McCall McPherson, a physician assistant and thyroid expert, explains how hypothyroidism damages your metabolism and blood sugar control. She covers intermittent fasting and recommends GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic and Mounjaro as particularly effective for thyroid patients, citing metabolic and heart benefits. Talk to your doctor first.
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If you have a thyroid problem, have tried absolutely everything under the sun to lose weight without success. I have a solution for you. I'm McCall McPherson, physician assistant, Thyroid expert and founder at Modern Thyroid Clinic. So what happens in thyroid patients, and women especially, I feel over time is we lose our metabolic potency, our sensitivity of our blood sugar metabolism, which is basically the cornerstone of our whole metabolic function. The longer we have thyroid problems, the worse this function gets and the more we lose that sensitivity. When I tell my patients this all day, every day, when we fix your thyroid hormones, when we perfect them, and I mean perfect, not just looking at someone's tsh, their metabolic function can start to heal with work. You know, one of the things I recommend is intermittent fasting to start to resensitize that system. But that takes time. So you work, work, work to resensitize that system. Once it is sensitized, you can lose weight with effort more appropriately. But that could take years, right? This has been a giant part of my practice that I haven't a problem I haven't been able to solve in my practice. And it's an important one for women especially. And recently the FDA approved a new class of weight loss medication that I feel are absolutely perfect for thyroid patients. These are drugs like Ozempic, Manjaro, Semaglutide. They are GLP agonists. They influence your metabolism in new different ways. These are not stimulants, these are not, you know, phentermine based products. These work in a few different ways. One, they pull excess blood sugar that's circulating in your bloodstream out, which creates your body's ability to have more sensitive insulin and blood sugar. Sorry, if you hear my very loud dog eating. And a couple other ways, it decreases hunger, it decreases cravings, and it increases feelings of satiety or fullness earlier when you're eating. So essentially what this does is while you're on the medication, your metabolism is improving and it's that core part of your metabolic function that's really destroyed with hypothyroidism. So when my patients come off of these medications, their metabolic function is actually better than they went on them. Life changing. Not only that, but historically we've had to sacrifice people's health to lose weight so that their long term health improves. Semaglutide actually improves people's health, reduces risk for diabetes, high cholesterol, heart attack, stroke, overall mortality. So pretty impressive. Maybe talk with your doctor about it, because I haven't been this excited about something in medicine in a very, very long time.
