Latest / Love Your Gut / Ep. 126: You've Been Taking Iron for 2 Years For Low Ferritin. Here's What This Is Telling You

Transcript

Ep. 126: You've Been Taking Iron for 2 Years For Low Ferritin. Here's What This Is Telling You · Love Your Gut

• 0:03
  Dr. Heather Finley: Welcome to the Love Your Gut Podcast.
• 0:05
  Dr. Heather Finley: I'm your host, Dr.
• 0:06
  Dr. Heather Finley: Heather Finley, registered dietitian and gut health specialist.
• 0:10
  Dr. Heather Finley: I understand the frustration of dealing with GI issues because I've been there and I spent over two decades searching for answers for my own gut issues of constipation, bloating, and stomach pain.
• 0:21
  Dr. Heather Finley: I've dedicated my life to understanding and solving my own gut issues.
• 0:25
  Dr. Heather Finley: And now I'm here to guide you.
• 0:28
  Dr. Heather Finley: On this podcast, I'll help you identify the true root causes of your discomfort.
• 0:33
  Dr. Heather Finley: So you can finally ditch your symptoms for good.
• 0:36
  Dr. Heather Finley: My goal is to empower you with the knowledge and tools you need so that you can love your gut and it will love you right back.
• 0:43
  Dr. Heather Finley: So if you're ready to learn a lot, gain a deeper understanding of your gut and find lasting relief.
• 0:48
  Dr. Heather Finley: You are in the right place.
• 0:50
  Dr. Heather Finley: Welcome to the love your gut podcast.
• 0:55
  So a couple months ago, our dishwasher was not working, and by didn't work, I mean it was literally not even worth it to run the dishes in the dishwasher.
• 1:05
  You would run the full cycle with the best detergent possible, and the dishes were just not clean, no matter how much you scrubbed and all the things.
• 1:15
  So we went through multiple cycles of, like, buying different detergent.
• 1:20
  We switched from liquid to pods and the Rinse Aid, like, all the stuff.
• 1:25
  And then I just started hand washing my dishes because literally the thing just didn't work.
• 1:31
  And if you think about it for a second, it's like it's kind of unhinged, like, the things that we, we went to to try to fix this dishwasher.
• 1:40
  Well, turns out the dishwasher was never gonna work, regardless of what soap we used, because it had been installed wrong.
• 1:49
  The filter was installed wrong, so there was, like, a backflow situation happening.
• 1:54
  So it smelled, and there was just all sorts of issues, and it had been backed up since we had a power outage, and it shorted out the dishwasher, and we had to get it fixed.
• 2:05
  And now looking back, I'm like,"Yes, that is exactly when it stopped working." So why am I telling you this?
• 2:13
  There was no detergent on the Earth that was going to fix that.
• 2:19
  Every single fix I tried was a real fix, right?
• 2:22
  These are all legitimate solutions to a dishwasher problem.
• 2:26
  They were not solutions to my dishwasher problem, and I had no way of knowing that, because the part that was actually broken was nothing that I could see or also nothing that I had the expertise to fix.
• 2:41
  What does this have to do with you?
• 2:43
  This is very similar to what we see with iron and ferritin issues.
• 2:49
  So enter the iron supplement aisle.
• 2:52
  What I wanna say this whole episode is basically that iron, most of the time, does not fix ferritin.
• 3:03
  And that can be an uncomfortable thing to hear, but you probably already know that because you're listening to this podcast, and maybe you have known that for a while.
• 3:12
  You just haven't wanted to go there because every single person that you have consulted with about your ferritin issues has told you to take iron, most likely.
• 3:24
  When I was four months postpartum with one of my kids, my ferritin was nine.
• 3:30
  I had a doctorate in clinical nutrition, and that is so humbling.
• 3:34
  I was immediately handed a referral for an iron infusion from my thyroid doctor and But yet nobody could tell me why it was nine.
• 3:46
  It was just like,"Oh, your ferritin's nine." We didn't look at any other labs, just get an iron infusion.
• 3:54
  Quote, unquote, she said,"You're gonna feel so much better." But I just wasn't ready to do that.
• 4:00
  I had heard horror stories about iron infusions, and wanted to know why my ferritin was low.
• 4:06
  So I just decided, you know what?
• 4:09
  I'm gonna take some oral iron, see how I do, because that's also what I had learned about ferritin being low, was just take iron.
• 4:19
  So I took one kind, then I took a fancier kind, and then a different form, and then I took it every other day, and then I took it with vitamin C, and all this is probably sounding familiar to you.
• 4:29
  But my number, like barely budged.
• 4:32
  So it was like, I compare this to like walking up to a door.
• 4:37
  You know when you walk up to a door and it says pull, but you're pushing it, and then it doesn't open you, you push harder, and then you put your shoulder into it?
• 4:47
  That is exactly what you're doing when you're taking iron and your ferritin won't budge.
• 4:52
  You will try the six things right in front of you before you look at the glass and it says,"Oh, push, not pull," right?
• 5:03
  So that is what a lot of people spend so much time doing, is never looking for the fact that maybe there's a dishwasher problem or an installation problem, never looking that it says push not pull.
• 5:17
  And I want you to notice something about how that felt, because that's really what this whole episode is about.
• 5:24
  Um, if iron has not worked for you, you've probably had the thought, like maybe iron isn't the answer, or maybe you've thought, I must be just taking the wrong iron.
• 5:35
  I know we've all had those thoughts.
• 5:37
  So let's talk about why it's not a dumb belief to think that iron would fix ferritin.
• 5:45
  Your ferritin's low.
• 5:47
  Ferritin is an iron storage problem, therefore you think, well, if I don't have enough iron to store, then I should take more, right?
• 5:55
  That logic like completely tracks on a surface level.
• 5:59
  It's also what your doctor believes.
• 6:00
  It's what the pharmacy aisle is organized around.
• 6:03
  Your mom probably told you to do it.
• 6:04
  It's what comes up when you first search it.
• 6:07
  So that is s- totally normal, and for some people, taking iron does work for their ferritin.
• 6:15
  I would say in my experience, one out of 10 women.
• 6:20
  I actually recently posted an Instagram Reel, and I literally went through, like, 10 of our current iron clients, and I looked at how many people actually needed iron to fix their ferritin, and it was 1 out of 10 people.
• 6:34
  And I would say, obviously, that's a small sample size, but in general, that seems about right of the amount of people that actually need iron for their ferritin.
• 6:43
  So if you're truly low in iron and a lot of the other pieces of the puzzle, then it may actually be helpful, and you might actually need more iron.
• 6:55
  But there's a reason that that's, like, step four of the process If you're listening to this episode, maybe you've already tried that.
• 7:03
  So we wanna talk today about what are the other pieces, um, and what you've already tried, what are some other avenues that you can explore.
• 7:13
  I wanna talk about, first of all, just the mental exhaustion, the emotional exhaustion of that.
• 7:20
  You've probably thought about, like, how much money you've spent on iron.
• 7:23
  You've probably thought about how much money you've spent on doctor's appointments or medical appointments.
• 7:28
  The, the worst part of that is what it does to your certainty.
• 7:32
  Somewhere around, like, the third, fourth try, you feel like you don't know what's going on with your body.
• 7:39
  You don't know if you're exhausted because your ferritin is 14.
• 7:43
  maybe you don't know if you're exhausted because you have a four-year-old who doesn't sleep through the night, or maybe you're thinking like,"Well, I'm perimenopausal, and this is what everybody says I should feel like." You, you start to lose hope because you truly don't know what's helping and what's not helping.
• 8:00
  So you almost start, like, suppressing how you feel.
• 8:04
  Maybe your husband asks you how you're feeling, and you just say,"Fine," because you're really not fine, but you don't really know what your, like, baseline normal is.
• 8:13
  You stop bringing it up at appointments because you've heard many times your labs look good, and it's just easier to not get into it.
• 8:23
  You probably have a drawer full of half-finished bottles, and you genuinely could not tell me or anybody what actually has worked for you.
• 8:34
  So that's really the cost that nobody counts.
• 8:37
  It isn't, like, two years or$400.
• 8:39
  It's that you no longer trust your own read on yourself, and that is the exact thing that you need in order to make your next decision.
• 8:49
  And it's also why so many women just stop making decisions.
• 8:53
  It's, it's what keeps you from continuing to pursue fixes because you-- If iron fixes low ferritin, and then it didn't work for you, it can only mean one of two things, right?
• 9:05
  Either the wrong iron, not enough of it.
• 9:07
  Um, those are the only conclusions that you're thinking of, and you're thinking,"Well, that didn't work for me, so maybe this is just how I'm gonna feel." Um, you can't necessarily get out of this by, like, trying harder.
• 9:21
  Um, you already have done that.
• 9:24
  You're probably the most disciplined person that you know.
• 9:27
  So here's what I want you to know that is actually true about this.
• 9:34
  The standard approach of taking iron for low ferritin wasn't failing you.
• 9:40
  The iron was actually just helping you to answer a different question.
• 9:45
  Everything that you have done has told us something about what is actually going on with your body.
• 9:52
  So what do I mean by that?
• 9:55
  What I mean by that is if iron didn't work for you, we need to understand actually what ferritin is.
• 10:03
  So I like to compare ferritin to savings.
• 10:06
  Ferritin is not a vitamin level.
• 10:08
  It's not a dial that you turn.
• 10:09
  It is savings.
• 10:10
  So it is the reserve that your body builds when there is a surplus, the same way that you would grow a savings account, when you earn more than you spend.
• 10:21
  So now think about what taking iron actually is in that picture.
• 10:26
  Taking iron is making a deposit.
• 10:29
  But the thing about deposits, if you are spending more than you earn, you can walk into the bank and hand them twenty dollars and your savings will not grow, not because the deposit didn't happen, but because the deposit was already spent.
• 10:45
  You're spending more than you're depositing into the bank.
• 10:48
  That is what happens to a lot of people.
• 10:51
  That reframes some of the question.
• 10:54
  So the question was never,"How much iron do I need to take?" The question is, what's happening to the money?
• 11:01
  Is the deposit even reaching the account?
• 11:04
  Can the bank move it once it's there?
• 11:07
  And if there's nothing left over at the end of the month, which is your ferritin number by itself, that's really almost a useless number.
• 11:14
  It's just a balance.
• 11:15
  A balance tells you how much is in there, but it doesn't tell you why.
• 11:20
  You could look at two people's bank accounts.
• 11:22
  They could have the exact same amount of money in those bank accounts, and the reason why they have that amount of money could be completely different.
• 11:31
  One person could make twice as much as the other person, but maybe they spend twice as much as the other person.
• 11:38
  So two women could have a ferritin of nineteen or lower for completely different reasons and need completely opposite things.
• 11:47
  So you cannot tell them apart by just how tired they feel.
• 11:50
  Um, and then all the guessing is what really keeps people stuck Okay, so if iron isn't the answer, then what do you actually need to look at?
• 12:00
  There are three places that money goes, and I have done full episodes on each of these, so I'm gonna move a little bit fast because you can go back and listen to those episodes.
• 12:10
  I will link them in the show notes.
• 12:12
  But number one, the deposit never reaches the account.
• 12:14
  So you swallow the iron, it doesn't get in.
• 12:17
  Usually, that is low stomach acid, H.
• 12:20
  pylori infections, because iron is showing up in a form that your body can't use, and acid is what helps break and extract that iron.
• 12:29
  Sometimes it's motility, because if things aren't moving, nothing is getting delivered.
• 12:33
  Sometimes it's what you're taking it with, like coffee, um, because it's gonna bind to the iron and walk it straight back out of you.
• 12:41
  So that is-- There is one where, like, changes matter, so you can move your iron two hours away from your coffee if you think that that is the case for you.
• 12:53
  Um, more than likely, you've already tried that.
• 12:56
  Reason number two is the money is in the account, but the bank can't move it.
• 13:00
  So iron doesn't have legs.
• 13:02
  It cannot travel through your blood on its own.
• 13:05
  It also cannot load itself into storage.
• 13:08
  It needs a truck, it needs a driver, and the driver is built out of copper.
• 13:13
  So you can have a perfectly funded account and the bank with no one behind the counter.
• 13:19
  So you show up to the bank, and they are closed, or nobody is working at the front desk.
• 13:24
  So this is where retinol matters, uh, the real kind, not beta carotene.
• 13:29
  This is where B12 needs to look at, to be looked at, possibly MMA.
• 13:34
  Serum B12 is not a complete picture, and this is why a woman on high-dose iron sometimes feels worse rather than better, because you're just piling up inventory into a warehouse that doesn't have a truck or a driver Okay, and then last, number three is you're spending more than you're depositing.
• 13:54
  So this is often one that nobody talks about, and it's the one that I would bet for most of you that are listening.
• 14:01
  Sometimes it's literal, like the tub is draining faster than it fills, so this would be like heavy periods.
• 14:07
  If that is you, then this is worth getting evaluated by your provider,'cause everything runs alongside that conversation.
• 14:16
  You have to fix a leak, and minerals are a huge part of that.
• 14:19
  Gut health is a huge part of that.
• 14:21
  Stress, nervous system, there's so many pieces of that.
• 14:24
  But sometimes your body is hiding the money on purpose.
• 14:28
  So inflammation of any kind will tell your body to lock iron away, because most things that would like to make you sick also need iron to grow.
• 14:40
  So your body is smart enough to know,"Hey, let's move iron away." Your tank is already full, but your ferritin reads low.
• 14:49
  every milligram you add is getting locked up with the rest.
• 14:53
  So sometimes, and I think this is the one that will make some of you think, is nobody puts money into savings during a bad month, right?
• 15:02
  If you have been under-eating, training really hard, running on adrenaline for two years, you have a toddler that doesn't sleep, a job that doesn't stop, maybe your body is just, like, not in a surplus season.
• 15:15
  you're covering the bills.
• 15:16
  You're keeping the lights on.
• 15:18
  You will keep making red blood cells so you can carry oxygen, but you will not build a reserve, because building a reserve is what a body does when it has enough left over and when it's not inflamed and stressed.
• 15:30
  So if you have underlying gut infections, you have underlying things going on, this is a big one, which is why you just cannot out-supplement an overwhelmed system.
• 15:40
  So I say that all the time, and it's very literal here.
• 15:45
  So the thing that usually happens right about now is now you're like,"Okay, well, that's so overwhelming.
• 15:52
  What do I actually do about, about this?" The first thing that I think is helpful is instead of having the thought,"Oh, great, like, I've wasted two years and$400 on iron," I get that The mindset shift here is that gave you information that you could not have gotten any other way.
• 16:14
  You know now with certainty that the intake of iron isn't your bottleneck.
• 16:19
  That is useful information, and that is helpful for knowing what your next step is.
• 16:25
  Another thing that I'll say is if you've maybe stopped believing that your ferritin can change, I get it.
• 16:32
  I've been there before too.
• 16:33
  You've probably tried so many times that you're just like,"I'm investing in all this stuff.
• 16:39
  I'm disappointed." Your body is protecting you from disappointment because you're just doing, like, simple math in your head.
• 16:47
  So if your own belief is really tapped right now, you can borrow mine for a little bit.
• 16:52
  My ferritin went from nine to 77 in almost four months once I stopped taking iron, and I started getting to the real reason why my ferritin was low.
• 17:05
  We have had so many other clients with the same experience.
• 17:10
  We have had clients with a ferritin of three get their ferritin up, and this is, like, without infusions.
• 17:16
  We certainly have clients that do need to get an infusion, um, while we're working on underlying gut stuff, especially if they just feel like they cannot function, but I will say that is the minority versus the majority.
• 17:30
  So you don't have to believe right now that it can work.
• 17:34
  You just need to believe enough that there is something else out there that you could look at.
• 17:40
  Looking at how your whole system is working together and looking at the three things that we looked at.
• 17:46
  Is your deposit reaching your account?
• 17:50
  Are you-- do you have money in the account, but you can't move it?
• 17:54
  So your iron can't be transported, or is inflammation blocking your ferritin from underlying gut infections or inflammation?
• 18:04
  Whatever it might be, is that blocking the iron from actually being stored?
• 18:10
  Because once you know what that is, maybe it's a combination of those things, you can actually do something about it.
• 18:16
  So one thing that you can do is get a full iron panel.
• 18:22
  The first step is ferritin on its own is not enough information.
• 18:28
  We love a full Monty iron panel because it'll at least tell you what's going on in your blood with the iron system.
• 18:37
  If your provider won't run a full Monty iron panel, I would at least get a ferritin, a serum iron, TIBC, transferrin, um, if you can, because you're gonna have a little bit more of a comprehensive picture there.
• 18:51
  Um, it, it will tell you a little bit more about what's going on than just ferritin.
• 18:58
  The full version that we run has about thirteen markers.
• 19:01
  It also can be helpful to look at CRP and inflammatory markers.
• 19:05
  If you have thyroid issues, can be helpful to pair that as well.
• 19:10
  There are also places that you can order your own iron labs, where if you just wanna get the full panel, you can do that.
• 19:17
  So I will link some resources in the show notes.
• 19:20
  So before I let you go, I wanna go back to my dishwasher for a second to tie this all together.
• 19:25
  When we finally got the dishwasher fixed, it made so much sense.
• 19:31
  It didn't matter what I was doing.
• 19:32
  It didn't matter that I was, like, rinsing and using different detergent.
• 19:37
  There, all that effort I'd been pouring into the wrong part, I finally felt, like, free from.
• 19:44
  Now I don't have to spend hours scrubbing everything.
• 19:47
  So that's the whole thing that I want for you today.
• 19:50
  You came into this episode holding a belief that makes perfect sense, which is ferritin is low Ferritin stores iron, so take iron.
• 20:00
  And when iron didn't work, that belief only let you ask one question, which was,"Which iron?" So I wanna leave you with a different one.
• 20:09
  Ferritin, remember, is your savings.
• 20:11
  Iron is a deposit.
• 20:13
  Your ferritin number is a balance, and a balance will never tell you what happened to the money.
• 20:20
  So the question was never how much iron.
• 20:22
  The question is which part of your system is spending that iron before it ever gets saved?
• 20:28
  And that question has an answer.
• 20:30
  It's not just one you can find by buying another bottle, which brings me to on Sunday, September 27th, so 10 days from the release of this episode, I am running a live training.
• 20:44
  It is called Why Iron Isn't Enough.
• 20:46
  And most of the hour, I am gonna pull up real panels on screen and show you why iron isn't enough.
• 20:55
  I will walk you through exactly why your ferritin won't move, and you will leave understanding how you can actually increase your ferritin.
• 21:07
  And what that means for you is you will leave with a skill instead of just information.
• 21:12
  You will be able to look at your own results and see a story in them.
• 21:17
  The real value is what happens the next time your labs land in your inbox.
• 21:22
  You're gonna open your PDF, you're gonna be sitting in the pickup line, and you're gonna scroll to your ferritin, and instead of that flat feeling of like,"Here we go again," you will know what you can do.
• 21:33
  You will know why your ferritin won't budge and what you can do instead.
• 21:39
  And that's probably what you want, right?
• 21:41
  You wanna know how you can actually increase your, your ferritin.
• 21:45
  But the part that you want more than that is you want your energy back.
• 21:49
  You want your hair to stop falling out.
• 21:51
  You want your bloating to improve.
• 21:54
  You want iron to stop hurting your stomach.
• 21:56
  So I want you to be there.
• 21:58
  If you have struggled with low ferritin, this is my most popular masterclass, and I'd love to see you there.
• 22:06
  I know Sunday is a weird day to ask, but the reason I do it on a Sunday is because I know so many of our clients are moms, and it is so much easier to get support and get help and devote that hour to yourself.
• 22:21
  So it is recorded, but you're gonna get the most value out of this if you can join live because I always stay on at the end and answer questions.
• 22:29
  I think last time I was on for like an hour answering questions.
• 22:33
  So come live, get your questions answered, get some insight.
• 22:38
  The link is in the show notes.
• 22:39
  I would absolutely love to see you there.
• 22:42
  And if not, I'll see you next week on the next episode of the Love Your Gut podcast.
• 22:46
  Thanks for joining.