E218: BONUS - Is It Really Just Your Hormones, or Is Your Thyroid the Missing Piece? With Nicole Fennell, RDN

What if the mood swings, the exhaustion, the weight gain, the painful periods aren’t just about your hormones after all?

You’re exhausted before the day even starts. You can’t lose weight no matter how hard you try. You’re freezing when everyone else is fine. Your hair is thinning, your periods are a mess, and no one seems to have any real answers, just more tests and “you’re fine.”

I see you. And you’re not crazy.

In this conversation, I sit down with thyroid expert and registered dietitian nutritionist Nicole Fennell to help you understand what your thyroid is trying to tell you, and how it could be the missing piece in your hormone puzzle.

You’ll learn:

• The most common (and often ignored) signs your thyroid needs help, beyond just fatigue
• How stress, undereating, gut issues, and inflammation quietly drain your thyroid without you even realizing it
• Why “normal” lab results don’t always mean everything’s okay, and how to actually get a full picture of your thyroid health

If you’re sitting there feeling broken, confused, and out of options, this episode is for you. Let us help you connect the dots and remind you that your body is on your side.

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Disclaimer: Nothing in this podcast is to be taken as medical advice, please take informed accountability and speak to your provider before making changes to your health routine.

This podcast is for women and moms to learn how to balance hormones naturally in motherhood, to have pain-free periods, increased fertility, to decrease PMS mood swings, and to increase energy without restrictive diet plans. You'll learn how to balance blood sugar, increase progesterone naturally, understand the root cause of estrogen dominance, irregular periods, PCOS, insulin resistance, hormonal acne, post birth-control syndrome, and conceive naturally. We use a pro-metabolic, whole food, root cause approach to functional women's health and focus on truly holistic health and mind-body connection.

If you listen to any of the following shows, we're sure you'll like ours too!
Pursuit of Wellness with Mari Llewellyn, Culture Apothecary with Alex Clark, Found My Fitness with Rhonda Patrick, Just Ingredients Podcast, Wellness Mama, The Dr Josh Axe Show, Are You Menstrual Podcast, The Model Health Show, Grounded Wellness By Primally Pure, Be Well By Kelly Leveque, The Freely Rooted Podcast with Kori Meloy, Simple Farmhouse Life with Lisa Bass

Transcript

[00:00:00] Leisha: Hey friend. Welcome back to the podcast. I have Nicole Fennel here as our guest today, and we are gonna be talking about the thyroid. I think this episode is very much needed. It's a long time coming. We haven't had a recent thyroid episode, and Nicole is a dietician who works with the thyroid and thyroid symptoms all the time.
 we're really gonna go deep today and help you understand if some of your symptoms. Are related more to your thyroid than to your other sex hormones that you might be blaming it on. And we're really gonna talk about a holistic, functional approach to the thyroid. That doesn't include just slapping some thyroid supplements on it, or just doing an extra mineral here and there.
We're really gonna talk about how the thyroid works in all of the cells in your body, the thyroid hormones work in all the cells in your body, and how important it's so that you can have more of a. Just more of an understanding of if this is something that affects you or not. So welcome, Nicole. Go ahead and introduce yourself.
I'd love to hear a little bit about you, your work, your family. Before we get into all the details.
[00:01:00] Nicole: My name is Nicole Fennel. I'm a registered dietician and I feel like at this point I've been a dietician since the Dark Ages, so going on over 15 years at this point. And I have three kiddos. Run a now virtual private practice. I used to have a brick and mortar practice in Houston, Texas, but transitioned to virtual during the pandemic when I was pregnant with my third.
And here we are and I've really honed in on the population of people who are living with thyroid dysfunction or suspect that they have thyroid dysfunction because I feel like so often thyroid issues are so common that they're normalized and they get brushed off to the side. But because the thyroid hormones play such a pivotal role in how your cells function, I find that it's so important to really bring it to the forefront and allow thyroid hormone dysregulation or thyroid hormone dysfunction to be sort of like the first step in the process of unraveling the deeper issues of why it's there in the first place.
And as a classically trained dietician, I started my career, working in hospitals and nursing homes and really. Feeling like unfulfilled and feeling like I wasn't really helping people and catching them after the fact, like they were already really sick and not very motivated, and I just didn't feel like I was making much of a difference.
And it was honestly, with my own Hashimoto's diagnosis, when I was in my early twenties planning a wedding. I was vegan at the time, I was running marathons, like doing everything quote unquote that I was trained to do and found myself feeling terrible in my early twenties when I should be living like the prime years of my life.
And after visiting doctor, after doctor and then telling me like, oh, you're fine. You're healthy. You're a dietician, you're eating vegan. You're great. I finally stumbled on a doctor. Who diagnosed me with Hashimoto's. And on one hand it was whew, I'm not crazy, thank goodness.
But on the other hand, I was like, what do I do with this? I have no idea. Nothing trained me for this. And so I was finding myself caught in this middle area of I thought I knew what I was doing and I'm working so hard, but the harder I work, the thicker I'm getting, and I clearly need to change something.
And I wasn't given very many options except let's just wait and see until you're bad enough. For medication. And being very type A I was like, I don't wanna do that. And so I really dove into the research and started to really understand that Hashimoto's and thyroid dysregulation absolutely gives you symptoms, but in and of itself is a symptom of deeper imbalances. Through a lot of research and my own experience started to realize the shifts that I needed to make in my life with food and with my lifestyle, with my mindset in order to start to truly feel better and take better management of my own health. And so through my own experience realizing that man as a supposed medical nutrition expert, I didn't even know how to take care of myself.
Certainly other people have this problem too, and that's when I went all in on the thyroid population and helping to serve people who are finding themselves in this messy middle area of knowing that they feel badly, not really sure why, and then also what to do about it. So that's the long and short of it, of why I am here and why I do what I do.
[00:03:56] Leisha: I actually, I love that so much because my story is so similar. That. I also worked in the hospital for almost 10 years as a nurse, and I was interested in nutrition at that point, but I could just see, even, what we were giving them as information on nutrition. I was just like, this is terrible.
This is truly terrible. What stood out to me the most was our diabetic patients and their diabetic diet it was like Wednesday nights. It was spaghetti and a bread roll and a diet soda and then a diet piece of cake, and I'm like. What are we doing? Like I even knew better than that, as a 23-year-old new nurse.
Anyway, long story short, very similar that I didn't feel like I had the time to truly help my patients. Learn to do better or learn to do anything to control their health. I was just really managing their sickness and their very acute, critical sickness in the hospital.
And while I find that there is actually so much value in that and I. We need that. We absolutely do. And it makes a humongous difference to have good nurses and doctors and dieticians and all of the people in the hospital, truly change lives and save lives. And so I'm so thankful for that and I wanted to be on the other side of it where I could help people hopefully not get there and not have to keep coming back.
Where is truly more like emergency surgery or emergency care or things like that that are not as preventable as this chronic disease that we were just treating all the time. I agree with that so much. And I think that it's so interesting that you have moved into the thyroid space because again, even as a 24-year-old nurse, I'm like every single patient when I'm writing down their history, it's hypothyroid and 
then Diabetes and heart disease, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And it's like the hypothyroid didn't even seem like a big deal at that point but why is it there with every single person who is chronically in the hospital? It's there's gotta be something there. So let's talk about that. Let's start with what the symptoms are of thyroid dysfunction.
Kind of at a broad scale. I think that there's a few that most people know, but what are those? And then let's also talk about the ones that people don't actually know are related to their thyroid and potentially maybe even think are just normal or think they're more related to estrogen or cortisol or something like that. 
[00:06:03] Nicole: I would say like the most common ones and are definitely gonna raise some flags are things like feeling really fatigued. Weight gain, constipation, hair loss, eyebrow thinning. I. Those are really common ones. And sometimes even like later down the spectrum of hypothyroidism symptoms. But because thyroid hormones impact every single cell, really any symptom is not off limits. So it could be brain fog, it can be feeling cold. It can be period irregularity, it can be heavy periods, it can be lack of a period. And truly the symptom set is pretty large, and I encourage people, if you're feeling off in any way, like deviating from your norm, it doesn't hurt to check in on your thyroid. And because the thyroid hormones impact every cell, I like to think of the body, the human body, like a table with four legs, and one of the legs , it would be like your thyroid and your thyroid hormone. The other leg would be your adrenals and your adrenal hormones. One leg would be the sex hormones, and the other leg would be the brain. When one of those, or more of those legs are wobbly, the whole system gets a little bit wobbly. So if you're having period issues or you're having lots of stress, you're dealing with brain fog, that can affect the thyroid, and the thyroid can affect all of those. And so really remembering that your body doesn't operate in a vacuum sometimes.
We've been trained to think that if it's a heart issue, it's only a heart issue, and if it's a blood sugar issue, it's only a blood sugar issue. Everything communicates. So if one area is off, it will affect other areas. Really taking care of your body in a holistic whole body way is the best way to support your body.
So coming back to the symptoms, really a vast array, but the biggest ones would be feeling cold, tired, rundown, sluggish weight gain, constipation, hair losses would be probably the more common symptoms.
[00:07:47] Leisha: I love that because it is so easy to say these are the symptoms, but then it's like. This could also be something else and or it could be a combination of your thyroid and your gut that's causing you this fatigue or all of that. So when you're talking about the thyroid symptoms, it's being so generalized and so widespread.
It's because the thyroid actually impacts all of your cells in your body. So will you talk about that, how does the thyroid actually work? How does it affect our bodies? Let's have a little anatomy physiology lesson on the thyroid because I think we could all use that. I think we all know both my hands and feet are cold and I'm losing my eyebrows and probably something's wrong with my thyroid, but like so easy to really not know anything outside of that.
[00:08:28] Nicole: Exactly. Oh, I wish I could share graphics. I teach at
[00:08:32] Leisha: I know you're like, I need a whiteboard right 
[00:08:34] Nicole: I know. I'm like, I need my PowerPoints. I tell people so often, and this is not all the time, but very often, thyroid hormone dysregulation doesn't mean that you have a thyroid problem. Most of the people that we encounter their thyroid is fine, but their thyroid is underperforming because of other factors that are going on.
And so again, taking that big bird's eye perspective and a holistic perspective. Holistic meaning like whole body perspective. What we teach is what we call the thyroid hormone journey, which is this big communication access inside the body that starts with the brain triggering your thyroid to produce thyroid hormones.
Thyroid hormones do a lot of things inside the body, but simply put, you can liken them to like the ringleader of metabolism. Metabolism is a fancy word for your cell's ability to produce. Energy. Everything that we do in the body requires energy. And I'm putting that simply. Some things don't require energy, but let's just operate under the impression that things like digestion, the creation of hormones, moving your muscles, having a heartbeat, all of that requires energy.
And in order to get energy, we have to have metabolism. Metabolism is what takes. Food that we eat and spins it into a currency that our body uses, which produces energy. Thyroid hormones play a big role in regulating that. So when that system is off, it makes sense that you would feel run down and things slow down, like your digestion, your ability to produce heat, and that's why people would hypothyroidism feel cold. But in order for your thyroid to even produce. Reduce hormones, it has to be signaled from the brain through something called TSH, thyroid Stimulating Hormone. And that's often what's tested if you've quote unquote had your thyroid checked. There are a lot of things that will affect TSH and we can certainly talk about that.
But if signaling is off, then the thyroid is not gonna get the signal that it needs to produce thyroid hormones. So that's like. One opportunity for a misstep. Then your thyroid has to produce those hormones and it requires energy, but it also requires building blocks. And so iodine is something that's required.
Iron tyrosine. So lots of things that we predominantly get via the diet. Nutritional deficiency. And energy deficiency can be a big factor into why the thyroid may not be producing ample amounts. You know that step number two is production. And then we have to get thyroid hormones throughout the body, which requires a delivery system through different transporters. And a lot of those transporters are predominantly made from different amino acids. They have to be made predominantly in the liver. So again, nutrition is a big thing that plays a role in that. Once these hormones get transported to places that they need to go, they have to be converted into active form.
So they have to go from predominantly being T four and turn into T three, and that process requires nutrition. Things that will impact it would be things like stress, inflammation and blood sugar dysregulation. We have the conversion as the next step. Then our cells have to absorb and utilize.
Those, and that is going to be influenced by things like blood sugar, inflammation, stress, nutritional deficiency. And so there are a lot of opportunities for misstep, which can be overwhelming. Like, Oh my gosh, how am I gonna get it right? But I like to spin it into like, but look at all these opportunities that we do have control over.
We do have control over the quality of the diet that we're eating. We do in some capacity, have control over. How stress impacts us. We can't control all the stressors in life, but we can impact how our body responds to it. We can work on managing our inflammation. So I like to leverage all of those steps in that thyroid hormone journey as a positive thing to focus on and pour into the body to allow our bodies to have the tools necessary to make that process as streamlined as possible.
[00:12:09] Leisha: I think that just understanding how much of a bigger picture it really is is so helpful. And even just knowing like, okay, the TSH itself, maybe there's a lot more to that picture, but also. So understanding that our cells and our metabolism and our nutrient absorption and all of that comes back to how well this system is working.
But there are also a lot of factors that can work against the thyroid system essentially. Can you speak to that a little bit too? If you have, for example, a lot of inflammation and gut dysregulation, how does that affect your thyroid so we can . Bring that full circle for people who are like, huh, I wonder if my thyroid needs some extra love and support.
[00:12:48] Nicole: I find just clinical experience and research has shown there are five, and this is not an exhaustive list, but five main areas that really impact the body's ability to optimize thyroid hormone production and utilization and signaling in that whole pathway that I talked about, the thyroid hormone journey. And I call it the Brain method, and so that's an acronym that stands for blood sugar balance, the b. R is regulating inflammation. A would be adrenal resiliency or just becoming more resilient to stress or acknowledging the stressors in life. I would be intestinal health and N would be nutrient repletion.
So those are big potential drains on the system. But again, we like to spin it into a positive of how can we optimize these systems to really hone that entire communication pathway. But. I would say, simply put, if somebody asked me to describe why I think hypothyroidism predominantly happens, I would say that hypothyroidism or low thyroid hormones is a metabolic adaptation to some sort of stress on the body. And that can be physical stress or it could be emotional stress, or it can be both. So you know, would having a gut. Infection be a stressor. Absolutely. Would having a nutrient deficiency based stressor absolutely. Would being a working mom with multiple kids be a stressor? Absolutely. those are things that we can't necessarily take away or stop, but I think it's not about having no stress in life.
It's more about knowing what your stress is and pivoting and doing what you can to alleviate the burden of stress and the perceived stress that the body has. at the end of the day, it's really about balancing. The stress response inside the body by pouring good nutrition, adjusting lifestyle factors, and trying to create as much balance in the body as possible.
[00:14:25] Leisha: I agree with that so much, and I'm curious. Curious if you see, this is just a little side note, but I'm curious if you see the acute onset of thyroid symptoms after like really big life stressors or often then you see this as a slow burn or if you see both really evenly or, I would assume both, but I'm just curious what 
[00:14:44] Nicole: yeah it's definitely both. I would say, and research even confirms this, that in 80% of patients, and this is from research, 80% of people who have an onset of thyroid hormone dysregulation or hypothyroidism, especially rooted in autoimmunity. It's related to what they call uncommon emotional stress.
What that means is that oftentimes there's this almost like storm brewing behind the scenes and the intensity and the duration of the storm is different for everybody. It could be something that happened over 30 years, it could be something that happened over three months, but there's something brewing underneath the surface and then there's like a big stressor. And maybe that's not a super obvious stressor. Maybe it can be like a slow drip that kind of accumulates over time. But usually, 80% is a pretty big percentage. Usually it's stress that kind of pushes it over the edge. They find that it's this combination of some sort of genetic predisposition, which is very multifaceted and we can't change genetics, but we can influence how your genetics manifest, which is called epigenetics. Some sort of gut dysregulation. Because our gut houses the majority of our immune system, but our gut is where we absorb. Basically all of our nutrients. And those nutrients, like vitamins and minerals are so important for the creation of thyroid hormone, the signaling of thyroid, all of that thyroid hormone journey.
So some sort of gut dysregulation and then some sort of stressor on the body. So it's like this trifecta that happens that typically precedes a diagnosis or kind of sets the stage for hypothyroidism. Stressors can be emotional stressors, like finances, relationships, things like that. But stressors can also be toxins.
It could be nutrient deficiencies. There are a lot of things that stress , has a lot of subcategories under it.
[00:16:27] Leisha: Yeah, I know. Stress is it's so big in everything. Everything with our lives and our health and our emotions. It's so multifaceted that I think it's so important to be able to understand where our bodies need more resilience to stress, because we can definitely prioritize reducing stress in some seasons.
In some seasons you can't, to be honest. And so it's like how can we, create more nutrition and more mineral balance in your body and have more of a foundation to stand on when that stress does come? Because I do think that a lot of. Hormone imbalances, thyroid hormone, or sex hormone imbalances can come from like this underlying weakness in the body slash mineral imbalances, deficiencies.
And then you just get pushed over the edge at some point. And I think I agree with what you said, it could be stressors for 30 years and then it finally pushes you over the edge. Or it could be really acute stress for however long. And it really depends on your body. Your nutrient status at birth, your mothers health there's so many layers to it, but I think that the beauty that, I just wanna throw this in the middle, where we're listening to all of this and we're like, okay, this is a lot and we're gonna, we're gonna talk about some strategies, but the beauty of being able to pinpoint that stress is a factor for long-term health problems.
The beauty of that is also there are so many strategies that are so simple. Even doable for busy moms
to be able to build up that safety in the body so that you are more resilient to stress. But I think the biggest caveat that I say to that is consistency is key in that it's not like we can just expect. Okay figured out my thyroid was off. I figured out my estrogen was off my gut, whatever.
I'm gonna take supplements for three months. I'm gonna eat right for three months and then I'm gonna go back to what I was doing and expect everything to be fine. And it's it's not gonna work. But you also don't have to be perfect for the rest of your life to feel good. So I just wanna. Just quick little throwing that in.
Okay, so another question that I have for you is, we hear this all the time you have someone come to you, I have someone come to me and they're like, I have these symptoms. And you're like, okay, so have you had your thyroid checked? And they're like, oh yeah, my doctor said it was fine. And maybe it actually is a full thyroid panel, but more often it's a TSH, maybe a T three, maybe a T four.
Or some combination of three things. So I would love to hear your thoughts on that. Does everyone who has a thyroid concern need a full thyroid panel? Are there other things you would prefer to look into? where does lab testing come in that it's helpful so that we know what treatment is most helpful or the most necessary?
[00:19:03] Nicole: I feel bad for TSH 'cause I feel like it gets poo-pooed so much and people like roll their eyes at A TSH, but I actually think it's really valuable. But I was liken it to watching one episode of a show where you can get the idea of what the show is about but you don't really appreciate. The whole backstory and character development. So I do think that A TSH is helpful, but it, the TSH, the thyroid stimulating hormone is a brain hormone. So it's not actually a thyroid hormone. And again, that's not a bad thing that's giving us insight into the signaling. But because the brain is gonna communicate with the thyroid and the ovaries and the adrenals and that big communication access. There's a lot that can negatively influence, or maybe I should just say influence in general, how well the brain secretes TSH, and so things like stress and certain nutritional deficiencies, undereating, even if it's like accidental undereating dieting, stuff like that can. Create a suppression in TSH secretion.
And why that's important to know is because TSH has an inverse relationship with your thyroid hormones. And so typically when thyroid hormones are low, TSH goes up. But in the presence of stressors on the body. TSH secretion isn't triggered as a protective adaptation. The body, when it's facing a stress, whether it's running away from a tiger or whether it's, going through your bank statement like that, still can, hopefully not, but can create stress inside the body. When the body is faced with stress and it goes into this like preservation mode of fight, flight, freeze fawn, it's not going to be in rest, digest, reproduce, metabolize mode at the same time. And what better way to prevent increasing your metabolism and promoting fertility than to turn down thyroid hormones?
And tSH again, is helpful, but it's more helpful in the context of a full thyroid panel. So a full thyroid panel is gonna be looking at hormones both bound up into proteins and free and available, and I think that's really helpful to look at. I also like to look at antibodies to get an idea of what is the root, or what is one of the root causes into thyroid hormone dysregulation?
Is it related to autoimmunity? Is it not related to autoimmunity? A full thyroid panel is a really good place to start. But I look to look at an even bigger picture because a full thyroid panel is gonna be focusing on the first couple of steps in this thyroid hormone journey, which is signaling production and conversion.
But it doesn't always tell us necessarily how well the cells are able to absorb and utilize the thyroid hormones. Looking at other metabolic markers, like looking at. Blood sugar, looking at insulin, looking at inflammation, looking at vitamin and mineral parameters. Those are things that again, take the bird's eye perspective.
You can either have one episode of a show, you can have a season of a show, or you can have a whole series of the show. I like to look at the whole series and get the whole experience to truly understand and identify where are these little opportunities for optimization so we can really hone that entire communication pathway.
[00:21:56] Leisha: I think that anytime we can zoom out. It's going to be helpful. And I agree . I am not saying that TSH is completely an unhelpful marker. I just find that there's more to be desired when it's the only marker and it's like, okay, maybe it is in normal ranges or maybe it's a little bit suboptimal, but why?
I'm always just like, but why? And it's like we're, we have this like one little girl ballerina on stage and the curtains are closed almost the whole way, and you're like. Is she a soloist? Is she not? Does she have a whole ensemble behind her and you're not gonna be able to tell what's actually happening, which is that one little, you know, superstar lab results.
But I do agree that it can be helpful. I just think it needs to be along with other markers, okay. So you have hit on nutrition a couple times. I know nutrition is a huge foundation of what you do. It's a huge foundation of what I do. Could you go just a little bit deeper into what those kind of big red flags are with nutrition that you see lead to thyroid dysfunction, whether someone does or doesn't have symptoms.
Now you mentioned undereating accidentally. That's such an, I don't wanna say an overused term. I use it all the time. I probably overuse it, but what does that actually mean to you when it comes to the thyroid? Is it always calories? Is it just nutrients? It can be all kinds of things. So let's talk about that.
[00:23:18] Nicole: Absolutely. I like to operate under the impression and I love to teach people whether it's my students or my clients, we have good bodies that are on our side. And so when we have symptoms, it's not our body's way of like trying to get back at us. It's more of our body's way of trying to get our. Tension. And so I think about it , like a siren. That can be annoying. Like symptoms are designed to be annoying to get our attention, and I include hypothyroidism and hormone dysregulation as a symptom that absolutely gives you symptoms. And so oftentimes, when you're peeling back the layers and understanding, okay, my body is on my side when I have symptoms, it's for a reason.
What would those reasons be? When you think about the thyroid hormones role in metabolism, it makes sense that if there is a nutritional deficiency, whether it's an energy deficiency with not enough calories coming in, whether it's a macronutrient deficiency or an imbalance, meaning an imbalance in your carbs and proteins and fats or, and or it's a deficiency in micronutrients, or vitamins and minerals that allow our body. To get energy from the calories that we're eating, whether it's a deficiency or an imbalance in one or all of those areas that can lead to hypothyroidism, because hypothyroidism is a metabolic adaptation oftentimes to. Undernourishment. That undernourishment might be, intentional dieting, it might be accidental undereating. Really at the end of the day, what it is in the energy imbalance, meaning that there's not enough energy coming in. And maybe that's overall, maybe it's not enough energy at the right times, and it may not match energy, exertion, or energy output. And so that energy imbalance, especially when you add stress on top of that. Sends that message to the body to go into this protective hibernation mode, to conserve energy. What we find is, a lot of the clients that we're encountering are either accidentally undereating or they've intentionally dieted, or they've done something like, low carb or. Vegan in which they're cutting out macronutrient groups.
These macronutrients, proteins and fats and carbs are essential. We have to get them through the diet. Yes, we have backup safety nets in the event that we don't have access to carbs or we don't have access to proteins. But those are survival mechanisms. They're not thriving mechanisms. The less that we can rely on survival mechanisms, the better because another survival mechanism is. Hypothyroidism and turning down your metabolic rate. So food and the message that we receive from food sends that message of safety that allows the body to set the stage for optimal thyroid function.
[00:25:49] Leisha: Amen to all of that. I agree so much, and I think that's really helpful to have it broken down in that way and understand, and I'm just gonna throw this out there, for those of you who are listening and you're like, okay, yes, maybe it's my thyroid, but also it's potentially my sex hormones 
The exact same process that she's talking about affects your sex hormones because you have to have safety in your body for your body to say it's safe to make estrogen and progesterone in the right amounts because you're not going to wanna make a baby if you're in survival mode. Again, we as women, we truly need to be spending more time in a mode where our bodies feel the safety to thrive than just in survival.
And sometimes I think we think that survival is good enough. I think that we have this perception in our world that it's fine to just be getting by and we think it's just for a season. We're like, okay, it's just the newborn stage. And we're like it's just the toddler stage. And then we're like, it's just the teenager stage.
And they're like, it's just menopause. Hold on. That's your whole life. we've gotta slow that down. And there are seasons that are more challenging than others, but asking yourself like, what are those basic things you can do to nourish in those seasons? Is going to be literally game changer for your thyroid and for your sex hormone.
So I just wanna remind that the survival mode lie that it's fine to be in survival mode forever. It's not true. your body will tell you differently. Okay. Last question that I have before we wrap up is thyroid supplements. There are lots of like happy thyroid. Fix your life. Take the thyroid, desiccated thyroid all the things that you could get an Instagram ad for if you accidentally said something about your thyroid on Instagram or iodine.
, A lot of people know that iodine affects the thyroid. Iodine deficiency can be an issue, but I actually think it's fairly unsafe to take thyroid supplements willy-nilly, whether it's iodine, whether it's desiccated thyroid. Or even just a multivitamin, thyroid supplement.
So I would love to hear your thoughts on that, 'cause I'm sure you've seen a lot of that and what it actually does.
[00:27:45] Nicole: Yeah, man, and I think those definitely have a time and place, but I think focusing on what they are, which would be supplements, they're supplemental to diet and lifestyle. Style and there to fill in gaps, but not be the whole foundation. And so I think that there's a time and a place for supplementation, including iodine, but it's definitely not the starting place. So if you're somebody who has been diagnosed with thyroid dysregulation or you suspect it, I would recommend starting with the foundations as maybe unappealing as that is. But truly that's gonna build the foundation upon which your body is able to perform or not perform. And what are your daily rhythms like?
Are you eating enough food at the right times and the proper proportions and the right amounts for your body? Are you focusing on nutrient dense foods and really honing in there as opposed to starting with the supplementation? I wish that taking a supplement could solve all this. That would be so easy and so many people would be happy.
But unfortunately it just doesn't work that way, especially when we're thinking about something like. Iodine, the last thing that your thyroid wants to do is be forced to make thyroid hormones when it doesn't have the support crew there. It's sort of like if you had a car that was right on the verge of e and you'd floor the gas, like you're gonna run outta gas really quickly. And so when you. You throw an iodine into a body that's not ready to use iodine, meaning that maybe there's not enough energy coming in the form of calories. Maybe you're not getting enough carbs. Maybe you're not getting enough protein, maybe you don't have enough iron. Maybe you're deficient in other things and you throw iodine in there, that makes the whole system go a bit haywire.
'cause it's like throwing kerosene on a fireplace fire. it's just too much. Iodine is not often the place that we start sometimes people. In our practice, at least get to the point of adding in iodine. But we find that a lot of people have success before even getting to that point. Now, iodine is a really big topic because oftentimes, not always in America, but in a lot of other places, iodine deficiency can be a big cause of hypothyroidism. The reason being is that iodine is like the, one of the most critical components to the creation of thyroid hormones. That's not so much here in America. That doesn't mean that doesn't happen. And do people have suboptimal levels? Of iodine often, yes, but a true deficiency is not always super common. It could also be problematic because most cases of hypothyroidism are related to Hashimoto's, which is an autoimmune disease, and the hallmark, or one of the hallmarks of Hashimoto's is a dysregulation in a certain reaction that happens inside the thyroid sites or the thyroid cells. In an area where there's an enzyme called thyroid peroxidase and.
Part of that is working to create thyroid hormones, but when that process is being attacked by the immune system, it's almost like having two gears that just aren't working very well together. maybe the gears are spinning, but it's getting clunky or it's like kind of rusty. And if you throw iodine in there, the system sorts.
Starts to like back up, and that can become very toxic to the thyroid because one of the byproducts of trying to create thyroid hormones is hydrogen peroxide. So if you throw in a bunch of iodine and force a thyroid to produce a ton of thyroid hormone, but it can't do it efficiently, you get this backup of hydrogen peroxide, which is like really toxic to the thyroid.
 it can actually lead to more harm than good. All this being said, it really does take a very individualized approach to see, okay, why do you have a thyroid issue in the first place? Is a supplement appropriate for you? Do you need something like iodine? And unfortunately it's just not one size fits all.
It'd be really cool if it was that way, but it's just not ' we're all individuals and we all have different diets. We all have different stressors. We all have different capacity for absorption of a nutrients. So it really does take a very specific look into your life and your body to decide what's appropriate for you when it comes to supplementation.
[00:31:23] Leisha: I think that's so helpful to realize and just also to know if you have been, working on your nutrition and your mineral status and really building this up, then maybe that is a time where these things could help you bridge over versus just, it's just the first, you know, you're like.
Looking at Instagram and it's oh, your hair's falling out and you have gut issues. Take this desiccated thyroid and everything will be better. It's just not true. There's, I don't know, supplement that will do that. And I do like supplements as an addition to what we're doing because sometimes it can speed up results and sometimes it can speed up rebalancing things.
So I like that, but it can't be the only thing. I totally agree with that. . I do have one more question. I thought I had the last question, but here's one more question that I wanted to touch on. With hypothyroidism and fertility, for someone who's having trouble trying to conceive specifically, what would be some of the signs that the thyroid might be part of that issue?
Because the thyroid does affect cycles in certain ways. Just anything off the top of your head that, that would affect fertility. Because it is a really big factor and I think it's overlooked often.
[00:32:28] Nicole: , I would say the biggest symptom being difficulty with conception. That would be a really big symptom of thyroid dysregulation. And of course that's very multifaceted, but I don't know about you, but I often see that if there is sex hormone dysregulation, I. Oftentimes there's thyroid hormone dysregulation, and when there's thyroid hormone dysregulation, there's often some degree of sex hormone imbalance.
And so I would say from the get go, if you know that there are hormonal imbalances and there is a difficulty with conceiving, I would absolutely check your thyroid hormones and get a full thyroid panel and work with somebody who can really hone in on. Creating that safety in your body through diet and lifestyle strategies.
Other symptoms would be the symptoms of hypothyroidism. So if you're having digestive issues, a lot of times if you're feeling like constipated, if you're having a lot of bloating and a lot of upper abdominal distension if you're tired, if you're cold, if your hair's falling out, if you're not sleeping well overnight, if you're not waking up refreshed, those would be other signs. But like I said. Because the hormones impact every cell, really. Any symptom is not off the table. So if you know that you're just feeling off and you can't put your finger on it, lots of times it's a thyroid issue, not a thyroid gland issue, but your body's ability to reduce and absorb and utilize thyroid hormones lots of times, that's a deeper issue.
[00:33:51] Leisha: And I think being able to just take the first step of like, okay, if I'm having all these symptoms, maybe it's not just a need for thyroid medication. Sometimes it is, sometimes, we talked about that, but sometimes you do need thyroid medication until you can work on the underlying things long enough.
So that can be a piece of the puzzle. But I also, I have seen. That sometimes you need thyroid medication for a short term, hopefully versus long term. And I know a lot of people will say, and a lot of doctors will say, here's your thyroid medication and you have to take it the rest of your life.
But there's hope. So I think not being afraid to do what you need to do in the moment, as long as you have this big picture of there is more to the picture and step-by-step, there's a lot of improvement that can be made. So thank you for all of this. This has been so good. I would love to hear just where everyone can find you.
I know you mentioned it sounds like you have a couple different ways that people can work with you. If you wanna tell us a little bit about that and then we'll put all of the links in the show notes.
[00:34:53] Nicole: . I'm an educator at heart. I literally teach and part of what I do is teach clients how to become more acquainted with their body and their symptoms and how to really transition. Our body being against us to, like our body is on our side and how do we start to understand symptoms.
And I provide a lot of free education on my Instagram, which is chewsfoodwisely, C-H-E-W-S, food Wisely. I blog fairly frequently. chewsfoodwisely.com. And then we support clients in a variety of ways from private one-on-one work to. Lab analysis. we really like to meet people where they are in their journey, whether they've had thyroid issues for 30 years and are still kind of like, I don't know what to do with this, or they just got diagnosed.
And we're again, really big believers in feeling empowered through education and being able to advocate for themselves and understanding that life is fluid and there are different seasons. if you're in a season where you need that medication. Great. I've been there. Lots of people have been there.
Approaching your body with grace and gentleness and being able to, again, be your own advocate from a place, not a fear, but a place of loving your body and being educated about your body.
[00:36:00] Leisha: I love that. Thank you so much, Nicole. We will put all of those links in the show notes and I'm so thankful you were here today.
[00:36:06] Nicole: Yeah. Thanks so much.