Latest / Health with Hashimoto’s - Thyroid or Immune Education for Autoimmune Thyroid Disease / 130 // The Gardening Secret to Taking Control of Hashimoto’s

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130 // The Gardening Secret to Taking Control of Hashimoto’s · Health with Hashimoto’s - Thyroid or Immune Education for Autoimmune Thyroid Disease

0:00
Welcome to episode 130 of the Health with Hashimoto's podcast.
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I am talking to you from Minnesota in January where the ground is white. The creek is frozen.
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My 11-year-old was out on the creek yesterday or maybe the day before,
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tried to create an ice skating rink.
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He doesn't have ice skates, but that's okay. He was out there with a shovel making a rink.
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Everything is frozen. Everything is dead. Everything is white.
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Every once in a while, the snow all melts because, you know,
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it's crazy temperatures.
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And then everything is just gross. It's all brown or gray or muddy and everything is just gross.
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And then I opened my mailbox where my kids bring up the mail and inside the
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mail, there's a seed catalog or there's a chick catalog.
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And that brings such hope and excitement to our entire house when we get those catalogs.
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I don't know about you. I don't know if you get seed catalogs in the mail or chick catalogs,
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but these bring the hope of spring and they completely apply to your health
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and you taking ownership of what's going to happen in your health.
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I'm going to tell you all about how they relate to each other.
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First of all, hi, I'm Esther.
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I have Hashimoto's. I'm a registered nurse. I have four boys and I homeschool
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half of them have a super busy life, just like you.
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I have discovered in my decades of working with patients that people are busy.
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You don't have to work as a nurse to figure that out. But specifically talking
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with Hashimoto's patients, people with Hashimoto's, everybody is so very busy.
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It seems like we all carry so much weight. We all have lots of balls that we're juggling.
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We all wear lots of hats, whatever kind of analogy you want to use. We are all busy.
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And so there's different things that each of us has to consider when we are looking at our health.
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And you are the CEO of your own health. You are in charge.
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You are the gardener. You are the chicken keeper.
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I don't know what they call those. Is there an official word?
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Like, you know, a sheep herder is a shepherd, you know, a dairy farmer.
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They're a dairy farmer. What's a chicken owner? I don't know.
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I have chickens. We have maybe 20-ish chickens and I have roosters and I have hens.
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So technically I do not need to get chicks, but I've been looking through the Chick Catalog.
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And every spring I do this, or every January, I'm like, okay,
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I really need some new chickens.
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And every year, it's like a discussion in our house. My husband's like,
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do we really need new chickens? Because we have a hen going broody in the spring.
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But this year, I've looked at the catalog, and I want some new blue egg layers,
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and I want some new green egg layers.
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I feel like we don't have enough variety in our eggs.
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I mean, they're the same inside. It's just the aesthetics. And I know that.
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And I also want a couple that lay the deep dark chocolate brown color egg.
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Again, same thing inside, but they're just so fun to look at.
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So every year, you know, we flip through the catalog.
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It sits on our kitchen counter. Everybody is looking at the chick catalog.
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Not everybody looks at the seed catalog, but I feel like the seed catalog is
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more applicable to more people in it who listen to this podcast.
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So I don't know about you, let me know.
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Send me a message on Instagram or in our school community, and let's talk about
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chickens or your garden. I would love to know what you're looking at.
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So you are the CEO of your own health. You are the gardener of your health as
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a garden, and you are the gardener.
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And how this applies is that experts can guide you, but ultimately,
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it's up to you to cultivate your health.
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I use the CEO analogy a lot. So we're going to shift that to gardening and it'll
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be gardening, not chickens, even though out of the two, I much prefer my chickens
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rather than the garden because the chickens,
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I mean, sure they poop, but there's no weeds.
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I don't really like weeds. I don't know about you.
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Not a big fan. I would like to go out in August or September and just harvest,
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not wade through a bunch of weeds that we did not deal with in the earlier part. of the summer.
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So when you're looking at a seed catalog, there's a couple of things that you need to know.
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First of all, you want to know your zone and you want to know your soil type
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because you have to be able to buy the right seeds.
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You want to know what's going to work.
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You wouldn't plant like a tropical plant. You wouldn't plant what's something
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like I wouldn't plant a pineapple in Minnesota because it's not going to grow.
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I wouldn't plant desert plants. I wouldn't plant
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in my soil, because it's not going to work. I see people with lemon trees in
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the seed catalogs, and they talk
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about how you can bring it inside in the winter so that it doesn't die.
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And that way, in a northern climate, you can still have a lemon tree,
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which sounds really cool.
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Also, I already mentioned, I think I have four boys. And I think I mentioned
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that I have four boys, not I think I have four boys. I absolutely have four boys.
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I know that if I brought a tree into the house, it would get knocked over.
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We have things flying around our house all the time, whether it's darts or paper
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airplanes or balls or arrows.
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They have set up a 10 meter archery range in my kitchen.
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I don't have like a kitchen, you know, to the next room, to the next room.
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And they have a little rope that cordons it off so that everybody stays safe.
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Like I know my family and I'm not going to get a lemon tree because it would
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not be safe to bring it into the house.
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So that's the number one thing when you're looking at seeds.
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You have to know what's going to work in your area.
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And so how does this apply to your health? Well, you have to know yourself.
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You want to know your symptoms. And if you know your diagnosis,
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you want to take that into consideration too.
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Like, you know, if you know that you have Hashimoto's, you're not going to apply
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something that's related to a completely unrelated diagnosis.
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I mean, you're not going to look up and say, what can I do for chronic kidney
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disease when you have Hashimoto's? Maybe you have both, but they are not related.
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And I say that even as somebody who says all the time that everything is related to everything.
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And virtually every single disease comes down to a couple of things,
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including inflammation and oxidative stress.
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So I have a hard time saying that it's completely different,
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but there are completely different things, right?
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Chronic kidney disease, and Hashimoto's. You are not going to approach them in the same way.
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So that is one way that you can look at your health as like a garden or looking at seeds.
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You want to know what your symptoms are and what your diagnosis is.
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If you don't have a diagnosis of Hashimoto's, you still know a couple of things.
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You're listening to this podcast.
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So maybe you know that you have fatigue and you're completely tired.
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Maybe you know that bottling your metabolism.
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There's so many things that you are working on, and those are the things that
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you're going to be looking for solutions for.
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So you want to know your gardening zone and your soil. You want to know your
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symptoms and your diagnosis.
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And of course, these are places that your doctor, your endocrinologist,
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your specialist, these can help you.
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And that is kind of like selecting the seeds and the plants.
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So you want to know your zone and your soil, your soil type,
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so that you can, you know, even know what to look at in the seed catalog.
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And then you're looking at the seed catalog and...
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I don't know about you, but first I go through the entire thing.
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I look at every single page and I dream, okay, if I was in a tropical climate,
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if I was in somewhere warm, I would love to have this plant.
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And then you can get down to the reality.
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I live in Minnesota. Not everything is going to be here. So I look at what would
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I love to have in my garden?
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And at this point, when I'm looking
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at the seed catalog, I'm still not contemplating like all the realities.
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I'm looking at all the possibilities.
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And that is what your doctor or your endocrinologist, your specialist can help
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you with. They can give you all the possibilities.
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Maybe for your specific situation, the doctor is like, okay,
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I want you on some thyroid medication. I want you on Synthroid.
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I want you on low-dose Naltrexone, like we talked about in the last episode
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with the pharmacist, the LDN.
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Maybe your doctor says, I want you doing red light therapy. We are going going
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to have an episode about that in, I think, next month.
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I have a guest coming on. She's actually a nurse I worked with in the emergency
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department. And we have both gone into the holistic health space.
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And she uses red light therapy. So we're going to talk about that.
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And maybe there's a lot of different things that your doctor or your endocrinologist
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or your chiropractor can recommend.
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That's like the seed catalog, looking at the seed catalog and saying,
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all of these are possibility.
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I could get you know these shrubs and
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I could get these all these vegetables and I can get all of these fruits
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and my dream list is huge
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when I'm looking through that seed catalog like it's
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like a little kid in the you know back when are you old enough to have the jc
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pennies catalogs when you were little like we'd go through with a marker and
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circle everything now they get amazon catalogs in the mail and I mean amazon
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learned from that they didn't used to have a catalog now they have a Christmas
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catalog they send to every household so that your kids can circle everything.
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I'm like that with the garden, with the seed catalog. Like I'm circling, I'm making this dream.
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Same with your health. You could have all of these dreams. Maybe you want a sauna.
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Maybe you want an infrared sauna. Maybe you want the red light therapy.
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Maybe you want those vibration plates for your lymphatic system.
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There's so many different fun things, fun tools that you can look at and you're
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like, oh my goodness, I want that.
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All of these things would help. Maybe you want chiropractic visits.
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I had that at the beginning of this year and it helped so much.
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I had a, I think, 26 visit package and it was so helpful because the chiropractor
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even told me, he's like, you're doing so many things right.
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You're doing all of the right things as far as diet and lifestyle.
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We just need to get your nerves and your spine, your bones, we need to get everything
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in alignment so the nerves are sending the right signals. So maybe that's on your dream list.
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There are a lot of things where, you know, your doctor or your specialist,
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they come in with all of these ideas
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that can help you and that is super
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helpful just like the seed catalog we have a dream list just like that in your
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health you have a list of things that could help that you would love to do at
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some point in time however just like my garden I don't have the space and I
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don't have the budget to do all of that.
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So you, as the gardener in this scenario, the gardener of your health,
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you need to choose what's going to work and what's not.
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Your doctor, your specialist, is there to give you the ideas and the suggestions,
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but you are the one who figures out, is this going to work for my life?
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Your chiropractor, maybe they say, maybe they're the ones who diagnosed you
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with Hashimoto's. That's the case for my sister.
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She has thyroid antibodies and the chiropractor looked at her labs and said,
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you have this and said, you need to go off gluten and dairy.
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Totally shut down my sister. Like she still thinks about it and she's trying to do it.
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But that was the first thing that the chiropractor said to her.
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And my sister is like, I, what?
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No, I can't. What? You know, it was not something that she could apply to her
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life at that point in time.
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She was the gardener. She had to say, this is going to work in my situation.
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This is going to work. Like I have enough garden space for this.
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I have enough budget for this. That wasn't something, the huge dietary change
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wasn't something that she could do at that time.
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Because she is the gardener, she gets to make that decision.
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It's not the chiropractor's decision to make. It's the chiropractor or the endocrinologist
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or the doctor who gets to recommend that this might help.
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And remember how I said that by August or September, my garden is overrun with
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weeds because I didn't have the time.
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I didn't have the energy to take care of them. I could send my kids out to go weed the garden.
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But quite honestly, I have not trained them well to do that.
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And so they don't do a good job.
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I carry the burden of guilt on that one. Like I should have trained them better.
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And I have not. So we are not a good weeding family.
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And then, you know, things happen, weeds grow, that's what they do.
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And we don't have as good of a harvest.
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Well, the same thing in your health. So the doctor gave you this wide array
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of like all of these things could help. and you get to look at that selection.
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You say, okay, these are the things that I actually have time and space and budget for.
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But then you also have to maintain. You have to figure out, do I have time.
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Space, mental space, energy to maintain this?
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This is why I talk so often about choosing things that are simple and sustainable.
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Because if it's not sustainable, like let's go back to the example of my sister,
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going off of dairy, sure, maybe she can do it for a day. She can figure out what to eat.
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But for her, it's not sustainable.
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She eats out at her mother-in-law's a lot.
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And so to have my sister have a special diet, it would really be my mother-in-law
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or her mother-in-law that has to make some accommodations.
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And that's not going to happen right now. There's a lot of different things
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that make my sister say, this is not a choice. This is not a decision that's going to work right now.
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It's like the weeds growing up. She could do that change for a small amount
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of time, but then problems would happen.
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She's going to have some ice cream because ice cream is good. My grandpa just died.
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He was 97 and we had ice cream at his funeral because he loved ice cream.
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Like even as he got into his later bad years with Alzheimer's,
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like that was still like the one thing that he loved. He loved ice cream.
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And so we are an ice cream family. Are we going to give up our ice cream?
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Well, that'd be really hard.
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Do they have dairy-free ice creams? They do. And that's a whole other topic,
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pick, but you get where I'm going with this.
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You have to pick things that are sustainable, because if they're not sustainable.
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Then just like not weeding your garden, you're not going to get a good harvest.
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And our goal is a good harvest. Our goal with the garden is a good harvest.
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Our goal with our health is abundant health, to feel like yourself again,
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to have enough energy to carry out the life that you want, to be fully present
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for your kids, for your family, at your job, in your recreational activities.
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You want to be fully present and you need energy to be able to do that.
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Being a lump, just like, you know, a lump like a rock wherever you are,
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whether you're at the sports games,
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watching your kids, your work even, just trying to get through the day,
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getting the bare minimum with the kids or, you know, making meals,
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just doing the bare minimum.
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It's so hard to go through life doing the bare minimum and wanting to be and
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do more. You need energy.
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And so we need to figure out what can work with the amount of energy that we have.
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Now, when it comes to choosing, you know, dietary changes to make,
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I go through this with you in the Holistic Hashimoto's course,
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because a lot of things come down to what is going to work in your life right now at this time,
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with this season, with this amount of energy that you have,
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like what is going to work for you.
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And there's an entire week that we spend on your diet and figuring out,
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are there changes to be made? We all have changes.
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There's always things that we could do better, but figuring out what is going
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to make the most impact while being simple and sustainable.
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I have two little eBooks in there. You know, if you decide to go down one route
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or down another route, I have, you know, supplies or resources for you so that
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you can make that work into your life.
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And then in a garden, you're also going to deal with weeds and pests.
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And of course, in our health, we have weeds and pests. We have things that crop up.
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And the biggest thing I see in this category is the things that bombard us that we don't choose.
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I live out in the country, and if I'm going on a walk in the early spring or
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any time in the summer, there is a chance that the farmers all around me could
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be spraying their crops.
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And so I try not to go outside during that time because, I mean,
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they're poisons and we don't want that.
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So that's a big case of an environmental toxin that I would be exposed to. But we all have that.
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There are always things that come into our lives that are triggers that can
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harm our health, that could exacerbate our Hashimoto's.
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Maybe it's a huge stressful event.
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Maybe it's, like I said, the chemical toxins.
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Maybe it's inflammatory foods, like you ate something.
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There's a lot of different things and we get to look at those as empowered people.
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Okay, this is what happened and this is what I'm going to do in response.
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We don't have to be a victim.
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We don't have to just, you know, blame the circumstances. We can look at it and say, what can I do?
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How can I recover from this? And how can I prevent it from happening again?
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The weeds in our garden are going to grow. We are going to have pests,
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the deer, the rabbits, whatever it is for you, maybe voles, moles,
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I don't know, there's, you know, rodents in your garden.
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Maybe those are pests that you have to deal with. Just like in our health,
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we also have to deal with pests and things that crop up.
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I mean, stress, it is a pest, right? We want to be able to remove them.
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And there is an entire module in the Holistic Hashimoto's course about stress.
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We started out with stress because that is one of the easiest things that you
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can learn to take action against. You can't remove all stress.
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We live in one of the most stressful times in history.
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I think I said a couple of weeks ago on the podcast that I had heard,
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and I don't even remember the statistic anymore, that we are exposed to as much
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stress as our grandparents were in their entire life, and we're exposed in a
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very short amount of time.
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And if you remember that statistic, I don't even remember which episode it was.
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Let me know, because I want to learn that statistic again. I did not write it
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down. I just told it to you.
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So back to the garden, when you get that seed catalog in January or February,
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and you're looking at it, you're not dreaming of all of the work.
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You're dreaming of the end result. When you're looking at all of the strawberry
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plants, you are picturing the strawberries.
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You're tasting, smelling the strawberries in your mind. You are picturing the abundant harvest.
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When you're looking at all of the different varieties of peppers,
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you're like, oh my goodness, look at those cute little mini ones.
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Look at the big ones. Look at all the colors. Look at this purple pepper.
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So cool. What would that be like to have it in my garden?
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It's the same thing with your health. You are dreaming and you're looking forward to better health.
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What would it feel like to have more energy?
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What would it feel like to not have brain fog? What would it feel like to have motivation?
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How would you be functioning if your metabolism was working better and you could
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drop 10%, 20% of your weight?
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How would that change your life? That's what you get to dream about and that
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is what you get to implement. You are the gardener.
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You are the person who ultimately makes the decisions.
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Your doctor, your specialist, chiropractor, all of those, they make recommendations.
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They have the seed catalog.
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They help you figure out your zone.
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You get to look at the size of your garden, the size of your budget.
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You get to look at how much time, how much mental energy you have to invest
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in different things, and you get to figure out how you get to implement all of the changes.
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You are the one making the decisions.
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Your health is in your hands. The seed catalogs come and we have lots of dreams.
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But then we get to do the work. And that is what I invite you to do.
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You have your health in your hands. And I have a tool for you.
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It is the seed catalog, except it's specific to you.
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The Holistic Hashimoto's course is designed for you.
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I have it set up so that it is specific, so that you look at it,
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you're like, okay, we're talking about stress.
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This is my situation. And this is what I can do. And I walk you through like
20:48
different options and I teach you how to do things.
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So the seed catalog of the Holistic Hashimoto's course is helping you do exactly
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what you have time, space, mental energy for.
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Everything in there is designed to be simple and sustainable so that you don't
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have to keep fighting all of the weeds.
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You don't have to keep fighting. I want you succeeding, but you are the gardener.
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You get to make the decision. It's not your doctor. It's not your endocrinologist.
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It's not your chiropractor.
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They have the suggestions, but you are the one in control of your health.
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Speaking of doctors, if you are going to use your FSA or HSA money for the Holistic
21:26
Hashimoto's course, I do have a letter that you can print out.
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It's on the website and then you can have your doctor sign it so that you have
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documentation for the IRS because the IRS is in charge of your FSA and HSA money.
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So if you would ever get audited, then the IRS has proof that your doctor said
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that the Holistic Hashimoto's course is a good part of your treatment plan.
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The IRS says they want things that your HSA and FSA money are going for,
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they want it for treatment.
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And so that's why I have that letter so your doctor can sign it and say,
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yes, this is what this person needs.
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So the link, of course, is down in the show notes. You can find the Holistic
22:05
Hashimoto's course in our school community. It's in the classroom tab.
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The link down below will take you directly to the page where you can read more about it.
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You can get to the course either one of those ways. I always want to make it super simple for you.
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So head down to the show notes, click the link. I cannot wait to help you out
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through the Holistic Hashimoto's course because you are in control of your health
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and this is going to be a great thing for you to use as you take control.
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This podcast is for informational and educational purposes only.
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Please discuss any concerns and plans with your trusted healthcare professional.
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If you found this episode helpful, will you please share it with a friend?
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I'll see you next week on the Health with Hashimoto's podcast.
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Music.