 Our first question is from Heather from California. Hey, Heather, how can we help you out? I saw, how's it going? Good, how are you? I recently found out I have hypothyroidism and I wanted to get your guys' thoughts on natural interventions versus like synthetic hormones and pharmaceutical treatments. Just wanted to hear your thoughts on it. Okay, so you got diagnosed by a doctor that you're not? Yes, correct. Okay, and to be clear, you said hypo, not enough thyroid. Hypo, yes. Okay, so obviously first off, I'm not a doctor. I've just been a trainer for a long time. I've worked with a lot of people. I've worked with a lot of functional medicine practitioners. So I'll comment from that position. And by the way, did you get tested for antibodies or anything else in relation to your thyroid? Correct, correct. And this has been a continual testing probably over the last like nine months or so. Okay, so functional medicine practitioners sometimes will have somebody do elimination diet. They may recommend supplements like ashwagandha. But here's the thing, and I also worked with a lot of doctors and I would talk to them often about thyroid issues. Hypothyroidism, if it's just too little thyroid, is a pretty, from a Western medicine standpoint, pretty easy to fix situation. You just take thyroid medication. The challenge becomes when you're taking the thyroid is figuring out the right amount for you. Cause oftentimes you'll start it and then you'll get the effects of feeling like you have too much or too little. This process can take, you know, six months to a year to really figure out the right dose. But aside from that, it's a pretty easy fix and you don't wanna go too long with too little thyroid because it's pretty bad for your health and your overall quality of life is you probably already experienced low energy, slow metabolism, that kind of stuff. How are stimulants going to affect her? Like caffeine and things like that, pre-workout. Typically someone who's hypothyroidism, that's a good question too. I would assume you probably have been trying to self-medicate with a lot of caffeine. I try to stay away from caffeine as much as possible but there were some times when I was feeling like extra lethargic and definitely was doing a lot more coffee. I tried not to break like coffee after 1 p.m. But I was starting to do it like three o'clock in the afternoon because I was just dragging some days. Yeah, by any chance did you practice a ketogenic or a really low carb diet for a long time? No, I did not. I've never been like vegan vegetarian or anything like that either because I know sometimes like B12 deficiency can be a part of this. Yeah, and in low, like keto diets practice for long periods of times in women sometimes will show up with thyroid issues. That's why I asked that question. The best thing I can recommend is to follow your doctor's advice and to train appropriately. So you're gonna have to kind of listen to your body which means you might not be able to train very intensely or very often because your energy is probably not gonna be great until you get the right amount of thyroid. You also, there's different types of medications that you can work with when it comes to your thyroid. So, you know, synthroid is I think the most common thyroid medication and then you can do, you know, like, I believe they do like bioidentical type, thyroid type stuff. So, you know, you can explore that kind of stuff but, you know, from a diet and exercise standpoint it's tough because you don't wanna go too long with low thyroid. It really affects your quality of life in a negative way. I'm sure you've probably experienced. Yeah, yeah, honestly it was a pretty big decline in my health. I'm a healthy person overall. I have a degree in kinesiology, sports medicine and nutrition and I'm also a personal trainer. So like I take care of my body really well and I started getting some cues and went to my doctor right away and we've been kind of figuring out over the last few months what's been going on with me. That's cool. And were you noticing the brain fog, like the lack of being able to concentrate that kind of stuff? Yeah, totally. I'm one to have a really good memory and I was really forgetting stuff. It was really bad and I was like, is this just me aging, you know? And then it was, but I could definitely tell something was off. Did you have any kids by chance? Just curious. No. Okay. What's the training protocol look like? How are you training right now? I am doing, I'm actually doing MAPS anabolic right now. Okay, that's probably, yeah, I would say that's probably the perfect program for you right now. Putting myself in three days a week, I think is what's kind of just fitting in with my energy levels right now because before I was training like more like four or five times a week and I was basically wearing myself in at that point. Yeah. I mean, when it comes to hormones, here's the deal. You know, you can do things naturally to try to balance out hormones, but in certain cases, the low amounts of hormones themselves pose a greater risk to your health. So like, you know, men with low testosterone, for example, they can try raising their testosterone naturally, sometimes they're successful, but if they're not, then taking testosterone is better for their health than saying, I just want to be, you know, natural type of deal. So thyroid is one of those and it's, you know, from what I understand from the hormone doctors I've worked with and trained, you know, they're like, look, this is one that you can just take the thyroid, not a big deal and it makes a tremendous improvement in the person's health and quality of life. It's an area I've never messed with. I mean, I've had lots of clients and it's just one of those ones that they just, they take the medication and I've worked around it with the doctor. I've never tried to do anything holistically to change it. Yeah. So I hope that helps. Yeah, thank you. I just wanted your guys' input because I've heard a lot of stuff and I've researched myself. So Sal, Adam, Justin and Doug, thank you so much. I really appreciate you taking my question. You're welcome. Thank you. All right, take care guys. Yeah, that one's a bit over my pay grade because I had a lot of clients that had thyroid issues but it wasn't something that I ever messed with. It was something that whatever your doctor is telling you as far as medication we're gonna follow. I know little things like the question I was asking with caffeine, how hard she's training, like those types of adjustments I would know to make. But as far as, you know, when you're starting, when you get into hormones, it's not something that I feel like that I can really control very much. I've been dealing with this quite a bit with Courtney, you know, with her thyroid and just trying to get the medication like you had mentioned with just getting that right, the right dose. It takes a while and I think that it's frustrating because, you know, you have to actually wait and be patient for a while before it all kind of like balances out. But once it does, it's pretty dramatic, you know, what kind of happens. Oh dude, it's, you know, that's why I asked her about antibodies. Like sometimes people will have like autoimmune reactions to their own thyroid and this will cause them to have symptoms of low thyroid, but they're producing adequate thyroid hormone. It's just they have all these antibodies. So how Hashimoto's is an example of something like that. In those cases, some, from my experience, sometimes holistic measures can make a tremendous improvement by helping your body's own immune system regulate itself better. Yeah, but what do you mean by holistic measures? You mean like cutting out maybe inflammatory foods, reducing the intensity of training, maybe cutting out caffeine and stimulants. Yeah, I wouldn't know where else to go. Looking at food intolerances, SIBO sometimes can cause issues like that. So treating SIBO. But I mean, if you just have low thyroid, you know, okay, and I totally respect it when people want to do things on their own and naturally. Give it a little bit of time. If it's not working, take the hormone because having low thyroid is not good for you. It's just not good for your health at all. And then later on, if she, you know, Justin asked if she had any kids, she said no, if she wanted to have kids, if she was pregnant with low thyroid, that can cause major problems for the baby as well. So it's not one of those that you wanna, you know, necessarily, you know, just put to the side and say screw it, I'm just gonna be natural. If it's low, your quality of life is just terrible. Well, especially when you're talking about someone like that, like all the questions we're asking, I mean, she obviously knows what she's doing and she's researched a little bit herself and she's taking care of herself health-wise. So I didn't see any like obvious things like, oh, I'm abusing caffeine or I'm training seven days a week, super intense or marathon running or anything that I thought that might be throwing her hormones off. She sounds like she's got pretty good balance already. So I would have drove her right back to her doctor.