Dr. Tabatha Barber explains why standard thyroid tests miss the full picture. Your thyroid doesn't just control metabolism, it downregulates it during stress, starvation, or illness to protect you. High cortisol pushes thyroid hormone toward reverse T3, which lowers active hormone and slows your metabolism.
It's really important to realize that your thyroid is so much more complex than conventional medicine will have you believe. It is. Not just TSH and free T4. I mean, we just like that was a grain of what's going on, right? I mean, all of our other systems impact the thyroid. The thyroid takes on the burden of the other systems because say that you are in starvation mode, say that you don't have food available and you can't eat. Your body doesn't want to maintain that same high metabolism that you have because then it will start to break down your own muscle for protein and you will become malnourished and you will get very sick. That's what happens to very malnourished people. So the thyroid will turn down your metabolism in an effort to slow your energy production and your energy requirements to sustain that stressful situation. The same thing happens when you have surgery or you are sick or you have too much mercury exposure from the food that you're intaking or, you know, having mercury fillings removed inappropriately or think so many things. So what I want you to realize is your thyroid is always just trying to keep you balanced overall and it's not met. You know, it's not that it's not doing its job, it's doing what it feels, feels is the best for your body at that time. And so we fight against that. If we are like living high, crazy, stressed out lives and we're pumping out cortisol all day because we hate our job and we're just going from dusk till dawn and we're doing all the things our thyroid has to keep a balance overall. So it will adjust those signals and make less thyroid hormone because it's being shunted down the reverse T3 pathway and reverse T3 will become dominant.
