When your thyroid is not working, doctors will usually give you three options…
Medicate
Radiate
Cut
If you ask me, I see those three options and my mind thinks “is there a fourth option?”… because I definitely don’t want to cut it off…
That’s why I started researching this topic and in this blog post, I’m going to share with you my thinking process and what I did to get my energy back and get my body to produce hormones again…
What works for some, may not work for others
One of the most common things you’ll read about when it comes to low thyroid function is “lack of iodine.”
This is something that started back around May 1st, 1924. They were saying that people were getting enlarged thyroid glands, also known as thyroid nodules, or goiter. Interestingly enough, this was around the time that they introduced iodized salt to the market…
What I found interesting about hypothyroidism was knowing that most people I talked to, did not have thyroid nodules… so iodine deficiency alone couldn’t be the reason why so many people felt tired all the time, had brain fog, hair thinning (or falling out), unable to fall or stay asleep, etc…
I also started to notice that there were people who struggled to lose weight… while others actually struggled to gain weight…
Some people had bad TSH levels, while others have good thyroid levels, but still feel tired…
There were some people who had autoimmune issues… Hashimoto’s…
In other words, there were all kinds of different “flavors and colors” of hypothyroidism… which is why you start reading stuff online and some people will say “do this, don’t do that” and it contradicts what another person said in a different forum…
How to Combat Hypothyroidism Fatigue
Before you go to battle, it’s important to know who/what you are fighting…
For the longest time, I thought that I felt tired all the time and was gaining weight because of an underactive thyroid… I was told this would be a thing for life and that there was nothing I could do about it… they told me I was going to have to take hormones for the rest of my life…
That did not sit well with me, but I’m glad they told me that, because I started to wonder, how does the body produce hormones…
… at first, I was under the impression that my thyroid wasn’t producing enough T4… that’s what they tell you and what most people believe… but the thyroid is only part responsible for thyroid hormone production, not solely responsible…
Take a moment and let that sink in…
… because many people I talk to are so hellbent on trying to “fix their thyroid” that they completely miss other parts of the body that may be contributing to low thyroid hormone production…
Let’s start upstream…
The thyroid gland produces what’s called thyroid hormone T4… this is an inactive form of thyroid hormone meaning the body can’t use it unless it is converted into the active form thyroid hormone T3…
The conversion from T4 to T3 happens in the liver…
Right there, your mind should have an “ah-ha” moment thinking that it may not be the thyroid you need to fix… and it will resonate even more, if you’ve tried taking T4 and you don’t feel better…
Most people would then try to take T3… but I don’t go there… I’d rather look at why is my liver not converting T4 into T3?
When you ask better questions, you get better answers…
So the first step in fighting thyroid fatigue is to know what the root cause is without having your entire focus on the thyroid… rather look at the thyroid as part of a bigger system and look at the entire system…
How I was able to get my energy back
For context on this next part, I wrote a book on how to brew beer and was an avid homebrewer teaching others how to brew beer…
I did not care about health at the time and looking back, I know that I damaged my liver from getting black out drunk more often than I’d like to admit…
…. but there I was desperate to find a way to get rid of thyroid fatigue… and also wanted to get rid of other things I was experiencing like gas, bloating and constipation.
Funny enough, I was trying to figure out why I was so gassy, and I came across an article that mentioned yeast candida overgrowth as the cause… when I read this, I about fell off my chair… because the only other time I had seen the term yeast candida, was in a beer brewing book talking about wild yeast that could ruin a batch of beer…
… and it was a sudden epiphany that made me realize that my fatigue, gas, bloating, vitamin deficiencies, low hormone production, hair falling out and a full laundry list of things were directly tied to the health of the probiotics in my gut… or because of the wild yeast and bad bacteria that had grown because of the toxic environment in my gut…
Once I had this realization, I started to look at my body like a fermentation vessel… a place where probiotics needed to grow… and I looked at the brewing book I’d written as a blueprint for growing probiotics…
Things clicked for me in an uncanny way that I couldn’t believe… how could I know this information that so obvious and simple that many people including doctors don’t know about…
The first thing that came to mind was digestion… I was gassy and bloated because of poor digestion…
As a beer brewer, my job was to digest starch in grains like barley or wheat into sugar. I had to digest the proteins in the grains and break them down into amino acids… the way I did that was simply by soaking grains in water with minerals…
Why You Need Minerals to Get More Energy
Think of a double AA battery… it stores energy, right?
Notice how in order to use the energy inside the battery you use a conductive mineral like copper. That’s what conductive minerals do in our body… they allow us to use the energy that’s stored inside the cells of our body…
The cells of our body are called cells because they are indeed battery cells…
Pair that with the knowledge that without minerals you can’t digest food, and it becomes quite apparent that minerals are a must in order to digest food and get energy.
Food is supposed to give you energy. It made sense to me that if I was mineral deficient, I wouldn’t be able to digest food, and if I wasn’t able to digest food, then I wouldn’t be able to convert food energy into energy that my body could use.
So I started looking for conductive minerals and found that SOLE salt made from large pink Himalayan crystals combined with salt from the Great Salt Lake in Utah (which is high in ionic magnesium) gave me all the minerals I needed to ensure proper digestion…
This is what gave birth to the hydration challenge… I started reaching out to people who had been trying to get energy for years… they’d tried everything and nothing had worked for them… and they couldn’t believe that I was asking them to just incorporate mineralized water into their daily routines…
… but when they tried it, they started coming back to me and asking me for the next step…
Some people were hesitant because they were being told that salt is bad for you…
What’s interesting about that statement is that the statement is missing context because not all salt is created equal…
Salt with minerals is good for you… for the reasons I just shared above…
Salt without minerals is bad for you… because you need minerals to digest food, and use the energy stored in the cells of your body…
It’s mind boggling to learn that iodized salt… the salt they claim is good for your thyroid has no minerals… and people wonder why they are tired all the time…
Underactive Thyroid or Low Hormone Production?
Once I realized that I was able to boost my energy levels by simply improving my digestion, I looked at my hormone production and decided I was going to figure this out…
I just couldn’t believe that this is a problem that hasn’t been solved by “health professionals…”
Like seriously… what are they teaching them in school?
Not this apparently…
As I started diving into what is needed for hormone production, I was quite shocked to learn what the raw materials are that the body uses to produce hormones…
Vitamin D
Cholesterol
Saturated fat
What’s crazy is that I had always thought that cholesterol and saturated fat were bad… (I also used to think iodized salt was good at one point)… so this was flipping my entire world upside down… or upside right as I like to say it now…
… because I now had to make a decision… do I continue to believe that cholesterol is bad for you, or do I look into it to see if it helps me produce thyroid hormone…
It wasn’t just thyroid hormone I was dealing with…
I also had low melatonin hormone production… melatonin is the sleeping hormone… I had a hard time falling asleep. I would toss and turn all night and wake up a walking zombie…
I also had low dopamine and serotonin… the feel good, happy hormones… so I was depressed and had a lot of anxiety.
In other words, it wasn’t just low thyroid hormone I was dealing with… it was other hormones as well… so I needed to shift from trying to fix an underactive thyroid to fixing low hormone production…
This next step gave birth to what I now call the better sleep challenge… where people start improving their hormone production… most people see an improvement in their sleep…
That is amazing in and of itself… but I want to be clear about one thing… increasing hormone production is a skill… it’s not about popping pills and changing your diet…
When you learn this skill, you can really become good at hormone production and although not everyone takes me up on this, the few that do, have experienced amazing results that I don’t like to share often only because I don’t want to set the expectation that you can just get a few supplements and get results…
I hope this gives you a starting point and enough information on what you can do to turn your health around… our goal is to create success stories so that one day we can share your story to inspire others to start their journey…
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