Hashimoto Disease and MTHFR: An Interview With Dr. Emily Kiberd

All right, cool. So today we have on Dr. Donnie Wilson, a dear friend, naturopathic physician, and also an expert in thyroid disease, thyroid dysfunction, stress management, and then also, like a very, very specific niche, which is the mthfr, which I first heard maybe like a year ago. But.

I can't wait to dive in with you and just talk about how this affects women with Hashimoto's, because really, that's who's in the group. And it's just another aspect of how to heal our bodies from the inside out. So I'm so excited. You're in California right now. Yes, and I'm from the east coast. So just give us a little bit of background about yourself, people that don't know you.

I'm so happy to be here and so glad to meet you all. How awesome that you're in this program and learning more about what you can do to help your thyroid. So I just want to acknowledge you for doing that because it takes, you know, sometimes it takes a bit of a choice to choose yourself and to choose getting more information. Right. So I think that's. That's awesome that you're here and wanting to learn. And I'm a naturopathic doctor. I've been practicing for about 20 years. I'm usually in New York with them around nearby. We always like when we can actually see each other in New York. Right.

So I'm. Yeah, I'm in Manhattan, in Long island. And, you know, I specialize in, as you mentioned, you know, helping people to understand how stress affects our bodies. And looking at it not just in terms of sort of our daily financial relationship stresses, but also stresses in our environment like toxins and foods and lack of sleep, and so how all these different factors of stress affect us. Sometimes it's tempting to either try to just dismiss the stress, like, what can I do about it? So forget, just try to let it go. Or we try to just force ourselves through it, you know, try to be sort of superheroes and work against the stress. And the reality is that we're humans, and so we are going to be affected by stress in some way. It's very unique, actually. Both of our genetics. We have genetics that come into play related to how we respond to stress. And we also have our past history of stress exposure that affects us in any moment in time. And so I really think, like, this topic of, well, thyroid, but specifically autoimmunity. Hashimoto's with the thyroid is a really good example of how for some of us, we have a genetic tendency toward Autoimmunity. And when stress compiles and turns on those genes, then Hashimoto's can happen. And as Dr. Emily's teaching you how to reverse that is so amazing. MTHFR is just another gene that we can look at and see how that comes into play.

So what if you're going to just like sum up mthfr?

Yeah. What is it?

So I know a lot of people joke about MTHFR and what it seems like it could be, and I tend to kind of say it fast because I say it so much, so then it just comes out fast. Mthfr, it's really actually quite simple. It's just about a B vitamin called folic acid. Folic acid is vitamin B9. And when we're looking at genes, a lot of the times what we're looking at is how we each have a unique way of processing nutrients. We can look at how are genes related to vitamin D, for example, or other B vitamins. But MTHFR is specifically the gene that manages folic acid. And what it's really doing, its job is to turn folic acid into the active form called folate or methylfolate. A lot of times those two names get used interchangeably. Like you'll hear people saying folic acid, but they really mean folate. Or they say folate and they really mean folic acid. So. So this is getting very specific and saying actually there are two different.

Versions of that nutrient and the job of MTHFR is to turn folic acid into methylfolate or folate, the active form. And so those of us I have mthfr gene SNPs, which is you too, right?

Yeah.

So that's one of the reasons why I got so interested in it and researched it and figured out how to address it is, you know, it's like we can get very motivated by what's going on with our own health. Right. Like you with Hashimoto's too.

Yeah. Low activity with mthfr. Like, what are some common things that it could lead to?

Well, it's actually quite a long list and it's different for each person. By the way, it's not that everybody with an MTHFR gene, SNP has the same symptoms, but I would look at it as here there's a bunch of potential symptoms that could be related to mthfr, including migraines, for example, or headaches. That was one that for me, I spent a lot of years figuring out how to solve migraines for myself. It can also be related to anxiety and depression, because folate is a really important nutrient that affects the neurotransmitters. So if we have a nutrient that might not be like, say, with MTHFR gene, snp, the folic acid might not be turning into folate as effectively, then we don't have enough folate to help our nervous system. So we're going to tend toward neurological symptoms. But the folate is also really important for. I think of it as making healthy cells in the body. So anywhere that our body's trying to make healthy, new cells could be affected. Even in terms of hair, there could be hair loss. It can show up related to pregnancy, increased risk of miscarriage, increased risk of neural tube defects, because this, again, has to do with formation of healthy cells. It also can increase risk of abnormal Pap smears, because this is where we're trying to get healthy cells on the cervix. MTHFR can also increase risk of other things like heart disease risk, diabetes risk, dementia risk. Stuff that is kind of sounds scary when you think about it. You're like, ah, I don't want to know about that. But the good news is once you know you have this gene, you can do something about it. So you can prevent these issues.

Yeah. What specifically with like, MTHFR in the thyroid or like a low functioning thyroid, like a woman with Hashimoto's.

Mm. Yeah. So this, this is a really good point because.

Sometimes when we're thinking about Hashimoto's, we're coming from that angle, right? So we're like, okay, the more I improve my thyroid function and decrease autoimmunity, is my B vitamin function gonna improve? Which I think that that is the case. But even more so in this situation, we want to look at it the other way, where the better your body can use B vitamins, the better your thyroid is going to work. And so.

You want to really, if you know you have a MTHFR gene, snp, it might mean that before you dive into helping your thyroid, you might need to work more on the B vitamins and then be able to come back to working on the thyroid.

Yeah. People often talk about, like, methylation.

Yes, methylation.

What the heck is methylation? I know, right? When we got used to saying mthfr, now we got to say methylation. I think of methylation. I just call it the B vitamins cycle because it's really how our body uses B vitamins, not just folate. Folate is one of the B vitamins. Right. But it comes together with the B12, which probably all are aware of B12. So you get B9 and B12 coming together. Then they literally are making like a circle, like a. Just think, I think of a spinning wheel, you know, and this spinning wheel is bringing in not only the B12 and the folate, but also B1 and B2 and B5 and B6. All these B vitamins come together, and when they go through this cycle, they end up making something called SAM S Adenosylmethionine, which is what goes out and does all the good stuff, goes out and makes healthy cells, healthy neurotransmitters, protects our DNA. So we want the B vitamins to make SAM and it's in biochemistry. We call it methylation. But to me, it's just. It's just this B vitamin cycle. If you ever wonder why is it so important to take B vitamins? What's the deal with these B vitamins? Well, this is it. They're in this B vitamin cycle making SAM and the thing is, there's a lot of potential stresses, we might call them, that bogs down or creates traffic jams in the B vitamin cycle. So the more we're under stress of various sorts, we don't use our B vitamins as well. And so we're much more likely to have low thyroid. You know, it's going to affect our thyroid, too, when that's the case.

Yeah.

Can you talk about how to test so, you know, if there's.

An easy way? Because I know sometimes it's like we go, especially with Hashimoto's, we go down the rabbit hole of like, many, many, many tests. Is there a way to test if we have the MTHFR gene variation? And then.

After that, I want to talk about, like, homocysteine.

Yeah, Love it. So MTHFR I mean, you can do it in a blood test. You can, like just in a regular lab. You can have a doctor order just MTHFR and find out if you have. There's really two MTHFR we call them a SNP SNP is a single nucleotide polymorphism, or I think of it like a gene variation. It's not like a major gene disorder. It's a small variation in the gene, and you can test it in regular blood work. Sometimes insurance doesn't cover it, and then it might cost a couple hundred dollars. So what I usually recommend is instead do one of these gene panels that you can do with your saliva for like $100, like a Ancestry.com gene panel for $100. And not only will you be able to find out mthfr, but you'll get all the rest of your gene data so you can get a lot more information for less.

And then we can, because we want to know about the mthfr, but we want to know about the other genes too. So then we can really put the pieces together. So that's how I usually recommend testing for it.

Would that include like 23andMe? Is that an option for checking?

23Andme is also an option. The thing with 23andMe is not sharing some of the other genes we want to look at. So. So in the past year or so more. So I'm using ancestry.com because they just provide a bigger profile of genes in the data. And now someone who's a layperson, you might be like, well, I don't even know what all these genes are anyway. But what you want to do then is work with someone who can look at all the genes and help you understand how they all fit together and what it means.

So if you did like ancestry.com would it show you, oh, you have the MTHFR, the SNP, and then. And then you could consult with like a functional medicine doctor to be like, okay, well, what do I do now, knowing that information?

Mm. And really, I think what we usually do is we get the data. It's called genetic data. It's a big, long list of your genes from ancestry. And then we put it through software that interprets it. And so that's where the. And there's a bunch of free software, even online. But you might work with a practitioner who, you know, like, I use a certain software and then I can. Then I go through it and there's more and more practitioners who are trained in addressing mthfr. But I just would mention that don't be surprised, you're going to run into practitioners who either don't know what it is or don't know how to address it or will dismiss it. And so.

If you're concerned you know about some of these symptoms and you want to know more, then it's worth finding a practitioner who really does this a lot. What I found is just working with thousands of people with MTHFR is I was able to create a system. It really you. It's not something where you just dive in with the same thing for everybody. It's not one size fits all. It's a very unique.

And.

And so I look at mthfr, but then I'm looking at many other aspects to really get the best solution. So just to Put that out there too. We can talk about that more. But it actually ends up to be quite an opportunity to look at your whole health. And again, methylation is affected by so many potential stresses. We need to look at what are the stresses for you that are affecting your MTHFR and methylation and then get it working better again in that way.

It's just like one piece of the kind of root cause Hashimoto puzzle.

Yeah, it's one, but it's, you know, it's. Once you're in there and you're realizing, hey, there's a puzzle here and I can solve it, then you start to realize, okay, now I want to solve this puzzle. Where's this puzzle piece fit in? You know, and it makes a difference.

Yeah. Let's talk about homocysteine.

Homocysteine is. So we're talking about this B vitamin cycle that's going on. Homocysteine is one of the steps in that cycle. And it's nice because it's a test that we can measure in the blood. So again, you can go to a regular lab to get your blood drawn and have homocysteine tested. I actually feel like everybody should have it tested every year. And definitely people who have MTHFR should have it tested. You should know your homocysteine level because homocysteine is one way that we can tell how well is this cycle spinning? Is it going perfectly and everything's on track, or is there a traffic jam and it's going too slow? Or do you need more folate in your diet or in your supplements in order to get it working well? So it's the way that we can determine. See, it's very tempting once you find out you have MTHFR to just decide, okay, I have mthfr, I'm going to take a bunch of folate. Oh, that must mean I need 1 milligram or 10 milligrams or 20 milligrams of folate. And a lot of practitioners, that's what they'll do is just say, oh, you have mthfr. You need a bunch of folate. But that's actually not the best way to address it. Once you know you have mthfr, the next step is find out your homocysteine level. Because many times I find that people are getting plenty of their homocysteine is doing great and they don't need any more folate. And so you really need to know anytime when you're looking at a gene, you need to know how is it affecting My body at this point in time because our genes are not always affecting us. Right. We have a lot of genes that may or may not be turned on at this moment and may not be a problem. So we got the homocysteine. Really helps me know whether we even need to address this B vitamin cycle. And then we can go from there.

Is there, like, what's the range?

Is it kind of like tsh, where there's a range, but then there's like, really an optimal range? Is it similar with homocysteine?

Yeah, that's a good way to think about it. I like that. Yeah. With tsh, we kind of know, okay, we want it, we like it here, but, you know, maybe close to there is okay. With homocysteine, I like it to be right about a 7. So those of you who may have your homocysteine levels already, pull it out and go, okay, am I at a 7? I mean, 6 to 8 is pretty close, but if it's much higher than 8, let's say it's a 15. Then we're like, okay, there's a traffic jam going on here. We got to figure out, do we need more folate, or is it just that we need to clear out some stress? Or if it's lower than 5. That's the other thing. It's possible. Some people think, oh, we're only worried about a high homocysteine, but it's actually possible to have too low homocysteine, like, say it's at a three, which, by the way, I find is pretty common in women who are trying to get pregnant or pregnant. It's much more common to find a low homocysteine, I think, because women are taking a lot of folate in preparation from pregnancy, and they end up kind of using up all their homocysteine. So it's this careful balance. We got to help build the homocysteine back up again while still maintaining adequate folate intake for pregnancy. So that's a tricky. A little tricky situation that sometimes I find gets missed for women. I do a lot of work also with fertility and especially related to mthfr, and that's an area that often gets missed. But I think it's really important.

I think a lot of women who are trying to get pregnant or having difficulty or.

Miscarry, I think just in the general public.

Don'T think, oh, I should check my thyroid. I should check my homocysteine levels. It's more of like, it happened. And I don't know why, but I'M just gonna kind of like give it up to the universe and try again. But that there's actually something that we can check that's like, within our kind of, like, our control.

I'm also trained as a midwife, so I'm, you know, trained in the standard prenatal care. And standard prenatal care does not include necessarily checking homocysteine or thyroid before pregnancy or in early pregnancy. And so it's often not done. Now, there's more and more research to say that especially thyroid function is super important in early pregnancy. And as well as I would say with mthfr, homocysteine is super important, but it's not part of standard care yet. And so I definitely recommend it. If you know you have MTHFR and you know you have thyroid issues and you're planning a pregnancy, your usual practitioner might not be willing to order it, but there's ways for you to get that taken care of on your own. You might have to do separate. Get it. Separate attention, you know, separate attention and care for that. And it's worth it because. Yeah, if you want to get your thyroid optimal and you want to get your homocysteine optimal so that you're decreasing your risk of miscarriage and helping to have the healthiest pregnancy possible.

So if someone has the MTHFR gene variation, taking folic acid is problematic or not problematic.

Yeah. So when you have mthfr, you want to. That's number one, basically on your list. If you know, okay, I have mthfr, then just stay away from folic acid. So look at your bottles on your shelf. If it's your prenatal, if it's your multi, if it's your B complex, if it says folic acid at all, just throw it away and start over. Because it's just. I mean, you might. You might be able to. Your body could process it to some degree, but it's not worth it. You know, it's not worth it to use a nutrient that your body can't really use 100%. When you could go out and buy a multi or a B complex that has. What you're looking for is you want it to say methyl folate, like M E, T, H, Y, L methylfolate, or there's some different patented versions of methylfolate, like. But basically, if it says. The other way to look sometimes is 5mthf, it'll say 5mthf on the bottle and then it'll say methylfolate. But if it says folic acid at all, then Forget it. I really think that all multivitamins and B complexes should have only methylfolate in them. Even someone who doesn't have an MTHFR SNP would benefit from methylfolate. We all need methylfolate, so I think eventually that'll happen. But the research is relatively new and the companies haven't necessarily all changed over to methylfolate yet. So you have to watch out for it for yourself.

Yeah. Do you have any favorite brands or. I know variations like some have fillers and some don't.

Well, definitely. I mean what you'll find is if you're. Because some of the highest quality, say multis and B complex and basically folate, most of them are available through practitioners only. So sometimes you really, it's worth it to work with a practitioner who can get you access to some of these products. There's some that you. I'm trying to think some you could probably find online, like pure encapsulations, I think sometimes you could find on your own and pure encapsulations will have methylfolate. I think almost all, I think all of their products are now methylfolate. Double check always though. I mean there's designs for health, they're seeking health.

And so there's definitely some high quality companies where you know they're going to have the methylfolate and they're also not going to have dairy and gluten and sugar and other junk in there that you don't want.

Yeah. How would you support. Just like we're on the topic of supplements, methylation pathways through how we eat and then also supplements. Mm.

Well, I mean in terms of eating, some of it is really just having a kind of a clean diet which you probably already are doing. If you're addressing Hashimoto's. You're probably already avoiding gluten and you know, probably dairy and doing kind of like an anti inflammatory diet. When you're doing that to help Hashimoto's, you're actually also helping your methylation and mthfr. So that's always great. I always love when you can make one change and it ends up helping more than one thing. Right. So like feels like multitasking but it's actually with less work.

So that's it. I mean that's a great way to start. I mean we also know that certain foods have natural folate in them, like greens, you know, like kale, chard. So when you're choosing these healthy green vegetables, you know you're going to be getting some natural folks. But I wouldn't go and try to get all your folate from vegetables, because what's going to happen is you're going to just have too much. There's such a thing as too many vegetables. I mean, it's like, hard to believe, right? Sometimes we're, like, drinking green juices and we're doing everything to get enough vegetables. But what can happen is if we go crazy and we're having, like, kale at every meal, then it can not only affect our digestion, like, it's just too much fiber overfeeding the bacteria. And then it can be where you're, you're actually getting, you know, if you're having too many greens, you can actually get exposure to chlorine. So it's, it's, you know, don't try to go overboard on trying to get it all from your vegetables. Just choose your healthy diet and your healthy intake of greens and vegetables and then do your homocysteine. And if it shows, oh, you still need more, then add a supplement.

Yeah. So if you went to, like, your regular primary care, you're like, hey, I want to check my homocysteine. Do you feel like that's like a pretty common ask?

I mean, I'm hoping it's becoming more common.

But, you know, it really depends on the doctor. Some of them are going to be like, you know, I'm not going to do that, or they're not sure if your insurance is going to cover. But they, you know, it's worth asking, like, if you're like, hey, I just going in for my regular physical, might as well ask for the homocysteine. And then if the doctor is just like, not sure and not willing to order it, then then, yeah, there's ways to. You can, you've probably talked to your, you know, to everybody in your program that there's ways to do tests that are, you know, out of pocket if you need to. So if you really don't ever feel stuck. Stuck for your health, I would say, because there's ways to get the information you need.

Yeah. We had Dr. Alan Hopkins on two weeks ago. Three weeks ago. Three weeks ago with work. Just giving other options outside of insurance only. Yeah. Testing.

Because then, yeah, you could just do it on your own and then you got the information, you know, being that advocate for yourself. Right. But it is nice if you can. If, if you can get it through insurance, great. But if not, you got other options.

Yeah. So can you just talk about. Because we haven't had anyone talk about just maybe common root causes that we kind of talked about foods a little bit. We talked about mthfr, some root causes that might put stress or load on the system.

That women should look at if they have Hashimoto's.

Yeah, I love that. That's. Yeah, to me it's like.

It'S this concept of looking at the stresses and here again it's going to benefit both the methylation and it's going to benefit the Hashimoto's at the same time. So we talked a little bit about diet, I mean and I would say avoiding certain foods, even like sugar and higher inflammatory foods, that's a way to drop your stress exposure and it's going to help everything. You can also look at things like are you getting enough sleep? Like sometimes I know for me years ago I would be like, you know, trying to get everything done and I would do less sleep because I'm like, oh, I can't get anything done when I'm sleeping. But actually there's so much that happens when we're sleeping. So getting in like at least seven and a half hours of sleep, it's amazing what that can do where your immune system can have a chance to reset and your nervous system can reset and your metabolism can work better. So sometimes it can be simple things just like, hey, how do I make sure that what can I do to help get even a little bit better sleep, let alone like hydration and maybe like, like I would even think of things like say toxins, for example, you know, do you need a filter for your water so you're getting clean water? Do you need a filter for your air so you're getting clean air? Because we get exposed to these toxins, say, you know, safe from water, we're getting chlorine exposure that's going to inhibit thyroid, inhibit methylation. If we're getting say toxins from even from like a mold toxin or.

From the dry cleaners or. For me, what I found for myself, by the way, is that when I ran a toxin panel on myself, I found that I was super high in something called butadiene, which comes from flame retardant. And I was getting flame retardant exposure from my Tempur Pedic mattress.

And so as soon as I saw that I did not sleep on that mattress another night, I'm like, I'm on the couch until I got a new mattress. And it made a huge difference. I was not only getting migraines, but I was getting migraines that caused vomiting all day. And once I changed the mattress and dropped the flame Retardants.

I didn't have any more of these migraines, and I think it's because the toxin from the mattress was inhibiting methylation. Right. So sometimes looking at your environment and saying, what are the various stresses that could be affecting me? And sometimes it's something, you know, you wouldn't even think of, like a mattress, or, you know, you just have to kind of go, wait a minute. Where is this stress coming in? And how can I make changes that are going to just basically help your whole body work better? Yeah, if that helps.

Yeah, totally. What was the test that picked up the flame retardants?

Great Plains lab has a urine toxin panel, and it tests for pesticides, insecticides, even some of these chlorine metabolites. And so you can see, you know, hey, am I high in any of these toxins? I don't know how many of you are in New York City, but often I find, you know, York City, we have a lot of exposure to exhaust from traffic. Right.

Particular matter from everyone hitting their brakes all the time.

Oh, my gosh. Exactly. So you start. I mean, sometimes you're like, do I really want to know? But actually, once you see the levels, then you can go, oh, okay, I need to get an air filter, or I need to do some sauna therapy and get these toxins out so you can become proactive. I like to do tests that I can do something about.

Let's do a test where we can actually go, oh, okay, now I know what I need to do so that my body can function better. So all of these are factors. Even metals, for example, if anyone has, say, amalgam or metal fillings in their teeth, Metals can also affect methylation. So it may be worth going to the holistic dentist and say, hey, what are my options here? So that we can get the metal out of the way. But. And then the gut bacteria, which we mentioned a little bit, I love to. Especially with. Again, with autoimmunity and methylation. Gut health is so important. You wouldn't necessarily think that, right? You're like, what does my gut have to do with methylation or B vitamins? And what does it have to do with autoimmunity? But it has everything to do with it, right? It's like, if. If and when we're stressed, our gut health gets thrown off. We're more likely to get leaky gut. We're more likely to have our gut bacteria imbalanced. And once there's leaky gut and imbalanced gut bacteria, it just opens up all these possibilities for other issues, not just digestive health like you would think, well maybe I'm going to have diarrhea or I'm going to have bloating. But no, it actually then makes it so, you know, you're susceptible to viruses and autoimmunity and it affects this whole use of B vitamins. So sometimes the first thing I do when working with someone who has MTHFR is we look at their gut health.

How's your gut bacteria? What do we need to do to help the microbiome? Because we know that if there's imbalanced gut bacteria they make toxins that can go anywhere in the body, including creating traffic jams in methylation.

Yeah. And I feel like, and you can tell me if this is accurate or not is if it was just one of those things, like if it was just.

A genetic variability and we weren't, you know, we didn't have mold toxicity or toxins, we probably not show signs of an autoimmune condition. Yeah, it's like, like the cup is filling and then, you know, things don't have anywhere to go and it just overflows to like this full blown flare up totally.

And, and sometimes you're like, why me? Why now? You know, like, oh, this other person, my same age doesn't have this going on. You know, like it's, we get caught in the comparison. But really we have to remember that we're each so unique. We have our unique genetics, we have our unique stress exposure and you never know what combination. At what point does that equation, you know, work out to mean there's Hashimoto's or there's migraines or whatever it is. And so just, yeah, just realizing it's, it's a matter of like, yeah, when, when this cup fills up for you and then all of a sudden there's autoimmunity. But that also means we can reverse it as you, you know, I mean that's what I love. What you're doing is like we can now peel away and take empty this cup, so to speak. And, and I think the, the same things that you, a lot of the same things you would be doing to help reverse Hashimoto's will also help with MTHFR and methylation. So you'll be helping both of them at the same time.

Yeah. So one of the things that I talk about in Thyroid Strong is the importance of building muscle. Just because with Hashimoto's we have a tendency towards lower muscle mass and then also.

Doing it in a way that's really smart. Such that we don't injure ourselves, because with Hashimoto's, we also have, like, a slower tendon turnover, which is like, slower recovery. And then the thing that's not really in the literature, but that I've seen a lot is like, tissue laxity, hypermobility, which I know you also experience.

Yep.

I'm wondering, you know, through thyroid strong. It's through strength training with amazing form, not a lot of reps, taking long rest breaks in between sets. I'm curious what your experience has been with.

Kind of combating your own tissue laxity.

Yeah, I figured this out a couple years ago too, that I, you know, that I have this hypermobility. Of course, once you figure it out, you're like, oh, my gosh, of course. Why didn't I see that way beforehand? But now I'm much more likely to see it in other people. I'm sure for you, you're like all of a sudden, it's like so many people have this hypermobility without realizing it.

And it can, you know, again, it can kind of compound on top of some of the other things. So for me, with these migraines, for example, I have mthfr, so I'm sure that was adding to the migraines. But I also had the hypermobility that increases risk of migraines. And it's only when I was able to address all of that that I really saw a difference. And I think that the exercise part of it is essential because basically when you have these hypermobile joints, the collagen is not helping very much to keep things in place. So you have to have the muscles help you out. And once you're gaining the strength in the muscles, you're way less likely to have the joints moving and causing pain. And I completely agree with you. I mean, what I found for myself that was very helpful was Pilates, especially when I was. When I was really weak. I was starting off, you know, I think looking back a few years ago, I'm like, oh, my gosh, I was so weak, but I had to rebuild. And you just have to start somewhere. And those, yeah, small reps and core strength. And you just have to. Sometimes you just start very small. Like, sometimes I would be after 10, 15 minutes, I'm like, that's it. Because the other factor here is the adrenal glands. When we're talking about stress and we're talking about thyroid and autoimmunity, the adrenals are right there in the background.

If you're At a point where you know you're tired and you know you don't have a lot of strength, then you're very likely. You also have your adrenals struggling. And so you have to listen to your body and you have to go, hey, maybe I can only get in five minutes of.

A little bit of strengthening. But it actually counts, right? It actually. Because sometimes you're like, oh, why even do five minutes? Is it going to make a difference? It's going to make a difference. When you're in that situation, it does make a difference. And then you can build on it, right?

Yeah, absolutely. It's like, take taking action, and baby steps is going to be better than nothing at all. So might as well start.

Yeah, might as well start. And then just then you'll be so surprised that you can gain on that. But definitely, because, like, for me, what even would happen part of hypermobility is you're also going to be more likely to have, like, postural hypotension. So you're changing postures, and so you're more likely to feel dizzy. And to me, that's a sign of like, okay, now's my time to take a break. Got to go breathe. Come back to this later. But I can definitely tell you that the strengthening makes a huge difference now. I can do way more strengthening, and it makes even more of a difference. And the more that I can build strength, the less and less that these other health issues are a problem.

And you're actually. You're like, lifting weights.

Yeah, actually lifting weights. Yes.

Actually, your Facebook Instagram shot of muscle definition. I love it.

Thank you. Thank you. The other day, actually, I was doing some shoulder presses with a little bit higher weight than I usually was. And I always am excited because I feel like, okay, I know this is. Whenever you feel that you're like, okay, I'm going to know this is going to be beneficial. And yet, because of the hypermobility, I might still have a rib that moves out. So then I just have to have that awareness where I go, okay, yeah, I'm doing a little extra strengthening. I might have this, you know, rib move. And now I'm going to get it back in place again. But I'm. It's. It's all with this strategy of moving forward versus Because I know sometimes they can feel like every time I work out, I'm in pain and I don't know what to do, and I. And then you just end up stopping. So it just trying to create a bigger strategy. And I really feel like so much of it is acceptance of your body and listening to your body so that you know, you know when it is time to take a break. And that, that doesn't mean that you're failing. It just means that's part of the greater strategy.

And also sounds like. Which is really important, especially for strength training is building the foundation and the basics of movement before.

Starting to do a heavier press or which is. Which is so important. Which is like, basically with thyroid strong is like how to do the move, the building of the foundation so that when you do challenge to go to a higher weight, everything's like, in place.

Yes. It makes such a difference. It really does. That's awesome. So awesome that you're doing that.

Yeah, it's super. It's so fun. And it's, you know, deep down it's like I want to empower women through strength to feel good in their body. Right. And how can that manifest into.

Getting out of a bad relationship or changing a job or whatever it is? Do you have any resources?

I know you write a lot of blog posts.

Yeah, the blog is a great. If you're wanting to learn more about MTHFR. Yeah. @drdonnie.com I have a whole bunch of blog posts and I also, if anyone was interested in learning a little bit more, like say you have your ancestry or your genetic data and you want a little more help. I do have a. Like a. I guess we call like a master class that you can. Oh, yeah.

Because I write a little recap and I'll drop it in the recap.

Okay, great.

I totally want to know.

Yeah, good, good. Yeah. Because then you, you know, you just. It's answering some of these questions. Okay, now what do I do next? And. And I understand you feel like you're, you know, just in a place where you're like, who do I ask? Who can I trust? What do I do? I feel on my own. So just get it. Giving those tools to be able to move forward.

Awesome. Well, send me that link and I'll drop it in the notes.

This has been so informative. I often talk about checking MTH on thar, but I always am like, you know, methylation pathways and just go talk to your functional medicine doctor. So I feel like so much more educated and empowered.

Oh, good. Wonderful. I'm so glad. I'm so glad. And if any other questions come up, just let me know. Okay, Happy to answer. Yeah.

Thank you so much. It was so good.

Good to see you too. Thank you, Em.