Latest / Health with Hashimoto’s - Thyroid or Immune Education for Autoimmune Thyroid Disease / 114 // Struggling with Weight Loss? Why GLP-1 May Not Be the Answer

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114 // Struggling with Weight Loss? Why GLP-1 May Not Be the Answer · Health with Hashimoto’s - Thyroid or Immune Education for Autoimmune Thyroid Disease

• 0:00
  Hey, welcome back to episode 114 of the Health with Hashimoto's podcast.
• 0:04
  I'm trying something new this time, and I am going on video and audio.
• 0:09
  So if you're listening to the regular podcast, awesome.
• 0:12
  If you also want to see this, it will be on YouTube, and I'm going to put it
• 0:17
  on my Facebook so that you can see the words and all of that.
• 0:21
  Just to try something new. Let me know if you like it. So, okay,
• 0:25
  let me switch my screen here.
• 0:27
  Today, we're going to talk about GLP-1 and weight Now, back several months ago,
• 0:32
  I want to say maybe six or seven months ago, I did an episode on GLP-1 and weight loss.
• 0:38
  Now, all of the information on that episode is correct, except at the end,
• 0:43
  I looked at benefits versus risks and said maybe the benefits outweigh the risks.
• 0:49
  Well, more has come to light and I can no longer say that.
• 0:52
  So if you've listened to the episode, I just want to add that disclaimer up front.
• 0:56
  I can no longer say that the benefits outweigh the risks, but we're going to talk about all of that.
• 1:00
  What GLP-1 is, what the medications are. And I know that women with Hashimoto's
• 1:06
  have struggled so much to lose weight.
• 1:08
  You feel like you're doing everything that you can. You're eating right.
• 1:11
  You're exercising, you're sleeping, you're drinking enough water.
• 1:14
  You're doing all of the things and still not not losing weight.
• 1:18
  You have 10, 15, maybe 50 pounds that you would like to release.
• 1:24
  You don't want to lose it and then find it again. You want to release it for good.
• 1:27
  And I know that you're struggling and you're looking for hope.
• 1:31
  And GLP-1 agonists are a type of drug that has just taken the market by storm.
• 1:37
  6% of people in the US have tried them.
• 1:40
  And that's millions, millions and millions of people.
• 1:44
  So we know that they are popular, but let's talk about what they are,
• 1:47
  what they do, and a little bit about if they might be the right choice for you.
• 1:52
  But like I said, the benefits do not outweigh the risks, but there's natural
• 1:56
  ways to increase your GLP-1.
• 1:58
  It's a little bit about me. If you are not familiar with this podcast,
• 2:01
  I am a registered nurse. I am a holistic health educator.
• 2:04
  I and my husband have been married for almost 21 years.
• 2:08
  We We have four boys. We homeschool two of them and two of them go to a local charter school.
• 2:13
  I am the host of this podcast, Health with Hashimoto's. I am also the creator
• 2:18
  of the Holistic Hashimoto's course.
• 2:21
  So in the GLP-1 series, I'm going to do three episodes, I think,
• 2:25
  maybe I'll extend it to four based on conversations with you, input or feedback.
• 2:30
  Today, we're talking about GLP-1 weight loss and meds.
• 2:33
  In the next episode, we will talk about how I can naturally increase your GLP-1.
• 2:39
  And then in the following episode, we'll do a new GLP-1 system so that you can
• 2:46
  increase your GLP-1 and lose weight.
• 2:50
  Also on this one, if you are watching it, there is a really cool image of a
• 2:56
  woman who's 250 pounds and this is internal.
• 2:58
  You can see all of the white fat, the adipose tissue, and just look at the organs,
• 3:05
  how compressed the organs are.
• 3:07
  And then you can also see 150 pound woman next to her and the organs have so much more space.
• 3:14
  They are not compressed. They are not squished by all of the fat.
• 3:19
  And of course, we want to be healthy as we can on the outside and on the inside.
• 3:23
  So first, what is GLP-1? It is a hormone.
• 3:27
  It's a natural hormone in your body. When you eat, you have four different hormones
• 3:32
  that all are signaled when you eat. GLP-1 is one of them.
• 3:38
  The other ones, let me tell you, it's like GIP and PYY and CKK.
• 3:46
  Now all of those are activated or triggered when you eat.
• 3:49
  GLP-1, we know more because of the medications.
• 3:54
  So I'm mostly going to talk about that one. But what it does is primarily it
• 3:59
  regulates your blood sugar.
• 4:00
  It tells your pancreas to release the right amounts of insulin.
• 4:04
  And it tells the liver to slow down glucose release.
• 4:08
  Your liver is constantly releasing small amounts of sugar into your bloodstream
• 4:13
  because your cells need energy.
• 4:15
  And so when you eat, your stomach, the GLP-1, is like, hey, I got this.
• 4:21
  You can slow down for a little bit. We're getting enough sugar from the food.
• 4:25
  So the liver slows down its production of sugar so that your food can do what your food does.
• 4:32
  And then the insulin we're going to talk about in another slide.
• 4:35
  The second thing the GLP-1 does is it slows gastric emptying.
• 4:39
  And the agonists or the the medications seem to also slow the gut.
• 4:45
  The natural GLP-1, when your body makes it on its own, it does not slow down
• 4:52
  your gut, at least as far as I can tell.
• 4:54
  It's the agonist, it's the pharmaceutical mimics that tends to slow down the gut.
• 5:00
  But all GLP-1, the natural stuff, the real stuff, and the pharmaceutical mimics,
• 5:05
  they slow down your gastric emptying. So that's your stomach itself.
• 5:09
  And that's a good thing, because you want your stomach to tell your brain, hey, we're full.
• 5:15
  Also, you want the food as it's leaving your stomach to go kind of slowly,
• 5:20
  because remember, I said, there's four different hormones that are all triggered.
• 5:25
  Well, as your food is leaving your stomach, that's when it's triggering some
• 5:30
  of those hormones and some of the pathways.
• 5:33
  And we want the food to go by slow enough so that it can, you know,
• 5:38
  so it can talk to those things that are now going to send information all over your body.
• 5:43
  So number two, it slows gastric emptying. And then the third thing it does is it reduces appetite.
• 5:50
  It does this in your brain. Your brain has GLP-1 receptors.
• 5:54
  And so when the GLP-1 is released from your body or as a medication,
• 6:01
  it reduces that appetite.
• 6:03
  It also, we talk about food noise.
• 6:06
  That's not a really common phrase yet. I believe it will be,
• 6:10
  but food noise is how much space food and food thoughts take up in your brain.
• 6:17
  That would be all of the cravings. It would be the constantly thinking about
• 6:20
  what am I going going to eat next, or what do I want, or in all of that food
• 6:25
  talk, that food noise in the background of your brain, it reduces that, or it can reduce it.
• 6:31
  So let's talk about blood sugar for a minute. When you eat, of course,
• 6:35
  you're getting nutrients from what you eat.
• 6:38
  Obvious, right? Well, our cells need energy in order to run.
• 6:43
  Also obvious. The energy that our cells use is sugar, is glucose.
• 6:49
  Glucose so when we eat we provide energy
• 6:52
  in the form or fuel in the form of glucose
• 6:55
  and our body can turn different sugars into what
• 6:59
  we need and that's awesome but our cells
• 7:02
  can only use so much energy so when
• 7:05
  there's extra energy it has to go somewhere and also it has to go into the cells
• 7:10
  so they can use it so when we eat our body releases insulin in response to how
• 7:16
  much sugar we eat The insulin's job is to let the sugar go into the cells to fuel the cells.
• 7:23
  Now, if your cells have enough fuel and you have extra sugar in your bloodstream,
• 7:28
  then the insulin's like, well, I got to put this somewhere. So it shoves it into fat.
• 7:33
  In fact, if you hear me talk about insulin on past episodes,
• 7:37
  I usually refer to insulin as the fat storage hormone because it shoves the
• 7:42
  extra sugar in your bloodstream into your fat cells so it can be stored for later.
• 7:48
  And that's not doing a bad thing.
• 7:51
  It's doing exactly what it's supposed to do because we do not want extra sugar
• 7:55
  running around in our bloodstream.
• 7:57
  We would break. That's not how our bodies are designed.
• 8:01
  So the insulin is our God-given gift to take care of the sugar inside our bloodstream.
• 8:08
  And again, it allows the sugar to go into the cells to provide the fuel.
• 8:12
  And then if there's too much, then it shoves it into the fat cells.
• 8:15
  It also can store some sugar in some muscle cells. It can store some in the liver.
• 8:20
  Primarily, it stores it in fat cells.
• 8:23
  The complications of this is when you have too much sugar running around your
• 8:27
  body or chronically elevated insulin.
• 8:30
  So like your body is constantly trying to put the insulin or the sugar somewhere,
• 8:34
  then you can develop a lot of complications. big ones are heart disease,
• 8:39
  kidney damage, and nerve problems, but really it impacts every single cell.
• 8:43
  So it's kind of a big deal. And this goes for if you're a diabetic or not.
• 8:49
  I was listening to a functional medicine doctor yesterday and she said there's
• 8:54
  a test that you can do. I did not know.
• 8:57
  It's a regular cholesterol test and you divide it by something else.
• 9:00
  It was two common common things and you divide one by the other.
• 9:05
  And that tells you your risk for diabetes and higher body is dealing with all
• 9:13
  of this sugar and insulin.
• 9:14
  And what they're finding when they do that math equation, 80% of US adults,
• 9:21
  and I would assume that also is the same for you if you're listening in Europe or Australia.
• 9:27
  I know I have listeners all around the world, but that's the the same,
• 9:31
  I would assume, for all, you know, Western medicine and like highly processed
• 9:38
  countries, I would assume.
• 9:41
  So 80% of us are at risk for diabetes.
• 9:44
  Our bodies are already not doing well with insulin and sugar. It's kind of scary.
• 9:51
  So let's talk about GLP-1 agonists. Now Now agonists is just a fancy name to say like a mimic.
• 9:58
  Pharmaceutically, they have tried to create this GLP-1 hormone.
• 10:03
  But of course, people cannot make exactly what God made. So it is a mimic.
• 10:09
  And because it is a mimic, it doesn't work exactly like the GLP-1 hormone does in your body.
• 10:15
  So they refer to these medications as GLP-1 agonists.
• 10:20
  So when you hear agonists, just think mimics.
• 10:23
  They're trying to do what God designed your body to do naturally.
• 10:26
  These are some of the names. So semaglutide is probably the most common one.
• 10:30
  The names for those would be ozempic, wagovi, and ribelsis.
• 10:36
  Ribelsis is a tablet or a drop. I can't remember. It's oral.
• 10:39
  The other ones are shots. Most of these are shots.
• 10:42
  There's also liraglutide. That would be sexenda and victoza.
• 10:49
  Tira, Tira Petide, I might be butchering these names. Sorry.
• 10:54
  So Tira Petide is Monjaro. And I know a lot of people have switched to Monjaro
• 10:59
  if their insurance will cover it, because that one is GLP-1 and GIP.
• 11:04
  Remember I said there's four different hormones that are triggered when we eat all in our stomach.
• 11:10
  GIP is one of them. And that one is, it impacts your gastric,
• 11:15
  let me see if I I can get this out.
• 11:18
  Gastric inhibitory, oh my goodness, gastric inhibitory peptide.
• 11:23
  It regulates your nutrient balance and it has a positive effect on your heart
• 11:28
  function, your bone strength, and your cognition. So that's your thinking.
• 11:32
  So that's the tirzepatide.
• 11:36
  And then there's others, excentatide, which is bieta and bidurion.
• 11:42
  Again, I might be butchering these names.
• 11:45
  Dulaglutide is trulicity.
• 11:49
  Lixendotide is aldixine, I think you say.
• 11:57
  Albaglutide is tanseum. And then there's a really long one, f-peglenotide.
• 12:04
  And I did practice these all before I started recording. You can't tell, right?
• 12:10
  Unfortunately, these are huge for costs.
• 12:14
  This is not the same in Europe. Europe is not as broken.
• 12:18
  They do have a broken medical system, but it's not as broken as the US.
• 12:22
  And in the US, the insurance companies have this agreement with the pharmaceutical
• 12:29
  companies that the insurance companies will make a lot of money.
• 12:33
  So when you use insurance, then insurance covers a bulk of this if they approve
• 12:39
  it for you. But just out out-of-pocket.
• 12:42
  The oral tablets cost between $250 and $940 per month, and typically it's around that $900 mark.
• 12:52
  And then the injectables, which is all of the other ones, I think everything
• 12:56
  except for one on that last list, the injectables cost between $720 and $1,300 per pen.
• 13:04
  Now remember I said most of them are injectables, so they come in a pen and
• 13:08
  you dial it to however much you need, and then you put that in your subcutaneous fat.
• 13:14
  So whether you use your arm or your belly or your thigh, you put it in,
• 13:17
  you know, in that fat and that's how it works.
• 13:21
  All of these are crazy, ridiculously expensive.
• 13:25
  If insurance covers this for you, your cost will be lower.
• 13:30
  I've seen as low as like $25 a month. However, the people that I have talked
• 13:35
  to, my friends, they say insurance covered it for a little while,
• 13:39
  and then their insurance stopped covering it.
• 13:41
  And then they have to pay out of pocket or go off of it.
• 13:45
  And so that is another cost.
• 13:48
  The cost of stress, worrying about it, trying to have this hope,
• 13:53
  trying to have this solution, and not being able to afford it, that is also a cost.
• 13:58
  That cost of our brain power and of our stress and our emotions,
• 14:02
  that's big. So let's talk about some of the benefits.
• 14:06
  I've pulled a chart from a website called Diabetes Daily.
• 14:10
  They compared a whole bunch of them. They looked at the drug.
• 14:13
  They looked at the number of weeks that were done in that drug's trial.
• 14:18
  They looked at the A1c reduction. So the A1c is a lab value that you have,
• 14:25
  and it tells how your blood glucose has has been regulated over the past,
• 14:30
  I think it's, is it 90 days or six months?
• 14:32
  I know it's, you know, it's your historic value of how your body is doing for blood sugar balance.
• 14:38
  And we want that to be on the lower end.
• 14:41
  So it looked at the A1C reduction. It also looked at how much weight people
• 14:46
  are losing and then the delivery form.
• 14:48
  Like I said earlier, only one of them is a pill and that's the ribelsis.
• 14:53
  All of the other ones are injectable.
• 14:56
  So people are losing weight. The studies varied between 26 weeks and 52 weeks was the longest one.
• 15:04
  And people were losing on average between five and about 28 pounds.
• 15:10
  So that's pretty significant, right? The five pounds, that was the 26 weeks.
• 15:15
  So as you are on it longer, although there's a 52 week that people only lost eight pounds.
• 15:21
  So people are losing weight. The A1C is going down. People are having benefits.
• 15:27
  And this is why we love these medications, because people are getting the benefits
• 15:32
  that they're looking for so hard.
• 15:35
  Their blood sugar is more regulated.
• 15:37
  Their weight is coming down.
• 15:40
  But what about the side effects? I said, when I am educating patients here on
• 15:46
  the podcast, or on one-on-one consulting.
• 15:49
  Or when I was in the emergency department for 17 years, or when I worked in
• 15:54
  the clinic for a little while up in Alaska, one of my jobs is to educate my
• 15:58
  people, my patients, to empower them to make the best decision for them.
• 16:04
  Only you can make the best decision for you. You are your best patient advocate.
• 16:09
  And you get to balance what are the potential benefits versus what are the potential risks.
• 16:15
  And unfortunately, these GLP-1 agonists, Again, think GLP-1 mimics,
• 16:21
  they do have side effects.
• 16:23
  Now you can see that there's a whole bunch of different medications, right?
• 16:27
  They have a whole bunch of different medications because the drug companies
• 16:30
  want to minimize the complications, but they're not succeeding.
• 16:36
  So these side effects are side effects for all of the GLP-1 agonists.
• 16:42
  And I was talking to a friend the other day, her sister is about to go on one
• 16:47
  of the GLP-1s and her sister is saying,
• 16:51
  my doctor said the side effects on this one are less and basically the benefits
• 16:55
  outweigh the risks. Let me tell you about the risks.
• 16:58
  And again, this goes for all of the GLP-1 agonists.
• 17:03
  The biggest one, okay, so there's death. That's a really big one.
• 17:07
  It's not as common, although in the last, let me look, in the last six months,
• 17:13
  there's been a 40% increase in the amount of deaths from these GLP-1 agonists.
• 17:20
  There have been 162 deaths over the course that these have been on the market.
• 17:27
  In 2018, there were 62,000 reported reactions.
• 17:33
  And now every reaction does not get reported to this database.
• 17:37
  In fact, it's actually speaking as a nurse and somebody who sees medication
• 17:42
  reactions and my coworkers also see them.
• 17:46
  I don't think any of us have ever reported it. And the doctors I worked closely
• 17:50
  with, I don't think they ever reported them.
• 17:52
  So my thought is the amount that actually gets reported is way,
• 17:57
  way, way smaller than the actual amount.
• 17:59
  But either way, in 2018, there were 62,000 reported reactions to GLP-1 agonists.
• 18:06
  Out of those 62,000, 10,000 of them were serious, which means there were complications
• 18:13
  that required hospitalization or even, like I said, death.
• 18:19
  So death is obviously a big one, but the most common one is muscle loss.
• 18:24
  And when you're losing weight, you want to lose fat.
• 18:27
  You do not want to lose muscle, right? Because our muscle, it provides a lot of our metabolism.
• 18:34
  And so we want to have that energy burning. We want to have muscles so that
• 18:38
  we're strong enough to live.
• 18:39
  We want to be able to have quality of life and we need strong muscles to do that.
• 18:44
  Unfortunately, when people go on these GLP-1 agonists, think mimics,
• 18:48
  they're losing 60% muscle and only 40% fat.
• 18:54
  So if you lose 10 pounds, that means six pounds of that was from your muscle
• 18:59
  mass, and only four pounds were from your fat.
• 19:03
  And that is devastating, because you are lowering your metabolic rate,
• 19:08
  because you've just lost that muscle.
• 19:10
  And when people go off of the medications, then they gain back all of the weight,
• 19:15
  but they're not gaining back the muscle.
• 19:18
  So if you went on the medications, you lost 10 pounds and six of that was muscle.
• 19:23
  And now you went off the medications, you've regained the 10 pounds,
• 19:27
  all 10 pounds, you've regained as fat. Again, like I said, devastating.
• 19:32
  Also, people are losing bone density. Now, anytime you lose weight,
• 19:36
  you do lose a little bit of bone density, but they're seeing more and more bone
• 19:40
  density lost from these GLP-1 agonists than from other forms of healthy weight loss.
• 19:46
  Other side effects are a lot of the things that you see because of how it works.
• 19:51
  A lot of the gastric intestinal stuff, vomiting and diarrhea,
• 19:55
  you know, things are running out both ends.
• 19:57
  Also constipation, very, very common, unfortunately.
• 20:00
  There's also nausea and abdominal pain. And then you have pancreas,
• 20:05
  thyroid, and kidney problems.
• 20:06
  I went into one medication website for providers,
• 20:12
  and I could not move into the website until I clicked the acknowledgement that
• 20:18
  these medications have a high risk of thyroid cancer.
• 20:23
  It's not really a risk that I want to take. One of my friends who is a nurse
• 20:27
  in the ICU, she's taking care of somebody who has a necrotizing pancreatitis.
• 20:32
  So their pancreas got inflamed and their pancreas started dying.
• 20:35
  And it's worse than that. Look up necrotizing anything if you want. It's not good.
• 20:41
  There's also kidney problems with this. And like I said, you know,
• 20:44
  death is also a side effect.
• 20:46
  These GLP-1 agonists do have side effects. They carry so much hope.
• 20:52
  We want their benefits, but they do have side effects, and they are impacting a lot of people.
• 20:58
  We want to think that will never happen to us, but these do happen,
• 21:02
  and unfortunately, to a lot of people.
• 21:05
  Like I said earlier, you always have to look at the scale, benefit versus risk.
• 21:11
  So are the benefits of these GLP-1 agonists more than the risks?
• 21:16
  And like I said back in that earlier episode I did, I said maybe they do.
• 21:21
  But now I've seen more data. It's been, like I said, I think six months since
• 21:26
  I did that one and more has come out. And no longer can I say that.
• 21:30
  The benefits do not outweigh the risks, especially since in the next couple
• 21:35
  episodes, I will be telling you how we can activate your own GLP.
• 21:39
  Remember, GLP-1 agonists are mimic.
• 21:42
  They're mimicking what God gave you and how your body is supposed to work.
• 21:46
  So in the next couple episodes, we will talk about activating that so that you
• 21:50
  can lose weight naturally using the GLP-1 that God gave you.
• 21:56
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• 22:02
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• 22:08
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• 22:12
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• 22:16
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• 22:20
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• 22:23
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• 22:26
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• 22:31
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• 22:34
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• 22:37
  Music.