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80% Of Your Immune System Is In Your Gut

… Understanding Hormones…

[text_block style=”style_1.png” align=”left” font_size=”16″ font_font=”Cabin”]The most transformational lesson I came across was that 80% of your immune system is in your gut…

I found that many of the hypothyroidism symptoms I was experiencing had only a little to do with my thyroid, and had a lot more to do with my gut. Basically I understood that because my gut was toxic, the trickle effect was that it lowered my thyroid function.

A toxic gut lowered hormone production & vitamin production… it led to poor digestion which in turn led to giving me symptoms of leaky gut, IBS (Irritable Bowel Syndrome), adrenal fatigue, etc.

So I decided to focus my attention on healing my gut…

I was watching this video by Dr Alejandro Junger, author of the book Clean…[/text_block]

[text_block style=”style_1.png” align=”left” font_size=”16″ font_font=”Cabin”]A lot of things he started saying were hitting home for me… starting with digestive issues, allergies, depression, irritable bowel syndrome, etc.

It was the first time I’d heard that our intestines are like the roots of a tree… that’s where we FEED from, but only if we have the right bacteria and if we have a healthy gut.

So I mustered up courage and did a green juice fast… after 5 days I felt so much energy, I decided to continue and this experience forever altered the way I look at health, nutrition, and hypothyroidism.

After I did my juice fast, I was practically eating raw vegan though I didn’t consider myself “vegan”…

… but through that experience I learned the next big lesson I’m about to share with you.

One of the benefits of eating raw whole foods was that my gut inflammation was drastically reduced and my digestive system improved…

The problem was that it was very hard to boost my hormones on that diet alone… I also wasn’t prepared for the heavy detoxification that comes with fasting which I’ll talk about later.

I mentioned earlier that I found out I had low Vitamin D… my first test came in at 22 ng/mL… consequently I had low testosterone…

Things started making sense why I was experiencing all these hypothyroidism symptoms… and I figured out that testosterone was another hormone I needed to regulate in my body (women need to do the same, which naturally regulates estrogen as well as you’ll see later on)

I had picked up a book called The 4-Hour Body by Timothy Ferris, and I remembered reading about Vitamin D… so I flipped open to page 258 on the chapter titled “Sex Machine I” where it talks about boosting testosterone.

The one thing that stood out was that testosterone is made from cholesterol…[/text_block]

[text_block style=”style_1.png” align=”left” font_size=”16″ font_font=”Cabin”]In fact the majority of hormones are made from cholesterol… another way to think about it is that the body is incapable of making hormones without cholesterol.

So I found that the hormone making process goes something like this…

For both men and women it starts with cholesterol turning into testosterone… testosterone is then converted into estrogen and women naturally convert more testosterone into estrogen…

This is a simple explanation of how men produce testosterone.

This article explains how women produce estrogen.

Notice how the process starts out the same

Hypothalamus > Pituitary Gland > Testes (Men)/Ovaries (Women)

Now follow along… this is where I believe ALL HORMONES begin because of the feedback loop inherent in the production of these hormones.

Here’s how estrogen works in the female body… pay close attention to the role of cholesterol in the production of ALL hormones:[/text_block]

[text_block style=”style_1.png” align=”left” font_size=”16″ font_font=”Cabin”]Here’s how testosterone works in the male body… pay close attention to the “feedback loop” and how it applies to pretty much ALL HORMONES:[/text_block]
[text_block style=”style_1.png” align=”left” font_size=”16″ font_font=”Cabin”]Notice how the process is for the most part the same (only difference is that men have testes that produce more testosterone, and women have ovaries which produce more estrogen)…

… but they KEY point is that it all starts with increasing the amount of cholesterol in your diet AND boosting your vitamin D/gut health << That’s the magic formula!

Your gut will make most of the hormones that are needed for other hormones to be made including thyroid hormone… it will also make things like serotonin to keep you from getting depressed…

This is what I found and how I started to connect the dots… this is possibly one of the most important topics I had to understand which started to shed light on all my hypothyroidism symptoms…

Understanding all hormones is a pre-requisite to Understanding Thyroid Hormones… and how to stop the thyroid madness![/text_block]