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Autoimmunity

Feb 14
0

3 Things I wish I knew when I was diagnosed with Hashimoto’s

By | Autoimmunity, Fatigue, Hashimoto's, Hypothyroidism, Lifestyle, Metabolic Balance, Mindset, Pathology

1/ Healing is a marathon not a sprint

I was privileged as a Nutritionist student who understood that despite what the GP was telling me, I was not ok, this was not normal, nor the simple consequence of simply ‘doing too much’. From the moment my head lifted off the pillow in the morning I was a walking zombie. I felt a rising panic that this was going to be my life now, forever. By my third GP, after having to pay privately for proper pathology because the first two doctors refused to run a comprehensive thyroid panel, I finally got a diagnosis.

After my initial grief & fear (which lasted a few months) I came to a place of relief; I finally had a face for my fatigue, brain fog, weight gain, haywire hormones & low moods. Ever the A type personality, I pulled out my text books, wrote out meal plans, put a supplement chart together and created a plan to get my life back on track.

I don’t think I need to tell you how that panned out.

The following few years are a blur of different practitioners, doctors, diets, many many supplements, so many blood draws that I was on a first name basis with my local pathology clinic and a lot of money spent without great results. I would feel better for a time and then decline again. It was always two steps forward, one step back.

I was discouraged, impatient and desperate.

It wasn’t until I found a Naturopath who specialised in thyroid health to guide me that I started to get improvements. But the big healing shift occurred after I implemented my own personalised nutrition food plan (the same plan that every Thrive Method member now receives) years after my diagnosis.

Healing is a marathon meaning you have to show up daily, consistently & persistently for months to years to reignite your energy, shift stubborn weight and regain your previous health. And you have to keep it up! Slipping on bedtimes, work boundaries and daily eating habits will make your health slip backwards. I hate to break it to you but your habits need to change for life if you want to keep your results.

Going on a diet for a few weeks or months just to shift some weight and then returning to your old habits is not going to cut it, it will just damage your metabolism even more.

I wish I had known this, it would’ve helped me fight the late nights, excess coffee, constant pressure to exercise, frequent snacking and one too many wines on the weekend which kept me stuck for years. My clients and I have discovered that nothing tastes as good or is worth feeling subhuman everyday. Now I look back and I’m grateful for every connection I was able to make and each step that led me closer to where I am today. Not only did I learn SO much (which I can now share with you!) but it makes me supremely thankful for the level of health I now enjoy.

 

2/ How blood sugar regulation was crucial to battling symptoms

I knew what I ate mattered of course, I was studying Nutritional Medicine and ate a really good diet if-you-don’t-mind-thank-you-very-much! 90% of my daily eating was whole foods, made from scratch, lots of veggies and much of it was organic.

BUT, my blood sugar still wasn’t regulated, I wasn’t addressing meal timing, portion sizes, macronutrient balancing and ensuring I was getting enough protein, healthy fats and complex carbs daily. My coffee habits and addiction to busy-ness was keeping my stress hormones & insulin high. There was also enough inflammatory & processed foods creeping in to keep me trapped on the disregulated blood sugar rollercoaster day after day. I wanted off but I couldn’t find the release switch and truth be told, I wasn’t equipped with the knowledge to recognise what it was anyway. Wasn’t poor blood sugar regulation only relevant to those with diabetes? How wrong I was.

If I had understood how crucial blood sugar regulation was for lowering inflammation and shifting stubborn Hashimoto’s weight, exhaustion, brain fog, poor sleep, haywire hormones and my skin I wouldn’t have suffered all those years. It turns out eating ‘healthy’ foods was not enough.

If, like me back then, you wouldn’t know where to start when it comes to blood sugar regulation, I have a free nifty resource that makes it all extremely simple and easy to follow. You can download it here. Oh how I wish I had a resource like this when I was first diagnosed with Hashimoto’s disease!

 

3/ That a Hashi’s diagnosis is not a life sentence and there is hope for healing

The moment I discovered I had an autoimmune disease is seared into my memory, I remember the windows and light behind the GP’s desk and the sensation of my stomach dropping. Later that day doctor google provided me with enough doom & gloom to keep me afraid and trapped in victimhood for a time. The ‘C’ word worried me in particular because I already had a genetic predisposition and had just been through a ten month long osteosarcoma scare. But the idea of living out my days tired, foggy and unable to stop the gradual weight gain was pretty daunting in my late twenties with two little boys in tow.

I wish I had known that remission and even curing yourself of autoimmunity was entirely possible. It would have helped me take action & dig myself out of that pit sooner.

Every week I hear diagnosis stories from women and how they were told that their immune system was slowly destroying their thyroid tissue and that there was nothing they could do. Eventually their thyroid would be irreparably damaged and they would be reliant on medication. No hope. End of story.

This is not your sealed fate, there is A LOT you can do and it is possible to cure yourself of Hashimoto’s. I wrote a blog post on this topic last year, check it out here. But even if you never get your antibodies down into remission level you can still manage Hashimoto’s to the point where your symptoms are mild or in some cases eliminated and you can lead a normal life again. I’ve done and my clients do too.

Tessa

P.S. I was fortunate that as a Nutritional Medicine student I already knew gluten was a no-go for those with Hashimoto’s otherwise this blog post would’ve been titled, FOUR things I wish I knew…lol.

Nov 08
0

Is there a cure for Hashimoto’s?

By | Autoimmunity, Hashimoto's, Hypothyroidism, Pathology

I’ve encountered a lot of confusion and misinformation on whether there is a ‘cure’ for Hashimoto’s on the internet.

Rumours abound! Sheryl from Canberra says one thing, Monica’s GP told her this, Suzie’s myotherapist has another opinion and Kara’s next door neighbour sells this all natural pill which is practically a cure for everything so naturally she’s had the cure all along!

At the beginning of our journey if we weren’t lucky enough to have a Hashi’s savvy GP or specialist diagnose us, many of us heard something like this, “There is no cure, Hashimoto’s will eventually claim your thyroid and you’ll be reliant on lifelong hormone replacement therapy by that stage, here’s your prescription.”
Bloody bleak if you ask me! And on the other hand there are others, usually on social media, claiming they have found THE cure.

In my opinion, both are false.

It’s all a lot more nuanced and complicated than either of those scenarios will allow.

A cure implies that there is a single intervention such as a medication, therapy, pill, diet, supplement or lifestyle choice that can bring an end to the autoimmunity attack, normalise thyroid function and give you back your life permanently. If that is your definition then no, there is no single ‘cure’ for Hashimoto’s disease.

We need to remember that we are all unique and so is our Hashi’s story. Recovery can often be as complicated as what triggered the autoimmune disease in the first place which is a combination of at least 3 of the following; intestinal permeability (a ‘leaky’ gut that is on high alert due to poor function & inflammation), trauma/grief/stress, genetic predisposition, environmental exposures to heavy metals or other toxins, viral infections, nutrient deficiencies, being female, undergoing hormonal events such as child birth or menopause and other funky genetics that can impact our bodies ability to function optimally.

So how could one intervention (insert pill, therapy, device, diet, exercise) address all those factors? The honest answer is that it can’t and there really is no magic cure. Sorry!

BUT!

It’s not all doom & gloom either though because you don’t have to sit back and take the bad news lying down, you have plenty of control over how you feel and maybe even whether or not you can get yourself into remission too. You might not have the right tools or knowledge just yet, but they are out there. If you ever need to outsource this process I’m always here to help because having a clear plan, expert guidance and accountability from someone who understands your thyroid condition kinda makes me your Hashi’s fairy godmother.

Many have been able to get their antibodies down to below 100 (remission) or even 50 which means that you are technically no longer in a Hashimoto’s disease state. Generally speaking, the longer you’ve had Hashi’s the harder it is to bring antibodies down with lifestyle changes. That being said, you can still improve the symptoms drastically regardless of what your antibodies are doing and live a normal life that is no longer sabotaged by your symptoms. Last time I checked I was in remission (happy dance). While this can happen spontaneously in the case of postpartum Hashimoto’s Thyroiditis, usually this occurs because these people have adopted dietary and lifestyle changes and found success.

As someone who falls into the former category and has built a career helping Hashi’s women regain their lives, my perspective is that Hashimoto’s is a chronic inflammatory condition and autoimmune disease that needs good management throughout your lifetime. Even if you do get antibodies into remission or lower, it has the potential to return if the triggers that were present initially are replicated or still present. We’ll always need to take better care of ourselves than your average person. Our liver, gut, thyroid and immune system just need more lovin’ and VIP treatment.

The important thing is to do what you can to improve your health and chances of remission while focusing on how you are feeling rather than the antibody numbers on the page. Because it is 1000% possible to maintain a healthy weight and have abundant energy with antibodies present.

So when it comes to Hashimoto’s, I prefer use the phrase ‘well managed’ rather than ‘cured’.

Oct 11
0

Hay Fever and Autoimmunity

By | Autoimmunity, Gut Health, Hashimoto's, Hypothyroidism, Lifestyle

Let’s have a talk about hay fever.

It’s been on my mind lately because every second person is complaining about it and for the first time in 8 years, I’ve had nary a sniffle or an itch. You see, when my health imploded with Hashimoto’s disease I had the most horrific two years of gut issues. And severe hay fever was one of the seemingly unrelated issues that reared its ugly head at the same time…or was it unrelated?!

It was so sudden & severe that I relied on anti-histamines to stop myself from sneezing myself off the freeway or gouging my itchy eyeballs out.

When I look back it all makes sense, I had been through a period of trauma & high stress (fire, cancer scare, financial pressure, grief, family troubles, you name it), I was fasting frequently, eating restrictively and over exercising in an attempt to manage my hypothyroidism weight gain, running a business, studying full time and raising pre-schoolers. On top of that the house we were renting developed a leak and we had an indoor NGV style water wall every time it rained heavily but it wasn’t arty and chic, it was a mould nightmare.

My gut health plummeted, I was diagnosed with a nasty SIBO infection and allergies entered my world for the first time.

So what in the actual heck causes a seemingly perfectly healthy person to suddenly mount an immune response to harmless substances such as pollen or dust?

Research tells us that babies who are breastfed and kids who grow up with pets and play in the dirt are less likely to suffer with allergies, so what does that tell us? Allergies are related to the different types & breadth of variety of bacteria (or lack of) that we are exposed to. This is one of the reasons why I go all the way back to your birth in your Initial Health Assessment so I can look for red flags and start to identify the drivers of your autoimmunity and your constitutional weaknesses so we can make a plan to get you feeling human again.

Allergies and autoimmune disease both have something in common…the gut!

70-80% of immune function occurs in the gut and behind mucosal layers (think nostrils, lungs, gut lining) so when your gut modulated immune function is compromised & on high alert your immune cells can start to identify substances such as grasses as a threat. And when things are really dire your immune cells can mis-identify your self-cells as a threat, hello autoimmunity!

So yes, it’s really common for people with autoimmunity to also have allergies as it is one of the first signs that all is not well in the gut. But not everyone will express that way either. So do you have to have hay fever to have autoimmunity? No. But do you have to have gut issues in order to develop autoimmunity? Absolutely! For some people it’s been an issue since infancy and for others it’s an inflammatory response to a number of factors that are unique to their story but often involve periods of high stress, the wrong food choices, a deficiency of thyroid hormones, mould exposure and sometimes antibiotic or certain medication use.

When it comes to hay fever if this is one of the ways your body is expressing disordered immune function, there are some very helpful nutrients & foods that act like anti-histamines in your system I’ve shared below. But when it really boils down to it, your gut health needs to be addressed so your immune system & gut health can turn off those wailing red alerts and stop expecting a bogey man behind every dust mite or thyroid cell.

Strategies to battle hay fever symptoms…

  • Avoid exposure: wear sunglasses outdoors, not heading out if it’s windy, smearing lip balm on the inside of your nostrils to protect that mucosal lining, change your shirt when you come home
  • Vacuum regularly with a HEPA filter vacuum
  • Ingest omega 3 fatty acids via regularly consumption of fatty fish or a supplement to drive down inflammation
  • Reduce consumption of inflammatory foods such as processed foods, excessive refined sugar containing foods, alcohol & vegetable oils
  • Take specific strains of probiotics that are allergy-specific (like LGG)
  • Consume nutrients that act like antihistamines (quercetin – caution it’s a goitrogen, zinc, vitamin C, ginger)
  • Focus on upping your vitamin D either through sun exposure and/or supplementation
  • Cooled chrysanthemum tea eye wash for allergic itchy eyes
  • Focus on microbiome restoration and gut health (a longer term option, but start now!).

Without improving gut function, lowering gut inflammation and improving your microbiome composition your gut will continue to drive autoimmunity. You may find that you continue to struggle with bloating, constipation and other uncomfortable GI complaints, allergies, food intolerances, fatigue, joint pain, low moods, brain fog, skin issues like eczema & dermatitis, nutrient deficiencies, frequent respiratory infections and your skin, hair and general health will never reach their full potential. Releasing weight becomes that much more difficult when an inflamed gut is causing internal stress on your system and dysbiosis (an imbalance of the good & bad bacteria in your gut) has been shown to impair glucose tolerance meaning that increased insulin will keep you in fat storage mode.

YES! Your gut health even affects your metabolic health!

This is precisely why I address digestive function and gut health with all my Hashimoto’s clients and why a gut healing protocol is one of the pillars of The Thrive Method. It’s just too essential to ignore and without it, it is kind of like trying to fix a leaky boat with a pad of post it notes. Implementing a gut healing protocol is often the first thing I do depending on my findings in your Initial Health Assessment and your pathology results. Not forgetting that the way I teach my clients to eat regulates their blood sugar which is one of the foundations of restoring gut function.

Has hay fever been part of your autoimmune journey? What about any of the other symptoms I’ve mentioned above?

Tessa

Jun 21
0

Is Self Sabotage robbing you of thyroid healing?

By | Autoimmunity, Hypothyroidism, Metabolic Balance, Mindset
Let’s get down and dirty with self sabotage

Self sabotage can do a doozy on us when it comes to food & health goals, and thyroid recovery requires a lot of self commitment.

So how can you tackle self sabotage?

I don’t think there is anyone who hasn’t experienced that little voice convincing them to abandon their commitment to their health.

You might find yourself eating the birthday cake at the office party when you’ve committed to not eating gluten for autoimmunity.

Or eating a whole bag of corn chips when all you really needed was a handful.

Maybe you are a chronic Monday-morning-er, forever putting off your own health needs for another day.

Why do we do it to ourselves?

1. Fear of the Unfamiliar
Each one of us have 3 basic needs (once food, water and shelter are taken care of!). They are:

  • Love
  • Safety
  • Belonging.

When our subconscious mind realises that we are making changes, it freaks out and worries that one of these needs will be compromised.

Self-sabotaging behaviours stem from the concern that if you change, one of these needs will no longer be met. It’s the fear of the unfamiliar, which is a very human fear.

2. Food FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out)
We fear that we’ll never be able to eat the food that tickle our tastebuds ever again.

I think we all know that this simply isn’t true and in many ways this becomes a scapegoat mask with one of the other two base fears above hiding behind it.

When you apply a balanced approach, you can and will enjoy celebratory foods at special occasions without sabotaging your results.

I’ve said it hundreds of times but I’ll say it again, you do not have to be a food nun to get extraordinary results.

This thinking really stems from a deprivation & dieting approach where food is bland and you have to stick to it forever or you reverse your results (thanks weight watchers!).

You also learn to luxuriate in the flavours that nature provides.

One of my incredible clients was telling me recently how the sweet & sour pork that was always her favourite take away is no longer appealing, her palate has changed.

Another client said this about my Metabolic Balance coaching…

“Everything feels balanced so that when you want to have a treat with your kids or with your friends, you can! I’ve been describing it as the easiest, simplest way that I’ve ever lost weight or improved my health since I was probably 25.”
– Rachael

3. Fear of Success
No, that’s not a typo!

Fear of success is another very real (arguably the most common) reason we sabotage our efforts.

What will you have to face or do differently if you finally succeed? Will your relationships change? Will you have to do that thing you’ve been forever afraid of?

When we up level one area of our life & wellbeing we can feel pressure and fear the consequences in other areas too.

For some, poor health has become a subconscious victim badge they are reluctant to part with.

For others, their weight gain is an unconscious protective mechanism against romantic or sexual attention.

So, what can you do about it?

  • Awareness. Bring a gentle awareness & curiosity when these thoughts pop up.
  • Analyse, what is really going on? With a dose of self awareness you can unmask those fears. Bring them out of the darkness into the light and pull them apart, turn them over, analyse every nook & cranny. Are they really true?
  • Rewrite the story. Once you have teased apart the fears and removed their power you can craft an affirmation to combat them next time they rear their ugly heads.
    Self sabotaging thought: ‘If I regain my energy then I’ll have no excuse to not start that business I’ve been talking about for years & make it a wild success. If that happens I’ll be exhausted and too busy to spend time with my family. I’ll finally be able to afford that dream car and then my friends will think I’m a snob and won’t like me anymore.’
    Your affirmation might be: ‘I am committed to eating in a way that reignites my energy so I can be present for my family, fulfil my dreams and have no regrets’.

If you want to get down and dirty with your self-sabotage then the two books I recommend are The Big Leap by Gay Hendricks & The War of Art by Steven Pressfield. Hendricks refers to it as the ‘upper limit problem’ and Pressfield as ‘resistance’, but essentially what they are referring to is self sabotage, holding ourselves back from growth.

Self-sabotage is such an issue with my clients that I have a whole step dedicated to it in Food Freedom.

Did you know that all my Thrive Method clients get Food Freedom as a gift to help them create powerful habit change and long term success? It’s important to me that all the incredible women I work with are equipped with strategies so they can finally get the incredible results they desire for good.

You can book a free health chat here if you want to talk more.

May 18
1

My Autoimmune Metabolic Balance Journey

By | Autoimmunity, Client Results, Hashimoto's, Hypothyroidism, Metabolic Balance

As promised, an update on how I am going with Metabolic Balance….

Was it trauma from my past?

Was it the house fire?

Was it the 10 month long cancer scare?

Was it my overachieving ‘I can do it all” personality?

Did the gut issues lead to the autoimmune issues, or did the autoimmune issues lead to the gut issues?

I’ll never know… but by my 30th birthday I knew something was seriously wrong.

I’d fought and won the war against SIBO, my gut was pretty good but my fatigue was next level. In fact my 15 years of gut issues were starting to look like a walk in the park compared to this. My skin was sooo dry, I was still getting hormonal acne (in my 30s?! No fair!), my fingernails couldn’t grow, my hair was thin and my periods were a mess and dominated the calendar month.

To top it all off I was pretty sure I had rosacea and my PMS was getting so bad that I was starting to worry about the effect of my moods on my kids. I was getting this chronic cough & sore chest whenever I burned the candle at both ends. I had also put on 5kg and just couldn’t shift it, I had to watch everything I ate or my clothes would keep getting tighter & tighter. Good sleep was very hard to come by and let’s just say my moods were such that I wasn’t easy to live with, my poor family.

My cup was so very, very empty. 

The kicker? I was about to graduate as a Nutritionist! I was meant to be the picture of health! My diet was pretty schmick but the things I had done in the past were not working any more.

I went to my regular GP and said something was wrong, either my iron was low or something was up with my thyroid. I had remembered years ago that an integrative GP had made a comment about my thyroid being ‘sluggish’.

He checked my iron and it was fine. My TSH came back ‘within range’ but my new Nutritionist training had taught me that TSH above 2 was not ideal and indicated thyroid function was declining. I stamped my foot and insisted that he check my other thyroid markers. I had to pay privately, but I got it done.

My hunch had been right, none of this was normal! These symptoms were not just my lot as a mother & student.

I had Hashimoto’s disease.   

I went on the Autoimmune Protocol (AIP), started seeing an amazing Naturopath who specialised in thyroid autoimmunity and I felt soooo much better. Stress would derail me but I was working on my meditation & mindfulness. Maintaining my weight still felt like an uphill battle and I was tired of eating so well yet always having to be vigilant. My menstrual health came & went but my sleep was never amazing, I awoke unrefreshed every. single. morning.

Then 2020 hit. The stress of having to shut my clinic, support my family and feeling the collective weight of fear around Victoria and the world completely undid all my hard work and threw me back into the haze of Hashimoto’s disease. 6+ months of hard lockdowns and the fear of an unknown future took their toll. My clients were all struggling, the stress was seriously impacting their health. And it was the same with me. Some of the less desirable symptoms of autoimmune disease flared up big time, the painful joints, inflammation, poor cognition and fatigue were preventing me from being the mum, wife & boss lady I knew I could be. My periods went haywire and I was diagnosed with Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder. The anxiety was so bad that I was barely sleeping and when I did I often woke during the night with panic attacks.

I was in the middle of a serious autoimmune flare and I couldn’t seem to crawl out of the pit I had fallen into. 

The thing about autoimmunity and thyroid dysfunction is that you don’t tolerate stress well. We’ve got to remain pretty zen just to maintain a regular level of health.

I had heard some colleagues talking about something called Metabolic Balance. They were losing stubborn weight, sleeping well and most importantly they had more energy than they had enjoyed in years. In their photos they looked somehow sparkly & full of joy (no BS). Their clients were experiencing the same incredible benefits. I heard story after story of effortless weight loss, reduced inflammation, awakened libidos (hello!) and 20-something-year-old energy levels. I wanted a piece of that! And it was all based on your individual blood chemistry. No fad diets or calorie counting, no supplements, just individualised, whole food, nutrition.

I contacted the head of Metabolic Balance in Australia & New Zealand and fast tracked my training. I knew that as part of my training I would receive my own individualised nutrition plan and I couldn’t wait to start.

The first week was a bit of a rude awakening, I had headaches & my bowel motions were allllll over the place. I wasn’t used to my plan and had a few failure meals. I had doubts and my brain was coming up with every excuse as to why this was a bad idea. It was also Easter which did not help one bit!

The second week I got a few pimples, the headaches improved and it was like a switch was flicked and I was able to sleep deeply all night. I woke up in the same position that I went to sleep in and couldn’t remember anything but a few vague dreams. Whoah! I even measured myself and hooley dooley I had lost 4 of the 8cm I was hoping to shed off my butt. In ten days! You’ve got to understand that I have a wardrobe (or two) full of vintage pieces I have been collecting over the past 15 years, and I desperately wanted to fit back into them! What’s more, I was maid of honour on the Friday night of that week and was not fitting into my dress that had been custom made for me the year before for a COVID-cancelled wedding.

Well guess what?! I fit into the dress! Only 10 days after starting MB!

By week three I was experiencing the 10/10 energy that I had heard so much about. I honestly asked myself, ‘what Hashimotos? I feel great!’

It’s now been six weeks and I’m honestly feeling amazing. My sleep & energy are superb. The weight loss is a nice side effect and I feel like I could happily keep this up for the rest of my life. My personalised food list has become an old friend and I’m super confident with creating satiating & tasty meals now. I’ve lost all the lockdown weight and I’m reacquainting myself with some of my wardrobe favourites.

Here I am in a 1930s dress I bought at the beginning of lock down, you know, to cheer myself up. By the time it arrived months later I couldn’t get it over my hips! Now I have to wear a belt because it’s too big on my waist!

    

After years of feeling frustrated with my own health but also feeling like I didn’t have the best tool to help my clients with sustainable weight loss, I can finally say with confidence that I have found that tool.

Can you tell I’m just a little bit excited about Metabolic Balance?! My books are now open for MB, I suggest you book a free health discussion with me here to see if MB is suitable for you.

I cannot wait to see the transformation in my clients. I want everyone to know, you don’t have to accept feeling crap all the time, transformation is possible!

Tessa

 

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