What I’m going to share with you is different than what you may have heard before. If you stick with me through the end, you will get a different perspective on thyroid health that you won’t hear from health professionals.
I’ll start out by listing the order of things you may be looking to fix if you have an underactive thyroid.
- Low thyroid hormone production
- Weight loss
- Tired all the time
- Trouble falling or staying asleep
- Brain fog
- Hair thinning or hair loss
- Anxiety
- and more…
I could keep going, but all of these issues have less to do with your thyroid and more to do with your gut flora. Let me share with you how this helped me get my energy back, and lose weight.
I used to think that feeling tired was just part of getting older until I started to feel tired all the time. I would come home from work and have zero energy to do anything. I’d sit in my kitchen without moving even though I needed to do things, like cook and clean.
What got me to look at my gut flora was a day when I had so much gas, I knew it wasn’t normal. It was becoming more often for me to be bloated and constipated. When I looked up what could be causing me to feel that way, I found that it was yeast candida. Yeast candida is a wild yeast, meaning it’s not good when you have overgrowth.
My background happens to be in brewing beer. As a beer brewer we use brewer’s yeast, which is a probiotic. That means that it’s good for you to cultivate and grow brewer’s yeast in your gut.
This was the moment I had an epiphany about what I needed to do to fix my thyroid. The takeaway from this type of thinking was this…
Bad bacteria in your gut (like yeast candida) is considered bad because they eat the food you eat, steal nutrients and create toxins. Those toxins drain your energy and create body fat.
Probiotics on the other hand, they digest food for you, produce vitamins and other key nutrients out of food and that’s how you get energy from food.
I couldn’t believe this was never a topic of conversation when I went to see doctors or other health professionals… .but I knew I was on to something when I started thinking about the health of my probiotics to get more energy, produce hormones and lose weight…
So I started looking at the things I did when brewing beer to grow probiotics and observed to see if I could borrow some of the principles I had learned to grow probiotics in my gut.
One of the first things that came to mind was water. The brewing process starts when you add hot water to grains. If the water has no minerals, then you won’t digest the starch in grains into sugar. I knew that I needed minerals in order to digest.
This was my first eureka moment!
I immediately thought to myself, “I don’t add minerals to my drinking water”… is this why I’m having a hard time digesting food and ending up with gas, bloating and constipation?
Sure enough… I started to drink water and adding minerals and my digestion improved after just a couple of days….
My Hydrating Water Recipe
1 Quart of clean water
2 mL ionic magnesium
4 mL SOLE salt
Since I wasn’t digesting food properly before, I became deficient in vitamin D… so I started looking around for ways to get vitamin D…
Mind you, I knew going in that probiotics are what make vitamins for you. Probiotics make vitamins through digestion and fermentation…
I did not want to take supplements for life, so I started looking for natural ways to fix my underactive thyroid…
My research led me to find fermented cod liver oil with butter oil, which is the only natural food that contains natural vitamin D.
I was looking for more energy, not expecting this to improve my sleep, but that’s exactly what happened. I started getting sleep that was deep and restorative. I started waking up feeling refreshed with no brain fog and that did give me a boost of energy!
Later on, as I researched vitamin D, I found that vitamin D is a pro-hormone. That means that the body uses vitamin D as a template to make other hormones, including thyroid hormone. It’s important to note the difference between natural vitamin D and lab made vitamin D.
Natural vitamin D does not require you to dose. You can take as much as you want and you won’t get toxicity from it. Lab made vitamin D on the other hand does require you to dose. You’ll typically be given something around 3,000 to 5,000 IU’s or higher in some cases. When you hear about vitamin D toxicity, know that it happens with lab made vitamin D and that’s why I stick to natural only.
I continued looking at other things I could learn from the brewing process to grow probiotics in my gut and the more that I did that, the more I was able to get energy and produce hormones. There was very little that I did that was directly related to the thyroid. Things like iodine, ashwagandha, selenium and other herbs don’t work unless you have healthy gut flora.
