicity worse rather than better. Ways to know if you are dealing with over exposure to toxins are:

1. taking a lot of medications

2. being sensitive to odors

3. having used or been around toxic chemicals or potentially toxic chemicals over a period of time.

4. muscle pain

5. brain fog, poor memory, other cognitive issues

6. numbness on one side of the body

7. symptoms of autonomic dysfunction such as dizziness, fainting when standing, problems urinating, loss of bladder control - this sounds like a drug commerical - and I think you would have to be quite toxic to present with this though I could be wrong.

8. medications, supplements that cause the opposite of intended response or cause a sensitivity

10. 10.Other things to consider

1. sleep- are you sleeping 7-8 hours per night and is it good quality sleep. Until I started sleeping well- I was a complete disaster. I had to move out of my own bedroom because my husband snores so loud and he sometimes chokes in the night and then punches the bed or wall - not conducive to good sleep. He did a sleep study and they said he might have mild sleep apnea. He tells me I’m a light sleeper and minimizes the punching because it only happens every once in awhile. Imagine being sound asleep and all the sudden, there is a fist near your head or you hear it hit the wall. That will cause a cortisol response and probably keep you from falling asleep for a couple hours. While separate rooms to sleep in has not been good for marriage, it has been great for my health and my happiness. If I don’t get good sleep, I am a disaster. Emotionally and physically. It is like I can’t function. If you do nothing else, make good sleep a priority!

2. Liver function is another thing to consider but a complete blood count should cover that. Your liver needs to be healthy to convert T4 to T3 so your cells can use T3. You also need it to make healthy bile so you can remove toxins via your bowel movements.

I want to discuss a few other things too.

Understand what health professionals don’t know - any health professional.

Chances are they are not well versed in autoimmune diseases, especially when it comes to how to manage them with diet and lifestyle (and some people will need medications)- in both holistic and conventional practices, diagnosing AID can be challenging taking many years to do. Some will tell you it is hopeless, some will tell you you can just change it with a few supplements and a diet change.

It is complicated and very dependent upon your own body’s biochemistry.

Conventional and holistic medicine provides little Medical Education around autoimmune disease. My own masters program had a class specific to autoimmune disease and it provided me with little direction on how to work with individuals with AID- I already knew most of what was taught.

Many tissues in the body can be affected so it isn’t super easy to understand. Your practitioner should not take on the idea that when they have a hammer everything is a nail. There is no general protocol for your condition. You don’t get better and then you get frustrated- I have been there!

Do you have your own bias? If you feel food might be bad but you don’t want to try a gluten free diet so you find a practitioner who agrees with you- you are letting your bias determine the management of your disease- we all have some bias but don’t let it gauge your direction

Take charge of your own health- you know how this impacts your body and your life- if you are looking for someone to tell you how to live, what to eat, etc then you won’t get better. You have to be the one in control of your health. Only you know how you truly feel, only you know if a supplement is working ( you should feel something when you take most supplements designed to help a condition)

• how are you going to monitor your condition?

• lab tests

• questionnaires

• journaling

• are you going to be active or passive in your own health care

• How are you going to build your healthcare team?

• nutritionist

• doctor

• trainer

• build a team of trusted professionals who can help support you - every AID is different and each one has individualized expression of each disease - 10 people with MS or Hashi’s won’t present the same way because each has different triggers and ways the disease expresses itself

This is a lot to think about and probably a little overwhelming. Bottom line is you can fix the reasons why you got Hashimoto’s but you will always have to manage it. Stay off those depressing thyroid facebook groups and start thinking about how you can start feeling better now! You don’t have to feel crappy all the time. You can have more energy, lose weight, and get your life back and I can help you do it.

Thanks for tuning in.

Go to Help for Hashimoto’s dot com to get my guide “5 things your doctor won’t tell you about hypothyroidism” and schedule your Fight Fatigue discovery call so you can start to feel better sooner rather than later.

I appreciate you all!