McCall McPherson explains what reverse T3 is and why it spikes during stress, poor sleep, undereating, and overexercise. Lowering it means eating enough, sleeping well, reducing inflammation, and avoiding overtraining. Modern Thyroid Clinic also adjusts medication by increasing T3 or reducing T4 to rebalance thyroid hormones.
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What to do about an elevated reverse T3. We're referring to the thyroid hormone that blocks your active hormone and ruins your progress. I did more on a post about this last week, so check for that. However, let's talk about what your options are if your reverse T3 is high. Number one, what I want you to understand is reverse T3 is a purposeful mechanism of your body. It tries to push you into recovery mode. Okay? So think about times when your body wants you to lay down, rest and recover. When you're sick, when you're inflamed, when you're pregnant, when you're sleep deprived, when you're poor, when you have poor micronutrient or caloric or protein intake. Right. You're hungry, you're over exercising, those types of things. Part of the way your body makes you rest is it makes you tired. And one of the ways it does that on purpose is it increases your reverse T3 that that keeps you from absorbing your T3 or active thyroid hormone. So from a lifestyle perspective, you want to reverse engineer those things. You want to eat a low inflammatory diet, get enough sleep, stress modulation stress is another one. Make sure you're getting enough micronutrients, caloric intake, protein, those types of things, not over exercising. So that's lifestyle. Still to a degree, I find there's a huge percentage of the population that is not able to out lifestyle reverse T3, especially if you're on levothyroxine or Synthroid or that class of medication. So what we do at Modern Thyroid Clinic to improve this is we take over your biochemics biochemistry and force your reverse T3 down. We do this by increasing T3 and that sends a message back to your brain, lowers your TSH, lowers your T4, the source of your reverse T3 and it lowers your reverse T3. Maybe I'll try to put a diagram in here. It's a feedback mechanism. You can also just simply, if someone's on a levothyroxine based medication and they have a ton of reverse T3, even reducing levothyroxine because that's T4, the source of reverse T3 would then trickle down and also reduce reverse T3. But the key is creating balance between free T3, your active hormone that you need to feel good, energetic, have a metabolism, a libido, all the things and a balanced or lower end reverse T3 so it's not blocking the absorption of this other hormone that we so desperately need. I hope that makes sense. Ask your questions below about reverse T3 and I'll answer them.
