Your Thyroid Needs Support
How is your metabolism? Metabolism is what we call the chemical reactions in the body that turn food into fuel. Our bodies need this to do everything from moving to thinking. If your metabolism is sluggish, your thyroid needs support.
Your thyroid is a small, butterfly-shaped gland that wraps around your windpipe in your throat. The hormones it produces affect all aspects of your metabolism.
Nutrients Are Building Blocks
As with everything in your body, function is affected by the supply of necessary nutrients. Where do you get those nutrients? Primarily from your food, of course, and some use supplements to augment.
The challenge is that modern agriculture and farming techniques resulted in depletion of nutrients in our soil. And if the nutrients aren’t in the soil, they can’t be absorbed into the food grown in that soil. You need to think specifics and consider whether a supplement would fill the gap.
Key nutrients for thyroid are iodine, selenium and zinc. While available in supplements, I recommend starting with food choices. You don’t want to overload iodine, but you can get gentle supply by eating seaweed, wild-caught seafood and strawberries for starters. The best source of selenium is Brazil nuts – eat 3-5 a day. And pumpkin seeds are a great way to boost your zinc.
Moderate Your Stress
In addition to eating nutrient-dense foods you need to account for stress. Stress can deplete nutrients by reducing digestive secretions and by shifting your hormone balance.
Your thyroid is even more susceptible to stress than most of your organs because of the interaction between thyroid hormone and cortisol. Cortisol is a necessary hormone your body uses to respond to stress, and high levels can reduce the effectiveness of thyroid hormone.
Your thyroid needs support. and that involves providing the nutrients needed to produce thyroid and convert T4 to the active T3 your cells utilize. It also requires that you moderate your stress level on a daily basis.
Being realistic, it isn’t possible to completely remove stress from your life. However, I have written before about simple ways that you can press the pause button on the “fight or flight” and cool the fire of stress. From deep breathing and gratitude to improving the tone of your vagus nerve, there are a variety of tools that can benefit you.
Be mindful of that valuable little thyroid gland in your throat. Consider how your food choices can support (or hinder) its function and your overall metabolism. I firmly believe that there are many who have low thyroid function – I certainly did – without even realizing it.
Your daily choices in food and life habits have such a powerful influence over the function of your body. My purpose is to support you with education on what choices will support you for positive outcome. Your body is resilient and can resolve the functions that aren’t working properly.
You simply need to provide the building blocks needed and remove what is hindering proper function. I can help you.
