Hi, its Dr Eric Balcavage. We are back for another edition of Thyroid Thursday. Today I want to follow up on last week’s Thyroid Thursday edition where we talked about why women have a tendency to have higher levels of hypothyroid symptoms and higher rates of autoimmune disorders, especially autoimmune attack on the thyroid gland.
One of the things we talked about was that women carry more leptin naturally because they have higher levels of estrogen, and I said this week I would talk about, what are some natural ways that you can bring your leptin levels down?
Well, there’s a couple of things you can do.
Reduce your carbohydrate intake.
Leptin should signal the brain that it’s time to stop eating. But, when you are constantly sending lots of leptin signal to your brain, it can tune out the leptin. It stops listening to the signal. The more you continue the cycle of: carb overload, increased fat production, increased leptin, you can develop leptin resistance where the brain just stops listening to the leptin signals.
You keep eating and increasing carbs, increasing fat storage, increasing leptin, increasing leptin resistance, and the whole inflammatory cascade just continues to cycle out of control.
What’s the solution? Reduce your carbohydrate load. Move towards a more low carb, higher fat, mild to moderate protein diet. Look at things like a ketogenic diet or a keto-adapted type of lifestyle. There are plenty of resources available to get into that role, but definitely one of the simplest things to do is to cut down your carb load.
The easiest way to do that is cut out the breads, pastas, and grains. They are not necessary for optimal health. Eat foods more like they came out of the ground, walked the earth, came out of the ocean or off the trees. So, eat real food. If it’s got more than 2-3 ingredients on the label don’t eat it, eat real food. It’s probably the simplest recommendation I can give you.
You keep eating and increasing carbs, increasing fat storage, increasing leptin, increasing leptin resistance, and the whole inflammatory cascade just continues to cycle out of control.
What’s the solution? Reduce your carbohydrate load. Move towards a more low carb, higher fat, mild to moderate protein diet. Look at things like a ketogenic diet or a keto-adapted type of lifestyle. There are plenty of resources available to get into that role, but definitely one of the simplest things to do is to cut down your carb load.
The easiest way to do that is cut out the breads, pastas, and grains. They are not necessary for optimal health. Eat foods more like they came out of the ground, walked the earth, came out of the ocean or off the trees. So, eat real food. If it’s got more than 2-3 ingredients on the label don’t eat it, eat real food. It’s probably the simplest recommendation I can give you.
- Start strength training.
If you start strength training and building more lean muscle mass, you’re going to have a tendency to be able to manage more carbohydrates. Now, we don’t want to be loading our body with carbohydrates, but by building more lean muscle mass, you are able to burn more carbohydrates, therefore there is a greater chance of getting more of that glucose that you consume into your muscle tissue and utilized. Less will be getting stored as fat and triggering a leptin response.
- Do cardio correctly.
One of the biggest challenges for people is their thought process. There is a thought process that if you want to burn fat you need to perform cardio-vascular exercise. What I find and what I see, and we see this quite often in the endurance community, is we are just training wrong.
We are not training in a fat burning heart rate; we are training more at a carbohydrate burning heart rate. We are training at the wrong intensity. So, we do this chronic cardio, we are not getting better at burning fat, we are actually churning and burning, and our body is craving more carbohydrates. So, we get done our chronic cardio workout, it didn’t help up metabolize or burn fat, we are starving when we get done and we eat lots of carbohydrates to refuel ourselves because our bodies are craving the sugars to replenish what we burned off, and it continues to create a vicious cycle.
One of the best things that you can do, if you are going to do cardiovascular training, is to do cardiovascular training appropriately. Get a heart rate monitor, take 180 minus your age and then you want to stay at whatever level that is, minus about ten points. So, if you are 50 years old and you take 180 and minus 50, then your aerobic training range where you’re going to burn fat as a primary fuel source, is going to be somewhere between 130-120. That’s the rate you want to train in.
You will be surprised at how slowly you almost have to go to build a true aerobic base and get your body into a fat burning mode. If you’re going to do cardio, don’t just go out there and run as hard as you can every time you go out just so you can feel like you had an exercise. Start building a proper aerobic base where your body is burning fat and not constantly looking for carbohydrates, because that will drive you to eat more carbohydrates, which will drive more inflammation, it will drive more leptin, and drive that whole cascade we talked about last week.
- I really recommend you work with a functional medicine doctor for a couple of reasons.
You want to check for insulin resistance or find out if you’re already in an insulin resistant state. A functional medicine doctor can run your glucose, your hemoglobin A1C, triglycerides, lactose dehydrogenase, and your leptin levels as well. You want to look and see if you’re already in this high leptin, leptin resistant, insulin resistant state. You want to work with a functional medicine doctor to run those tests.
Why do I say a functional medicine doctor? It’s usually the functional medicine doctor that’s looking and running those tests. Traditional medicine just doesn’t typically run those tests unless they’re assuming you’re already diabetic.
One of the things I discussed that can drive up leptin levels is estrogen. A functional medicine doctor can evaluate for estrogen problems and estrogen dominance. Last week we talked about how, as your increase estrogen levels increase, you increase leptin, and increased leptin increases inflammation. A lot of women have estrogen imbalances and they have estrogen dominance. They have a hard time detoxing the estrogen out of the system, which creates that estrogen dominance. If you work with a functional medicine practitioner like myself, we’ll be able to do an appropriate hormone panel/hormone testing to find out if that’s a challenge for you. Then we can give you strategies to address the challenges naturally.
The next thing to think about is, get your inflammatory markers checked. So, there are a number of inflammatory markers that a functional medicine practitioner can run for you. If you have higher levels of inflammation, that’s going to drive up leptin, it’s going to drive that autoimmune and cellular hypothyroid state. So, a functional medicine doctor is going to do that for you. Unfortunately, in traditional medicine, a lot of those markers are rarely run on a traditional metabolic panel.
The next thing to be looking for with your functional medicine doctor is any signs of infection. You may not think you have any infection, but the gut is a window to a lot of infectious processes. So, work with a functional medicine doctor, they can do some testing to find out if you’ve got yeast or bacterial overgrowth These are two things that have really been tied to driving autoimmune conditions, as well as viruses and parasites.
The next thing you want to be checking with your functional medicine doctor is cortisol levels, because cortisol is good to a certain range, but high levels or low levels aren’t good and high levels can definitely drive inflammatory processes, driving cellular hypothyroidism, and driving autoimmunity. So, work with your functional medicine doctor to evaluate cortisol levels if that’s appropriate.
The last thing, work on improving your sleep, rest and recovery. It’s really important. There is a great tool, it’s called heart rate variability. Heart rate variability is an indication of the state of your nervous system. It tells us which state your nervous system is in; if you are in a sympathetic (fight or flight) response or para-sympathetic, which is rest and digest response. Heart rate variability will let you know when you’ve recovered after a stressful day, experience, or training. There are some really neat apps that you can use on your IPhone. One of those I really like is called HRV4 Training. You’ll want to pick that up at the app store and then starting testing your HRV every day. Definitely work on improving sleep.
Overall, what can you do to reduce your leptin levels? The number one thing and the easy answer to sum all this up, is to reduce your stress; physical stress, emotional stress, chemical stress and environmental and microbial stressors. When you reduce the stress load, you reduce leptin. When you reduce leptin, you reduce inflammation, reduce body fat, reduce hypothyroid symptoms and reduce the risk of developing autoimmunity.
Alright, hope that helps. If you have any questions, put it in the question box below or give the office a call and we’ll be more than happy to help you out. Thanks.
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