How to Lose Weight with Thyroid Disease with Dr. Alan Christianson

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Welcome to the JJ Virgin Lifestyle show with celebrity nutrition expert, Fitness hall of Famer and four time New York Times bestselling author JJ Virgin. JJ is a warrior mom whose knowledge and expertise have helped change hundreds of thousands of lives. With over 3.5 million podcast downloads and appearances on Dr. Phil, Dr. Oz, the Today Show, Rachael Ray, Larry King Love Whoa, whoa whoa.

This show is about you, not about me. I want to help you find practical, real world ways to dial in your health and mindset so you can finally lose that weight and feel strong and energized. Stop settling for less than your personal best. It's time to find out how to look and feel better than ever. And I'll be right here with you the whole way. Welcome. It's JJ here with a repeat guest because he's one of our all time favorites. I've got Dr. Alan Christensen with me today on the show. That's Dr. C and and we are going to be talking about a subject everyone always, always wants more and more info on. And he's going to give us the latest on losing weight with thyroid disease. I know you ask about it, you ask about it. And he's got a couple eye opening pieces of information for you. Plus we are going to give out his thyroid symptom quiz so you can get your thyroid symptom score. This is a really important piece of information to have and to use ongoing so you can be that personal health detective. Connect the dots between your thyroid and how you're feeling. You'll be able to get the show notes which are always awesome and the link to that quiz@jjvirgin.com forward/doctor C. And that's just going to be D R C. Now before we dive in with him, let me tell you a little bit about him. If you're new to the show and you've not heard some of the old interviews with Dr. C, we'll also put them in the show notes, because he is just one you'll want to tune into. Let me tell you a little bit about my buddy. I've known him now for, gosh, seven, eight years. He is a very close friend, as is his awesome wife, Kieran. He's a naturopathic physician. He focuses on Hashimoto's thyroiditis and natural endocrinology. He's got a fabulous clinic in Scottsdale, Integrative Health. And I'm actually a patient there. He is my doctor, my personal doctor. He's my son's personal doctor, and he is the one who helped me get my first thyroid back dialed in and finally get my adrenals healthy again. You know, it's like I kept misbehaving. So he's also keeps me in line with not going and burning out my adrenals over and over and over again. He is the New York Times bestselling author of the Adrenal Reset Diet. And he also wrote the complete guide, Idiot's Guide to Thyroid Disease. I have a chapter in there in weight loss resistance. He is the founding president of the Endocrine association of Naturopathic Physicians, and that is the first medical specialty board dedicated to naturopathic endocrinology. He's also appeared and appears regularly on all over the place, natural national media like, including Dr. Oz, the Doctors, the Today show, and CNN. And again, those books he's had, he's written are fantastic. The Adrenal Reset Diet, the Complete Idiot's Guide to Thyroid Disease. Things you will want to have in your Library. All right, Dr. Alan Christensen, welcome to back to the show. I am so glad you are here with us again.

J.J. virgin. I'm always glad to be with you. We're gonna have a blast.

I know every time we do this, I like, get something new, like the whole wet carbs, dry carbs, which you'll have to talk on here. Even though it's not really related. We'll have to let everyone know now that I blurted that. But every time I learned something, even though, like, we've spent years together and you're my personal doc, I still always learn something new because you are such a fact finder and you're always. You're always in the trenches. Lear and stuff.

Thank you.

So. It's awesome. Well, this is a topic that is always a big, hot topic for the audience. And of course, it's all around how to lose weight with thyroid disease. And let's just like, dive into the kind of obvious question of how do you know if the reason you're struggling with your weight is your thyroid.

You know, one of the first things to make you suspect that is if your weight bounces up and down by more than a pound a day.

Walk us through that. Like, if it's every once in a while, I'm assuming it's not, but, like, on a regular basis, you're up £2, you're back down, you're up £2, YOU'RE BACK down. That kind of thing.

Yeah. So here's the thing. If it's simply a matter of the whole calorie math, which you and I know, there's more to the story than that, but if it's just a matter of that calorie math thing, it would never change that much. But a lot of people, shoot, they'll see a change several pounds a day, not uncommonly. So whenever you see that happen, it's saying that it's more than just what's going on between. Between the food and the rest. There's something off how your body's regulating your metabolism.

Which takes me back to one of the big advices that I give everybody is that you should be weighing in every single day.

Yeah.

So, you know, I used to say, I used to be like a. A scale interventionist, because way back when in the dark ages, we were told like, you should only weigh once a week. And, you know, the latest research does not prove that out.

You know, I think you're right because for some people, they can fluctuate a lot. If have more data points, you can at least see through some of that noise.

So let's talk about the other side of this. And I've been so fortunate that you are my doc and my doc from the start, as my thyroid started to go sideways. Is this whole thing around thyroid medications, because you would think this is an easy thing. Oh, your thyroid goes low, you take some thyroid medication, it's all cool. No, this is not the case. So, you know, let's talk about this. Because all thyroid medications were not created equally, as far as I can tell. Would you agree?

It's completely huge. You're totally right. And the medicines are not everything, of course, Your lifestyle and your diet, they're huge. But the medicines are the most passive part. I mean, you swallow a pill, might as well swallow one. That's going to make a difference. So, yeah, we did a study in the clinic in which we measured basal metabolic rate, you know, how much fuel someone could burn at rest, as they were on different thyroid medicines. And we saw the difference could be more than 3, 3, 400 calories per day with when everything else was the same.

Wow, that is crazy.

It's like, you know, an hour's workout that's happening. We're not even doing it well.

So how would you know? Like, how would you know if this is your issue or not, though?

Well, so if you're seeing your weight fluctuate a lot, we think this is a culprit. And if you're on thyroid treatment and your medicine is one that either you can't absorb well, or it's not well standardized, or it doesn't have all three hormones, those are the big three things to think about.

Okay, and so what types? Like, what would be a medication? Like, what would be some of the examples of not. Not the right ones versus the right one?

Well, sadly, the most common category used is not the right one. And that's going to be a T4 only medicine like Synthroid. And another wrinkle on that is that.

Which is what everyone's taking. Like, that's what everyone gets. They get Synthroid, one of the most.

Widely prescribed drugs in the country, and many are on the generic brand. And the difficulty there is the generics are made by tons of different manufacturers and you don't always get the same one. And you can have a whole different set of binders or fillers from one batch to the next.

So what is one to do if they go to their doc, and that's the one that the doc prescribes, and they still don't feel well, but the doc's unwilling to do something about it.

You have to vote with your feet.

March out of there, you know, because I got to tell you, I see this so often as I'm doing these Facebook lives. I can't tell you how many people are on thyroid medication. But, you know, they still have difficulty losing weight, they're cold, their cholesterol is elevated, they're constipated, they're depressed. I mean, they have all the symptoms. Right.

You know, you mentioned cholesterol, too, and that's fascinating. So do you know what cholesterol tests were used for before they were used for heart disease?

Well, I have a feeling you're going to say for low thyroid function. Wow, I didn't know to see. There. There we go. There we go.

This might be that. I gotta pull something out to blur.

I know. Well, you did. Your work is done. I mean, we can now talk about your wife and how awesome she is.

You know, cholesterol tests were first to use as thyroid tests because there's such a strong link between if your thyroid's working or not and how high your cholesterol is.

Wow, that is fascinating. And, you know, and again, so this is one of the things that's really important for everyone to understand is that, you know, this is when you've got. You've got a look at thyroid from a couple of different ways, and if you've been taking a medication, you're not seeing those things shift, like cholesterol, constipation, depression. It's time to dig deeper, especially if it's Synthroid. I love the vote with your feet. Find a functional, functional doc.

And.

And here's another one, because, you know, I watched this happen. It seems like out in the world something will hit, you know, just like, you know, what, 25 years ago, everyone had Candida. Now everyone is sibo. Right? I mean, it's like it's always something and. Right. And. But what I saw about 10 years ago was that everyone was iodine deficient, you know, and they were taking huge amounts. So let's talk iodine. Do you need it? How do you know if you need it? How much do you need all of that?

You know, so here's the. Here's the big, bigger issue even, is that nutrients, we think that nutrients are kind of like the gas pedal, and the more you have, the faster your car goes. But nutrients are more like the keys. So if you don't have the keys, your car's not going very fast. But, you know, say we took one to your car and say I went down to the hardware store and I got 10,000 spare sets of keys for you, and I poured them all on. You're not going to go 10,000 times faster. It's just going to get in the way. And it's crazy, but that's how iodine works. If you don't have it, the car can't start. But once you've got enough of it, every little extra bit actually shuts off the thyroid and slows it down more than anything.

So. Well, how do you know if you need it and how much you would really need then?

Well, the easiest way to know if you. If you need it is to check to see if you've got a pulse. And if you've got a pulse, you're actually. Believe it or not.

And.

And this is even more of a paradox for those with thyroid disease because they get a lot of iodine in their thyroid medicine, and in most cases, they're getting, in that alone, the full, safe amount for the Day. So every spec above that, there's actually a big study, jj, that was done a few years ago. They took people that were severely hypothyroid, and they were not yet on treatment, but they should have been. They had TSH scores averaging 14 to 20. So they were really hypothyroid. And they did nothing more than put them on an iodine restricted diet, like less than 100 microns per day. And over the course of the next next six weeks, 83% of those people were completely cured.

This is just frightening when you look at what was going on there for a while where everybody was taking, like. And the. It was 25 milligrams. I remember, like, when you said that it goes. It wasn't micrograms, it was milligrams. Like, they were high dosing this stuff. Yikes. All right, let's shift gears and let's enter a dangerous little territory. Ready? You know, I always say you could take a bunch of nutritionists and put them in the room, put the vegans on one side, the paleos on the other, and. And just let them duke it out. And I just kind of go down the middle and say, hey, you know what, let's just eat the healthiest diet for you. But what about someone with thyroid disease? Like, where should they land on vegan versus paleo? And is one better for them than the other?

Well, let's cover. Let's cover both of those. And they both. They both got some good things that they bring to bear, and they both got some shortcomings. So the good thing about the vegan side is that they're probably a little more apt to have legumes and maybe a good diversity of vegetables in their diet and probably higher fiber diets. And that's so critical for the gut flora, especially for butyrate in the gut flora. And that's an important part of the body regulating thyroid hormones. Now, the pitfall about the vegan side is that how much protein they get relative to their carbs and fats often runs lower. And that's even harder for someone that has thyroid disease. So it's not about getting protein deficient, because you can avoid protein deficiency as long as you get enough food, but it's getting enough protein relative to carbs and fats, so you keep your muscle tissue activated.

One other thing with the vegan diet, well, it could be for either, but, gosh, I get this question on my Facebook page so often, so I'd love you to discuss it because I've got kalephobic Thyroid people with hypothyroidism who are kale.

Kale afraid, you know, so that's all about goiters. And goitrogens are a huge category of chemicals that can slow iodine uptake. And if you're in a part of the world where your overall iodine intake is averaging less than 50 micrograms, that can make a tiny increase in the rate of goiters. So totally true. But in the modern world, we had no Hashimoto's disease at all until we fortified iodine in our salt back in the early 1900s. So the goitagenic foods, the same compounds that act as goitrogens, are the compounds that cut our cancer risks and help our livers and help our intestinal tract. So there's no detriment to goitrogens in the modern world. They're actually really good foods to include.

Wow. So, you know, the more I'm getting from this is the more that, that dosing iodine has been an issue. It sounds like.

So here's the thing about. I talk about how slowing the thyroid. So if someone in the worst state of too much thyroid hormone called thyroid storm, and they're in the emergency room, the drugs that shut off the thyroid actually take four to six weeks to work. I was just talking to my residents about this. But if someone's in like life threatening thyroid storm, the one surefire way to stop their thyroid instantly is megadose iodine. There's nothing more effective.

Well, there you have it. Everything, everything, all, everything has to be balanced. So we just talked the vegan. Let's, let's trot over to the paleo side.

Paleo side, they're more apt to do well and they can easily do well in terms of protein per calorie. But a pitfall is they often run really low in fiber diversity. You know, there's. Fiber is often thought of as a thing and you know, if you're ever low, you take Metamucil. But no, it's not a thing. And there's 16 types of it that we could talk about. They're all important. And once you exclude all legumes and all intact whole grains, you've cut out a lot of those different types of fiber from your diet. So that's the pitfall there.

So that leads me into the one that I have to bring up because I think it is one of your most. You say a lot of genius things, but this one is we just, we still. It comes up in my house probably every day and it is how you categorize carbs. Because I love what you just said about fiber. We do. We think of it as a thing, but it would be like thinking of carbohydrates as a thing or protein as a thing. You know, the same. It's the same situation. So your. Your explanation of carbs is so easy for people to grab a hold of. So let's, let's. And you just kind of whipped it out one day as, like a nonchalant little thing. And I'm like, oh, my gosh, that. So let's talk about how you. How you strategize. What would be the word for it? Strat. Anyway, categorize that one. How do you categorize carbs?

Well, so there's. There's a lot of people, me included, that if you eat too much, the wrong kind of carbs, you want more of those same foods. So it's easy to think about that whole category as being a bad thing. But the simplest way to break them down is really the wet carbs and the dry carbs. You know, the dry carbs have really no water left intentionally. So this is like crackers and chips and cookies and things like that. Even like rice cakes. And there's some relationship between glycemic index, glycemic load. But the wet carbs, beans, you know, like cooked peas or sweet potatoes or oatmeal, no one ever binges on those foods. But, you know, you put a big bag of chips in front of me and call it good, and that bag of chips isn't going to survive very long.

That bag of chips is a serving, isn't it? It's like, I. I will admit, you know, Tim was out of town and I had these bean chips. And the next. And next thing I know, you know, evil twins sitting on the counter with bag of bean chips. I'm like, well, this could be dinner. It's like fiber. It's like trying to make this okay, I gotta get these out of the house, you know? Yeah, you're right. I've never. But I never sat down with a big bowl of black beans and a spoon and just went to town. That's never happened, ever.

When I wake up late at night and think, oh, there's some leftover beans in the fridge. I'm gonna go, yeah. Wow.

I'm gonna go have those. Right next to him is the wild rice. I'll do that next, you know? Yeah. That has been the simplest thing for me to think about, is we just go, okay. And it doesn't mean you can never have those dry carbs. I just know what they are. And I'm like, all right, going into dry carb category territory here.

I'm just going to be careful.

Proceed with caution. Now, let's talk about, like, the cortisol, because first of all, like, you're, you know, you started out as, like, really going deep into thyroid. You wrote the Idiot's Guide for Thyroid Disease. Then you wrote the Adrenal Reset Diet. How do thyroid and adrenals, how do they go together?

Awesome question. That's why the one book followed the next. They completely go together. So the adrenals, they've got so many jobs. They govern how all your other hormones get used by your body. So if your thyroid levels fluctuate, your body can adjust cortisol to compensate for that. The problem is that living in the modern world, we've got a lot of things adjusting cortisol when we don't want. You know, our body reacts to stress the same way it reacts to famine. We go into a storage mode and we hold on to everything. And that storage mode also makes us more thyroid resistant and also makes us set the stage to being at risk towards autoimmunity.

So I know we talked about. We've been talking about thyroid for weight loss. What about. What about adrenals for weight loss?

You know, they're big. So what happens there is if they're not timing right, and this is the funny thing, because it's not about them being broken, about them not ever making cortisol or making crazy amounts, although that can happen. But the big thing is, if they're not making the right amounts at the right time with your daily rhythm, then all of your fuel is going out of your muscles and into the visceral fat. You know, your body is completely doing what it would do to prepare for a famine or prepare for a winter. And this is wild. Check this out. Here's another one that might be able to blow your mind again. But. So you talk about cortisol, the stress hormone. So we make it from the adrenal glands, but the belly fat makes even more.

So if someone's got. You know, it's interesting because you hear a lot about adrenal exhaustion, right? But I mean, what do you see the most of? Because I feel. I always felt like, you know, when I would be looking at someone's adrenals and looking at the test, it's sort of like you get those people crawling in, you know, at the end. Like, my feeling was always like, when Their adrenals were high. The only thing that would get them to start paying attention is they started to lose muscle and get belly fat. But prior to that they're like, I feel great.

You know, you know, so when it's off, you're right, they can have, they can be over expressing cortisol, they can make it at the wrong time, they can be under producing it. And it's often those who are at that last stage to where they really had their attention gathered, really something, they've got to address it. So it's rather common that that's the group that's, that's getting pointed out. But it's, and it's not even that the adrenals can't make it at that stage, it's that the body is intentionally changing the timing. So we talk about like resistance, but then also the body itself intentionally withholding that cortisol output. So that, that's what's going on is the body is trying to let the system rest up and repair and recover. And the question is what, what is it that brought you to that state? You know, what, why is it's being overdone or what is, what is this lacking? You know, what's the cause and what's.

Really important here that I hope everyone's hearing is, you know, with all of these things I think we want some simple absolute answer, right? You know, like, oh, cortisol bad. No, cortisol is good. No, cortisol die. You know, it's like, you know, and iodine good, no, too much iodine bad. So, so you know, the big thing with everything is getting it to balance, getting the right rhythms, getting everything into balance and all of these things play together. One goes off, other things go off. You know, you go and start to high dose something like iodine. Now you're going to mess up your thyroid. If you mess up your thyroid, you're probably going to start having adrenal issues, you know, then you'll probably have sex hormone issues and everything goes sideways. So it all comes down to really getting these things.

Things balance the body is that when it is really balanced and reset and not only is it stable, but it's going to keep itself there by and large, unless something really goofs it up.

So let's flip over to you and some of the crazy things you do. By the way, if you guys are not following Dr. C on his Facebook and Instagram, this is a guy who rides a unicycle up mountains. Like it is super entertaining. He rock climbs and he'll do like, you know, little things. Facebook lives while he's rock climbing and hanging from a rock. So, you know, very, it's very entertaining to watch. And his, his wife is a beauty pageant queen. So kind of the polar opposite. She's not going to be rock climbing with him. And, and I'm, and I'm with her. I'd like, you know, I'll go shoe shopping with her any day of the week. So. So love to hear one thing that you do every day that you feel like just makes a big impact in your life.

You know, one of the biggest ones for me is just spending some time outside and doesn't really matter where you are. If you've got access to desert or backcountry or even just like a little park. There's so much data. They call this vitamin N for nature. And they've shown that like moving on a treadmill versus moving outdoors, the effect upon your body and nervous system are just completely different. You know, we were adapted to an environment in which we were around a lot of plants, a lot of living things in the natural environment, and our bodies need that.

Yeah. It's interesting now living out here in Rancho Santa Fe and having this orchard and just making a point every day, like, my office is all I see. All outside. I go outside every day. I walk in the dirt. It's. What a difference. Wow. You know, it's incredible what it does for your mood. And my son Grant, in healing his brain injury, like, he just naturally started to go outside and get in the dirt and garden. So, you know, it's, it is incredible. I used to say, oh, go outside for the sunshine. It's way more than that. Super helpful. Now I have something. We always give a really cool, special gift out and yours is especially important because you have a thyroid symptom score. So let's talk about quiz. Let's talk about your how to find out your thyroid symbol symptom score.

This is a cool thing. So this is for two people, two categories of people. There's those who know they've got thyroid disease, they're already on treatment. And there's those who do not know whether or not this is a factor for them, both of them. This quiz has been validated against large numbers of symptom scores of those who had various thyroid blood levels. So we know it's statistically meaningful. And in the course of just a minute or so, you can do this quiz and know a strong probability how likely it is your thyroid is happy as a lark and doing Great. Or a little bit off or off by a big margin. And once you know one of those things, you'll also get some feedback on what are your best steps to do about it based upon how your score came out.

Well, I love this, too, because I always teach people to take personal responsibility for their health, to be able to connect the dots between, you know, what they're doing and how they feel. So what's great is this is such a key, important thing to be using if you are taking thyroid medication so that you can really tell, gosh, is this working? How do I feel? And then if things start to shift, you'll know when to go back in and get tested again, just in case, you know, you need to change your dosing. So I see this as relevant for a lot of different reasons. So I love that you're giving this to everybody and you'll be able to get this by going to. Now, what the heck did I decide? I was. Remember I told you before it was going to be me. It was gonna be what? Dr. C. Okay. I was like, vitamin C. What? Vitamin C. Okay. So what I'm going to do, because Dr. C's been on the podcast quite a few times. He is a. He's a super guest. We have. He's lots of raving fans. So what we're going to do is we're going to put all of this with the show notes@jjvirgin.com forward/drc or Dr. C DRC and you will get to be able to take your thyroid symptom quiz to get that score. And again, whether you suspect you have thyroid disease or you have it and you're. You are medicated. This is super important for you to do again to connect those dots. And even if you don't think you do, I will tell you why this is important for you to take. I knew the day my thyroid shifted, I could feel the shifts of it because I was aware of the symptoms. And so this is something you want to be aware of those symptoms, because if this starts to shift for you, you'll know and you will be able to go running over to your functional doc and get yourself dialed in. Because if your thyroid's not working well, nothing's. Nothing's going well.

Sure.

At all. Yes. It just impacts everything. So thank you so much for being with us again. You always dropped the big wisdom bombs. You did it again. You know, I know there was a little pressure this time, but you always, you always deliver, Allan.

I was glad to hang out. Lots of fun all right.

You love to get you back on a Facebook live too. Everybody loves those. I super appreciate you. All right. Now after the break, we'll be answering a listener's questions. So stay with me.

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This is the time when I answer a listener's question. Today's question is from Margaret in Boca Raton, Florida. I love Boca Raton, Florida. Jealous, jealous Margaret. She writes in jj, you talk all the time about your adrenal issues and how you healed them, how did you know you had them and what should I be looking for? And you know, I do talk a lot about this and it's so great because here I am, of course, you know, I always choose these questions that relate well to the topic at hand. And I did my first adrenal test way back when because one of my buddies was a lab director and he made me and I didn't want to do it because I knew that there was, it wasn't going to be pretty because I tend to push myself. And I think for those of us, if we are more type A and we're pushing ourselves, it's even more important to do these tests because you know, what you measure, you can improve. And it sometimes you need to just see it and go, all right, shape up. And so this is how you test adrenal function. You do something called an adrenal salivary index. It looks at your cortisol throughout the day, morning, midday, afternoon and evening and then also takes two snapshots of DHEA and compares them, gives you a ratio. Now, if you go to the doctor, they could run a blood test of cortisol the first morning. Usually it's 8am Cortisol and a DHEA. But that's just a snapshot in time. And what you heard today is it's really about the rhythm. Cortisol should come up early morning to help wake you up and then it starts to taper down later in the day and come down Lower at night because you're going to sleep. You may find that you have a reverse cortisol pattern. It's high in the evening, low in the morning. You're tired all day and all of a sudden you can't go to sleep at night. Or you may find out that you're just tired all day long. Or you may find out that you're because your cortisol is low all day long. Or you may find that you feel okay in the morning and then all of a sudden you just feel exhausted in the afternoon. That might just be because your cortisol comes down too low, too fast in the afternoon. So you really need to look at that rhythm throughout the day. And we will give a link for how you can do some cortisol testing in the show notes. But again, it's called usually an adrenal stress index or an adrenal salivary index. And you're looking at a, a spit test. You use saliva four times during the day, morning, midday, afternoon, evening. And then you're also going to compare it to two of those times to look at tha, and you look at that ratio as well. And then you'll know based on that, what do I need to do? Do I need to take some things that just help balance out my adrenals? That's what I tend to do is use a product and we'll use, we'll put this in the show notes as well. That balances that, that helps tonify your adrenals, that if they're low, it brings it up. If they're up, it brings it down, helps balance it. But another thing you'd want to look at here is vitamin C. It's the number one vitamin used by the adrenal glands. Super duper important and quite often when we're under stress, you blow out your vitamin C. That's what can lead you to be sick more often because you know, vitamin C critical for immune function. So again today we're not going to talk about all the things you can do. The most important thing, the first part is how do you know? And that is one of the key ways you know and also start to think about, you know, am I tired? Am I gaining waist around my weight, weight around my waistline, my belly, Am I getting belly fat? Am I breaking down muscle? Have I lost my sex drive? Is my hair falling out? Oftentimes adrenal dysfunction comes with low, low iron and thyroid issues, which can cause your hair to fall out as well. Am I craving sugar? Is my gut, Do I Have food intolerances, my gut, leaky. Those are all signs, kind of adrenal issues as well. And one of the things that I want you to think about, and I loved what Dr. C talked about today with thyroid symptoms and you really learning what those are so that you'll kind of get a feeling of, how do you feel? And is this thyroid medication working? I am so dialed into how I feel and what the symptoms of adrenal exhaustion is. Elevated adrenals and low adrenals that I know. Like, the last time I took the test with Dr. C, I was like, I knew I was doing fine because I'd done everything I needed to do to heal my adrenals. And so I expected to get a good test. I got an amazing test. I was kind of really thrilled with that. Better than I've ever had before. But I'd really gotten connected, gotten to the point where I'd connect the dots and know what I need to do and know when I'm starting to push it too much, and I back off. Because if you really trash those adrenals again, leaky gut, sugar cravings messes up your thyroid and your sex hormones, breaks down muscle, messes up your sex drive ages you. These are not things you want to mess with. So this really matters. All right, if you'd like to leave a question, pop on over to one of my social sites, JJ Virgin Official on Facebook or JJ Virgin on Instagram. We're always scouring those and seeing what questions you ask because we love ones that really, really fit into the podcast. So we're looking over there, and if I'm doing a Facebook Live, I love it when you interact and ask questions there as well. So we do Facebook lives into my main page and into my groups on a regular basis. So do that there as well. And now it's time for the review of the week. And every week, I grab a review from itunes. And we love these, by the way, because I know that, you know, if you're trying to figure out which podcast to listen to, you go over there and you go, all right, what's gotten a lot of reviews? So these. These matter a bunch. So if you've not left a review yet, can I kind of beg a little bit? Please, please, please. If you feel so inclined, please leave a review over in itunes. It helps out a bunch. And while you're there, if you haven't subscribed yet, subscribe and share it on over to some friends. So here, this one comes from Dodie. Four, five stars. She says or he. Not sure which one. Educational and informative, very thoughtful to the point, and just the right amount of time. Cool. I love that I try to make these kind of like, like, you know, driving podcasts. So I know the average commute is what, like 22 minutes or you go to the gym for 30. But that's what I do is I try to make it so that you can take me to the gym, take me to the grocery store, drive, drive with me and turn your car into a classroom. So thank you so much for that, Dodie, and thank you in advance for leaving a review and I will see you next week.

That's all for this episode of the JJ Virginia Lifestyle show, which marks another step towards a healthier body and mind. Don't forget to rate, review and subscribe to the show and we'll talk to you next week. The holidays mean more travel, more shopping, more time online and more personal info in more places that could expose you more to identity theft. But LifeLock monitors millions of data points per second. If your identity is stolen, our US Based Restoration Special specialists will fix it, guaranteed or your money back. Don't face drained accounts, fraudulent loans or financial losses alone. Get more holiday fun and less holiday worry with LifeLock. Save up to 40% your first year. Visit LifeLock.com podcast terms apply hello listeners.

This is Anne Bogle, author, blogger and creator of the podcast what Should I Read next? Since 2016, I've been helping readers bring more joy and delight into their reading lives. Every week I take all things books and reading with a guest and guide them in discovering their next read. They share three books they love, one book they don't, and what they've been reading lately. And I recommend three titles they may enjoy reading next. Guests have said our conversations are like therapy, troubleshooting issues that have plagued their reading lives for years, and possibly the rest of their lives as well. And of course, recommending books that meet the moment. Whether they are looking for deep introspection to spur or encourage a life change, or a frothy page turner to help them escape the stresses of work, school, everything, you'll learn something about yourself as a reader and you'll definitely walk away confident to choose your next read, with a whole list of new books and authors to try. So join us each Tuesday for what Should I Read Next? Subscribe now wherever you're listening to this podcast and Visit our website whatshouldireadnextpodcast.com to find out more.