Pesticides, plastics, all kinds of chemicals and toxins loose in our environment. Toxins mess up your endocrine glands. This has led to an epidemic of millions of people with hypothyroidism. That means your thyroid is not putting out enough hormone to keep you alive or it might be dead. Mine is dead from a very common autoimmune disease. This happened over forty years ago.
It doesn't matter how much you diet or exercise, you won't lose any weight without additional factors (such as hormone replacement -- thyroid and testosterone are the biggies) and additional studies, such as reverse T3 formation and leptin resistance.
Interview I've been quoting from:
http://thyroid.about.com/od/loseweightsuccessfully/a/weight-loss-diet.htmKent Holtorf, MD: We try and investigate and treat as many dysfunctions and suboptimal metabolic conditions that we can. We have had success with a large range of individuals, from those who need to lose a few pounds to those who are over a hundred or more pounds overweight. The most satisfying are the people who lose 50 to 100 pounds or more. It totally changes their lives.
We are also seeing more patients who come in after gastric bypass – those who either didn’t lose weight or have gained much or all of their weight back. Most have low tissue thyroid levels as well as significant leptin resistance. They can also have a growth hormone deficiency as well.
We had one person who was eating 800 calories a day after having gastric bypass and she was still gaining weight. Nobody believed that was all she was eating until they put her in the hospital and monitored her food intake. They insisted her thyroid was fine, as she had a normal TSH, T4 and T3. When we checked her reverse T3, however, and it was over 800 and her leptin was 75. We checked her metabolic rate and it was 45% below normal. Dieting alone would, of course, never work with such a patient.
Also, toxins such as biphenyl-A can block the thyroid receptors everywhere in the body except for the pituitary, which has different receptors. So due to the ubiquitous nature of these toxins, I believe that everyone has a relative deficiency of thyroid activity that is not detected by the TSH. People blame food intake and lack of exercise for the obesity problem in this country, but I think a major problem is the thyroid-disrupting toxins, as well as stress.Additionally, dieting is shown to not only reduce the T4-to-T3 conversion and increase reverse T3, but it is also shown to reduce the numbers of peripheral thyroid receptors -- but again, not in the pituitary -- so the same amount of thyroid has less of an effect, but the TSH is unchanged. This exemplifies the importance of clinical and target tissue assessment in the determination of overall thyroid activity in an individual. Also, women have fewer thyroid receptors than men, making them more sensitive to small decreases in serum levels of thyroid hormones.
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Another article by Dr. Holtorf:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kent-holtorf/long-term-weight-loss---m_b_192933.html?show_comment_id=24291950#comment_24291950It is not simply a problem that individuals are taking in more calories than they are consuming or lack of exercise or willpower, but rather it is a complex vicious-cycle of endocrinological and metabolic dysfunction. Contemporary medicine has failed to address these dysfunctions in overweight individuals and doctors and patients continue to believe that all cases are a matter of willpower and lifestyle. Thus, it is no surprise that obesity is reaching epidemic proportions.
Research is demonstrating that dysregulation of two key hormones may be a cause or major contributor of weight gain or inability to lose weight in the majority of overweight people. The first is leptin and the second is reverse T3. The exciting part is that doctors can now test for the presence of these physiologic barriers to weight loss and prescribe appropriate treatments with potentially dramatic results.
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BTW, I do NOT eat when I am bored, or for comfort, or for relief from stress. I have always been unable to consume a normal restaurant meal at one sitting. I cannot eat a burger that is larger than 1/4 lb. unless I am extremely hungry. Because restaurant meals are so huge, I can take the leftovers home and get one or two more meals out of them. My mother and grandmother just KNEW I was going to die because I did not eat enough to keep a bird alive. And I was physically active, I just came home every day after school and collapsed for three hours due to my hypothyroidism. Back then in high school, I was of normal weight. I could have died from hypothyroidism, instead of from not eating enough.
I also had severe bacterial pneumonia/bronchitis on and off for about seven or eight years. I had numerous hospitalizations and ER visits. When you are barfing your guts out because of sinus infection drainage, you lose your taste for food. In all the time I was sick over those years, I only lost about six or seven pounds. In order to get to the recommended BMI, I should have been losing thirty pounds. Never happened.
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More info:
www.thyroid-info.com
www.thyrophoenix.com
www.stopthethyroidmadness.com
What is my thyroid and why does it hate me?
http://www.beautynewsnyc.com/in-this-issue/what-is-my-thyroid-and-why-does-it-hate-mean-interview-with-dr-kent-holtorf/http://www.holtorfmed.com/handouts
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