Hypothyroidism and Weight Gain

March 15, 2024

Have you been facing a losing battle when it comes to weight loss? Do you eat healthy and exercise regularly, but still can’t shed those extra pounds? Your thyroid could be the culprit. Watch this podcast and read the transcription by Dr. Steven Hotze on how low thyroid function can lead to weight gain, and what you can do about it!

Podcast Highlights:

0:39: If you don’t get active thyroid hormone into your cells, then your cells don’t produce adequate amounts of energy and your metabolism becomes sluggish and slow.

0:51: Now, you can check your thyroid hormones in your blood, but that doesn’t necessarily tell you whether or not you have a low thyroid condition.

1:30: Your body’s temperature should be 98.6. But oftentimes, people with low thyroid will have lower temperatures. They’ll run in the 97s, even in the 96s.

2:58: Unfortunately, conventional physicians think the gold standard is to do a blood test to test the thyroid stimulating hormone (TSH).

4:54:  …thyroid values can be as tall as the Empire State Building and as wide as the Grand Canyon because it encompasses 95% of the people.

5:33: And remember, the thyroid hormone is what enables the cells to produce energy. They are the stimulating spark plugs of the mitochondria, the power plants of the cells that enable those cells to produce energy from the nutrients and the vitamins that you take in your body.

6:04: Now, one of the reasons you’re not producing enough thyroid hormone may be that your thyroid hormone is not being converted to the active thyroid hormone.

7:05: But if you have a problem making that conversion, that’s known as type two hypothyroidism – you’re not making a proper conversion of T4 to T3.

7:24: Fluoride poisons the enzyme that converts T4 to T3 so you don’t make a proper conversion. Also, fluoride competes with iodine. You have to have iodine to make thyroid hormone.

9:09: Fluoride is a toxin. It does not belong in toothpaste. It should not be in our water.

9:44: …because thyroid governs your metabolism, it obviously is going to affect your weight. If your metabolism is sluggish and slow, you’re going to tend to gain weight. If your metabolism is high, you’re going to tend to be thin and trim. In America, since we put fluoride in the water in the 1960s, at that time, 15% of the people were overweight and 5-7% were considered obese.

10:16: In America today, 75-80% of the population is overweight and 40% of the population is obese.

11:33: The fluoride is what’s causing the hypothyroid situation in Americans.

12:06: Another cause of low thyroid can be antibodies to the thyroid gland. This is called autoimmune thyroiditis. That’s when your immune system makes antibodies to your own thyroid gland.

14:07: We’ve had thousands of our guests that have come in that have been on synthetic thyroid hormone and they still have all the symptoms of low thyroid…And why doesn’t it work? Because it’s T4. 

14:32: The Synthroid, the levoxyl, levothroid is T4. It’s the inactive thyroid hormone.

15:41: And people, when they convert from synthetic thyroid to active natural thyroid, natural bioidentical thyroid, they notice a huge difference because they’re getting the active T3, which motivates those cells to begin to produce energy and to begin to convert the T4 to T3, the active thyroid hormone.

Podcast Transcription:

Dr. Steven Hotze:  Hello, I’m Dr. Steve Hotze. Welcome to today’s program. Have you had problems with difficulty in losing weight or an unexpected weight gain, even when you’re eating right and exercising right? It may be that you have a condition known as hypothyroidism, or low thyroid levels in your system.

Your thyroid gland of the neck produces thyroid hormones. They are secreted into the blood. They have to be assimilated into the cells. If you don’t get active thyroid hormone into your cells, then your cells don’t produce adequate amounts of energy and your metabolism becomes sluggish and slow.

Now, you can check your thyroid hormones in your blood, but that doesn’t necessarily tell you whether or not you have a low thyroid condition. The thyroid gland, which produces the thyroid hormones, causes the cells to produce energy. And so, if you’re not producing enough energy, you’re going to have a host of symptoms associated with that.

Symptoms of Hypothyroidism

You may have fatigue. You may have difficulty losing weight or unexpected weight gain. You may have cold sensitivity, cold hands or cold feet. You may have a low basal body temperature.   Your body’s temperature should be 98.6. But oftentimes, people with low thyroid will have lower temperatures. They’ll run in the 97s, even in the 96s. That’s why they tend to be sensitive to the cold.

It can also cause you to have brain fog or an inability to focus or think clearly. You can have muscle aches and muscle pains. You can have joint pains. You may have problems with constipation. You may have problems with recurrent and chronic infections because obviously if you don’t produce enough energy, your immune system’s not going to be as effective as it would be if it had adequate or an abundance of energy.

And also, you can have an enlarged tongue. So if you stick your tongue out and look in a mirror, it may be scalloped like on a pie because it’s enlarged and it’s growing up against the teeth.

Particularly in women, we see hair loss. You may have ridged fingernails. You may have puffiness in your skin. You may have dry skin. All these are signs of low thyroid condition.

Also, recurrent and chronic headaches may be due to low thyroid.

Conventional Approach to Hypothyroidism

So if you have had these symptoms and you’ve gone to the doctor, and maybe you’ve read an article so when you go and you ask the doctor, “Do you think I could have low thyroid?” He’ll say, “Well, let me check your blood.” Unfortunately, conventional physicians think the gold standard is to do a blood test to test the thyroid stimulating hormone (TSH). The thyroid stimulating hormone is produced by the pituitary gland, which is deep in the brain, and it stimulates the thyroid gland to produce thyroid hormone.

Now, I like to give an analogy. The thyroid stimulating hormone is like a whip. The pituitary gland is the rider of the horse. The horse is the thyroid gland. If the horse is running slow, the jockey takes the whip and whips the horse trying to speed it up. Well, this is what the pituitary gland does. It reads the amount of thyroid in your blood. If you’re not producing enough thyroid hormone, it increases due to the fact that the thyroid gland may be sluggish. It tries to whip it into shape so the thyroid stimulating hormone goes up. And if it goes too high, then that is indicative that you’re not producing enough thyroid hormone and the thyroid gland is sluggish.

So that’s the test doctors look at is primarily the TSH, thyroid stimulating hormone.

Unfortunately, the normal levels for your TSH are measured by a lab and they take the mean, or the average, and they add two standard deviations. Well, that encompasses 95% of the population. So the thyroid levels, what would be considered normal, encompass 95% of the people. So you go to the doctor and you get your blood drawn and he goes, “Well, your thyroid hormones are normal.”

But now, the thyroid values can be as tall as the Empire State Building and as wide as the Grand Canyon because it encompasses 95% of the people. So if at one time, your thyroid hormone was in a high level, think about the Empire State Building, if you were at a high level at one time, you can see all of New York City. You may go all the way down when you go down the elevator and you end up on the first floor. You’re still in the Empire State Building. Well, that’s the same way with thyroid hormone. You may have had a nice optimal level when you were younger, but as you age, the levels declined and now you’re in a much lower range.

And remember, the thyroid hormone is what enables the cells to produce energy. They are the stimulating spark plugs of the mitochondria, the power plants of the cells that enable those cells to produce energy from the nutrients and the vitamins that you take in your body. You produce electrical energy. And if you’re not producing enough electrical energy, you’re low-voltage, and that may be because you’re not producing enough thyroid hormone.

Now, one of the reasons you’re not producing enough thyroid hormone may be that your thyroid hormone is not being converted to the active thyroid hormone. There are two thyroid hormones: T4, which your body makes 94% T4, and T3, which your body makes 6%. T3 is the active thyroid hormone. T4 is the inactive.

If this is the thyroid hormone, my fingers represent the four iodine atoms that are attached to T4. That’s the inactive thyroid hormone. It doesn’t do anything in the blood. It has to enter the cells. You’ve got trillions of cells. And once it enters the cells, you have an enzyme that cleaves off one of the thyroid iodine atoms off the thyroid hormone to give you T3. That’s the active thyroid hormone. And that stimulates the mitochondria, the power plants of the cells, to produce electricity. That electricity then drives all the biochemical reactions and your cells function well, your metabolism goes up, and you do well. But if you have a problem making that conversion, that’s known as type two hypothyroidism, you’re not making a proper conversion of T4 to T3.

Adverse Effects of Fluoride on the Thyroid

Now, why would that happen? The major cause of that is fluoride in your system. We have fluoride in the water. We have fluoride in toothpaste. Fluoride poisons the enzyme that converts T4 to T3 so you don’t make a proper conversion. Also, fluoride competes with iodine. You have to have iodine to make thyroid hormone. Both of those are halogens and fluoride competes with iodine and adversely affects the thyroid gland’s ability to properly produce thyroid hormones. So we want to eliminate fluoride from the water and the way you do that is you get a filter. You can buy filters online and you can get reverse osmosis hooked to your sink, but you want to get the fluoride out of your system.

Interestingly enough, there was a huge debate back in the late 50s, early 1960s on the use of fluoride in water. So about 70% of the municipalities across the country have put fluoride into the water under the wrong notion that, “Oh, it’s going to keep you from getting cavities.” You go to a dentist. They want to put fluoride all over your teeth. That fluoride poisons your deiodinase enzyme within the cell that prevents you from converting T4 to T3.

And it’s also in the toothpaste. As a matter of fact, if you read the side of the toothpaste label, it tells you, “Warning: If you ingest any more toothpaste and swallow it, immediately call Poison Control or go to the emergency room.” Now, why would you have something in toothpaste that causes you to call Poison Control or go to the emergency room? That’s the fluoride. Fluoride is a toxin. It does not belong in toothpaste. It should not be in our water.

So in America, 70% of the municipalities were convinced by the companies that produced fluoride, and that really came from fertilizer companies because it’s one of the byproducts, so they took the fluoride, which should have been removed completely from the system, and they put it into the water. So they’re poisoning you in the water.

Now in Europe, they banned fluoride altogether. So what were the results of this? Well, because     thyroid governs your metabolism, it obviously is going to affect your weight. If your metabolism is sluggish and slow, you’re going to tend to gain weight. If your metabolism is high, you’re going to tend to be thin and trim. In America, since we put fluoride in the water in the 1960s, at that time, 15% of the people were overweight and 5-7% were considered obese. In America today, 75-80% of the population is overweight and 40% of the population is obese.

If you go to Europe and if you’ve ever traveled in Europe, and my wife and I have traveled and walked in the airports and I go, “Gosh, these people are so thin,” it turns out because they banned fluoride, they don’t poison the thyroid gland and they don’t poison the enzyme that converts the inactive to the active thyroid hormone in Europe. And so currently in Europe today, 15% of the people are overweight and 5-7% of the people are obese, the same way it was in America before we put fluoride in the water. And they banned fluoride in Europe. So you can go to Italy and they got pizzas and all that. You go to France, they got all kinds of breads. They don’t just give you a little bread in a barrel. They bring a cart of bread by and people eat bread. They drink wine and eat these rich foods and they don’t gain weight. They’re thin and trim. Why is that? Because they are not using fluoride. And there’s a strong enough correlation to know that it’s causation. The fluoride is what’s causing the hypothyroid situation in Americans.

So if you’re having difficulty losing weight or you’ve gained weight, then in a high probability, you should be evaluated for thyroid, not strictly with blood tests because a blood test can fall within the normal range 95% of the time. You want to have a physician who takes natural approaches to health, and he goes through your symptom list to see if you have the symptoms of low thyroid.

Another cause of low thyroid can be antibodies to the thyroid gland. This is called autoimmune thyroiditis. That’s when your immune system makes antibodies to your own thyroid gland. And this condition could be genetically inherited or it could be caused by bowel problems in the intestine, where you get leaky bowel syndrome and large molecules from food can pass through into the bloodstream, and they have antigen properties similar to the thyroid gland and you begin to make antibodies to those food molecules, but they also attack the thyroid gland. And the antibodies adversely affect the thyroid so you don’t produce adequate amounts of thyroid hormone, and they also bind to the thyroid in the blood.

And that can be a major problem because if they bind to the thyroid, they’re kind of like a safety tackling a halfback that’s running loose in the backfield, and the safety or one of the defensive linemen tackle them and they can’t get in and gain yardage or get into the end zone. That’s exactly what the antibodies to the thyroid gland do when you have autoimmune thyroiditis. They bind the thyroid hormone so it cannot be assimilated into the cells.

And you may have gone to your doctor and your doctor may have looked at your blood tests and said your TSH is high and he puts you on a synthetic thyroid, Synthroid, levoxyl, or levothroid. And you still have all the symptoms of low thyroid, but it lowers your TSH level, thyroid stimulating hormone, and it shows that you have adequate amount of thyroid. But you still have all the symptoms.

I’ve seen thousands of our guests, and we call our patients guests here at the center, Hotze Health & Wellness Center. We’ve had thousands of our guests that have come in that have been on synthetic thyroid hormone and they still have all the symptoms of low thyroid. Well, if you’re taking a preparation to treat a condition like hypothyroidism and you’re taking a product and it doesn’t correct the condition, then that product isn’t working. And why doesn’t it work? Because it’s T4. The Synthroid, the levoxyl, levothroid is T4. It’s the inactive thyroid hormone.

So when we treat for thyroid and we treat based, first and foremost, on clinical symptoms, we also do blood tests just to see what level you have of TSH and also of your thyroid hormones. But remember, those are just points in times that they can fluctuate. But if you have symptoms of low thyroid, then we will give you natural T4 and T3 compounded here at Physicians Preference Pharmacy or give you desiccated thyroid. That’s thyroid that comes, desiccated thyroid, from pig gland or from cow glands or from sheep glands. They can desiccate the thyroid. That means they dry it out and we encapsulate it and put it in a pill form, and you can take that. And that contains the active thyroid hormone, T3, as well as T4. And people, when they convert from synthetic thyroid to active natural thyroid, natural bioidentical thyroid, they notice a huge difference because they’re getting the active T3, which motivates those cells to begin to produce energy and to begin to convert the T4 to T3, the active thyroid hormone.

So if you’re having problems with the symptoms that we talked about, low energy, inability to focus and think clearly, difficulty with weight, cold sensitivity, sluggish bowel functions, joint and muscle aches and pains, recurrent chronic infections, puffiness, you’re having hair loss if you’re ladies, you got ridged fingernails or an enlarged tongue, you have chronic headaches, and your “get up and go” has just “got up and gone,” and especially when you’re overweight, it’s been shown that people that are obese almost invariably have hypothyroid symptoms. So if you have these symptoms, then you need to be evaluated by a physician that takes natural approaches to health and is willing to give you a trial of thyroid hormone, natural desiccated bioidentical thyroid hormone, and give you a trial.

And so what we do if you have symptoms of low thyroid, we’ll get blood tests, but we’ll start you on a low dose of natural thyroid hormone and we’ll gradually increase that and see if that boosts your metabolism. If it does, then your metabolism goes up. And guess what? If you eat right, your weight will go down and you’ll feel much better. And all of a sudden, your “get up and go” that “got up and went” will come back, and you’ll have energy and you’ll have vitality and you’ll have enthusiasm for life. And that’s what we want you to have. So as you march through life, we want you to feel alive. And if you don’t have enough thyroid, you’re going to feel worn out and worn down. If you keep your thyroid level up, you’re going to have plenty of energy and you’re going to have a wonderful life that’s full of vitality, and you’re going to have that enthusiasm that you had when you were much younger.

So if you would like to be evaluated for that, then you can give us a call at the number on the screen (281-698-8698), talk to one of our new guest consultants, and ask them to send you a copy of my book, Hypothyroidism, Health & Happiness. And this book is from a chapter of my book, Hormones, Health, and Happiness, that I took out and expanded, and it will help you understand the role that thyroid hormone plays in good health. So I want to encourage you to do that.

And I want to thank you for joining me today and I hope this gives you insight into how you can boost your metabolism and how you may be able to get down to a more ideal body weight so you’ll be enthusiastic about life. So thanks for joining us today. I’m Dr. Hotze and I look forward to seeing you and visiting with you when you visit our center. Thank you so much.

We Can Help

Are you ready to get your health back on track and lose those extra pounds?  At Hotze Health & Wellness Center, we will guide you on the path of health and wellness naturally. Take our symptom checker to find out if hormone decline and imbalance could be the cause of your weight gain. Give us a call at 281-698-8698 for a complimentary consultation! Don’t wait – it’s time to get your life back!

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