Latest / Health with Hashimoto’s - Thyroid or Immune Education for Autoimmune Thyroid Disease / Thyroid or Immune? Sorting the 6 Symptoms Every Woman with Hashimoto’s Knows ⎸ Ep 213

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Thyroid or Immune? Sorting the 6 Symptoms Every Woman with Hashimoto’s Knows ⎸ Ep 213 · Health with Hashimoto’s - Thyroid or Immune Education for Autoimmune Thyroid Disease

• 0:00
  Six of the most common symptoms I hear about from women with Hashimoto's.
• 0:05
  One is of course fatigue. There's weight resistance, brain fog,
• 0:09
  hair loss, constipation, feeling cold all the time. These are all super super
• 0:15
  common in women with hypothyroidism and or Hashimoto's.
• 0:19
  And you've been told that these are all just your thyroid and some of them are
• 0:22
  and some of them are never going to be fully fixed by your thyroid.
• 0:28
  Today, let's sort them thyroid or immune.
• 0:32
  Hashimoto's is an autoimmune condition. That means your immune system is attacking
• 0:35
  your thyroid, but knowing that is only the beginning.
• 0:39
  This summer series is built in three phases. Phase one was understanding what's
• 0:43
  happening in your body. Phase two is learning how to think about what you're learning.
• 0:47
  And phase three is building your own personal discernment framework with support.
• 0:53
  So most women with Hashimoto's have a lot of information.
• 0:56
  What they're missing is a filter, a way to evaluate what applies to them specifically.
• 1:02
  That is what this series is now designed to give you.
• 1:05
  If you want to start with a foundation, check with the show notes for Hashimoto's
• 1:09
  Decoded, new name, Hashimoto's Decoded, thyroid or immune.
• 1:13
  In less than one hour, I will walk you through the most common root causes and
• 1:17
  help you identify where to focus.
• 1:19
  My name is Esther Yunkin. I'm a registered nurse, holistic health educator,
• 1:22
  and the host of this podcast, Health with Hashimoto's.
• 1:25
  I believe your health is a blend of five interconnected areas,
• 1:29
  body, mind, spirit, diet, and environment. Let's work through this together.
• 1:34
  The thyroid or immune bucket framing system makes things a lot easier to think
• 1:39
  about and to understand what's going on with your health.
• 1:42
  So in summary, the thyroid bucket is how much your thyroid hormone is impacting.
• 1:49
  Every single cell in your body, all of your symptoms, root causes, and everything.
• 1:53
  Like medication lives in the thyroid bucket. Your immune bucket is why your
• 1:58
  immune system is attacking the thyroid in the first place.
• 2:01
  Medication does not live in the immune bucket?
• 2:05
  So this sorting question comes into play all of the time. It is how my brain
• 2:11
  thinks about Hashimoto's.
• 2:13
  And I've only recently started to clarify how my brain thinks on this podcast.
• 2:19
  So let's talk about the six most common symptoms of Hashimoto's and sort them into the two buckets.
• 2:27
  Number one, cold intolerance. And you feel cold all the time.
• 2:31
  All the time. I tell my husband that my bones are cold.
• 2:35
  For me, it happens mostly with my feet. Back before I knew any of this,
• 2:40
  before I was diagnosed, I was just cold all the time.
• 2:42
  I still run colder than the rest of my family, but it is not like it used to be.
• 2:47
  A lot of people with hypothyroidism just feel cold.
• 2:51
  See, thyroid hormone sets like your thermostat of your entire body.
• 2:57
  It impacts your metabolism, and metabolism runs your thermostat. So.
• 3:04
  Feeling cold all the time? That is very clearly the thyroid bucket.
• 3:09
  You are not getting enough thyroid hormone to your cells. Your cells are not
• 3:14
  having the little ignition switch of your thyroid hormone.
• 3:18
  You're not heating up. You're not warming up.
• 3:21
  If you are still cold all the time and you take thyroid medication,
• 3:25
  that could be a problem related to dosing or conversion.
• 3:31
  I want to emphasize that last part because most medications,
• 3:35
  levothyroxine, synthroid, things like that, are specifically T4 medications.
• 3:40
  That is the primary hormone that your thyroid produces.
• 3:45
  It is the inactive form.
• 3:47
  I have several different episodes about T4 and T3, what they do, what to look for.
• 3:52
  In essence, the T3 is what your T4 is converted to, and the T3 is like the ignition
• 4:01
  key of every single cell.
• 4:03
  If you are still having symptoms, it might not be related to T4 medication.
• 4:09
  It might be related to how your body converts that T4 to T3.
• 4:14
  If the conversion is not happening, then we need to work on why that conversion
• 4:19
  is not happening naturally in your body and or you need to work with your provider
• 4:24
  to get on a T3 medication as well.
• 4:28
  So in summary, Cold, intolerance, feeling cold all the time,
• 4:31
  that is the thyroid bucket.
• 4:33
  And I'm going to have to go a lot faster with the next ones if we're going to
• 4:36
  get through all six in the 10-minute short episodes of the summer.
• 4:40
  All right, let's talk about constipation.
• 4:42
  So constipation is typically a thyroid symptom.
• 4:46
  Your thyroid sets the pace of pretty much everything in your body, including your gut.
• 4:52
  Your gut tends to slow down when there's not enough thyroid hormone.
• 4:56
  So that is thyroid bucket.
• 4:58
  But then when your gut slows down, a huge portion of your immune system,
• 5:04
  like 70 to 80% of your immune system, lives in and around the gut.
• 5:08
  So it's going to, this constipation is going to show up in both the thyroid
• 5:13
  bucket and the immune bucket.
• 5:16
  Because when you're constipated, when things are slowing down,
• 5:19
  that means it's impacting your immune system, which is then impacting your thyroid.
• 5:24
  So constipation goes in both buckets.
• 5:28
  What about hair loss? Now hair loss, let's just go right off of the gut slowing down.
• 5:34
  When the gut is slowing down, absorption is impacted. Absorption is impacted
• 5:39
  because most absorption happens in your gut.
• 5:42
  And like I said, the gut is impacting your immune system.
• 5:48
  So for hair loss, a lot of the ingredients that you need for,
• 5:53
  you know, hair, ferritin, zinc, proteins, all of that is related to absorption.
• 6:00
  So again, hair loss, it's going to go in both buckets. The thyroid hormone does
• 6:05
  impact your hair growth cycle.
• 6:07
  When you don't have enough thyroid hormone, you're going to have more hairs
• 6:12
  in the resting and shedding phases of hair growth.
• 6:16
  So hair loss is thyroid, absolutely thyroid bucket, but it can also be impacted by the immune bucket.
• 6:25
  Also general hair thinning that is an especially like outer thirds of your eyebrows.
• 6:31
  Things like that are thyroid. If you're getting patches, round patches or irregular
• 6:37
  shaped like bald patches, that is something that you want to talk to your doctor
• 6:41
  about. That could be alopecia and related to something else.
• 6:44
  All right, brain fog. Huge, huge symptom of Hashimoto's.
• 6:50
  Your brain needs a lot of energy. Your brain needs a lot of ignition keys, that's thyroid.
• 6:58
  Inflammation though, inflammation is the immune system.
• 7:02
  And when you're dealing with a lot of inflammation, that impacts your brain.
• 7:07
  And so that's the immune side.
• 7:09
  Brain fog is in both buckets.
• 7:12
  And this is where like people get so confused or they try different things.
• 7:18
  Like they're going to try a bunch of stuff in that thyroid bucket.
• 7:21
  They're going to try the medications, the supplements, things that look at the
• 7:25
  thyroid bucket and treat the thyroid bucket.
• 7:28
  And then they don't get fully better and they just feel hopeless.
• 7:32
  But you have to look at both buckets for brain fog. You're looking at the immune
• 7:36
  system. You're looking at inflammation overall.
• 7:39
  You're also looking at thyroid function.
• 7:42
  So kind of same thing for weight.
• 7:46
  Of course with the thyroid side with a thyroid bucket you're looking at all
• 7:50
  of those ignition keys and when your cells don't have the ignition key they're
• 7:54
  not working well. They're not working optimally which means things are going to slow down.
• 7:59
  Slowing down is related to metabolism. When your metabolism slows down, you gain weight.
• 8:05
  You could be eating the same or less than you usually do.
• 8:08
  You can be working out the same or more than you usually do,
• 8:11
  and you are still gaining weight or holding on to weight. That's physiology.
• 8:16
  That is related to your thyroid. That's not willpower. that is not you to be blamed for anything.
• 8:23
  That's the thyroid. But also on the immune bucket or in the immune bucket is that inflammation.
• 8:30
  I'm sure you've seen pictures of people who post their inflamed self and their
• 8:36
  body and their faces, especially without inflammation.
• 8:40
  We know that inflammation is tied to weight resistance.
• 8:44
  So there are both buckets involved here in your weight, the thyroid bucket and the immune bucket.
• 8:51
  But I want you to know this is not a discipline problem. This is not you at
• 8:57
  fault for anything. I know you are trying your hardest.
• 9:01
  Sometimes you just need a little bit more information. You need to know how
• 9:04
  to sort things so that you can get your body to do what your body is designed
• 9:08
  to do and what it's supposed to be doing, right?
• 9:10
  All right, let's move on to number six, fatigue. This is huge.
• 9:15
  So much fatigue, so tired and tired like you are walking through mud or you're
• 9:22
  trying to function well on cold medicine.
• 9:26
  Like you're so tired, feel like things are not working well.
• 9:29
  And of course they're not working well because again, that thyroid hormone,
• 9:32
  you have less ignition keys.
• 9:34
  And if you have less ignition keys, then things are going to slow down.
• 9:38
  And that is the thyroid bucket.
• 9:41
  This is one of the things that people hope that synthroid or levothyroxine helps with right away.
• 9:47
  And for some people it does, and for some people it doesn't.
• 9:50
  And then we're still looking at the thyroid bucket, but we need to look at conversion.
• 9:54
  Is conversion happening?
• 9:56
  Do you have enough pre-T4?
• 9:59
  How is that lab value? Do you have enough pre-T3? What is that lab value like?
• 10:04
  What is your reverse T3 like? All of those questions are signals of why you are feeling so tired.
• 10:13
  All of those questions looking at those labs help you figure out the thyroid
• 10:17
  bucket and they help you figure out, you know, how conversion is happening in
• 10:21
  your body and whether or not you need more or different medication.
• 10:26
  Maybe you need a T4, maybe you need more T4, maybe you need a T3.
• 10:30
  Like I talked about earlier, this is a conversation about the thyroid bucket.
• 10:35
  And the fatigue, I don't really put very much at all in the immune bucket.
• 10:39
  I'm looking at fatigue as a thyroid bucket issue.
• 10:43
  All right, I'm already over 10 minutes. I tried to get through these six really
• 10:47
  quickly, but just know that it's very helpful to sort out your symptoms into
• 10:54
  the two different buckets, thyroid or immune.
• 10:57
  And if you're dealing with things that are in both buckets, that doesn't mean you're stuck.
• 11:02
  Quite a few of these symptoms landed in both buckets. And that's not bad news. It's not bad problems.
• 11:09
  It's just two different things. You get to look at two different buckets.
• 11:14
  I will help you sort. That is what I do in coaching, but we're already after
• 11:18
  10 minutes, so I want to wrap this up.
• 11:21
  If you have not started sorting, if you have not figured out how to sort all
• 11:26
  of your stuff into thyroid or immune, Hashimoto's Decoded is where the whole framework lives.
• 11:33
  It's $27, about an hour, a little less, and self-paced. You can get it right now.
• 11:38
  Head down to the show notes and click on the link for Hashimoto's Decoded, Thyroid or Immune.
• 11:43
  And once you go through that, if you feel like you just need a one-off call
• 11:46
  just to talk with me and pick my brain, like, oh, I have a question about this one.
• 11:50
  Does it go into both buckets? You can schedule a one-time coaching call,
• 11:54
  or you can sign up for the full six sessions.
• 11:57
  Whatever works for you. I want you to be able to feel like yourself again.
• 12:01
  I want you to be able to sort through everything and have the answers that you're looking for.
• 12:06
  This podcast is for informational and educational purposes only please discuss
• 12:10
  any changes with your trusted health care provider to take your next step join
• 12:14
  our school community and explore the courses available there you do not have
• 12:18
  to figure your health out alone
• 12:20
  so that is school s-k-o-o-l.com and it is the health with hashimoto's community
• 12:26
  i'll see you next time on the health with hashimoto's podcast.