All right, Yuri here. Welcome to another Fat-Loss Summit interview. Today on the hot seat, we have got my good friend Dr. Izabella Wentz.

Transcription

1 Izabella Wentz All right, Yuri here. Welcome to another Fat-Loss Summit interview. Today on the hot seat, we have got my good friend Dr. Izabella Wentz. Did you know that your thyroid gland is responsible for your metabolism? It is the master metabolism gland. And a lot of people are suffering from low-thyroid symptoms, or hypothyroidism. Sometimes, and very often, your doctor is not diagnosing it properly. If you have an underactive thyroid, or hypothyroidism, I understand the frustration because I ve dealt with that as well. Dry skin, brittle nails, difficulty losing weight, feeling lethargic; those are all symptoms of low-thyroid function. Here s something else a lot of people don t understand: It s not as simple as just taking some medication from your doctor. Ninety-plus percent of cases, when we re talking about hypothyroidism, is actually an autoimmune condition called Hashimoto s disease. Ninety-plus percent of people with low-thyroid function have an autoimmune disorder called Hashimoto s. Izabella was one of those people. She actually started off as a pharmacist and then, dealing with Hashimoto s, she had to figure something out. She had to figure out how to solve the problem. That s what she did. As a result of her work, she s helped hundreds of thousands of people. She s become a New York Times best-selling author for her amazing book, which we ll talk about quickly in the interview. What s amazing is that she s very young, but she s extremely knowledgeable and she s got a big heart. She comes from a great place; she really, really cares about serving her community. I think you ll really get a lot out of this interview. We re going to be talking about Hashimoto s, how to overcome it, how to get your thyroid back up to snuff so that you can lose weight on a more consistent basis without having to fuss about it all. Let s bring Izabella in. Let s get started. Here we go. Yuri: Guys, welcome to this very special interview today with my good friend Dr. Izabella Wentz. Just in case you guys don t know her, she s a New York Times best-selling author. She s one of the go-to people as it pertains to thyroid issues, specifically Hashimoto s, and that s what we re going to be talking about today, as it pertains to your ability to lose fat. Izabella, welcome. Izabella: Hi, Yuri, it s so nice to see you. Yuri: Likewise. I m excited to have you on here because, as you know, losing weight is not just about eating less and exercising more. There are hormonal things happening inside of us that determine a lot of our ability to function as we want to. A big part of that is what s happening with the thyroid gland. 1

2 Let s start off by just quickly giving your journey into why the interest in thyroid. How did you even get into doing what you do now? Izabella: For me, it was a very personal thing. During pharmacy school, I was never really interested in the thyroid. I just thought everybody needs to get on thyroid medications as they get older, and this is just something that happens over time. I was diagnosed with a thyroid condition myself when I was right around 27. At the time, I found myself putting on sweatpants that started getting a little bit tight and having a little bit of extra weight on my bones. I m pretty small, petite, and little, so just having an extra 15 pounds on my frame seemed like a lot for me. I also had all these really weird symptoms that were associated with the condition. I had fatigue for about 10 years; I had acid reflux; I had irritable bowel syndrome; hair loss; all these awful symptoms. Finally, when I was diagnosed with a thyroid condition myself, I thought, This is great. This is going to be the answer to all of my problems. Really, the medications were not the solution. I wanted to figure out what I could do in my own power to get myself better. I wanted to know if I did anything in my life that triggered the condition, if I could somehow make it better, reverse the condition, and just live a best life. That s how I sort of became really passionate about the thyroid; mostly because I had to. It was something I was dealing with, and there wasn t a lot of information out in the world. Most of the conventional medical doctors and pharmacists were telling me to just take medications. Take medications and that s it. Just be glad there are medications for this. There s nothing else you can really do. Yuri: It s amazing. What I love about our community is that most people in the health space get into what we do because of a health issue we had at some point in our lives. I think that s so authentic. It s not like we re here to unlike a lot of food and pharmaceutical companies just make money. It s serving people from a place that initially affected us, and we want to help others, which is awesome. The thyroid is very important because it controls our metabolism. Is it something you find is a problem more readily in women than men? If so, why is that happening? Izabella: Absolutely. Thyroid conditions affect women more often than men. There seems to be a five-to-one ratio. For every one man, there might be five women who are affected. Pregnancy, puberty, and perimenopause are the top three times that we see the onset of thyroid disease. There s a school of thought that believes hormones play a role. Also, there s this whole adaptive physiology process that, when you think about the thyroid gland, there s research that shows that thyroid tissues can actually sense danger. It sounds kind of crazy. If you re in a circumstance where you don t have enough food, you don t have good shelter, you re exposed to toxins, or you feel like you re in a dangerous place, the thyroid will actually start shutting itself down. 2

3 It ll say, Okay, we need to conserve our energy, so, therefore, I m going to make you more sleepy. We need to conserve our calories; therefore, I m going to make you hold on to many more of them. This is not a very good time to get pregnant, so I m going to make you less fertile. I think women are especially susceptible to that because we have babies, and if you are in a very toxic environment, if you re nutrient-deficient, if you don t have enough food on board, the best thing for your survival is probably not to get pregnant. Does that make sense? Yuri: Absolutely, yeah. That s amazing. Five-to-one, that s incredible. Kudos to women in general because you guys go through so much more than us men. There s no comparison. And just to have to deal with that as something else is just one more thing to deal with. You mentioned something interesting. You talked about how the thyroid gland can essentially sense stress. For example, if we re in a period of low calories or no calories, our thyroid gland will kind of slow down. It s almost like turning down the fire in the fireplace, right? Izabella: Absolutely. This can be measured. There s a hormone called reverse T3. Just as a background for those who don t know a lot about the thyroid, the main active thyroid hormone is known as T3. That basically helps to give us energy; it helps to regulate and speed up our metabolism; it helps us have really great skin-cell turnover so people will be growing hair and have nice, lustrous skin when they have enough of that hormone on board. What happens under conditions of stress, production of that hormone will slow down, and the body will produce something known as reverse T3, which looks almost identical to the T3 hormone, but it s got one molecule in an off spot. When it goes to different we have thyroid receptors all over the body, and when this reverse T3 hormone goes to these thyroid receptors, instead of turning them on, it just kind of sits there. It doesn t destroy them or anything, but nothing is happening. Some people have described T3 as the accelerator and then the reverse T3 as the brake. We ll see elevated levels of reverse T3 when people are under a lot of stress, when they don t have enough nutrients on board, when they re toxic. This is often in people who have been in traumatic accidents or car accidents; where their body is trying to slow down and rest and recover, you ll see elevated levels of reverse T3. Yuri: Interesting. Reverse T3 is like the seat filler at the Academy Awards but who doesn t get out of the seat once the actor comes back to sit down. Izabella: Exactly. Yuri: The thyroid is such an intricate gland because, I think the medical community tends to think if you have a thyroid issue, take some more T4 in the form of some kind of horse-derived synthetic thyroid hormone. But there are so many different levels at which the thyroid, from its creation to its ultimate function, can be disrupted, whether it s at the cellular level or in the gut or whatever. 3

4 Let s talk specifically about I guess we can get to that in a second, but let s look at thyroid function. Why does the thyroid impact our ability to lose weight, specifically as it pertains to women because they deal with it so much more than men? Izabella: The thyroid gland, one of its main jobs, is to work on our metabolism. The thyroid gland basically decides if we need to metabolize things faster or slower. That s its primary role, as well as regulating our body temperature. In times when the thyroid is under-active maybe because of stress, like we talked about in the reverse T3 situation, or in the case of having an autoimmune attack on the thyroid gland or not having enough nutrients on board, the thyroid function will slow down. That will result in a slower basal metabolic rate. For those of you listening at home, the basal metabolic rate is essentially how many calories we need per day to keep us running without doing any kind of crazy exercise or whatever; this is just your normal calorie requirement at rest. In a person with the normal, optimal thyroid function, you re going to see this is going to be one number. Let s take a random person, for example; you can have the person s identical twin, who is eating exactly the same amount and who is working out exactly the same amount, but their basal metabolic rate will be slowed down by the thyroid gland. Then, in that case, that person is going to be putting on weight no matter what they do. Let s say that person s basal metabolic rate may be 1200 calories until they re starting to lose weight or whatnot, and theirs might slow down to something like 700 or 800. You re just going to be constantly putting on weight even though you might be eating salads every day. We ll talk about why it s actually bad not to get enough calories; that kind of sets the basal metabolic rate even worse. That can be a problem. Yuri: Let s talk about that now. I ve done a lot of research on carbohydrates. It s such an interesting topic how we live in this culture where carbohydrates have been demonized because they pack on fat, but there s so much research that shows that low-carbohydrate diets suppress thyroid function and can make matters worse. Let s talk about this whole idea of eating enough, not eating enough, and how that impacts our thyroid gland and, thus, our ability to maintain our basal metabolic rate and, thus, lose weight. Izabella: What s really interesting is that most people I work with who have Hashimoto s and people with thyroid disease are going to be deficient in a lot of nutrients. One of the body s responses for being nutrient-deficient is actually making us hungrier and making us want to eat more. What s happening in people who eat a very low-calorie diet is, oftentimes, they re not going to be getting enough nutrients; therefore, that s going to increase their requirement for more food. Also, that s going to encourage the body to store more fat. The thyroid plays an important role in that. During the potato famine in Ireland, a lot of people who survived there wasn t enough food around actually had a thyroid disease because the thyroid gland slowed things down for people so they didn t need as many calories. 4

5 If you re somebody who has been on this crazy diet where you re only eating 1200 calories a day and you re exercising like mad, your body is going to be saying, Hey, we don t have enough food on board; we re going to become nutrient-deficient. We re going to get sick; we need to store every single calorie we possibly can. That s when people run into not being able to lose weight and putting on more weight. Definitely not eating enough and exercising too much can be big problems. Yuri: Cool. Specifically when you talk about nutrients, a lot of people think about iodine as the one nutrient that makes or breaks the thyroid. Is there more to it than just iodine? Izabella: Absolutely so. Worldwide iodine deficiency is the primary reason for an underactive thyroid. In countries that are industrialized the U.S., Canada, most of Europe, most of Australia we actually started adding iodine to the salt supply sometime in the 1950s. Most people who have thyroid disease nowadays, they don t have thyroid disease because they re iodine-deficient. Most of them actually have thyroid disease because they have an autoimmune attack on their thyroid. What s interesting is that since we started adding iodine to the salt supply, the rates of iodinedeficiency hypothyroidism have gone down, but the rates of Hashimoto s and autoimmune thyroid disease have gone up. Some research has even shown that too much iodine can be a bad thing. Having too much of it on board when you re not balanced with the other nutrients can mean that it can aggravate thyroid disease or bring it on. Nowadays, when I look at the average person who says they have an under-active thyroid, my first question is: Do you have Hashimoto s? If they don t know that they have Hashimoto s, I encourage them to get tested because, most of the time, their doctors will not tell them, and you need to do a specialized test for it. Looking at different studies and overall working with clients, 90 to 97 percent of people who say they have a sluggish or under-active thyroid who are on thyroid medications, this is because of Hashimoto s, not because of iodine deficiency. Now, a person with Hashimoto s may be iodine-deficient, but this is pretty rare. Yuri: What would be the specific protocol for: I have cold hands and feet all the time. I think I have a sluggish thyroid. What re the specific tests? Are there specific blood markers we re looking for? We ll go from there. Let s start with how we go about getting diagnosed, what we re looking for, and then we can take the next steps from there. Izabella: Sure. The first test most doctors will run is the TSH test, which is thyroid stimulating hormone. This is a screen test that is excellent for picking up really advanced cases of thyroid disease when it s done correctly. Back in the day, scientists first determined the reference range for the TSH test. How they figure out reference ranges is basically take a bunch of people s blood, people they think are healthy, and then they measure the TSH levels in that blood and say, This is the range we found in these healthy people. 5

6 Unfortunately, when they did this, thyroid disease being so common, they had people with thyroid disease in that poll of healthy blood. The reference range was pretty lax. They were saying that you can have a TSH as high as 10 and have normal thyroid function, where a person without thyroid disease should have a TSH somewhere around 1. Anytime it gets above 2, 2.5, that s when I start thinking the thyroid is not working optimally. When I was first diagnosed before I was diagnosed I was going to doctors and getting different tests and they were saying my thyroid was normal, where my TSH was a 4.5. For a 25-year-old woman, that was causing me to lose my hair, that was causing me to sleep for 12 hours a night. That was definitely not my optimal TSH. The other tests to look at are going to be, specifically for Hashimoto s, are going to be the thyroid antibodies: thyroid peroxidase antibodies and thyroid globulin antibodies; that s TPO and TG antibodies. These are going to be markers of an autoimmune response to your own thyroid gland. These are going to be elevated for 10 to 15 years before you ll see a change in TSH, and they can be causing symptoms. Your TSH might be normal, but when those antibodies are elevated, you can be anxious, you can be depressed, you can have cold hands and feet, you can be putting on extra weight. You can have a whole multitude of thyroid symptoms just by having those antibodies elevated. The other tests I would recommend doing are free T3 and then free T4. These tell us the active hormones, what the thyroid hormones in the body are and what they re doing inside the body. Of course the test we already talked about, the reverse T3; we can also test for that. Yuri: Cool. It s a very broad spectrum, not just looking at one thing and saying, Here, take some synthetic thyroid, and it ll all be good. Izabella: That s the whole comprehensive thyroid testing. So you want to make sure you don t just go to your doctor and then say, I think my thyroid is off, and let them do their thing. Say, I want comprehensive thyroid tests. Here is a list for them. I want to see my own test results. Oftentimes, unfortunately, doctors will miss things. It happens all the time; everybody s human. It s up to you to take these things into your own hands Yuri: Considering that more than 90 percent of low-thyroid cases are Hashimoto s, how do we go about resurrecting the thyroid and healing that problem? Is it a little bit more involved than just supplementing with a thyroid supplement? What s the first step? Where should we start? Izabella: If somebody has a really elevated TSH when they re having a ton of these symptoms, it may be a good idea to start a thyroid medication just because if they ve been so deficient in thyroid hormones, this is going to impact everything, and getting on thyroid medication can make them feel a lot better. 6

7 Now, you mentioned the T4 medication Synthroid is going to be something that is very commonly prescribed. In 2013, it was the number one medication in all of the United States out of every single medication. It s a pretty common medication, and most doctors and pharmacists have been trained that this is the best medication, this is the only medication you should give to people with thyroid disease. However, not everybody does very well on this medication. There are natural desiccated thyroid medications, which are made from it sounds kind of gross the glands of pigs. Or you can have a pharmacist issue a different medication that is going to be vegan and not going to have any animal origins. That has the T4 and then the T3, which is the active hormone. A lot of people actually feel much better with that because they ll say they ll be losing hair on the Synthroid, but once they switch over to this medication, their hair starts growing back. They ll be gaining weight on the Synthroid, and then once they switch over to the natural desiccated thyroid or the T4-T3 medication, they ll be losing weight and so on and so forth. This medication combination basically provides both of the hormones that are very, very much required for thyroid function. That s something to think about if you are already at the point where your thyroid has been severely under attack for a really long time. It s the time to start thinking about getting on medication. This doesn t mean that at some point, if we heal the thyroid and work on all these other things, you can t ever get off of medication. I do have some clients and some readers who have been able to get off medications once they were on and fixed some of the leaks. My place of passion is to talk about the lifestyle things that can be done to actually stop the autoimmune attack on the thyroid gland. Yuri: Let s talk about that. I have an autoimmune condition that means I don t have any hair. It happened when I was 17 years old as a result of just bombarding my body with terrible foods for 17 years of my life. Izabella: I ve been there. Yuri: Yeah. From my understanding, autoimmune disease, one from the next is not that far. There are obviously differences, but they can ultimately come from the same origin, a lot of times being compromised gut health or other things. From a natural perspective, for someone with Hashimoto s, do they look at healing the gut as a first step? Is it gut and other things? How would you go about walking somebody through that process? Izabella: In my experience, most Hashimoto s cases and I think this translates to other autoimmune conditions are going to be caused by a combination of nutrient deficiencies, food sensitivities, impaired ability to handle stress, the adrenals, impaired ability to get rid of toxins, intestinal permeability, or leaky gut, as well as, in many cases, if you ve done everything really well, chronic infections can actually trigger autoimmune disease. 7

8 The way that I walk people through it, I always say, Let s start with food and nutrition. Getting people on figuring out what their food sensitivities are. Gluten, dairy, and soy are the three biggest ones in Hashimoto s. In surveying my clients and readers, about 90 percent of them will feel better on a gluten-free diet; 75 percent will feel better on a dairy-free diet; and about 60 percent will feel better on a soy-free diet. Grain-free diets are somewhere around 70 percent as well. A lot of people will feel much better going on a Paleo-like diet or a diet that basically excludes some of the most common reactive foods. This is something that, in some cases, some people are actually able to get their Hashimoto s into remission just by the diet alone. They get rid of gluten or dairy, and then their thyroid antibodies can no longer be detected in the blood and then their thyroid tissue starts regenerating itself. This is something that I really like to see. Unfortunately, it s not the case with everybody, so other people may have to dig a little bit deeper, so we start thinking about nutrient deficiencies. Sometimes you remove a food and all of a sudden, you re absorbing things better and then you re no longer nutrient-deficient. Other people might have to supplement. I was one of the ones who still had to supplement. Using something like selenium, that has been found to reduce thyroid antibodies over the course of three months by about half. Selenium deficiency has been implicated as a trigger in Hashimoto s. This helps a lot of people with stabilizing their mood and energy levels as well. Doing a zinc supplement, this helps the conversion of T4 to the more active T3 hormone. I ve found people who took a zinc supplement have reported that they re able to have more energy and lose weight. You should also look at whether or not you have ferritin deficiency. Ferritin is the storage form of iron. This is often going to be deficient in people with Hashimoto s, so you have to make sure you either supplement for that or you figure out what s causing the deficiency. Vitamin D deficiency, you have to look at ranges of about 60 to 80. I think the last time I looked at the research, that was the range. That might change next week. Getting your vitamin D levels somewhere in there is going to be good. Having a B12 deficiency is also going to be very common in Hashimoto s, so you d have to get that addressed. Another big thing I see is having low or no stomach acid. A big proportion of people with Hashimoto s and thyroid disease are going to be diagnosed with acid reflux. When I worked at the pharmacy, I didn t think anything of it. We kept the thyroid meds right next to the proton-pump inhibitors because you often gave them together. We d throw birth control in there every now and then too. You see that. You have studies that show that people with Hashimoto s and thyroid disease are going to be stomach-acid-deficient, yet they re given medications to further suppress their stomach acid. This is because the symptoms of stomach-acid deficiency and acid reflux are going to be almost the same. 8

9 Doing a supplement like betaine with pepsin can be a tremendous difference in how you feel, how you re digesting your food, your energy levels. All of a sudden, you re getting a lot more nutrition from your food. I like to call it my Bradley Cooper supplement because have you seen the movie Limitless? Yuri: Yeah. Izabella: It s this movie where this guy gets on this drug that is illegal or harmful or whatnot. It makes him wake up. He was this bum of an author and he was trying to write his book and he had this messy, messy house and he was just really lazy and sleeping all the time and depressed. Then he took this drug and felt much better. Well, that s kind of how I felt on the betaine with pepsin. I started taking this with my proteincontaining foods, and then the next day, I woke up early, I woke up at 6 a.m. normally, I would barely crawl out of bed at 9:00. I had good energy. That was actually when I started writing my book Hashimoto s: The Root Cause. I thought, I ve been fatigued for 10 years. I ve been struggling with this disease for 10 years, and just taking that one supplement made such a big difference for me that I felt like, wow, I can actually do something with my life and overcome this. These are just some of the strategies that people can utilize. Getting probiotics on board is also helpful. People who are overweight seem to have different bacteria in their guts compared to people who are of average or underweight. Basically, people who are overweight have bacteria that take out more of the calories from our food. You could be eating the same amount of calories, but your bacteria are going to give you 15 percent more of that and put it on as fat. Those are some of the things that I always have people start with. And just doing things alone, just getting on the right kind of nutrients and getting on the right type of diet can really make a tremendous difference in how you feel, in your energy levels, in your weight. I love getting success stories from readers, where they ll send me before-and-after pictures and it s just amazing. They ll be doing it for a few months, and they re like, I changed my diet and I started taking some of the supplements. Look at me now! I m just so proud of them and so grateful to see that. Yuri: That s great. You can see it in your face; you totally light up. That s great. Knowing what you know now, would you be able to go back and work as a pharmacist? Izabella: I think so, but I think I would do a lot of counseling over the counter about natural things. I don t think I would get very many prescriptions filled. I would probably talk to every person for 30 minutes who came in with a prescription for thyroid hormone. I d say, Really, how are you feeling? Have you tried this and this and that? I don t think they would keep me on very long. Yuri: That Izabella, she s bad news. Get her out of here. 9

10 Izabella: Yeah! She filled five prescriptions today and told everybody to do this and that. Yuri: You d be Walgreens worst employee. Izabella: I pretty much would be that. Yuri: Or you d be saving countless lives, which is more important. Izabella: Exactly, and that s what I love doing now, just getting information out to people. Like you are, just to give them all these things back that they re not going to get from the mainstream medical model. Yuri: Sure. You mentioned betaine with pepsin. That s something I ve used off and on for years. It s so important because hopefully people start to understand that digestion is where everything starts. You either create good or bad health based on how you re digesting your foods, if that stuff is upsetting your digestive system. That s such a great recommendation. For those watching, even if you just have digestive symptoms like bloating or gas, just that alone will make a huge difference. It s such a staple, fundamental supplement that s so beneficial for so many different conditions. You also mentioned probiotics, which is interesting, and the bacterial strains between overweight and normal-weight individuals. We don t think that there s a difference in bacteria. I can t remember who was telling me this it may have been Sara Gottfried. She was saying that they re doing fecal implants between twins, where one twin is obese or overweight and the other twin is normal weight. I think they did this in mice, where they took the fecal implant, or the feces, of the normal-weight mouse and put it into the obese one. Within a few short weeks, they were pretty much the same body weight, the normal body weight. That s pretty powerful, just based on bacterial cultures inside the gut. Izabella: It s pretty amazing and I recently came across a case of somebody who it was a person who had the reverse happen. They had a condition like C. diff colitis, which is basically a terrible, terrible condition where you have 20 to 30 diarrhea bowel movements per day, and it can be lifethreatening. They received a fecal transplant from somebody for that, and they actually became obese after the fecal transplant. It s a very big area of interest for me. I haven t tried one myself or anything like that, but, certainly, it gives us an idea of how important our gut environment is for gene expression, nutrient absorption, pretty much for figuring out who s a friend and who s an enemy in our body. Eighty-five percent of the immune system actually lives in our gut, so, like you said, with autoimmune disease, having intestinal permeability is always a part of that. Looking at healing the gut is crucial. 10

11 When I did a literature review, there were something like 40 different things that can cause leaky gut. And gluten is the biggest thing, and that s kind of what everybody talks about. For a lot of people, just getting off of gluten will heal leaky gut, but there are a lot of other things. Having an overgrowth of bacteria in the small intestine can actually cause leaky gut. Not having enough glutamine or zinc can cause leaky gut. Having parasites, which sounds disgusting and we never think we d have them in Canada or the United States, but people do have them, and they can trigger autoimmune disease and the leaky gut in that respect. Really looking at your gut function. If it s not resolved by food, nutrients, and supplements, then you need to start thinking if you have toxins on board, infections on board that are potentially causing the gut barrier to be compromised. Doing things like probiotics can be very supportive in that process as you re trying to figure things out. Yuri: And isn t about 20 percent of T4 is converted to T3 in the gut as well? Izabella: Yeah, that s another very important thing: The gut and liver, they actually convert T4 into T3. We ll see in people with Hashimoto s that they ll have impaired gut function, and they ll also have impaired liver function. There s a phrase called liver congestion, and that sounds kind of weird to me, but that s the one most functional-medicine practitioners use. Basically, what it means is that when your gut is impaired, a lot of our toxins go out through our gut. When the gut barrier is impaired, then you re not going to be properly getting rid of toxins. Another pathway for getting rid of toxins is through sweat. One of the side effects of thyroid disease that nobody ever complains about but is present is actually reduced sweating. If you have an underactive thyroid, you re not going to be sweating as much, you re not going to be getting rid of toxins as much. Looking at that, you ve got your gut not serving as a good pathway to get rid of things, and then your skin is no longer a good pathway for getting rid of toxins. Your liver becomes overburdened and then your liver is basically stuck with getting rid of all of your toxins. Then it doesn t convert your T4 to T3 very well and neither does your gut. You re absolutely right; those are very important things to think about when you have thyroid disease. Working on your gut and liver can definitely make your medications work better, can make your internal stores of thyroid hormones work better, and your body as well. Yuri: That s huge. That s something not a lot of people think about. Even in the medical community, where it s very much you have a gut issue or a liver issue by itself; they don t look at the whole picture. I m just thinking off the top of my head here. If your liver is totally compromised and toxic, not only won t you be converting T4 properly, but you re probably not going to be metabolizing excess estrogen or regulating blood sugar properly, and that s going to lead to a whole host of problems. I didn t even know about the skin; that s pretty powerful. 11

12 Izabella: It s a whole cycle of things. Yuri: I guess the thyroid is basically, if it slows down, it just shuts down everything; everything is just conservation. Izabella: Yeah, exactly. It s, Let s conserve energy. I kind of like to think of it as hibernation mode. Semi-hibernation mode because you re not fully hibernating, but it s going to slow you down, so you re not going to be using as much energy. Yuri: Yeah. If you re in hibernation mode, think of the bear coming out of hibernation, and it s 30, 40 pounds overweight. That s kind of what it s going to be like, right? Izabella: Absolutely. Other than the extra fur on the body and things like that, that s not going to happen. Yuri: To shift gears to be a bit more optimistic here, if somebody, they ve worked out seemingly properly, they ve eaten a clean diet, and they re still having a tough time losing weight as a result of having Hashimoto s. What do you tell them? The first course of action would be to get diagnosed and then follow the protocols you mentioned? Are there other things they should avoid or start doing to help the process of losing weight? Izabella: Some of the biggest contributing hormones to weight with thyroid disease are actually the adrenal hormones. People with thyroid disease almost always have adrenal dysfunction. Whenever I test my clients, I find that about 90 percent of them are going to be in either stage two or three adrenal fatigue, where they basically whatever in their bodies is causing them so much stress, whether it s sleep deprivation, blood sugar imbalance, hidden infections, or just psychological stress they end up using up all of their cortisol. Then they have these very low levels of cortisol around, and their bodies basically go into conservation mode. My biggest tips for that I ve seen women who will work so hard; they ll try to walk for a few hours a day, they ll go to the gym, they ll be on these very low-calorie diets, they ll be eating very, very lean, and they ll be like, Oh my gosh, I just weighed myself, and I weigh three more pounds today than I did three days ago. What s going on here? It s that whole stress response of thinking that we re in a dangerous situation and then the thyroid said, Let s slow things down. Let s hold on to things. What I actually recommend for people who are having these problems with weight and thyroid is to do the following things: Try to sleep as much as you can. I would say, for two weeks, if you can go to bed by 9 p.m. and then commit to sleeping for 10 to 12 hours every night, that would be amazing. That can really help to restore some of those things. If you re somebody who s exercising a lot right now, cut back from the exercise. I ve had clients who cut back on exercise when they were in these advanced stages of adrenal fatigue, and, lo and behold, they started actually losing weight. The other part of that is making sure you re getting enough nutrients on board. Make sure that you re eating really good-quality food and you re not restricting yourself. Sometimes if you re doing the low-carb, you may not be getting enough calories on board, and you may not be having enough carbs to keep you satisfied. 12

13 Those are three things. They sound kind of counterintuitive, right? You need to sleep more and you need to eat more and obviously be less stressed, and that will help you gradually lose weight. That, to me, is kind of the first thing I would recommend before you do anything else. That can make a big difference. Just really getting enough sleep and eating enough can really reset your adrenals and then let your body know that it s not in danger, it doesn t have to hold on to ever single pound of fuel. Yuri: We serve a lot of female clients, and there s almost like a paradigm where they have a tough time eating more. It s almost like they feel like they have to eat fewer calories. There s this constant obsession or focus on how many calories are in a food, and that s kind of all they re focused on. Have you noticed that with a lot of people you ve helped? What kind of words of wisdom, as a female to a female, would you give along those lines? It s easy for me to say, hey, don t worry about your calories; focus on the quality of your foods. They re like, Yeah, whatever. How do you get that message across? Izabella: It s amazing because I used to have clients, and I used to be this way myself. I would eat those hundred-calorie packs. Do you know what I m talking about? They re full of sugar and Yuri: Oh yeah. I used to live on those in university. I was the lab rat for a couple diabetic studies, and we used to drink those Ensure drinks. My locker would have boxes of Ensure. I m studying kinesiology, no idea about how to eat well. This was just my personal story with nonsense like that, yeah. Izabella: I had a lot of Ensure in my days too because I thought it was healthy. People will eat these synthetic, processed foods. And they ll be, Okay, this has a hundred calories, this has a hundred calories, but you re really filling your body with junk, and you re not getting the nutrients. A lot of times, they ll be fortified, where they ll add different vitamins in, but the vitamins are often the cheap kind that don t get absorbed properly in your body, especially if you have any kind of methylation issues, which a lot of people with thyroid disease do; probably half of them have that issue. Then you end up basically filling yourself with junk that you can t process, and that s just causing more inflammation in your body. That tells your body you re under danger, and you end up essentially holding on to more weight in that respect. Really, if I can share anything is that my clients who stopped counting calories and stopped focusing on the number of calories they were eating, including myself, and just focused on eating real food, like eating avocados, eating good-quality organic meats, lots of vegetables, and things like that, you re not going to be hungry, and you re going to just start losing weight without really trying. That s one of the biggest things that I get from my clients. Some of them, sure, they ll do things to try and lose weight, and they ll try and get things optimized, but the others will say, You know, I haven t really been trying, and I just lost weight. I just started eating this way, and I feel amazing, my energy s great, and weight is just coming off. 13

14 I had the same thing with myself. The 15 extra pounds I weighed, I didn t have to focus on calories; I just started filling my body with really nourishing foods, and my body sort of got a new shape to it. I had always been working out. I always wanted to get a six-pack and never could do it. Then once I started going gluten-free, I was like, wow, where was that hiding? People will say the same things. It sounds kind of superficial and whatnot, but I think for us to really see the results of our work, it can be very, very gratifying. I would encourage anybody listening at home to think about that and just try to make one small change. Gluten and some of the grains, they can be very problematic on our blood sugar, and that can cause a lot of issues with anxiety levels, as well as putting on weight. When we eat a lot of carbohydrates, that s going to make us really hungry, so then we have to eat more frequently, and that s not going to keep us satisfied. Looking at more real foods and foods that balance our blood sugar, so lots of good proteins and fats. Carbohydrates, some, but not too much. Your body will be very grateful. Yuri: Awesome. I often refer to this as the French paradox, where the French, they re typically seen as thin and yet they eat whatever they want and there s very little heart disease. Having lived there, I could see it firsthand. You lived in Amsterdam for a number of years. Did you notice something similar there with the population when you compare it with living in the Sates? What are some of the visual differences you noticed? Izabella: Everybody in Amsterdam was much taller. That was one of the first things that we noticed. Most people were lean. You would not see an overweight person; you would hardly ever see an overweight person in the Netherlands. I don t know what the percentage rates were, but they were maybe 10 percent overweight, compared to the U.S., which, in some places, has as much as 40 percent of the population being overweight. It was amazing. One of the things people did there is they ate fresh and local. I was really excited about this when I first moved there because I had to go every single day to pick up food. They didn t use pesticides on most of their fruit and vegetables there, so you didn t even really have to buy organic because things were pretty much free of pesticides. Of course, that meant they didn t last as long as the ones with pesticides and GMOs do in your refrigerator, and you d have to go out and get them every couple of days. Eating fresh can be a big benefit because when we think about some of the pesticides that are in our foods, unfortunately, some of them have been connected to slowing down our metabolism. Some of them have been described as endocrine disruptors, where they mess up our whole endocrine system. There s one particular one that s used commonly on corn that has been connected to obesity. Just being pesticide-free I think made a big difference for people there. The other part of it was, people also rode bikes. That was a big thing; they rode bikes around town. Getting enough good movement is very, very important, especially conditioning yourself to that movement. 14

15 If you re somebody who s super exhausted right now, I would look at how movement makes you feel. If it makes you feel better, then do it. If it makes you feel worse, focus on resting and diet, and then move your way up to the movement. That s a really great way to sustain your muscles and to feel good about yourself. Not everybody is right at that moment. If you re really struggling, I would encourage you just to get some rest and then do things that are very supportive for you. Doing maybe a yoga or light stretching at the moment. The healthier you get, you re going to be able to do more exercise. Definitely, exercise is a great way to maintain your weight, but overdoing it is not a good thing, especially if you feel worse after the exercise. Yuri: I couldn t agree more. I ve got a couple rapid-fire questions for you to finish off here. In your experience, what s one thing people don t know they don t even know when it comes to fat loss or losing weight? Izabella: I think one people don t know is that having nutrient deficiencies on board can make them crave more foods. Taking a multivitamin supplement and getting those nutrients on board can be very helpful for them. Yuri: Awesome. And final one is: I just got word that, unfortunately, the human race is coming to extinction because of this obesity crisis. You re called in to this special task force, and they ask you, Izabella, you re the expert on this. What do we do? What s the one thing we can do, starting today, to reverse this problem and get our lives back? Izabella: I would start giving people more thermogenic foods and more foods that contain fat. I would give them avocados and coconut oil and coconut milk. I would incorporate that into their diets as much as I could. That way, they would be less hungry, and they would burn fat a little bit faster. Yuri: But there s so much fat in them! Izabella: It s the good fat, though! Fat keeps us full versus carbohydrates that may not keep us full. Yuri: Cool, awesome. This has been a fascinating conversation. Thank you so much for taking the time, Izabella. Everyone watching, we ll have a link to Izabella s book below this. It s a great read. If you ve got Hashimoto s or any kind of low-thyroid condition, it s just a tremendous read. You ll learn a tremendous amount in addition to what we ve already discussed here. Thank you so much for sharing your wisdom, Izabella. For our viewers and listeners, I hope you ve enjoyed this interview. We ll see you in the next one. Izabella: Thank you so much, Yuri, it s been a pleasure. 15