Reverse Hashimoto’s and Autoimmunity Naturally | Ryan Monahan

Speaker A: 00:00:01

If you enter a state of total adrenal exhaustion, what we call adrenal fatigue, that's going to suppress your cortisol levels are going to be tanked. It's like having no gas left in the tank. Well, in order to preserve resources and preserve energy, your thyroid might also slow down as a result.

And that would be a protective mechanism. Your body is saying, hey, this system is really stressed out and over taxed.

We need to slow everything down to put you into a metabolic hibernation, to force you.

If you're not going to slow down, if you're going to say, hey, you know what, well, I'm going to try to fight this and just push through it like so many people do in our culture, just go. Your body will slow it down for you. If you're not willing to do the work to rest and heal and repair.

Speaker B: 00:00:42

Welcome to the Optimized Woman, the podcast for high performing women ready to take back their health. I'm Orshi McNaughton, a board certified holistic health practitioner and functional nutritionist.

If you're tired of feeling stuck, you can't lose the weight. No matter what you do, your energy is in the toilet, your metabolism feels like it's at a standstill, and you lost the spark you once had.

Then you're in the right place. We are here to unleash the unstoppable force you're meant to be and give you the tools to fix what's holding you back.

So if you're ready to own it, start thriving again and live the life you deserve. And let's get to it. Hey. Welcome friends.

Today I'm joined by my friend and colleague, Ryan Monahan, a functional diagnostic nutrition practitioner who has dedicated his career to uncovering the root causes of complex health issues, particularly hyperthyroidism and Hashimoto. In this episode, we dive into the realities of thyroid imbalances, which affect millions of women and often go misunderstood or mismanaged.

The thyroid is essentially the master regulator of your metabolism, influencing how every cell in your body uses energy.

Yet when it's out of balance, symptoms like persistent fatigue, weight gain, hair loss, brain fog, feeling really cold, those can start to disrupt your life.

Ryan shares his expert insights on recognizing these signs, asking the right questions, and taking proactive steps towards managing and healing your thyroid health. This conversation is packed with eye opening insights and empowering advice for really anyone navigating thyroid health. So let's dive right in.

Speaker A: 00:02:25

So it was a very long and winding journey, starting all the way back to as early as I can remember having chronic symptoms was maybe as soon as like my early 20s where I started to experience chronic fatigue, brain fog, constipation, depression, all kinds of unexplained skin lesions and rashes throughout my body. So there were all these seemingly separate symptoms that I had yet to learn until many years later.

Might have had a common root cause to it, which we'll definitely get to today. So I remember sleeping sometimes 12, 13, 14 hours a day, still not feeling rested.

Some days spent entirely in bed just due to the debilitating fatigue. Just kind of staring at the ceiling, wondering when things were going to get better. It felt like Groundhog Day for anyone who's ever seen that movie.

Just kind of repeating the same nightmare over and over again. It was pretty brutal. I often say that I missed out on an entire decade of well being.

Most of my 20s were spent trying to find answers to this mystery illness, not really living a full life. So during that time period, I was jumping from doctor to doctor.

All these different specialists from, you name it, rheumatologists, ear, nose and throat specialists, dermatologists. Name your ologist, insert the blank, is too many to mention.

At one point I had even been admitted to a grand rounds at Yale New Haven Hospital, where they had over 40 medical students examine me. And essentially they wrote up a report of their findings, which in medical speak more or less said, we don't know. Ryan seems to be in good health.

I still have the letter for anyone who didn't believe me. Basically said, he seems to be fine, everything looks normal. Right? That kind of typical standard party line, so to speak.

It was a very long and grueling journey. There were points, as dramatic as this might sound, where I thought maybe I was dying from something that had yet to be discovered.

And I really started to lose hope after many years of trying to find answers. So eventually, I'm so grateful that I eventually did find an answer.

I started working with a doctor who was a traditional medical doctor, but he also had a sort of traditional Chinese medical background as well in tcm. And I literally begged him to listen to me.

I remember actually asking him to listen to my story because I feel like I wasn't being heard up until that point in time. And he really did. He sat down. I explained to him that I knew something was wrong and that it wasn't all in my head.

I felt intuitively that there was something we hadn't figured out yet. And he ran a very comprehensive lab panel of all dozens of different biomarkers, including a thyroid panel.

By the way, he was the first doctor that had ever done that. No doctor up until that point had ever suggested the thyroid or had ever run a thyroid panel on me. So he was doctor number 40.

Something in line after almost a 10 year search that had actually run a thyroid panel. When we got those results back, my tsh, which was thyroid stimulating hormone, for those of you who aren't familiar, it's a very basic thyroid test.

It's inversely proportional to the level of your thyroid functioning, meaning the higher your TSH value, typically the slower your metabolic rate, the slower your thyroid is functioning. The standard medical range for TSH is about 0.5 to 5. In the functional holistic world, we like to see it even tighter, maybe like 0.5 to 2.5.

And my TSH was above 150, which depending on which range you use is either 30 to 60 times above that reference range. So essentially I like to say, and it very much felt this way, that I was in a metabolic coma until that lab finding was discovered.

So that was the day I was diagnosed with Hashimoto's and everything changed.

Speaker B: 00:06:22

Ryan, why is it so common for Hashimoto's to go under diagnosed or misdiagnosed for years, especially for men?

Speaker A: 00:06:29

On average, Hashimoto's is about five to eight times more prevalent in women than men. So it is typically thought of as a women's disease.

It may be the case for that reason, which I don't personally think is really an excuse because I did have a lot of the red flags for what would be a thyroid condition. But men may go unnoticed or under the radar.

Like I said, it took over 40 doctors before a doctor had even thought to run a thyroid test, which is not particularly expensive, especially if insurance is running it. So why not just add that on, right?

If someone is experiencing fatigue, unexplained weight gain, brain fog, depression, constipation, low libido, these are just among some of the a handful of symptoms associated with hypothyroidism. The Hachimoto's condition is more prevalent in women. There are a number of different theories as to why that might be the case.

One being that women are about twice as likely to experience early childhood adversity, which could be measured through ACE scores, which is an adverse childhood experience, right? So women are more likely to experience trauma in our society.

Another theory is that estrogen is thought to be a potent promoter of autoimmunity, right? So during the follicular phase of a woman's cycle, there, there's going to be an increase or a surge of estrogen.

If you couple that with a lot of the personal care products. Women are estimated to use at least 12 personal care products every day. Many of these are loaded up with phthalates, parabens, forever chemicals.

All of these chemicals that act as xenoestrogens, they mimic the effect of estrogen.

So if these chemicals in our environment are kind of jacking up and increasing our estrogen, that might also be a promoter of autoimmunity through that mechanism as well.

Speaker B: 00:08:16

And I think also the two X chromosomes.

Speaker A: 00:08:18

Right, the two X chromosomes, that's another theory as well. That's a predisposing factor to developing autoimmunity.

Speaker B: 00:08:24

I was doing a little research before our call and according to the Internet, there's approximately 5% of the U.S. population has Hashimoto's, which is more than 60 million people just in the U.S. which is a lot of people.

Speaker A: 00:08:40

Yeah.

Speaker B: 00:08:40

And out of that a vast majority of these are women. And that's why we are talking about this today. Obviously we are mostly talking about women's health.

And you happen to have been so under diagnosed partly because you're a man, but even for women, all the things that you described of not being validated and seen and listened to, women are gaslighted every single day when they go to their regular doctor and they are not willing to run the full panels. They are lucky if they even get TSH tested. And that's a good question.

Why is the standard of care is just to run a TSH for sort of your standard allopathic approach?

Speaker A: 00:09:22

It's such a flawed way of doing things that we could easily spend a whole hour long podcast just talking about all the ways in which running just a TSH marker only is just not enough information. So I'll give you guys at least a few reasons to chew on. So let's start with the basics.

So firstly, TSH is thyroid stimulating hormone and it's a hormone not produced by your thyroid gland, but actually by your pituitary. So it's the pituitary which sits at the base of the brain and it's producing TSH to kind of stimulate the thyroid into action.

If the thyroid is not making enough thyroid hormone, TSH will kick in to stimulate the thyroid, hence the term or the name thyroid stimulating hormone. So I mentioned this because if we're running TSH only, it's technically not even a thyroid marker. It's not a marker of thyroid function at all.

It's technically a pituitary marker. So right off the bat, we've got problems. All right.

Second point that we can make is that the standard of care within the conventional medical model approach is to essentially wait until there's so much destruction to the thyroid that it's not keeping up with its ability to make thyroid hormone.

So research actually suggests that as much as 90% of thyroid function can be, that 90% of the thyroid can be destroyed or damaged before a diagnosis of hypothyroidism even shows up. What am I getting at here?

Well, if we're just waiting for TSH to creep up above that, let's say 0.5 to 5, we're essentially waiting for the thyroid to become damaged via inflammation. We'll come back to that in this podcast.

We're waiting for that damage to become so severe, in a sense, that the TSH goes out of range and your thyroid hormones start to drift low.

And the reason that's done is because from the conventional medical view, the only options that are really provided are to treat your thyroid dysfunction with thyroid hormones, say with Synthroid or generic Levothyroxine, which is essentially just attempting to brute force just to get those numbers into the normal range, but it's not necessarily addressing the underlying cause. So your numbers might look fine on paper eventually, but I hear this all the time. My thyroid values look normal, but I still feel brain fog and the.

And the hair loss and weight gain, like nothing's really changing, except my numbers look normal on paper. So you go to your doctor and you say, well, what can be done here? What kind of course of action can we take?

And your doctor is most likely to say, well, the thyroid, the fatigue or the weight gain or the brain fog or the low libido, those must be related to something else, because your. Your thyroid values are now normal. There's nothing else I can do for you. Well, Doctor, what if we run thyroid antibodies?

My very first endocrinologist, true story, word for word. I'm just. I'm actually quoting exactly what he said. He said, that would be a waste of my time, a waste of money.

Actually, he said it'd be a waste of my money. So what's the deal with that? Like, why are they saying antibodies are a waste of money?

In short, from the conventional perspective, there's nothing that could be done about autoimmunity. It's genetic. You're going to have it for the rest of your life.

There's nothing you could do to heal or repair that condition or mitigate the damage or negotiate with it all we can do is get the thyroid hormone values back into normal range. So that's part of the reason why they just don't even ever bother with running a full thyroid panel or looking for thyroid antibodies.

Speaker B: 00:13:04

Yeah. And a funny story here for you, Ryan. I literally just went to an endocrinologist last week to talk about thyroid.

So I had a full panel thyroid panel because I ran it myself and I had all the markers and I was going there with my markers to say, hey, I wanted to get some T3 medication, like a low dose. That, that was my objective. And I was trying to make a case. I was really prepared.

I had all my markers and pretty much threw away all the other markers and said I'm only going to look at TSH because the other ones don't matter.

Speaker A: 00:13:38

Yeah.

Speaker B: 00:13:39

And, and, and also she completely ignored my autoimmune markers. And so it's just funny that she was a fairly young woman, so she was probably very recently trained. So she's not even like old school.

So I'm just so surprised that it's still. That is still exactly the case.

You would figure like in 10 years things translate into the allopathic world, but the change is just not making its way into endocrinology, which not so shocking.

Speaker A: 00:14:13

And in a sense, to be fair, you can't blame these doctors. They're just doing what they were taught. And I don't necessarily think it comes from malice or mal intent or anything like that.

This is just what they're taught in medical school is that the standard approach to treatment is measuring TSH and T4 only. And if TSH is high and T4 is low, then you get thyroid medication and that's pretty much the end of it as far as what your options are.

Speaker B: 00:14:42

And you mentioned that so many people have symptoms even though their labs are in the right range. And I also see that with the people I work with that are already on thyroid medications.

There's so many women already taking thyroid medications, so they already been diagnosed as hypothyroid, they are on medications, yet they have all the hypothyroid symptoms. Like they coming to me to fix their hypothyroid symptoms, the classic symptoms, and yet they are already on medication. So what's your take on that?

Speaker A: 00:15:11

It breaks my heart because so many people are falling through the cracks of this system and not getting the care that they deserve.

There was actually a large scale survey conducted where they surveyed about 12,000 hypothyroid patients to ask them how satisfied they were with the quality of the care they were receiving with their thyroid hormone treatment. And essentially it was only about 50%. 50% said they were happy, the other 50% said they weren't. That's a huge margin of error. Right?

Like 50%, people that are taking, say, Synthroid or Levothyroxine, their thyroid hormone levels are normal, but they still feel terrible there. There's gotta be more we could do to help these people. So what's going on then? Your thyroid hormone levels are normal.

You're still experiencing all of these symptoms. The short answer here is that you are not addressing what caused the hypothyroidism to begin with.

So this might come as a shock to a lot of your listeners, but up to as much as 97%, you'll hear different estimates, but it's at least 90%. So let's say 90 to 97% of those diagnosed with hypothyroidism.

That hypothyroidism is actually caused by an underlying autoimmune condition, AKA Hashimoto's thyroiditis.

You would be shocked how many clients come to work with me having a prior hypothyroidism diagnosis where they have no idea that they have Hashimoto's. What is Hashimoto's? Let's just talk about that for a second. Hashimoto's is an autoimmune condition. It's inflammatory in nature.

It's a situation where your immune system is in an attempt to protect you. I do want to clarify here. Your immune system is causing damage.

It's attacking your thyroid gland and driving inflammation, and that resulting inflammation is causing damage to the thyroid tissue itself, such that it can't. It can no longer keep up with the production of that thyroid hormone.

Imagine if, like I had mentioned earlier, if 90% of your thyroid was destroyed or was damaged, it's going to have an awfully difficult time keeping up with that production of thyroid hormone. So the reason so many people aren't getting better is because they're just getting their thyroid hormone values.

Like they're just trying to pack it into the normal range, but they're actually not addressing what's causing it to begin with.

Speaker B: 00:17:31

So I guess that's a good way to segue into, like, common triggers for Hashimoto's and some of the underlying issues. And I'm sure we'll go into gluten sensitivity and one of my favorite topics and just a little side story here.

So I was diagnosed with Hashimoto 20 years ago.

I was in my early 30s and incidentally, I was lucky enough that I went to an integrative practitioner that ran the autoimmune markers for me back in the day. And so she actually is the first person who told me to get on like a gluten free diet, go 100 gluten free to get on the Paleo diet.

And 20 years ago, the paleo diet was still. What is that? No one really knew what that was. And even gluten free products were very hard to find.

It was a huge effort to be gluten free 20 years ago. It was just not in the general consciousness of you went into a restaurant or somewhere, like, they looked at you like a weirdo.

Speaker A: 00:18:29

You were way ahead of the curve.

Speaker B: 00:18:31

I tried to be gluten free and it was like so hard I made that switch. So I've been Gluten Free for 20 years and been kind of in a paleo ish diet for that long.

And just as a funny story, so for those of you that don't know me that well, I'm Hungarian and I grew up eating bread for breast, breakfast, lunch and dinner. That is such a staple part of our diet that we literally eat bread with every meal. And I. So I.

It was such a, like, strong part of my diet that that change was like, feel like somebody was cutting one of my arms off, having to give up gluten. And so it was like a really tough thing to make that transition because I was also addicted to that substance and it took me a really long time.

But after I was gluten free for about a year, my autoimmune markers completely went down to very low numbers. So for me, that made a huge difference. And then I've been gluten free ever since.

But I would love you to talk about the relationship of food triggers and maybe starting with gluten and then some of the other underlying issues that you know of.

Speaker A: 00:19:40

Since you mentioned your story, I have to share this as well.

So I'm half Italian, so I grew up in a really similar situation where I would say at least three or four nights out of the week, it was either pasta or pizza with a loaf of Italian bread. So really similar situation. And my first job was working at a family owned pizza restaurant. And we made everything from scratch.

The dough, the sauce, and yes, for anyone wondering, I did actually toss the dough up in the air. And it was very like old school Italian restaurant. I worked there for seven years on and off, and I was sick all the time.

And I never equated it to being related to Eating this pizza. I was working in the restaurant and when I took my dinner break, I'd be eating pizza. Sometimes I would have these.

I would describe them as sort of like allergy attacks or allergy spasms where I would sneeze repeatedly over and over again. Like sometimes dozens of times within like a 30 minute period. I'd sneeze like 40, 50, 60 times. My eyes would be bloodshot.

e you did where she. It was a: 2000

And I remember there were no real options at that time. People looked at you like deer in headlights at a restaurant if you asked for gluten free options. It's a whole different world now, right?

You can get anything gluten free so much easier. I'm at around 18 years, so pretty not too far behind you with that free journey.

Speaker B: 00:21:12

But. But I still don't want to discount how difficult it is to stop eating gluten.

Speaker A: 00:21:16

I mean, oh yeah, there's a huge emotional connection. Culture.

Speaker B: 00:21:19

Exactly.

Because I think the foods we grew up with, we have, as you said, we have this connection at a gut level, like you're giving up like your mother's cooking or something, like you're the favorite foods and it kind of translates into being deprived of something. But I think once, like, gosh, in the last 15 plus years, I'm completely.

I'm not only don't crave any of that stuff, but your palate changes completely. You crave what you eat. So once you transition into eating other foods, you start craving those foods.

But I still don't want to discount how difficult it is to make that switch.

Speaker A: 00:21:56

Easier said than done. No doubt about it. The way I coach my clients through this transition or change is to focus on the improvements you're going to see with your health.

In other words, what you're gaining rather than what you're losing.

Because I could say, personally, I'm sure you can as well, that I gained so much in terms of improvements in energy, mood, digestive health, that I wouldn't even dream of going back even for those little moments of pleasure with gluten, which I do miss still occasionally, but it's just not worth it for me with just waking up feeling a ton of energy. And this is absolutely 100 true. When I went off of gluten, I decided just to go cold Turkey. I didn't do a slow and steady transition.

There's no right or wrong, but I just went cold turkey. And my depression, which just felt like this gray cloud over my mind 24 7. It just lifted, like, within a week. I couldn't believe it.

I couldn't believe that something I was eating could be having that profound of an effect on me.

Speaker B: 00:22:54

Can you talk a little bit about testing? Because I know you do a lot of testing for gluten and you mentioned some facts.

I recently, Ryan had this great masterclass on Hashimoto's, and you were talking about how gluten, like, how almost everyone is sensitive to gluten. Can you talk about that for a second?

Speaker A: 00:23:11

So there was this study in a journal called Nutrients that was headed up by a researcher, Italian researcher named Alessio Fasano has a very long name of the study. Maybe we can include it in the notes. So rather than reading it, I'll just summarize. So basically, they looked at four different groups of people.

They looked at a control group. Every study needs a control. These were people that had no known issues with gluten as far as they understood.

No reactions when they were eating gluten. Otherwise pretty healthy. Then they looked at an active celiac group, people that had a celiac diagnosis, which.

Celiac is an actual autoimmune disease that affects about 1% of the population. Then a third group which had celiac, but that celiac was in remission. In other words, it was improving.

And then the fourth group they looked at was what's called ncgs, non celiac gluten sensitivity. That's where I fall. That's where I. I would argue the majority of the population falls.

It's where there's not an autoimmune component per se, but there is a strong immune reactivity like IgG, IgA immune reactivity, but.

Speaker B: 00:24:17

And sorry for the interruption, but sure, sure. But there is a huge correlation.

So once you have an autoimmune condition like Hashimoto's, that you develop another autoimmune condition like celiac or something else is also very. The likelihood is much higher.

Speaker A: 00:24:32

Yeah, there's a very high overlap between Hashimoto's and celiac, actually.

So within the study, they looked at these four groups that I mentioned, and they wanted to test to see when all four groups were exposed to gluten using. They used an intestinal biopsy. So this was done outside of the body.

They wanted to see how much that gluten exposure would increase intestinal permeability which we all know is leaky gut. What they found was pretty shocking that there was a similar increase in leaky gut in all four of these groups.

They, going into the study, their thesis or presumption would have been that the control group would have seen no change or little change, and the celiac groups would have seen the most change. And that's not what they found at all.

Actually, reading right from the conclusion of the study, they said this study demonstrates that gluten exposure induces an increase in intestinal permeability. That's leaky gut in all individuals, regardless of whether or not they have celiac disease.

Speaker B: 00:25:34

That is absolutely crazy to hear that. So because we mentioned leaky gut, can you. Can we just do a quick side sidetrack and talk about what that is?

Because that is connected to autoimmunity, and.

Speaker A: 00:25:48

Then we'll bridge the gap between why this gluten conversation is so important to Hashimoto's and autoimmunity. So if we think about our skin outside of the body, it serves as like an armor. It's a protective layer, protects us from the outside world, right?

It's also an organ of detoxification. Like, we sweat out toxins and that sort of thing, but it's largely there as a barrier, right?

So in our gut environment, within the entire intestinal tract, we have what we might think of as a second skin that's lining the interior of the entire GI tract, and it's called the mucosal barrier. Now, the.

The function of that intestinal mucosal barrier is, is to protect the inside of our body from all of the contents within the GI tract, all the bacteria, viruses, parasites, undigested food proteins, toxins that we ingest through our food and water. We have a large hole in our head, and we're taking in foreign objects from the outside world into our body all the time.

So it makes sense that we ought to also have in our gut another protective skin that's preventing all of the contents inside of the gut from spilling over inside to the body. And I'm trying to keep the language really simple here and not get too technical.

So a leaky gut or intestinal permeability is a situation in which that second skin, that mucosal barrier, is breaking down. Now, quick sidebar. This is really important. That mucosal barrier is extremely thin and delicate. It's only one cell thick.

It's much, much thinner than our skin.

So that that mucosal barrier can become pretty easily compromised by different inflammatory influences in the gut, like I mentioned pathogens, toxins, stressors, alcohol, too much sugar in the diet. There's lots of things that can do this.

But studies have actually shown that gluten, more so than any other variable, is the number one trigger for intestinal permeability, or leaky gut.

So if we can imagine this concept that what happens in the gut stays in the gut, leaky gut is a situation where that no longer holds true and that starts to fall apart.

And then you have this free for all where all the contents in the gut, all these foreign objects, are leaking outside of the gut into the peripheral tissue, into the bloodstream in the body. So now all of a sudden, you have almost like a form of minor sepsis in a sense.

You have bacteria, you have bacterial toxins like lps, you have undigested food proteins, like maybe gluten traveling all throughout the bloodstream, throughout your body. So why is that a problem? Well, these are foreign objects now that you've got floating around in the bloodstream that don't belong there.

So your immune system goes on. I call it red alert DEFCON 5. And that ramps up this inflammatory process and inflammatory cascade.

And throughout that process, as your immune system is trying to neutralize those threats, and in part, they can do this by firing chemical bullets, essentially, to break down these foreign objects in the bloodstream, some of your body's own tissue might get caught in the crossfire, including your thyroid, especially if you have a genetic weak link there. So your immune system is trying to protect you. It's trying to gun down and fire off bullets to break down the gluten or the bacteria.

But in the process, your thyroid gets attacked, and your thyroid might also mistake a protein in your thyroid for a protein and gluten and think it's the same thing. In the autoimmune world, this is called molecular mimicry.

And unfortunately, once the adaptive immune system has produced B cell memory, it's going to learn that association for the rest of your life.

Just like your immune system would remember a virus in your system forever, so that time when you get exposed to that virus in the future, your immune system knows to attack it.

Speaker B: 00:29:46

Hey there, Orshi here with a quick message. This is a brand new podcast and I would love your help with growing our community.

If you're finding this discussion valuable, I would be honored if you take a moment to leave a review and share this episode with a girlfriend or any woman in your life who might benefit from this information. Your support truly makes a difference, friends. So thank you for helping me spread the Word. And now let's get back to our conversation.

So gluten is sort of like the number one corporate, but there are so many other food allergies as well. Do you do food sensitivity testing or what is your way?

Speaker A: 00:30:20

I do.

Speaker B: 00:30:20

We're like an elimination diet. Aip. What's your process to screen out or try to find those root cause issues?

Speaker A: 00:30:28

So on the topic of food sensitivity testing, I really love the Zoomers from Vibrant Wellness. They're incredibly detailed in that they get all the way down to the peptide level.

So if you imagine gluten is like a long pearl necklace, this is very large protein structure that's made up of these individual pearls, which we call peptides.

So a test like the Wheat Zoomer, for example, can actually test for immune sensitivity to each individual pearl in the necklace, rather than just the entire necklace, which is what most traditional food sensitivity tests are doing. So the Zoomer gives you an incredibly high level of accuracy and detail. So when I do food sensitivity testing, that's what I'm running.

As far as elimination diets, autoimmune diets, when I work with a client, I typically add a baseline, get them off gluten, dairy, soy, alcohol, added sugars. That's kind of just my starting point.

In some cases where I might find it to be beneficial, we might consider an autoimmune protocol diet, which is a temporary diet to eliminate any potentially inflammatory foods that might perpetuate leaky gut. Now, the disclaimer I would put on that is, it is a very challenging diet.

It does basically require that you're preparing and cooking all of your own food. So it's not for everyone, it's not for the faint of heart. I don't necessarily think it's non negotiable. I always want to meet clients halfway.

And if you have someone who's a busy mom or working from home or going into an office every day, they might not necessarily have the mental bandwidth or the literal time to dedicate to something like that. So it all just depends on where that client's at and what we might have available to provide.

Speaker B: 00:32:09

Yeah, we spoke about leaky gut food sensitivities. I'm curious, how do stress and cortisol levels affect thyroid health and autoimmune conditions?

Speaker A: 00:32:22

If I look at cortisol more broadly, cortisol is our stress hormone. It's produced by the adrenal glands. During times of heightened stress or fight or flight, our adrenals are going to pump out more cortisol.

That cortisol is going to put us into a fight or flight state. It's going to help us to increase energy and increase alertness and awareness to run from the mountain lion, so to speak.

That's fine during short periods of heightened stress, but the problem is, in our modern world, we have chronic, unrelenting stress, Whether that's work stress or family stress. In other words, mental and emotional stress.

But stress can also be physiological, so that those stressors can include infections or pathogens in your gut. It can include toxin exposures, which might include heavy metals, mycotoxins, environmental toxins like pesticides or bpa.

So believe it or not, all of those inflammatory triggers can increase cortisol and promote constant chronic stress to the body. So they might.

It might not seem related, but if you're dealing with this chronic activation of cortisol, those same stressors might also be causing leaky gut or promoting inflammation in your thyroid. Right. So hopefully I'm not getting too far off track here, but I just find this to be really interesting.

When your thyroid is producing thyroid hormone in that process, it requires hydrogen peroxide to make thyroid hormone. Well, hydrogen peroxide, it's kind of like water with an extra oxygen molecule on it. It's highly unstable.

Just adding that additional molecule of oxygen going from H2O to H2O2. That's what hydrogen peroxide is. It's a really interesting situation because you have this chemical, this.

This molecule of hydrogen peroxide, which, although we need it to make thyroid hormone, is also highly reactive. It creates a really volatile environment in the thyroid.

Okay, so what would normally keep that in balance would be, for example, glutathione, the body's master antioxidants. So that glutathione would help to neutralize the excess hydrogen peroxide, so it's not causing damage or oxidative stress to the thyroid.

Okay, so what happens, though, if glutathione becomes depleted due to the nature of the very toxic world we live in, for example, all the heavy metals we're exposed to in our food, our air, and our water, that can deplete our glutathione pretty rapidly. And again, glutathione is the master antioxidant in the body. It's the most abundant antioxidant in the liver. It's.

And there's an abundance of glutathione in the thyroid environment. If you have toxins depleting glutathione, then that hydrogen peroxide, that balance is tipped off in the wrong direction.

Hydrogen peroxide builds up hydrogen peroxide is highly reactive. Like I said, it's going to cause a lot of oxidative stress to the environment. This is another thing.

As a part of the bigger picture of looking at the thyroid and why we can't only just be addressing the thyroid with medication only, we have to be looking at all these things. What, what is the status of glutathione in the body?

Is there a toxic burden throwing the system out of balance that's leading towards a stressed out thyroid environment? All of these represent stressors that can tax your adrenals, that can tax your thyroid.

The adrenals are part of the same endocrine axis as the thyroid.

I hope I'm not getting too technical here, but we talk about the hypothalamic, pituitary, adrenal, the HPA axis, It really should be the hpat, the hypothalamus, pituitary, adrenal, thyroid axis. They're all part of the same endocrine system.

And if you've got chronically elevated cortisol due to some of these stressors that can throw your thyroid out of whack, it could throw your pituitary out of whack.

I won't get too into the specifics of what that would look like on paper, but broadly speaking, chronic stress is going to also eventually result in your thyroid becoming depleted. Your thyroid. Let's throw one more example in here.

If over time you become, if you enter a state of total adrenal exhaustion, like what we call adrenal fatigue, that's going to suppress your cortisol levels are going to be tanked. It's like having no gas left in the tank. Well, in order to preserve resources and preserve energy, your thyroid might also slow down as a result.

And that would be a protective mechanism. Your body is saying, hey, this system is really stressed out and over taxed right now.

We need to slow everything down to put you into a metabolic hibernation. Right.

To force you, if you're not going to slow down, if you're going to say, hey, you know what, oh, I'm going to try to fight this and just push through it like so many people do in our culture, just go, your body will slow it down for you. If you're not willing to do the work to rest and heal and repair.

Speaker B: 00:37:25

And obviously the number one, one of the number one symptoms is fatigue that most people are struggling with. As a matter of fact, you touched on it briefly.

I would love to just go into just a little bit more detail on symptoms of hypothyroidism and Hashimoto's. Is there a difference in symptoms? Like where you can identify which one is which or.

I mean, if you do have also Hashimoto's, or you really just have to run the markers to see that test, don't guess right.

Speaker A: 00:37:53

That's always going to be my philosophy.

But given what I said earlier, that up to as much as 97% of hypothyroidism is caused by an underlying autoimmune condition, there really wouldn't tend to be a big difference in symptoms of having hypothyroidism versus Hashimoto's. In fact, it's pretty rare to only have hypothyroidism without the autoimmune component.

Speaker B: 00:38:16

Would you say that's more likely that men are in that situation, that they may not have an autoimmune component, but they have a thyroid dysfunction, whereas women, it's almost 100%.

Speaker A: 00:38:27

I think it may be, yeah, that may be the case. Now in my practice, I can't say for sure, only because more than 90% of my clients are women.

Just by the nature of autoimmunity being more common in women. Initially I had set out to serve men who are really underserved in this community.

But just as it works out statistically, I'm just getting more women coming in the door.

Speaker B: 00:38:48

Now I would love to put a little bit finer point on the role of inflammation because we know that Hashimoto's and hypothyroidism is connected. So can you speak a little bit more to the role of inflammation in this process?

Speaker A: 00:39:02

If we look at the term Hashimoto's thyroiditis, anytime you see that, what is it a suffix at the end? Itis. Itis. Think about rheumatoid arthritis or tonsillitis dermatitis, right? These are all inflammatory in nature.

So just to kind of explain inflammation, really simply, inflammation is synonymous with the immune system. So what's going on with inflammation is actually your immune system is ramping up its efforts.

So if, say, a tissue in your body like the thyroid becomes infiltrated with, whether that's mercury, like a toxin, or a pathogen, like some kind of bacteria or parasitic infection or something like that, your immune system will start sending in more immune cells into that affected tissue initially with what we call first responder cells. So neutrophils, macrophages, monocytes, things like that, that are part of the innate immune response. So without inflammation, we would die.

Not to sound dramatic, but it is part of the protective response in the body. When we're sending in these immune cells to eradicate the threat or to heal the damage. So that's a good thing. Just to be clear, like up to a point.

We want the immune system doing that. Chronic inflammation is the enemy. That's when we start to develop problems. Chronic inflammation is a sit.

That underlying issue is never really dealt with or identified on a lab test.

And let's be honest, doctors aren't testing for things like pathogens and toxins that would promote this kind of low grade continuous ongoing chronic inflammation. So as a result, the immune system never stops promoting that inflammatory response. So it's 24,7 and it's chronic.

Part of the reason why chronic inflammation is so highly associated with fatigue is that you have this system in the body which is working overtime and just imagine a doctor or a nurse working 80 hours a week. They're going to become exhausted and the immune cells are no different.

So you're really taxing this system of the body which is very energy intensive. It requires a lot of energy. So of course naturally that's that in itself among other reasons.

There's other reasons why thyroid issues are associated with fatigue, but that could be one of them is that chronic inflammatory response. One of my goals clinically in working with someone is to identify through lab testing what are these different factors contributing to inflammation.

That might be a combination of things. In fact, most of the time it is. We're looking at things like chronic infections, toxin exposures, food sensitivities being some of the most common.

Even mental and emotional stress that's chronic and unrelenting can also promote inflammation throughout the whole body.

Speaker B: 00:41:54

So you find these to be the most common sort of quote unquote root causes. We talked about doing like a full blood panel checking thyroid markers. We talked about food sensitivity testing.

Can you walk us through some of the other labs that you like to run to identify these issues?

Speaker A: 00:42:10

So getting more specific about which labs.

Speaker B: 00:42:12

We'Re running just in general, like what are sort of your go to. To identify. Yeah, these issues.

Speaker A: 00:42:20

Yeah. So there are certain labs I'll run in my practice that are non negotiable. One of which would be a comprehensive blood panel.

And yes, I am running a comprehensive thyroid panel on everyone that walks in the door no matter what.

Speaker B: 00:42:32

And can you just walk through just for people that are not familiar? Like what, what should people ask for as far as for thyroid markers?

Speaker A: 00:42:40

A comprehensive complete thyroid panel should include the following markers. Is going to be six in total, the first being tsh.

We talked earlier though about how TSH only is, in my view, if I'm being blunt, close to worthless on its own.

One thing I forgot to mention earlier is that tsh, even for the same patient, running a thyroid panel at the same time of day can fluctuate up to as much as 40%, just like your cortisol can fluctuate throughout the day. So that's a huge margin of variability where imagine running it one day it looks normal, the next day it's high.

And maybe it's just like a temporary thing, but without the context of the other markers, it's kind of useless.

Speaker B: 00:43:24

So I just wanted to put again a finer point on just to people to remember this, that when you test your markers and then you do follow up tests, you want to do it exactly at the same time, like in the morning to get the most accurate and even. And then if you are taking thyroid medication, know exactly like how long ago you've taken it and then do the same thing the next time you go.

So you have somewhat of an apples to apple comparison, even though there could be still fluctuations. Right.

Speaker A: 00:43:51

I 100% agree with that. Yeah. So try to mirror the same conditions like you said. In other words, if you tend to run it fasting, also do it fasting the next time.

If you tend to do it after a meal, that's not necessarily a problem, but just do the same thing next time. So you're mirroring those conditions. TSH would be the first marker on that panel. The next would be free T4 and free T3.

Most thyroid panels will include total T4 or total T3, which is fine. But the reason we want the free thyroid hormone levels is because those represent the bioavailable portion of that total pool of thyroid hormone.

In other words, meaning the amount of thyroid hormone that can actually be used and taken in by your cells. So we want free T4, free T3. Next would be reverse T3, which is if you imagine free T3 as being the accelerator pedal for your metabolism.

I like to say that reverse T3 is like the break. So if reverse T3 is elevated, but your free T3 is, let's just say it's actually pretty good, pretty optimal and normal.

That elevated reverse T3 can actually block or counteract the free T3 from doing its job. And you're still going to feel fatigued and weight gain, depression, all of that. Okay.

The vast majority of doctors do not run reverse T3, but it's super important.

Last two would be the two thyroid antibodies that would be associated with autoimmunity one being tpo, which is thyroid peroxidase antibodies, and the other being TGAB or thyroglobulin antibodies. So those six markers would constitute a complete thyroid panel.

Speaker B: 00:45:31

And can you just quickly also explain the difference between T4 and T3 so people have a little bit better understanding of the difference between these two markers?

Speaker A: 00:45:42

T3 is the good stuff. That's what your cells are actually using and taking in into your cells to actually activate your mitochondria to produce energy.

That's why I say T3 is like the accelerator pedal for the body. You have receptors for T3 on almost every single cell of your body. The receptors think of it as like a lock and key, right?

So you have a lock on the surface of your cells, and then T3 is entering through that receptor, through that lock mechanism to get into the cell and promote cellular energy. So it's really important stuff. This is why when your T3 goes low, everything you can imagine can slow down in your body.

Your energy, your mood, your digestion, it can all slow down. T4 is primarily produced by the thyroid hormone. It's the primary hormone produced by the thyroid.

But that thyroid hormone doesn't really get used until it's converted into T3. Believe it or not, that conversion, it doesn't happen in the thyroid. It primarily occurs in the liver. About 80% is estimated to occur in the liver.

The reason this is important is because, actually, let's pull this all together. We've talked about Synthroid. At one point in time, it was either the second or third most prescribed drug in the entire United States.

So most people are familiar with what Synthroid is. Right? Given that 10 to 15 million people or so are diagnosed with hypothyroidism in the US It's a lot of people.

The problem with Synthroid, for some people, not to say it's always a problem, but it's T4 only. It's T4 only. Well, we just walked through how T3 is what we really need. That's the good stuff. That's the accelerator pedal for your whole metabolism.

So why are doctors doing this? I'd like to think that most of them would know that ideally. Okay, big, huge quotations here.

And disclaimer, ideally, that T4 will get converted into T3 by your liver and there won't be a problem. How many people, though, are walking around with 100% optimal liver function? With the population that I work with, not very many.

Speaker B: 00:47:50

And I think the answer to your question is that's just what standard of Care is. That's what. That's the. Run the TSH and then give everybody T4. That's the standard of care. And that's why everybody still have hypothyroid symptoms.

Even though they are taking the medications and they're taking.

Speaker A: 00:48:06

They're doing what they're told, but they're. The T4 is not converting into T3, so they still have no energy. Right.

Speaker B: 00:48:11

And because they never look at T Free T3 or Reverse T3, they really don't understand the nuance of how to even adjust or combine these medications in the right way. Obviously, you and I are looking at more of a holistic approach of addressing this, but I think medication can definitely play a role. I'm curious.

Just a quick sidetrack and then I want to come back to the lab testing so we can finish that. You were able to completely reuse your own markers to a very manageable level. Are you on any medication yourself?

Do you take thyroid medication or you are able to manage this with lifestyle Completely?

Speaker A: 00:48:49

The answer is both. I do take NP thyroid, which is a generic version of armor.

So this is in a category of thyroid hormone support, which is known as an NDT or a natural desiccated thyroid hormone. And just to be clear, I. There's no shame in that. I see nothing wrong with it.

I'm saying this because there is, I believe, a bit of a bias in people that are very into natural medicine that feel like you should be able to heal your thyroid on your own without thyroid medication or that taking the thyroid medication will prevent your thyroid from being able to heal. Which couldn't be further from the truth or she. You saw that presentation. You saw the chart with my antibodies going down over time.

Speaker B: 00:49:28

Can you. Can you describe that real quick? So for people that have not seen your presentation? But.

Speaker A: 00:49:32

Yeah, but.

Speaker B: 00:49:33

But Ryan, being in this space of being an FDN and running his own labs, he's been doing his own biohacking for the last 10 years and running labs three times a year and have all his markers organized in a beautiful chart, which is so amazing because that is like the Perfect n =1 experiment.

Speaker A: 00:49:52

I'm glad you think it's beautiful because you should see the actual spreadsheet where the data came from. It's a total, total mess.

I've run a thyroid panel on myself a total of 38 times over the past 12 years, so that's an average of about three times a year. I joked in that presentation that I should win a Guinness Book of World Records for the Most number of thyroid panels run on one person.

I've been tracking my thyroid antibodies really diligently and regularly for a dozen years, 12 years in total.

to: 1700

Speaker B: 00:50:40

And by the way, crazy high. I mean, for people that don't know, I mean, those are really high, crazy autoimmune markers.

And that's why this should give hope to people listening that people that have Hashimoto's with, with really high autoimmune markers that you can put this somewhat into remission. You may not be cured per se, but you can feel better. You could feel good. You can get to that state.

So sorry to cut you off, Ryan, but I. I want to do. But I want you.

Speaker A: 00:51:07

You summarized it beautifully. And that's part of why I did it, to show that it was possible to secretly, in my mind, like a. A little bit.

There was a little bit of a kind of wanting to prove to the medical establishment who told me that this wasn't possible to that rebellious side of me, to kind of show that it could be done. But, yeah, mostly to track it for myself and also show other people that it's possible to manage and heal from autoimmunity.

Speaker B: 00:51:32

And I also love your approach that it's lifestyle interventions, testing, but it's also sometimes medication too, because at the end of the day, we want you to feel good and regain your life and get your life back. Whatever that takes.

Speaker A: 00:51:47

And whatever that takes.

Speaker B: 00:51:48

And I feel like the same way, like women going into perimenopause and menopause, our hormones run out and sometimes doing hormone replacement is the right thing for certain women to get your life back. The same thing with thyroid function, with age.

Also, I think there is this sort of term that's been coined of thyropause, or I think they call it thyropause. At some point when you get into your 50s, your thyroid function starts slowing down for almost everyone.

Not, maybe not everyone, but a very large percentage of the population go into the direction of hypothyroidism. What's your take on that?

Speaker A: 00:52:28

The first thing that comes to mind is just because that's common doesn't mean it's normal. I don't care if every single woman entering perimenopause developed hypothyroidism. I would refuse to say that's normal.

I Think that we're kind of living in a paradigm where we're exposed to more stressors than any other generation in human history.

Between internal and external stressors, the number of toxins, there's something like 80,000 toxins in our environment which haven't yet been tested by the fda. So these are unprecedented times. And in some sense we're fighting an uphill battle to maintain optimal health. I wish that wasn't the case.

I don't mean to paint a dark picture, but I do think that we have to, in a sense, work harder and be more proactive than ever.

So by the time a woman enters her 50s or 60s and starts entering menopause, you can make the argument that is this just a normal part of life for the thyroid to start slowing down?

Or is it that they've had five or six decades of hidden stress, of toxin exposure, of a poor diet, of lack of the right nutrition, et cetera, where these issues have finally caught up to them. Right.

Just like no different than doing maintenance on a car, regularly scheduling your oil changes and your brake fluid, your brake pads, all of these things. We want to be doing that with the human body every day is maintaining this beautiful biological machine.

Speaker B: 00:53:56

It's certainly not normal, but if you're. Or I wouldn't want to normalize it, but if you have the symptoms, it's something you should start investigating for sure. And I want to go back to.

So I don't. I kind of sidetracked the conversation. But you finished talking about a full direct panel, what that looks like.

And then we just want to round up the conversation on other testing that you also look at as part of your sort of standard labs.

Speaker A: 00:54:22

So blood chemistry is going to be. One second would be GI pathogen stool testing.

So assessing the overall health of the gut from the functional medicine perspective, we do believe that all health begins in the gut, and therefore all disease begins in the gut as well.

So a test like the GI MAP is going to be able to comprehensively assess pathogens in the gut environment, like bacterial dysbiosis, H. Pylori, yeast overgrowth, like candida parasites. We're also going to be able to assess intestinal health, including digestive markers, detoxification.

Gluten antibodies can be tested in the gut through a stool test, inflammatory markers as well. So that's going to be one of the most important tests in my practice.

I'm also a big fan of dhtma, looking at a hair analysis to look at mineral status and mineral balance. You can also get a window into heavy Metal exposure through a hair sample. So mercury, aluminum, arsenic, cadmium, lead, uranium.

Speaker B: 00:55:21

Things like this, which is so common. Like people don't realize we see that every day on the test. Is that right?

Speaker A: 00:55:27

Every day. I see it every day. People have no idea what's going on inside of their body.

That's the beauty of doing the lab testing and seeing what's really going on. Organic acid testing too. So you probably know too that I, I created earlier this year an entire course on organic acids for practitioners.

So it is more for a practitioner audience. But that's a test that I find fascinating. It's very comprehensive.

It can give you insights into mold overgrowth or mold colonization, oxalate issues, any issues with mitochondrial dysfunction, which is synonymous with energy. Right. The mitochondria are the energy factories of the cells. What else? Nutrient markers, neurotransmitter balance, detoxification.

So it really is like a functional lab test buffet. I call it the, the organic acid test. Then there will be some other tests that I will run occasionally based on the circumstance.

That might include food sensitivity testing, it might include SIBO testings for small intestinal bacterial overgrowth.

So oftentimes I'm finding myself more and more running the toxin panels to kind of assess the total toxic load in the body for heavy metals, mycotoxins and environmental toxins. No two clients are the same. It's all about bio individuality.

So it's all going to be highly based on what the client's history is, what they're going through and making sure we leave no stone unturned.

Speaker B: 00:56:51

Now for the listeners, what kind of natural healing strategies can our people, people listening to this implement to start healing from their Hashimoto's.

Speaker A: 00:57:01

If I were to start somewhere and to start with simple basics, the first place I would probably start with is the diet. Removing the low hanging fruit as I call it. The common offenders would be gluten and dairy. If I could just pick two, even I might start there.

A strong third would be added sugars. So that would also include the fruit juices and processed foods and snacks and the obvious ones, Snickers bars. Right. Things like that.

Essentially we want to get towards eating a real food diet. This doesn't have to be overly complicated, whether it's paleo or Mediterranean. Right. There's different kind of avenues we can go.

But the goal is to be eating food as nature intended.

It only what our grandparents or great grandparents were eating out of their backyard, which is, which means shopping around the edges of the grocery store and avoiding most of the stuff in the aisles. If you do that, sometimes just that alone can make a world of a difference. Not to say that's the end all be all.

Some people do start there and hit a wall with their symptoms. We also need to be considering all of these different foundations of health holistically.

So diet, we need to be considering our sleep hygiene, our level of movement and exercise, assessing our overall stress load, stress reduction. Do we have support from others? Community I think is highly, massively underrated in terms of the healing process.

It ultimately when I'm working with someone, we try to put together a plan, like a template for working with those foundations of health to build resilience.

I should mention too to your listeners, I did recently, this summer I wrote a 60 plus page guide on healing from Hashimoto's Naturally that goes in a lot of these things and more specificity and detail like actual real world action steps. It's totally free. So I would encourage everyone to check that out and download that guide.

And my goal in writing it was to basically write 10 action steps that I would do knowing what I know now if I was just diagnosed with a thyroid issue or with Hashimoto's. So that's going to include eating a nutrient dense diet. It's going to include testing your environment in the home.

I talk about testing for mold, for example. I talk about the benefits of considering natural desiccated thyroid hormone over something like Synthroid, all kinds of stuff.

So that's going to be your comprehensive guide. So check it out.

Speaker B: 00:59:27

If you send me the link, Ryan will include that in our show notes for sure. So be sure to check that out just to kind of round up this conversation.

And this does not necessarily relate to thyroid function or Hashimoto's, but I just want to have this final question. What's the single like most important thing that you learned about women's health that you wish every woman knew about?

And you said 97% of your clients are female. So I'm sure you've learned a lot. So is there one single thing that, that you learned that every woman should know?

Speaker A: 01:00:03

Being an advocate for yourself, believing that healing is possible, and having a relentless attitude towards being a self advocate, not letting you tell, not letting other people tell you that healing isn't possible.

Because as soon as you let go of that mindset, without that foundation, it's going to be next to impossible to stick with that journey to the end to see the results. So I think that developing that healer's mindset, that level of persistence is the cornerstone of everything.

And I can't overstate that enough, just that mindset piece. And so for anyone out there who's struggling with unknown symptoms, just know that symptoms don't just occur randomly in a vacuum.

There, there's always a cause, there's always a reason that your symptoms are happening. And it took me almost a decade as we talked about to get my thyroid antibodies into a normal range.

But a lot of that was due to my attitude of just, I'm never going to give up at this and just that level of determination. So, yeah, I, for years was struggling to find answers to my own chronic health symptoms.

And I can tell you from experience and from working with hundreds of clients that there is a way out of this. There is a path. You just have to be willing to invest in yourself and be willing to take that journey to restore your health.

Speaker B: 01:01:29

That resonates so deeply with me because it, gosh, that's been more than a 10 year journey for me too. And I think a lot of people are looking for quick fixes, but there is no such a thing.

When things are falling apart, there's no quick fix, unfortunately, like you have to unpack things one thing at a time. And it's a journey. Your health, it took decade, maybe even a couple of decades to get to the place that it is now.

And it takes time to unwind that and fix your health. And you have to be patient, you have to be relentless. You have to continue to advocate for yourself. Don't let conventional medicine throw you off.

Sometimes you, you do need some medications and you have to make a case for yourself. Again, you have to advocate to get the right medications too, because the doctors will just give you whatever the center of care stuff is.

Speaker A: 01:02:22

Use the best of both worlds too, right? Sometimes I use the analogy that thyroid medication is like a lifeboat.

And with a lifeboat, it's going to be much easier if your boat is sinking to get to the shore. And then once you're on the shore, it's going to be much easier to look around and ask the questions of why did the ship wreck?

Why did there the boat spring a leak?

Speaker B: 01:02:44

But especially if you're in that metabolic coma that you can be.

Speaker A: 01:02:48

Oh yeah, yeah. And I'll mention this too, that when I got on that thyroid medication, and initially it was Synthroid, I did switch in less than a year to Armor.

But even with the Synthroid, I felt like a different person overnight. I mean, overnight the change was dramatic and that that was an essential, integral part of my healing journey was getting on thyroid hormone.

I couldn't have imagined being able to do it without that.

Speaker B: 01:03:14

We need all the tools in our toolkit to get ourselves back on track.

Because I tell you, like somebody who also dealt with brain fog and fatigue and weight loss resistance and all the symptoms of being super cold and low body temperature and all those symptoms, hair loss, like, I can tell you that there's nothing like this. When your metabolism starts slowing down so much, it's like we don't want to live our life in this hibernation state.

We meant to have the vibrancy and the energy and the vigor to live our best life, and it literally prevents us from that. There's nothing like getting your health back. And you gotta be persistent and continue to go after that and believe that can happen for you.

And it may take more than a few months, it may take more than a few years to get there. But you have to find the right practitioner if you need help that can run the right labs for you, who can patiently work with you.

So on that note, Ryan, tell us, how can people work with you? Find you your website, all that awesome.

Speaker A: 01:04:20

So my name is Ryan Monahan and I go by the Mindful Nutrivore on all of my social media channels and feel free to reach out, connect with me, and send me a dm.

Speaker C: 01:04:29

Thank you so much for tuning in. This is Maya. Our production team pours our hearts into this show because we believe women deserve better.

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Speaker B: 01:05:24

SA.