by Libby Weaver
Family history of autoimmune conditions
You have been diagnosed with adrenal fatigue or another condition involving the endocrine system; or you have been previously diagnosed with an autoimmune condition
You wonder when it will be your turn—when you will be able to do what you want to do, rather than what others want or need from you.
Signs of an overactive thyroid
“Unexplained” weight loss
Overheating easily
You have a tendency to “unexplained” loose stools
You are amped-up regularly and tend toward anxious feelings
Your eyes are bulging forward from the eye sockets
Chronic stress
Family history of thyroid dysfunction or disease
Family history of autoimmune conditions
You have been diagnosed with adrenal fatigue or another condition involving the endocrine system; or you have been previously diagnosed with an autoimmune condition.
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THYROID SOLUTIONS
Solutions are scattered throughout this chapter, so please go back and reread it a second time to create your plan of action to optimize thyroid function. My additional suggestions are, as follows:
Go on a grain-free diet trial for a minimum of four weeks. Gut health often needs to be at the heart of thyroid treatments, particularly if there are antibodies present in the blood.
If you love dairy products and the idea of going without cheese makes you wonder if you could, then do it! It is often what we love (not just like) to eat that can be a problem. Do a four-week dairy-free trial if this is the case.
Have an experienced health professional assess your diet for iodine and selenium intake, and have a blood test to examine not only thyroid parameters, but also iron status.
Support liver and gallbladder function to assist with bowel elimination. Globe artichoke is particularly good for “thyroid” people.
Refer to the advice about estrogen dominance.
Adrenal support is almost always essential, especially when beginning to treat the thyroid. Refer to in Puzzle Piece 2, Stress Hormones, to refresh on adrenal support strategies.
You will probably crave coffee. Please explore taking a four-week break and observe how you feel at the end of this period. Use green tea, which has a low caffeine level, herbal tea, or dandelion tea instead.
If you have a diagnosed thyroid condition and you are on synthetic medication but your symptoms are still present, explore transitioning to whole thyroid extract under medical supervision.
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Puzzle Piece 7 Insulin
The pancreas is another gland (technically it is a “gland organ”) that makes a hormone intricately linked to body-fat burning or accumulation. Insulin is made by the pancreas, and it is a type of growth hormone, hence its capacity to drive fat storage. We make insulin when we eat. Carbohydrates elicit the largest production while protein drives only a small amount of insulin release, which is usually offset by another hormone that protein elicits called glucagon, which acts in the opposite way to insulin. Consuming dietary fats does not drive an insulin response.
People have become confused about and fearful of carbs, yet it’s imperative that we consume some carbohydrates since they are vital to the function of our brain, kidneys, and red blood cells. So how do we optimize carbohydrate intake while still burning fat?
How carbs can make you fat—or not
When you consume carbohydrates, whether they are starchy or sweet carbs, they are broken down into glucose. Sources of carbohydrates include bread, pasta, rice, all types of potatoes, and the other starchy vegetables (including pumpkin and corn), fruit, dairy products, candy (sweets and chocolate), cakes, biscuits (cookies), pastries, honey, maple syrup, and sugar. I have found it fascinating to ask audiences to shout out sources of carbohydrates over the years. Today, the only carbs audiences tend to identify are the starches (bread and potato are the first two words out of their mouths virtually every time), which I believe is the result of the high-protein diet era. When I asked audiences to name sources of carbs 17 years ago, the first and almost only word out of their mouths was sugar. Back then, fat was still the “enemy” of the public health nutrition messages, and the public believed that as long as there was very little fat in a food, then it had to be good.
Bread and pasta are high in what were known as complex carbohydrates and very low in fat, and people ate them by the bucketload. Back then there was still some wariness about sugar, as it had been hailed as the only enemy in the late 1970s on the back end of the previous high-protein diet age. You see, nutrition information moves in cycles, and it will continue to do so. To avoid getting caught in the latest fad, I remind you that nature gets it right, and it is human intervention that gets it wrong and makes food less nourishing and sustaining. My point here is that starch-based foods are carbs but so is anything that tastes sweet, unless it has been flavored by artificial sweeteners (see also Insulin solutions for more on this topic) or stevia, a beautifully sweet herb.
Glucose from the carbohydrates ends up in your bloodstream after digestion, and your body identifies that blood sugar levels have been elevated. Your body does not like it when blood glucose goes high, as too much sugar in the blood can damage the lining of the blood vessels, in a similar way to a free radical (described in Puzzle Piece 4, The Liver). To protect the blood vessels from damage, the pancreas secretes insulin into the blood. It is the job of insulin to remove the excess glucose from the blood so that homeostasis (balance) returns to the blood. The health and contents of the blood must be maintained at all costs.
Insulin first takes the glucose to the muscles and the liver, where it is stored as glycogen, places from which it can be released easily when we need a fast source of energy if we haven’t eaten for a while. But the size of our muscles is finite, meaning they have their storage limit. Once they are full of glycogen, if more sugar from the blood needs to be removed, insulin will transport it to guess where? The fat cells. Fat cells have an infinite capacity to expand.
An essential point to make here is that our muscle mass is critical. Do not allow yourself to lose muscle from this point forward in your life. At best, increase your muscle mass. At least, maintain it where it is today. Given the glycogen storage capacity of muscles and the ready source of energy they offer, coupled with the metabolism-driving power of muscles, I cannot encourage you enough to grow them. You do not need to become a body builder. You do not need to lift huge amounts of weight. I suggest you focus on strengthening the muscles housed in your core. Of course you can also work on the pretty ones that everyone can see, but make sure your core gets attention. Think about this. All of your organs that keep you alive, other than your brain, are housed inside your torso. These organs are held in place by muscles. Over time, due to gravity, poor posture and poor lifestyle choices, these muscles want to go south and, when this happens, they no longer work as efficiently as they once did. Pilates, yoga, and qi gong are all excellent for core strength, and you can even activate your core while walking sometimes for a little extra bonus. Bring awareness to how you hold yourself and how you move.
Food and insulin
Exploring the human history of food helps guide us with what to eat, especially when it comes to managing insulin levels. The only carbohydrates humans once ate were legumes, pulses (e.g., lentils), and berries, and later root vegetables. These days, there are over 3,000 snack food items alone on the average grocery store’s shelves, and this number is growing constantly. None of these packaged foods are what I call “low human intervention” (low HI) foods. Even white bread looks nothing like the stalk of wheat from which it came. If you showed a four-year-old child a stalk of wheat and a piece of white bread, do you think that four-year-old could tell you that the stalk of wheat made the white bread? Unlikely, as they are not even the same color. That stalk of wheat has been bleached, rolled, and pummeled to create that piece of white bread, so much so that all of
the nutrition that was present in the original stalk of wheat has been removed and, for that slice of white bread to have any goodness at all, the nutrients have to be added back synthetically. And just as an aside, how did you make glue when you were at school? With flour and water. Now, they package it up and sell it to us.
I am not saying don’t ever eat white bread. If you love it, buy it fresh from a good-quality baker, who uses no preservatives, perhaps on a Saturday morning, or better still, buy it fortnightly or even better still, monthly, and enjoy it. Remember, it is what you do every day that has the greatest impact on your health, not what you do sometimes. If you love it, eat it. Just not bucketloads and not every day. And if you need to have a four-week break from grains because of an inkling you might have got from information earlier in this book, then take your break and bring it back on occasions if you want to. You may feel so good without it though, that you never want to go back. It’s your call.
It is big surges of insulin on and off over the day or constantly high circulating insulin that cause the problem when it comes to fat burning. If you have spent months committed to exercising and eating well with little or no reward, have your blood glucose level as well as your blood insulin level tested. I have had clients with perfect blood glucose levels but their bodies are making huge amounts of insulin to keep their blood glucose inside the normal range, and you never know this until you test the insulin. No matter how much you exercise or how seemingly amazingly you eat, you will not access your fat stores to burn in this biochemical state. Insulin must be addressed.
Rushing woman’s syndrome
A typical pattern of food intake that I witness regularly is this: You get up in the morning, inhale some sort of processed breakfast cereal, and race out the door to work. Your blood sugar soars, and your pancreas subsequently releases a surge of insulin. Welcome to fat storage situation number one of your day.
You take shallow breaths all morning due to the perceived pressures in your day. After your peak in blood sugar from your hurried processed-food breakfast, by mid-morning your blood sugar plummets, and concentration levels are waning. You are relieved when you look at your watch and see it is 10:30 a.m. You haven’t achieved very much in your day until now other than trying to get on top of emails that you actually never seem to get on top of, but at least it is time for a break, an opportunity to get away from your desk, either with colleagues or by yourself, and head to the nearest coffee cart or café. You justify your desire, and subsequent purchase of a muffin, along with your large double shot skinny milk latte, by telling yourself that you have a big day ahead and you’ll probably go to the gym later anyway. Welcome to fat storage situation number 2 of your day.
You return to your desk and push on with some work, but, after a couple of hours, you are fidgety again and want lunch. Your blood sugar has come down from the high brought on by your mid-morning snack. You look at your watch again… thank goodness! It’s lunchtime! And out you go for lunch. You know you feel better in your tummy on days when you don’t eat bread for lunch, but you tell yourself that you are busy and you need to be quick. A sandwich, bagel, or a roll is always quick and easy. You inhale it. Then you want something sweet. Hmmm. Chocolate? No, not yet. Dried fruit for now. And, on the inside, your blood sugar and consequently your insulin level surge again. Welcome to fat storage situation number 3.
Within half an hour, you feel utterly exhausted, probably bloated, and you are berating yourself because you feel fat. You are, in fact, simply bloated but your discomfort and the wind building in your tummy, coupled with your swollen abdomen, makes you feel gross. You work in an open-plan office, so you are conscious of hanging onto that wind in case it has an odor (men don’t seem to worry about this in the way women do!). And so even though your colleagues may be (unknowingly) grateful, the bloating and hence the size of your tummy increases over the afternoon.
Headspace and hormones
The psychological process that goes on in your head, particularly if you are a woman, after lunch when you reflect on what you have consumed that morning, is incredibly detrimental to your health and your cortisol levels and, hence, your waistline. You feel like all you did was eat all morning and sit on your bottom. You think about the dress you were planning to fit into to wear to an event three weeks from now. Even though all you have done is eat breakfast, a muffin, a coffee, and a roll, in that moment, you believe that you will never fit into that dress and even though you thought you would go to the gym that evening, having not achieved very much over your morning, you know you will work late and not go. You think about the gym membership that cost you half a month’s pay and that you haven’t used it for the last three months, and you feel useless. You think again about the “massive” (as perceived by you) amounts of food you have eaten so far that day, and you berate yourself and your swollen abdomen. Then! Lightbulb! A thought that suddenly makes you feel better flashes into your mind. You suddenly feel back in control. What was that thought? “I won’t eat a snack this afternoon!”
You feel better, because you have found a way out of your perceived eating frenzy and expanding (bloated) waistline. But your blood sugar and insulin picture over your morning resembled a rollercoaster, so how do you expect your blood sugar picture to be any different than it was in the morning? The answer is it won’t be. By 3 or 4 p.m., your blood sugar has plummeted again, and you feel exhausted. The momentary elation from your “no afternoon snack” thought has vaporized and you are now “starving,” to the point that you could eat your arm off. Your blood sugar is rock bottom. So, instinctively, what type of food do you think your body will desperately want you to eat? You guessed it. Sugar. Almost nothing raises your blood glucose faster, and your biochemical drive for survival knows it. And now you feel so desperate for it, nothing is going to stand in your way. But if you give in and you eat something, when you said you wouldn’t, what emotion do you feel? G-U-I-L-T. And what stress hormone do you think guilt drives your body to make? C-O-R-T- I-S-O-L. What a vicious cycle.
So you give in and you eat whatever sweet fix you can lay your hands on. Some women will placate the need for food at this time by having their second coffee of the day. There’s no way a black coffee would hit the spot at this time of day, though. Because you are actually hungry you will typically choose a milk-based coffee here. Those who choose the coffee option feel mildly pleased because they didn’t give in and eat—but then these people “know” in the back of their mind that a second coffee is not ideal for them either. New clients express precisely this to me every day of my working life. They console themselves with, “at least I didn’t eat,” but whether you choose the coffee or the food, your blood glucose will rise again, as will insulin. And hello fat storage situation number four of the day.
Then the self-directed, silent, cruel statements typically begin. “You are hopeless. You have no willpower. Look at your stomach.” It is the “will I, won’t I, I said I wouldn’t, but I did” syndrome. And in that mindset, you are still at your desk at 6:30 p.m., still trying to get on top of the work you didn’t do that day because you were so busy thinking about food and exercise and dresses and your stomach and not passing gas, that you can’t go to the gym now because it is already 6:30 p.m. You still have more work to do, and if you work until 7:15 p.m., well, there’s no food at home so you will have to go grocery shopping on your way home, but, if you do, it will be 8 p.m. before you get home and then you still have to chop the vegetables, and you feel like that takes ages. And then you still have to cook, eat, and clean up, so it will be at least 11:30 p.m. before you are finished doing all of that, and you probably need to do more work at home that night. But you have to wash your hair in the morning and then straighten it and you need to get up earlier to do that…
And then you get up and do it all over again, and you wonder why you can’t lose weight when you don’t eat “that badly.” I know I used a similar scenario earlier in the stress hormones discussion, but it seemed appropriate
here as well—and it is a pattern common to many, many women. I call it “Rushing Woman’s Syndrome” (RWS for ease of expression; and it resonated so powerfully for so many women that I went on to write a book specifically about and titled Rushing Woman’s Syndrome).
Although I may have exaggerated some of the details of the scenario above—or not really—and there are many variations to what I have described, which may include children, partners, parents, or friends, I meet women of all ages who live like this and also some men.
There may or may not be big, traumatic stresses going on, but there is a daily, relentless juggling act that never ends. Such a scenario is typical of adults aged between 25 and 65, although it tends to be far more prominent in those between 30 and 55. It comes from a desire to make others happy, from being a “pleaser” in your nature, behavior that was likely rewarded in childhood. You feel good helping out and being there for others, but you never, ever put yourself first. You are exhausted underneath your smile and, if you don’t feel that way, you are usually living on adrenalin. I talked about this in my TEDx talk.
The cocktail of hormones being made in these scenarios mostly involves adrenalin, cortisol, and insulin. This disastrous cocktail in turn interferes with progesterone production, so estrogen becomes dominant. This down regulates thyroid function so you drink coffee or wine, or both, to warm up and cool down respectively each day—and, as a result, your liver gets a regular thumping. And still no one eats enough vegetables. Throw in some emotional confusion and chaos, still to be addressed, and you have Accidentally Overweight. Can you now see why I suggested earlier in this book that it is never about the food—but yet on the other hand, it is about the food? It’s time to slow down, beautiful people.
