JJ Virgin explains how an underactive thyroid causes weight loss resistance, fatigue, and hair loss, and why testing only TSH misses mild cases. Functional medicine testing checks free T3/T4, reverse T3, and antibodies. Stress raises cortisol and blocks T4 conversion to active T3. Adequate protein, fiber, and removing gluten or dairy if you're intolerant help, while cooked vegetables with goitrogens are fine.
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So if you're at your wit's end because you can't lose weight, no matter how much intermittent fasting you do or how balanced your gut is, or you detox or de stress and you think you've checked out everything that could be holding your weight hostage, you've arrived at your thyroid. Now, if you've got thyroid fatigue, you don't have to settle for the weight gain or the low energy that usually comes with it. There are things that you can do to get your thyroid healthy and moving again. So stay tuned for the way to unlock this key to revving your metabolism. Hey, I'm J.J. and if you want to stay current with the things that will help you get healthy and feel better, fast and lose weight and keep you from regaining it, let's stay connected. All you have to do is hit like on this video and subscribe to this channel, and you're done. So I've put out a few videos on reasons you might have trouble losing weight other than your diet, and this one could be a game changer for you. It's so important. Now, so far, we've covered stress, your gut, sleep, toxins, and over exercising, and each of them has an impact on how easily you lose weight or don't. What you're probably noticing is that you need to get healthy to lose weight and not vice versa. And if your thyroid isn't working optimally, that can massively impact your health. Now, this was an issue for me, so I can speak from personal, painful experience. You may already know if you've got a sluggish thyroid, but if not, here are a couple of the clues. Weight gain is obvious, but also fatigue. You feel cold, your hair and your skin are dry. You're losing some hair. Your cholesterol levels are going up, your sex drive is going down, you just feel a little puffy. You go to the gym, but you just can't seem to build any muscle. You're just a little depressed, you feel brain foggy, or you've got this yellow tinge to your palms. And that's, by the way, because you can't convert your beta carotene to vitamin A. And here's a weird one. You start losing the outer third of your eyebrows. Now, also a little one from my buddy, Dr. Alan Christiansen. He says if your weight bounces up and down a couple pounds a day, that is not normal. It's not calories, it's your metabolism going crazy. So weighing in every day, using the scale as a biometric tool, again, not as a Mean friend can help you sleuth this whole thing out if you feel like you have a problem. Okay, so those are all some of the symptoms. And, and by the way, even if you just said check on one or two of those, you could have a low functioning thyroid. The opposite of this is hyperthyroid. It has totally different issues. But if you can't lose weight and you're having problems with your thyroid, odds are good. It's probably low thyroid or hypothyroidism. And if your thyroid sluggish, it's definitely interfering with your weight loss. So you want to get a handle on it. When your body doesn't make enough thyroid hormone, for whatever reason, you're operating at a lower metabolic rate. If your thyroid is tired, you're tired. Your thyroid holds the key to burning fat and having great energy. And even if you don't have outright thyroid disease, a sluggish thyroid can slow down your metabolism and put the brakes on weight loss. Losing weight when you have an underactive thyroid can be tough. It can be really frustrating, I will admit. Done it myself. And if you've lost your thyroid from surgery or radioactive iodine treatment, losing weight can seem impossible. Fortunately, there's some things you can do now. Most likely if you have hypothyroidism, it's Hashimoto's, which is a hereditary autoimmune condition where the body's immune system attacks and damages the thyroid. This prevents the thyroid from making releasing enough thyroid hormone. So you're pretty likely to need supplemental thyroid hormone as well. And if you do, no amount of diet or exercise is going to take that weight off alone. But not all medications create equal. So that's something we're going to talk about. But here's the thing. Because most of the symptoms of hypothyroidism are pretty common, it can get missed or misdiagnosed. So it's really important to chase down what's going on with you because this isn't the only thing. It's not just about your weight. This is about your overall health. Undiagnosed hyperthyroidism can have a serious impact on your heart health, believe it or not, and your bone health. So you've got to get this figured out and I'm going to help you do that. So if you're thinking that maybe, but you're not sure you have thyroid issues, the first thing you got to do is you've got to get yourself checked out. And I recommend that you do this with a function medicine doctor who's Going to look past the normal range of the single TSH marker and look at the bigger picture, which is going to also include antibodies and symptoms. One of the challenges is that most traditional practitioners will only look at TSH or TSH and T3 and T4. And TSH, thyroid stimulating hormone, is produced by the pituitary gland. The challenge is that you can be hypothyroid and still in the normal range. Here, mild hypothyroidism, like what I had and it was just a little over, makes you tired, achy, and less likely to exercise. And then you pack on more pounds. And when you're tired, you probably crave and eat more sugary foods and carbs. I mean, it just all becomes a vicious cycle. Normal reference ranges often won't tell you that your thyroid is the problem. So just testing TSH is not going to give you the complete picture you need. And again, you're going to want to work with the functional medicine doctor who will give you the complete picture. You'll get TSH free T3 and T4, reverse T3 and antibodies. And you should also take a look at your iron levels and your cortisol levels as all of these go together. And they all tend to get whacked together, by the way. Chronic stress that causes cortisol to be elevated longer than it should also is going to negatively impact the thyroid along the way and starts to block that conversion of T4 to the active T3 hormone. So when you focus on healing your thyroid, you've also got to look at your stress hormones. Now, the right diet and supplements can help balance your hormones, reduce inflammation, bring down those thyroid antibodies, and bring back your energy when you get yourself healthy. Weight loss is this beautiful side effect. It's this beautiful side bonus. The first thing you want to do is make some changes to what you eat. And I'm going to tell you to start with the virgin anti diet. It's going to make sure that you eat enough protein relative to carbs and fat, which is super important here because lots of fiber is good for your gut and for the butyrate in your gut that regulates thyroid hormones. It's also critical to remove the key high food intolerance foods, because these things, specifically gluten, so it's soy and dairy, could be triggering that autoimmune response. Now, when you have a thyroid problem, you may also be worried about the goitrogens in foods like broccoli or cauliflower, but those are really only an issue if you're eating a pound or more a day of raw. And I'm guessing you're not doing that right. So a little bit of cooked broccoli every day. Cauliflower, that's not a problem. Now what about iodine? Should you salt? Should you not salt? Now, iodine is always a big question for thyroid issues and Google can scare the crap out of you. Can we be honest? So here's the top line. Depending on where you fit. If you're on thyroid medications, limit extra iodine. If you're not on thyroid medications, don't worry about supplementing with iodine. If you're not on thyroid medications and you're a raw food vegan, you may want to use some iodized salt. Pretty simple. And for all the rest of us, we're using really clean, perfect sea salt, right? All right, there you go. Hope you got some good tips in this video to help you get your thyroid back in gear and your metabolism fully healthy. Now, don't forget to like and subscribe so you can keep info like this coming your way. In the next video, we're going to tackle four ways to boost your metabolism that will make you look and feel great. See you there.
