A short interview where McCall McPherson asks an expert why many people have difficulty losing weight. The expert emphasizes that suboptimal thyroid function—particularly low T3—is a common and under-recognized barrier to weight loss. They explain that the thyroid produces mostly T4 (a prohormone) which must be converted to the active hormone T3 in peripheral organs (liver, gut), and note that many patients on T4-only medications may therefore have low T3 and struggle to lose weight.
Chapters
I want to go to an area that I get a ton of questions about, but it's weight loss, like thyroid. People have a very, very difficult time losing weight. Tell me some of the most common. First of all, why. Why do they have such a hard time losing weight, in your opinion? And what are some common mistakes, some patterns that you see in our people that maybe we could learn from? Absolutely.
So there's many different reasons as to why. I mean, the first is that a lot of times the thyroid is not optimal. And literally, like, it is almost impossible to lose weight when you don't have optimal thyroid hormones, especially T3. And I know you talk about that all the time as well, and that's huge. Right. And so because so many people are on a T4 only medication, they may not even know their T3 is low. Right. That's a big thing. Or it is T3. Can you tell people like T3, T4 and medication so they can have an idea? Of course. Absolutely. So T4 is our pro hormone. So our thyroid produces mostly T4. It produces a little bit T3, but a very, very small amount. And people often ask me, well, why is that? Our bodies are really smart. So nothing is done just because. Right. We need thyroid hormone for literally everything, our head to our toe. Right. And so if we had a lot of T3 produced in the thyroid, it would be used by the cells here, and there wouldn't be enough to go all around. So the body's so smart, and it produces a T4. T4 then has to convert to T3, but it doesn't do it in the thyroid. It does it in other areas of the body. So the T4 then travels to our liver, into our gut, where it converts and.
