3 Ways To Improve Thyroid Function

If you want BOOST your metabolism naturally, burn through stubborn fat and improve your overall health, then meet the only gland you need to understand for better hormone function: The Thyroid.

Many people have heard about the thyroid gland, but few can really grasp its importance of your “master metabolism” gland until there is an apparent challenge with it.

Your thyroid is a tiny gland that is shaped like a butterfly that sits in the back of your throat. It determines how your hormones function and ultimately how your health metamorphoses. Will it be like a beautiful butterfly or will you remain more like a caterpillar sentenced to living in a cocoon of pain, sickness and disease dependent on meds for life? Or worse will you have surgery to remove it? Sadly, more and more people we see at the practice come in living a life of a caterpillar instead of a butterfly due to sub-optimal thyroid function.

This tiny little gland is not designed to play small, just like you. It is designed to thrive and be a true powerhouse of happy hormone balance. The catch is you have to learn to give it the fuel it needs in order to function optimally and avoid the things that compromises its energy to allow it to do so.

The truth is many people are wandering around with undiagnosed thyroid conditions even though they are showing multiple symptoms of them. The prevalence of these issues are growing at alarming rates, faster than they can actually name them in many cases. Understanding the importance and aspects of this tiny gland can shed some light on how you can protect it. It can also repair it without relaying on drugs or removal. 

To put it bluntly, if your thyroid is not functioning optimally, its only a matter of time before a hormonal imbalance occurs. This often leads to inability to lose weight regardless of how hard you try, inability to gain muscle regardless of how much you work out or the inability to maintain an ideal weight in hyperthyroid cases. My hope is that this post is can help you start to grasp some of the things I recommend for patients with any signs of hormone malfunction.

The correct protocol includes all natural solutions I have seen work first hand in our practice as measured with before and after body composition analysis, pre and post symptom questionnaires and blood test biomarkers we offer through our 8 Weeks to Wellness program.

NOTE: I am not an endocrinologist and I don’t pretend to be one. In fact, I refer to many awesome doctors that support our goal of helping our patients become less dependent on long term medicine use for thyroid conditions and prefer to avoid surgery to remove the thyroid whenever possible. Those questions are best addressed to an endocrinologist. They are the hormone experts to ask to address your specific concerns.

Let’s face it who wants rely on meds their whole life, especially when they don’t know if they are actually working and often come with unwanted side effects? That’s right NO ONE. This information is designed for anyone seeking to decrease their reliance on these methods and focus more on natural alternatives that I am passionate about sharing with you and often go unnoticed.

If this sounds too good to be true or you’ve been told you don’t have a choice, hear directly from one of our patients who suffered with hypothyroidism and kicked his medication using this advice here. 

Thyroid hormones act on almost every kind of cell in your body to increase cellular activity or metabolism. Think of the Thyroid as the conductor of the symphony of your hormones.

Now think about the hormones it produces, which are called T3 and T4 as the members of the orchestra. If there is too much or too little thyroid hormone meaning someone in the symphony is off key in any way, the WHOLE ensemble is off. This is exactly how your thyroid gland works to regulate your hormones. If ANYONE one of your thyroid hormones is off key, the metabolism of your entire body is impacted. Since the thyroid hormones T3 and T4 control cellular metabolism throughout the body, when there is not enough of them for any reason, this metabolic function slows and becomes impaired. This in turn leads to the inability to lose weight, chronic fatigue symptoms and often hair loss, skin conditions and a variety of other autoimmune issues.  

Since the thyroid gland regulates metabolism, there is a strong correlation between thyroid malfunction and weight. Weight gain is more severe in people with hypothyroidism due to an excess accumulation of salt and water. Whereas weight loss, anxiety and inability to sleep are more commonly found in people who have an overactive thyroid; called hyperthyroid.

Though it seems that thyroid hormones could be an easy cure-all for weight control, the use of the hormone would also cause loss of muscle. This is detrimental to a person’s overall health and why muscle mass loss and inability to lose stubborn fat often go hand in hand in thyroid cases.

Here are THREE vital first steps.

1. Identify the Underlying Causes — Identify and treat the underlying causes of a thyroid disorder.  Ask yourself is it a toxicity, a deficiency or maybe both that has lead to this health challenge? Some of the most common ones I find are as follows:

  • Unknown food allergies, especially to gluten containing grains that many are often consuming on a regular basis without knowing their sensitivity to it.
  • Some have been exposed to environmental toxins, chemicals or heavy metals that can block thyroid function.
  • Nutritional deficiencies that are easily overcome with supplementation such as low Vitamin D, B-12 and magnesium levels can lead to complications 
  • Absorption issues such as iron, which can skew imbalances, which follows nutrition deficiencies.  
  • Perhaps the biggest contributor is abnormal stress levels or abnormal sleep schedules. In fact, shift workers like nurses, fireman and police are the most susceptible to hormone challenges, ironically and this remains discounted in many scenarios due to lack of mainstream “proof”. 

2. Minimize Your Blood Sugar – When sugar is taken into the body in the form of carbohydrate your pancreas releases insulin. Sugar in all forms is toxic to the blood stream. Your body responds by releasing INSULIN to take this sugar out of the blood and put it into cells where it can be used later on.

However “later” does not always happen unless you work it off with physical activity or reset it with a healthy sleep cycle. When not used up, this previously stored sugar turns to body FAT. We like to call insulin the fat storage hormone, because when you have too much sugar in the blood on a consistent basis your body starts to store it as fat around your internal organs as a protective mechanism.

This is why the single most important thing you can do is to find out how much visceral fat you currently have on your body and then follow up with a nutrition plan that helps you regulate your blood sugars on a daily basis.

We also recommend you find a practitioner that offers a lifestyle modification program such as our 8 Weeks to Wellness Program that can test and track blood sugar levels via a blood test to monitor your glucose, HBA1C and Homo- IR levels in addition to your hormonal levels. 

People with the presence of any hormonal issue want to pay close attention to avoiding processed foods and grains that spikes blood sugar and increases insulin release. 

3. Minimize Stress and Increase Sleep— Eliminate adrenal exhaustion and minimize stress by engaging in a comprehensive stress management program that includes self- care techniques that work for you in order to reduce cortisol production.

This could include things such as restorative yoga, meditation, and spending time in nature.

My next post in this series will focus on how to boost your sleep and reduce your stress levels to fix adrenal issues which is in a class of its own when it comes to hormonal imbalances at can itself lead to thyroid issues and vice versa. Stay tuned!

The good news is YES you can use any of these strategies starting tomorrow without having any testing done at all. In fact, these are things that EVERYONE can do to simply express greater health and function.

If you want to learn more in depth about the testing we recommend, how to interpret your results on any testing you’ve done and more on the other key hormones to pay attention to for your long term health then join us for Kendra’s FREE then sign up below to join us for Kendra’s FREE Secrets to Balancing Hormones Naturally workshops – click below to sign up!

Click here to sign up for May 17th workshop in North Andover.

Click here to sign up for May 24th workshop in Beverly. 

Can’t make the workshop by still want more info?

Provide your e-mail below to get the FULL 5 Simple Steps To Improve Thyroid Function PDF for FREE.

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