How to lose weight when you have a thyroid problem?

Probably the most frustrating and consistent symptom I see my patients want fixed at modern thyroid clinic is their metabolism. They want to be able to lose weight, even lose weight with effort, which is incredibly difficult after years of a thyroid issue. So let's talk about what I tell them. Number one, baseline, your medication must be perfect. So you need to have very, very well balanced thyroid hormones so that your body can start the process of healing thyroid, the metabolic damage that's already occurred. Okay, so you can see a ton of my old posts about that, but absolutely foundational. Okay, number two, you have to start to teach your body to switch from burning food to burning stored fat, which is called metabolic flexibility. A lot of thyroid patients lose this along with their insulin sensitivity. Okay, so your insulin sensitivity and metabolic flexibility are the cornerstone for your metabolism. You lose that with years of hypothyroidism, and so you have to retrain that process. The best, most powerful way that I've seen thyroid patients be able to do this is with intermittent fasting. So intermittent fasting is where you eat in a certain window during the day. And I have very particular recommendations for this that I found work while not stressing the body. So I'll post about that next. But intermittent fasting, you can see my dog down there, starts to repair the loss of metabolic potency. And it also, on a daily basis, makes your body switch from burning food for fuel to fat. Right? And again, that feeds your metabolic flexibility. Another way that you can work on this is with targeted supplementation. I'll talk more about this soon and give you guys access to a weight loss support or supplement rather that I've used with patients for years. And I will post about that really soon as well. So stay tuned. Lastly, when patients are really extremely frustrated with their weight and their inability to lose it. So be quiet, Oliver, or it's just taking too long in the process, or maybe they're becoming pre diabetic. I will use weight loss medications, particularly one that recently got approved for weight loss for non diabetic people. That is a GLP agonist called semaglutide. This is a very powerful medication for thyroid patients, especially because not only does it allow you to lose weight, it also works to fix the exact part of your metabolism that hypothyroidism has damaged over the years, so that when you come off of semaglutide, as long as your thyroid medications are optimized, your metabolism is actually healed and repaired. So more coming on this soon.