May 29, 2019

Podcast

Stephanie Ewals

How can I put my Hashimoto's in to remission if ...

Welcome to episode 52. I can’t believe I made it a year. I’m grateful you are listening. I suppose I should have done something to celebrate a year of podcasting but I have a crap ton of work to do for school this week which is generating a fair amount of stress for me so one day I will get it together and do some kind of giveaway.

I have been monitoring my blood sugar levels for the last few days because I have really been struggling with some symptoms of blood sugar dysregulation. It turns out that my body is not so much appreciating the morning protein shake, especially when it is made with raw cacao. The caffeine from that alone is causing me to get a jittery feeling. I did much better with a meal of chicken and cabbage for breakfast yesterday with more stable blood sugar all through out the day.

I am hoping to get a handle on this so my adrenals can have a break and I can gain some muscle. I’m finally able to get some exercise in after my broken collarbone.

Okay- on to a listener question

Hi Stephanie

I get confused with all the varying things I am reading about Hashi's, in particular how can my Hashi's be put into remission when technically it has burnt out? I am hoping you can shed some light on this for me, please.

Good luck with your studies - I know how much work goes into a Masters Degree.

Many thanks

Kind Rgards

Dorothy W

There are varying degrees of damage done to your thyroid when you have Hashimoto’s. The longer you go with inflammation in the body that creates higher antibodies you may have more damage done to your thyroid leaving it unable to produce hormone.

When you are putting Hashimoto’s in to remission you are putting out the inflammatory fire that is causing your body to be out of balance. That inflammation will be different for everyone and it will cause your thyroid to be damaged but how long it takes to put your autoimmune disease in to remission depends on how much damage was done and how long you have gone before you started making changes to your health.

It can often be diet changes that will bring antibodies down and put your disease in to remission. Often times though, you will need to do more than just a few simple diet changes.

Food is information for our cells. What you put in your body matters. Processed foods are basically dead foods. They have no good information for our cells to take in to build healthy tissues which build healthy organs which build healthy systems which build a healthy person or organism.

So food is important. What you eat is important and the quality of that food is equally important. It can be expensive to eat healthy, especially if you are buying any amount of convenience “health food” such as gluten free crackers or breads or lunch meat that is of higher quality.

It is time consuming to cook healthy foods especially if you get caught up in all the fun stuff so many food bloggers are making. I don’t have time for complicated dishes so I don’t make them. I made venison steak bites seasoned with Redmond Real Seasoned Salt, and pepper cooked in coconut oil and I steamed broccoli and sauteed Brussels sprouts in olive oil and added minced garlic at the end with some lemon juice. I added a side of my homemade sauerkraut and that was it. The night before I had chicken breast cooked in a cast iron skillet and roasted cabbage.

Real whole clean foods are a good place to start to put your disease in to remission.

You also have to look at what your blood sugar is like. If you have blood sugar dysregulation you will likely still be dealing with inflammation and thyroid issues even if your diet is perfect.

Do you wake up a few hours after falling asleep (or between 1-3am) and find it hard to get back to sleep?

Do you crave sweet things?

Do you have binge type eating or uncontrolled eating?

Do you feel like your appetite is excessive?

Do you crave coffee or sugar in the afternoon?

Do you get sleepy in the afternoon or after a meal?

Does your fatigue get relieved by eating?

Do you get a headache or feel shaky if meals or skipped or delayed?

Do you get irritable or hangry before meals?

These are all signs you need to work on balancing your blood sugar which can be done with diet but also lifestyle changes because it isn’t only food that causes a rise in blood sugar.

Lack of food, low blood sugar in the morning or not eating soon enough in the morning can cause your adrenals to have to get involved in raising blood sugar- a cortisol release and then you have an insulin surge and maybe you are insulin resistant and you are then storing fat because insulin is a fat storage hormone.

Some therapeutic foods for blood sugar regulation include:

asparagus

avocado

soaked and sprouted beans

brewers yeast

broccoli

brussels sprouts

butter

carrots

cauliflower

eggs

full fat dairy

kale

liver

onions

peas

pecans

salmon

seaweed

sweet potato

tomatoes

These foods and others have the very important B vitamins which are so important in blood sugar regulation as well as some amino acids and other compounds that help promote insulin to do its job as well as maintain hormone balance.

You won’t be able to put Hashimoto’s in to remission if you have low iron stores- ferritin. So have a full iron panel done at the lab. the lab range for ferritin is ridiculous. It is like 17-80 or something. Most people with thyroid issues feel better with ferritin in the higher range.

You also won’t put Hashimoto’s in to remission if you are dealing with adrenal insufficiency or hpa axis dysfunction. Your adrenal glands have many roles, one of which is to manage blood sugar. Another is to manage stress. So if you are having fights in your head with your parter or spouse, your mom or whoever, if you get really mad in traffic or have a lot going on and zero support you will likely be dealing with some kind of adrenal issue.

If you tend to be a night person- you get a second wind later in the evening and have trouble falling asleep and then are slow to start in the morning.

If you feel keyed up and can’t calm down.

Higher or lower than normal blood pressure, get dizzy when standing up.

Feel wired or jittery after drinking coffee. Caffeine is one of the worst things you can do for your adrenal health, especially if you are dealing with some kind of adrenal imbalance which most of us are.

If you get a headache after exercising- I had a friend who this happened to and she never could figure out why this was. I wonder now if she wasn’t dealing with adrenal issues. My guess is yes based on knowing a bit about her life.

Do you clench or grind your teeth?

Do you crave salt or salt your food before you taste it?

Do you have chronic low back pain that gets worse with fatigue?

Have chronic fatigue or get drowsy or tired often or easily?

Do you get a headache in the afternoon or yawn a lot?

These are all signs you may be needing to do some work on your adrenal glands.

Making sure you eat a meal with protein in the morning within an hour of waking will help your adrenals heal. Also make sure that you are getting plenty of rest and doing some gentle exercise along with a no sugar diet for a few weeks will help your adrenals reset.

There may be some burn out in your thyroid or damage. You may need medication for the rest of your life but you are not resigned to a life of fatigue and general malaise.

In my functional medicine training we are talking about making the whole person better- mind, body and spirit. One cannot work great without the other two in balance as well.

You can feel better and you deserve to feel better. This disease ruins so many lives but we don’t have to let it.

You can take charge of your health. This is what I most passionate about. Take charge of how you perceive your illness. Do not let it be who you are. This is so important.

I spent a lot of years hiding behind my disease and letting it define me. My kids got a sick mom. They also got a mom who for years let that sickness be her excuse until one day I woke up and wanted more.

I wanted a better life. I took that to an extreme for awhile too and now I have finally found some balance. I am less dogmatic with myself and am okay with the choices I am making in food and in life.

It is a process and takes some time to figure out- which can all depend on your life view and what kinds of baggage you took from your childhood and all that stuff.

Getting well is a bit of a process but it can be done. Of course it is much easier when you have support from those around you and the energy to get started but it doesn’t have to all change over night. Baby steps can be just the right place to start.

And one more thing about diet. The autoimmune protocol is a wonderful diet. Elimination diets in general are the best way to figure out which foods your body doesn’t really do well with. They are not the be all end all. You don’t have to stress about doing it. Start with what you are comfortable with but also know that healing may take longer if you are consuming things that inflame your body. The stress of trying to change your life can also cause inflammation so do it in a way that works for you and don’t compare your journey to any one else’s. We are bio individuals and so is our healing.

Thanks for writing in. I thank you for that. If you have any questions about this episode please head over to helpforhashimotos.com and leave a comment on episode 52.

I’m not loving how the social media outlets are banning some people these days because they don’t align with big pharma or big food companies.

People are starting to notice that these big companies care much less about our health and more about profits no matter the expense of the people consuming or being forced to use their products.

Nothing wrong with making a profit but there is a lot wrong with the integrity of some of these big companies and people are standing up for their health and changing the marketplace.

Please continue to do that. Stand up for what you believe no matter what side you are on and have a conversation about your side rather than slinging mud at others. We can’t change the world with mud but we can agree to disagree.

So anyway, I don’t have a big social media presence and not many of you would miss me if I disappeared off of social media. I encourage you to take a break from it as well. Spend time looking at the sunset instead of scrolling at pictures of one. Go for a hike or a walk with someone you love instead of texting them. Go to someone’s website instead of their facebook page.

You have the power to change the way things are done in this world and because it is money that rules the world, choose wisely where you spend yours.

Thanks for listening.

Find me at helpforhashimotos.com or email me at helpforhashimotos@gmail.com or fill out the contact form on my website.

Have a great week.

A listener writes in asking about the possibility of remission from Hashimoto's.

How can I put my Hashimoto's in to remission if my thyroid is burnt out? We discuss the ways we can start to put our disease back in to remission. We discuss blood sugar and adrenals and eating real food but not being dogmatic.

I was looking at my download statistics of my episodes and you know what the most popular episode is so far? The celery juice episode. I think it is titled Will Celery Juice Help My Thyroid. This tells me that you guys are looking for a quick fix. I get it. I would love a magic pill to just not have to take meds for the rest of my life and to not have to worry about overexercising to not put me in a state of fatigue for days. There is nothing magic about fixing this disease because it affects every system in your body. If you want to feel great, and who doesn’t, you will have to constantly be mindful of your diet and lifestyle choices. That part is simple- the mindful part because either you are mindful about what you put in your mouth and what time you go to bed or you are not. Simple. Do or do not, there is no try as Yoda says. It turns out you will always have to be mindful of leaky gut or intestinal permeability among other things.

Hashimoto’s can wreck your gut.

Remember that Hashimoto’s is an immune system problem causing hypothyroidism so your thyroid is NOT the problem. The problem is autoimmune flare ups that need to be managed. The problem is also that this disease can cause inflammation all through the body systems. Your immune system is not being regulated when hashimoto’s is active (you have antibodies) which means you can lose your gut barrier aka have leaky gut. It also affects the make up of your microbiome or the balance between the good and bad bacteria in your gut.

When there is inflammation due to a flare or high antibodies, and by the way, high antibodies can be 50 or 500 or 5000. It’s different for everyone and when there is inflammation, thyroid hormone won’t be converting. T4 won’t be converting to T3 so your cells can use the T3 or your thyroid receptor sites might not be responding well to T3.

I learned about a study from Dr. Kharrazian that showed that your thyroid hormones, T4 and T3, have a role in keeping your immune system working and bringing down inflammation.

Think about what that means for you if your meds are not optimized. Maybe your TSH is sitting at a 4 or 5 and your doctor doesn’t think you need hormone replacement for that or maybe you feel fine at a TSH of 5 and you don’t want to take medication. Well it turns out that this medication, if your body is in need of thyroid hormone (yet you feel fine without it) will help to regulate thyroid gland tissue destruction. All this to say that taking thyroid hormone replacement will calm down inflammation in your body caused by the autoimmunity.

This is why when you first go on meds you feel really good until you don’t! The thyroid hormone replacement you are taking started the process of calming the immune attack and calming the inflammation but when you keep doing what you are doing, it isn’t enough to fix the whole problem.

This attack on your thyroid has created a lot of inflammation all over the body and created tons of free radicals and oxidative stress. Oxidative stress just means that your body’s natural abilities to deal with free radicals is overwhelmed so those free radicals are going around in the body and wreaking havoc. Oxidative stress causes damage in the body at the cellular level and remember that we need healthy cells to make a healthy body.

Thyroid hormone replacement helps to protect against those free radicals and oxidative stress causing damage to your cells. Of course anti-oxidant supplements or foods can help you with this but the best first line of defense in this case is to be sure your body has enough thyroid hormone to start with otherwise the anti-oxidant supplements and foods are a bandaid though eating anti-inflammatory and anti-oxidant foods is never a bad idea.

One other thing that gets damaged when you have inflammation from poor thyroid hormone optimization is your gut. The gut lining is targeted by Hashimoto’s flares causing leaky gut and then leading to a host of problems including food sensitivities. So thyroid hormones can help in healing leaky gut. You can work on healing your gut all you want but if you need thyroid hormones and your body isn’t producing them or you are not taking them then it just causes this vicious cycle of damage and inflammation leading you to feel horrible.

Maybe you have been diagnosed and you are on thyroid hormone replacement but you have a doctor that doesn’t see the need to test your thyroid hormone levels yearly and you just keep taking the same dose for 3 or 4 years. It happens. So you might be in this subclinical hypothyroid place. Subclinical meaning your labs now look normal but there is autoimmune destruction happening that eventually causes need for more thyroid hormone.

Deficiency in thyroid hormones promotes more autoimmune destruction which produces less thyroid hormone and creates a terrible cycle of destruction in the body and one of the things destroyed or attacked is your gut lining. So now you have leaky gut which in and of itself can be a trigger for autoimmunity.

Here’s the thing though- we can’t just work on healing the gut. There is a whole host of things that need to be worked on and the gut and thyroid hormone replacement are just two of them. Healing the gut while there is a ton of inflammation happening just isn’t going to solve the problem. We have to work to get your inflammation down first with simple things like exercise, and lots of plant foods. These will increase your antioxidants naturally.

I’ll post a list of antioxidant rich foods from the Institute of Functional Medicine along with the transcript to this episode on my website. As far as exercise goes, just start moving. If you are new to moving at all, check out my friend Andrea’s business called Autoimmune Strong. Her website is getautoimmunestrong.com She starts at a very beginner level so you can get strong from the inside out.

The point is that we have to find your triggers- what is causing your flare ups, what is causing your antibodies to be higher. What is causing your inflammation? What is causing your immune system to be on fire?

The best places to start are diet and lifestyle which is kind of everything actually. We have to ask if there is something you are eating that is causing inflammation. How is your sleep? How are your relationships? How sedentary are you? Do you get outside? Do you have fun? All of these things matter to your health but to anyones health really.

Let’s get this figured out together. I’m taking new clients and can work with anyone from anywhere through my safe and secure health portal. Video chats are a nice time saver- you don’t have to take time from your day to travel to me. I can keep my services affordable because I don’t have an office to pay for.

What if you could stop sitting on the sidelines of your life and live more fully?

What if you could stop fatigue in its tracks and have more energy?

What if you had a plan to fix your Hashimoto’s?

What if you didn’t have to guess (and waste money) which supplements your body needed to help you move towards healing?

What if you had someone to help you who has been there, knows what it feels like and got out of the hole that is mismanaged hypothyroidism?

These are all things my clients get when they work with me.

Hand holding if you need it. An advocate. Someone who truly cares that you get better and knows how to help you.

I can help you feel better. Day by day.

Reach out today- HelpForHashimotos.com

One more thing before I go:

I try to always take a food first approach and I am happy to report that I can now offer you an Anti-inflammatory 3 day food plan to help you maximize your efforts to keep these cell damaging free radicals at bay. This plan is free on my website if you go to helpforhashimotos.com and click on the meal plans tab, then click just about anywhere on that page to be directed to the meal plan. You can sign up for a free trial to get the meal plan. No credit card required to do so. It’s totally free with no strings attached.

As always, thanks for being here. Thanks for tuning in. Thanks for sharing this with people you know looking for help with their hypothyroidism or other autoimmune conditions. Please leave me a rating and review on apple podcasts so more people can find the show and get help too. If you have not already, go get my new ebook The Definitive Guide to Hashimoto’s. When you sign up for my newsletter it will be delivered to your inbox.

Until next time! Love to you all.

Does Hashimoto’s Cause Leaky Gut?

Hashimoto’s can wreck your gut.

Stress, gut health and hashimotos

Can Probiotics Help Hashimoto’s

How to eliminate toxins from the body.

I believe being alive is NOT the same as LIVING.

I believe in using food as medicine.

I believe in helping you make your way to your version of health.

I do this by actively listening, critically thinking and using tools from nature.