59: Stop Holiday Weight Gain Before It Starts – The Ten Science Backed Hacks Every Thyroid Patient Needs with McCall McPherson

Welcome to Modern Thyroid and Wellness, the podcast that explores the intricate dance between health, wellness and thyroid, unraveling the threads that weave our vitality together. I'm your host, McCall McPherson, and I'm so thrilled to guide you on this journey to optimal wellness. Today we are talking 10 holiday hacks that you probably haven't heard of to get you through the holidays feeling, well, vibrant. So, so many of my patients almost feel anxious about the holidays because they know they're going to leave them feeling horrible having gained weight that they're going to have to work so incredibly hard to lose. And a lot of them can't lose it anyway. Inflammation completely depleted. So I'm excited to chat with you guys about some honestly, like, pretty simple hacks that'll get you through in a much better way. So, number one, let's talk about inflammation. So, interestingly enough, I get the insight and input from our data at Modern Thyroid Clinic about what causes, almost systemically across the board, increases in antibodies. And it's fascinating. So the one time every single year that I see the pattern where adults antibodies increase is during the holidays. And I mean, it makes sense, right? We're more stressed, we're eating differently, we're drinking differently, we're not getting enough sleep, we're traveling, everything changes, our lifestyle's shaken up and that manifests as an increase in antibodies. Interestingly enough, with kids, I see it in the summer and same reasons, right? So let's start by finding ways to target inflammation. So that could be something as simple as incorporating more antioxidant rich foods into your diet. Taking antioxidants, just a blend even of several supplements like glutathione. 500 milligrams of glutathione before bed to increase your body's ability to combat oxidative stress. Things like low dose naltrexone or LDN are prescriptive ways of doing this, but it can really change the game and trajectory of these two, two months, six, eight weeks of holidays where things can really be thrown off course. So that's number one. Number two is we all indulge during the holidays or we should, right? I mean, but finding strategic ways to minimize the after effects of those indulgences can take you so incredibly far. So one way that I've created this with my patients is through my food flow formula. And essentially it still leaves room for you to eat all of the things that you love, but you eat them on your plate in a different sequence or order. So my recommendation is starting with protein. It can even have some fats in it, but protein first, then nutrient dense, high fiber, low glycemic foods. These are things like low glycemic, low blood sugar, veggies, not starchy, but between the protein, fat and fib. You prime your body's blood sugar response system to not be on a wild roller coaster. And then after you eat those two things, then you indulge in carbohydrates, whether it's potatoes or sweets or whatever it is, but simply don't skip it. Just prime your body beforehand. And clinical trials in diabetes care studies have shown that shifting the order of your foods to a method like this can reduce after eating, blood sugar spikes by 30 to 40%, y'. All. It slows gastric emptying, it blunts the glycemic, the sugar load. And you can literally hack your blood sugar response simply by changing the order in which you're eating your food. So don't forget protein with some fat, fiber, and then things that are going to spike your blood sugar. Number three, we're like breezing right through these. This is what happens on my solo episodes. We just like, it's a one way conversation, so everything just goes faster. But it's good you guys are busy during the holidays anyway. So number three is leveraging the walking window. So ideally after you eat a big meal, it can be for Thanksgiving, it can be for Christmas, but within 30 minutes, walk 20 minutes. So it doesn't need to be fast paced. Literally take your whole family with you, take your kids with you most of the time. It's beautiful weather this time of year. At least it is in Texas. We like absolutely anxiously await this weather. But if within a half hour of eating, you take a 20 minute walk where you can still talk, still converse, it really significantly reduces your after eating blood sugar spike. It almost acts like an insulin substitute. And remember, insulin is what neutralizes our blood sugar. And activity triggers glucose to be transported into your muscle via the Glute 4 activation, which lowers after eating, blood sugar spikes by 25 to 35%. It also improves digestion, right? It allows our food to move through our GI tract. So just think if you already did food flow formula, you ordered your food in terms of the sequence that you're eating and then you walked after for 20 minutes in total, you would reduce your blood sugar spike by 55 to 75%. And I have to tell you guys, hypothyroid people, y', all, this is a big problem for us. Insulin sensitivity, leptin sensitivity, we, we lose that so early we become insulin resistant, leptin resistant, and that puts us into fat storage mode, which is why, you know, we can eat badly between Christmas and New Year's and gain eight pounds. Meanwhile, everyone else can eat badly from Thanksgiving to New Year's and gain two and a half. Right? Like, we are primed for fat storage. So finding ways to maintain insulin sensitivity to reduce our risk for leptin and insulin resistance is huge. So number four, this should probably be towards the end, but pair magnesium and glycine before bed. So it can be magnesium citrate, it can be magnesium glycinate, roughly about 200 milligrams and then 3 grams of glycine. Especially on high sugar, high stress days, if you're in a situation with family, you're feeling the heat. This actually enhances insulin receptor function and glycine lowers fasting glucose and it even can improve our sleep quality. It can put us into more of a relaxed state. Basically, it's like a biochemical reset for the nights that you've overindulged or indulged. Just fuel your body where your insulin doesn't have to work as hard. Again, it's all these little things that add up or when consistently used, absolutely change the trajectory of everything. Another big one that I love, and I personally can feel a significant difference when I utilize it, is strength training before your big celebrations, don't skip the gym leading up to this. A single session of resistance training, even 30 to 60 minutes of weightlifting increases again. GLUT4 transport activity in skeletal muscle. What that means is your muscles simply absorb sugar for the next 24 to 48 hours. It's like a sponge. And that's what we want. The sooner, the quicker our blood sugar gets absorbed into our system and isn't freely circulating in our bloodstream, the less likely we are to develop insulin resistance, leptin resistance, metabolic dysfunction that's so, so frequently occurs even really early on in hypothyroid people. So after you lift weights, muscle takes up glucose without really needing a lot of insulin, which allows us to maintain insulin sensitivity and that also allows us to our blood sugar to return to baseline more quickly. In one study, patients who or participants, I should say, who did 45 minutes of resistant exercise before a high carb meal had a 25 to 30% lower postprandial after eating glucose increase compared with people who took a rest day that day. So big, some big facts, some big summary points for this. If you lift about an hour before a large meal, expect a 20 to 40% reduction in glucose and insulin spikes, that's huge. You'll also experience less, less oxidative stress and inflammatory signaling from the meal's carbohydrate and fat load. Insulin is an inflammatory hormone in high levels. You can also reduce your. Your after eating fatigue. It was fascinating to me when I got a continuous glucose monitor a couple years ago from Nutrisense because all of a sudden I was, I was like working on something and I got exhausted, so tired I could not stay awake. And I looked at my continuous glucose monitor, I and my blood sugar was only like 140. That's not crazy, y'. All. That's not out of the realm of what I would expect. We're walking around with after we eat conservatively every day, and it made me exhausted, I started noticing a pattern that even mild elevations in my blood sugar after I ate drove enormous fatigue that I would not have pinpointed for that to be the cause without a continuous glucose monitor. So I think so much of the fatigue that we're feeling is blood sugar related and we don't even know number six. So think about pairing your meals with polyphenols. So these are present in high concentrations in things like green tea or red wine. Pair one of those with carb heavy meals and something really interesting happens. So polyphenols like resveratrol and EGCG temporarily inhibit alpha amylase and alpha glucosidase, enzymes that actually digest starch. So what that does is it slows the breakdown of those carbohydrates and it reduces the glucose spikes by about 15 to 25%. So significant again, like, think about all of these things added together and how much we can shift our experience on a daily basis utilizing these. But also over the long term, y' all, imagine incorporating these into our lives several times a week and not just during the holidays. One of your favorite conversations to have with me, I found that totally caught me by surprise, is about alcohol types. So be mindful if you drink alcohol of the kind of alcohol you're drinking. And I really build out that this concept and recommendations from my own experience. So I struggle feeling horrible with the smallest amount of alcohol. But over the last 15 years or so, I've learned a lot. I've been able to navigate all of this in a pretty successful way where I can still indulge in alcoholic drinks on occasion, especially at holidays and parties and gatherings and things. So here are some of my tips. Know a lot of. Sadly, in America, a lot of our wine that we are conditioned to drink. And most commonly, drink is incredibly, incredibly polluted with toxins, with high, high amounts of pesticides, fungicides. Just. It will make you feel horrible. So if I could say one recommendation right out of the gate, it would be to not drink wine from California. Not organic, not anything. There was a study done several years ago on organic wines in California. 100% of them had pesticides in them. Even the fact that, you know the vineyard across the street is using pesticides, the wind is blowing it. You know, it's being carried over. It's getting into the groundwater and transferring. So I recommend completely staying away from California wine. And y', all, I'm so neurotic about it. I will literally go to Napa for vacation, and I will not have a glass of wine the entire time I'm there, because I'm sure many of you also have this experience. I can get through a quarter of a glass of wine, and I'm already hungover from the poor, poor quality of the product long before I ever even have even the slightest bit of a semblance of a buzz. So be very mindful. I'm extraordinarily particular about specifically the wine that I drink. So I drink red wine and white wine from the Piedmont region in Italy. So some of my favorite names of those high, high end is called Barolo from Piedmont. A step down that's kind of readily available in most grocery stores, liquor stores. That's a red wine is called Barbera, Barbera di Alba, Barbera d'. Asti. Those are pretty safe from a red wine perspective. My favorite white wine also comes from the Piedmont region of Italy, and it's called Arnais a rneis Chef's kiss. If I'm out and about at a restaurant somewhere where I can't quite choose the nuances of maybe lesser known Italian wines, I will do a Pinot grigio for from Italy, y'. All. That's kind of it. Like, that's largely the wine that I drink from Italy. I will also drink French. The lighter in color, the better. Even if it's a little bit orange, it tends to make me feel less poorly. So hopefully that gives you a little bit of support in that regard. And then as far as harder alcohols go. And again, just fast forward this. If you don't drink alcohol, but harder alcohol, the only alcohol that I will drink is tequila, a blanco tequila. I don't want it sitting aging in a whiskey barrel for years and years and years. So blanco tequila, there is a app that you can use to determine how clean tequila is, how many additives, how many flavors, how much of this extra crap do they put in it? And it's called Tequila Matchmaker. I even think it's free. I also think it's online. So you can go to the liquor store, find blanco tequilas and look them up on Tequila Matchmaker and see in fact how clean they are. When I use tequila to make drinks, I use it with as little sugar as possible or no sugar. Things like lime, things like Topo chico, maybe with a splash of orange. The less sugar you have, the more more the the less likelihood of you poorly reacting to alcohol. So a couple little tips for those of you who like to enjoy a cocktail now and then. Number eight stop eating three hours before bed. Studies show eating dinner at 10pm versus 6pm leads to an increase in after eating, blood sugar spikes by 20 to 30% and reduced fat oxidation overnight. Which means your body is basically going into metabolic shutdown while you're asleep and you're going to move into a fat storage state. But there's some other implications too. So your growth hormone is incredibly powerful. It generally surges the first two hours that we're asleep, one to two hours in to our deep sleep. But we only get growth hormone released if our insulin is low. If our body knows we're in a in a state of safety, we're not overworking everything still. So if you're eating right before bed, you're not secreting growth hormone to allow your body to heal. Clean up all these other things. Just really be in a health based state. Eating close to bedtime actually reduces growth hormone secretion by up to 70% 70% y'. All. High insulin while you're asleep also increases core body temperature, making it harder to fall asleep, making it harder to stay asleep. And you'll even see improved sleep data on your aura ring etc if you don't eat close to bed. In a randomized controlled trial in endocrine reviews in 2022 Subjects who stopped eating over equal to or over over three hours before bed had significantly lower fasting glucose levels and improved insulin sensitivity the next morning even if the calorie intake was identical. Okay, but it goes deeper than this too in terms of protecting your long term outcomes. Like when I eat before bed. And again y', all, I am the canary in the coal mine. My system is so sensitive. That's why I bring all of this to you, because I have to do it myself or I won't feel well. But one of the reasons stopping eating at Least three hours before bed is that it lowers neuroinflammatory risk. So when we sleep better, we have stronger cleanup of what's called our glymphatic rinse, which is where our brain goes and cleans up our entire system and clears metabolites like beta amyloid and tau that are associated with Alzheimer's or dementia. It also drives well when we eat before bed late night, it the intake drives circadian misalignment, meaning our body gets confused, it doesn't think we're ready for sleep, and that leads to neurodegenerative pathways and it's just compromises our blood sugar, our inflammatory pathways, and all of these things increase our risk for neurodegenerative conditions. So stop eating at least three hours before bed anytime that you can, even if you don't do it every night. But be mindful of it and see how you feel on the mornings after you do that compared to the mornings that you don't, because it even impacts your next day, your insulin sensitivity, your blood sugar spikes the next day, which is going to make you feel so much better then as well. Number nine is turn down the lights before bed. Eat. If you're going to eat a little later, eat it over candlelight. Like have the lights dimmed. So at least 30 minutes before bed. If you're in a dimly lit environment with warm light, candlelight, no LED overhead lights, and some of those are so horrible, y', all, no scrolling. This will allow your body to release melatonin because when you have that light input into your nervous system, it suppresses it. One interesting study from 2020, two people that were exposed to overhead lighting before bed had a 30% higher nocturnal glucose level the following. Even the following morning, it persisted despite the two groups eating the exact same thing. So light is powerful, y'. All. And lastly, I'm telling you this because I have to hold myself accountable to it because this is my vice. Build in more rest time after big events. This is my goal moving into 2026, y'. All. I will perpetually marathon myself until I crash. And that's not good for anyone. But it is especially not good for people with thyroid conditions. And in turn, we also have adrenal conditions where our bodies cannot just put perpetually push through stress. We need extra restorative time. We need extra rest. So when you're planning out your holiday calendar, calendar this season, please, please, please look at it and build in time for rest. I hope you guys have a wonderful holiday season. Happy Thanksgiving, Happy Holidays, Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, all the family things. And I hope these tips and hacks help make your holiday season better, more vibrant, that you come out of it feeling just as good as when you went in.