Episode 1: My Story and the Why Behind This Podcast
Looking back to when I was first diagnosed with hypothyroidism and then Hashimoto's thyroiditis, I can still remember the feeling of being bone tired and operating in a fog. My story is unfortunately uncommon, with 1 in 5 women likely to experience thyroid disease.
However, my story differs from most- when doctors told me that I would struggle with this disease forever, I looked for different answers and what I found in the natural health world offered a path to healing... to reversing my diagnosis and putting my autoimmune disease into remission.
There is nothing like going through something hard to give you perspective and passion to help others navigate the same road. In this very first episode, I’m telling my story of being diagnosed with autoimmune thyroid disease and the path to reversing that diagnosis through a natural, holistic approach.
I'm so glad that you're here,
xo
Sarah
Mentioned on the show:
Hypothyroid Symptom Assessment (& Thyroid Testing Tip Sheet): bit.ly/thyroid-checker
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Want to read this episode instead? Here’s the transcript!
Looking back, sometimes it just makes me cringe when I think about how I was absolutely just barely surviving. So tired in a mental fog and just fried. And I kept being told that it was normal because I was a new mother, had this little baby. It's like it's not enough that thyroid disease impacts one in five women, but so often the medical community doesn't even believe them when they're struggling. And that was totally me. And this is a story I hear over and over and over again as I help women with their thyroid issues. It took years of feeling bad and advocating for myself with doctors to finally figure out what was going on and even longer to figure out how to effectively address it in a natural, effective way. And like so many others, there is nothing like going through something hard to give you perspective and a passion for helping others navigate that same road. And so in this very first episode, I'm telling my story of being diagnosed with autoimmune thyroid disease and the path, kind of the high level path. The, the highlights, the quick version because we'll break this down even more, but the high level path to reversing that diagnosis through natural, a natural holistic approach. So grab a pen piece of paper. I'm sure there'll be some things you'll wanna jot down along the way. And without further ado, here's the first episode of the Natural Thyroid Fix.
Okay, before we jump in, I'm super excited to share a quick assessment tool with you this week, which is, especially for people who are trying to figure out what they're dealing with are thyroid issues. Or maybe you just have a laundry list of random health things that are going on and haven't necessarily connected those back to thyroid issues. It's also great for anyone who's been told that how they're feeling is normal and that all their tests look normal, but you feel crappy. So you can head to the link in the show notes or go to bit le slash thyroid dash checker to take the hypothyroid symptom assessment and see where you're at. You're also gonna get a thyroid testing tip sheet, which is both of these are great tools to come back to you from time to time and see what gains you've made, and also kind of assess where you're at right now if you've already had some testing done. And so I'm excited to pass those onto you because you'll get access to both of those things. And those are really critical in helping to figure out what's going on and make a good path forward. So head to bit lee slash thyroid dash checker to take the short quiz to assess the symptoms that you're dealing with and see what ranges you should have all of your different testing levels, your blood work levels be in, and that will help you to feel good as you move through your days.
Welcome to The Natural Thyroid Fix. I'm Sarah Geissinger, a holistic lifestyle and nutrition coach and former hypothyroid mom who has reversed her thyroid disease using a natural approach to thyroid health. Trust me, I know what it feels like to move through the life in a brain fog, needing a nap by mid-afternoon and constantly be cleaning the hair you've lost outta the shower drain. Do you know what I'm talking about? If you're here, I bet you do. So if you're ready to reject the notion that this tired hypothyroid life is as good as it gets, and start implementing simple natural strategies to live a vibrant symptom-free life, then this is the podcast for you. Let's dive into today's show. Welcome. I am so excited for this podcast. So welcome to the very first episode of the Natural Thyroid Fix, which is something I have been kicking around for years.
I mean, if you have ever gone through something hard in your life, sometimes the silver lining, not that you'd ever wish to go through it again, but sometimes the silver lining is the passion and the knowledge and enthusiasm to help other people navigate that same road. And that is totally what dealing with hypothyroidism is for me, because this is a massive problem. the problem of hypothyroidism, especially among women, is just tremendous. One in five women are going to experience, um, thyroid disease, one in five women. So this is a major health crisis that just disproportionately impacts women. And there's over 27 million Americans that have hypothyroidism. And of that number, only half of them have been diagnosed. Some sources say that up to 90% of women over the age of 40 actually have subclinical hypothyroidism. So they have like not quite diagnosable hypothyroidism, but they've got symptoms.
Their ranges might be in a low but normal range. Yeah, 90%. So this is just near and dear to my heart because it's something that I have walked through, and I'm gonna tell you a little bit of more about that in just a few minutes. But of all these thyroid conditions that are going on, 80% of those thyroid conditions are in women. And additionally, of those 80% all of the thyroid cases, 80%, maybe even more than that, are actually not just like, you know, kind of a general hypothyroidism, which is like a diagnosis of just saying you don't have enough thyroid. Not really getting at why or anything like that. But of all the hypothyroid cases, at least 80%, some studies actually suggest more than that. Upwards of 90, 95% are actually autoimmune thyroid diseases, which while that's, you know, a different, it's a complicated thing, but it is something that can be addressed when you start working at root causes.
And so this is something that man, I'm just super passionate about because I believe that by helping women address hypothyroidism, we're just gonna see a ripple effect as we start to kind of knock down those numbers of women who are struggling with either diagnosed or undiagnosed symptoms of thyroid disease. We're gonna see this ripple effect of women. Imagine what it the world would be like if we saw the ripple effect of women feeling energetic and focused and so freaking good that they can actually lead and serve their families well, work in careers that they love and have just massive impact in their communities in the world. Man, that just gets me excited. Just thinking back to what I felt like when I was first diagnosed with thyroid issues and how I feel today and this kind of journey that has the, the difference. There's, there's just such a difference, man.
It just gets me excited to think if we can help more women walk that road of healing, I just think that would be incredible. So anyway, I'm gonna jump in today. My name is Sarah Geissinger and I love teaching about thyroid health, especially helping women navigate kind of putting together a strategy, a plan for taking natural, natural methods, natural strategies, nat natural focus, like a holistic kind of lifestyle focus on addressing their thyroid issue. I just love doing that. So if you don't know me, which many of you don't <laugh>, then you maybe you don't know. I'm not a doctor, I need to make sure I remind people of that. I'm not a doctor. I highly recommend finding a doctor that you can work with. You'll hear me say this over and over and over again through each episode.
It is so important to have a doctor that you can have a positive relationship with, that there is open communication that they are on board with, um, helping you keep tabs on your thyroid and are open to the, the sort of natural interventions. Honestly, even open to just the idea that thyroid disease is reversible <laugh>, because there are a lot of doctors out there who don't, who aren't even necessarily on board with that. So it is super important for you to find a doctor to work with. I offer lots and lots of support in the natural health world in the, um, kind of holistic perspective. Um, the functional perspective, I have a lot of knowledge base and nutrition and my, that's where my training lies in functional nutrition and holistic lifestyle interventions. And so I am a big believer in putting together a care team with various perspectives, meaning that you find, you know, doctors bring wonderful things to the table and wonderful perspectives and, you know, medical degree and lots of information from that perspective.
But it's important to recognize that we all have limitations and we all have biases, right? And so that is why by putting together a care team and maybe a number of individuals, a maybe a doctor, whether it's a general practitioner, an endocrinologist, you are a nutritionist. If you want to be working like one-on-one with a nutritionist, I believe a dentist is a biological dentist that has a holistic perspective, is really helpful. There's like a therapist. There's, you know, some stress and emotional stuff to work through too. as you move through, I think it's important to expand the number of people who are speaking into your healing journey. That's hugely important. I hope that you'll also allow me via this podcast to be a part of that healing journey. So there are huge pieces of what I love to teach have massive impact, but it's important to, to kind of have multiple voices speaking into your healing along the way.
So I come to you with my training over 10, years of experience researching and kind of distilling down the most important bits of information in, of research into kind of a system or what I like to call a roadmap, if you will, based on the things that helped me most to reverse my symptoms. Um, and ultimately will help you most as well. I kind of like to think of myself as a synthesizer of thyroid information cuz there is literally so much out there. there's a lot of noise out there in this, in the thyroid health world. And so with that ton of information, um, it's absolutely out there for you to find for yourself, but it can also feel very overwhelming. I know that because I was that. And so when you try to go it alone, navigating all that can be to, to try and figure out how to feel better can, can be a bit overwhelming.
And so I hope that I can serve you by synthesizing out some information and distilling it down to the most important things. So, that the stuff that I focus on in terms of healing and natural health are simple and sustainable lifestyle shifts that create a ripple effect of health. And I'll, I'll kind of teach you why and how the systems work together and all of that, because the ultimate goal is to have back, um, a symptom-free life, a vibrant life of energy and c um, clarity. Um, maybe you're one who is frustrated because you're carrying around a couple more pounds and you'd prefer all common, common, common thyroid problems. So my personal story is, 12 years ago, my first baby was born, my oldest, she is, I'm sorry, 12 years ago is when I started working through the thyroid stuff. My first baby is actually 14, about to turn 15.
So a few months in, after having that baby sh I realized that something just was not right in my body. And at that, you know, when you have a baby, nothing's right in your body. But I could tell that there was things going on that were beyond what was maybe normal. My hair was falling out, I couldn't think clearly. I was so, so bone tired, exhausted. I felt like I was in a fog. I couldn't get anything done like efficiently <laugh>. But at the time, because I just had a baby, I got the hard brush off from literally every one of my doctors, um, saying things like, oh, of course you're tired. You're a mom. Now, moms are always tired as if that is a good reason to not investigate further. You know, this is more though than a tired, like you know, just nap while the baby's napping kind of tired.
if you struggle with hypothyroidism, you, you totally know what I mean. It's like being tired to like the core of your being, like the soul of who you are, <laugh>, right? At the time though, all my blood work kept coming back as normal and I literally, if you would pull up that I have my, my free symptom checker that you can kind of go through, if I would be able to check every one of those boxes or I would've been able to. and so that got me bouncing from doctor to doctor to doctor, both general practitioners, endocrinologists, rheumatologists, so many, so many doctors. And literally nobody really ne had much to offer. But I was diagnosed with a bunch of different things, which were basically just defining the different symptoms I had. I was diagnosed with fibromyalgia because I always had like, aches in, it was just felt achy and painful.
My muscles felt weak, chronic fatigue syndrome cuz I was tired. So they're like, oh, you have chronic fatigue syndrome, irritable bowel syndrome. I had all kinds of digestive issues, depression. And with all of these things that I was diagnosed with, every single one of them came with a prescription to address it. And none of those prescriptions actually did anything to, help to, to resolve it. And so it, it took about two years of me bouncing around all these different doctors, but my blood work eventually did start to show the markers of thyroid disease. And so at least by then I started to get taken seriously that there was a problem. Because before that I was literally being treated like I was just a lunatic patient. And that the things I was feeling was how everyone was feeling, which is so frustrating.
Just an aside here, which I'm sure I will go back to another episode more fully, but it is so frustrating to continue to walk into a doctor's office and not be believed. To be looked at like, you are just nuts. And that it's a psychosomatic symptom that you're dealing with and not an actual problem. So this is so, and it's so common and so frustrating. But anyway, I digress. So once I was ultimately diagnosed with Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, which is if you are unfamiliar with Hashimoto thyroiditis, it's where the immune system is attacking your thyroid boiled down very, very simply. and so this is measured by, um, a blood test. It can be measured in a couple ways. The most common way of diagnosing it is a blood test that measures the antibodies that your body is creating to fight your thyroid.
It's, you know, kind of misidentified the thyroid as like a foreign invader that your immune system must attack <laugh>. So this is, this is actually the most common form of thyroid disease. And so most people actually who are hypothyroid actually have Hashimoto thyroiditis, even if they have not been diagnosed. And so this is because the treatment protocols are the same. And so they don't generally, not generally, but oftentimes doctors will just not even test to see if it's Hashimoto’s. If it's an autoimmune thyroid disease, because it doesn't matter the symptoms, the treatment is gonna be the same. So anyway, I was given a thyroid hormone medication, told, you know, you're just gonna need to take this for the rest of your life. And, but you also should sort of expect that you might just be a little more low energy and that just might be your new normal.
At that point, I was 27 years old at, I had a toddler. The baby had turned to a toddler <laugh>, and that was my breaking point, like totally unacceptable that this was the only solution that I was given, especially when I was still feeling so crappy. And so I started jumping in and researching everything, asking questions like, okay, so if my immune system is attacking my thyroid, why? And I would get answers from my doctor saying, oh, it just happened. Sometimes <laugh>, like nothing more, you know, and I'm asking questions like, well, what's causing my body to happen? What's causing my immune system to overreact? and then I started thinking, okay, so what does the holistic or natural health world have to say about this? Like, you know, are there other perspectives that I'm not hearing? Turns out, yes, there's a lot out there.
There's actually a ton of research, there's a ton of information out there of what kind of a more holistic view would say on thyroid issues. Now, this was a long, this not a long time ago, this was, you know, over 10 years ago. And so information was much harder to come by. There was not nearly as much re much research. There was not nearly, as many, you know, books and, and podcasts and, people talking about this problem. But there were that you could find them for sure. And so, I did, and I started digging into all of that research. What, um, you know, the research on which body systems impact the thyroid and how, um, thyroid disease can be triggered and what kind of approaches can you, could you take to address these things so that you're addressing the things that actually caused the problem to begin with.
I learned and started to discover that basically all of these different body systems, if you would start to work backwards and, and address the issues that were going on in the various body systems that can cause thyroid problems, if you start to get at the, like the root causes, then your body can actually heal. It can reset, it can, this is not like a life sentence. And I was amazed because that was absolutely not the perspective I was given from my doctor. And so I started to implement these things over time, um, and I was just patching it together. I didn't have a functional medicine doctor. I wish I did at the time, again, not in my area, not easily accessible. Um, and the, I started just kind of patching it together and would make changes in my life. And based on various protocols that it was, I was able to find that I could, um, from understanding that I had gathered about how to support my liver, my adrenal system to heal my gut.
Those were the main things - I started making dietary changes to get rid of certain foods and then adding certain foods in that were nourishing to help me to heal. I learned to cook in a totally new way, to get completely rid of processed food as I started to learn about the particular, inflammatory nation nature of those processed foods. so I started making swaps to lower my overall toxic load as I learned about the way that chemicals have a particularly negative impact on people with Hashimoto’s and how important it was to support my liver, because your liver plays a critical role in making sure that you have enough active thyroid hormone t3. And so if you can support that, that, that's a big piece of the puzzle. And so things started snowballing. Um, I had a lot of interventions going on, you know, I'm making all like cleaning out different, um, chemicals we'd been cleaning with, or laundry soap or personal care products, swapping out food, all these things.
And it was getting pretty complicated pretty quickly. It was actually getting to be a little overwhelming. I had been adding in supplements that were helping, um, too. And at one point I was taking 15 supplements at multiple times a day on a very complicated schedule. It felt like at the time, I mean, right, right away, 15 supplements, just sitting on your counter is just not sustainable, right? that's, that's just too much. And it was, but it was challenging to figure out what was helpful and what was extra because there was a lot of information. However, I was feeling better. And so I was willing to do all of this, all of this, these interventions, these things, because in the short term I was feeling better and things were looking up. but it became very clear to me very quickly that this wasn't sustainable.
It wasn't simple, it wasn't affordable, it was effective, but it needed to check those other boxes of being sustainable and simple and affordable <laugh>. But I needed to basically be able to figure out how to do this, how to make these lifestyle shifts for the long term. And that shifted me into a season of my healing journey, where I just needed to figure out how to simplify and boil it down to the essentials so that I could stay feeling good for the long haul. My symptoms were resolving. I had a couple more babies in there recovered from them without landing myself into a hypothyroid crisis again, like the first time around. And all the while, those lifestyle shifts were becoming more a part of our routines, normal habits, um, and things that could actually were maintainable over the long, the long haul.
Same thing with supplement protocols and foods and all of those things. Working through, distilling them down to the most important things and things that you could actually continue doing was really an important part of the longest stretch of my healing journey. So, fast forward to about three and a half years ago, I'd been on a, on a good stretch of feeling good throughout pregnancies, after them, all of that, my thyroid levels always look good, you know, for, for like five or six years they had been looking solid and I'd been feeling good and had been making all these lifestyle changes. And in that time, I had said to my husband, I was like, you know, I really want to find a functional doctor that I can develop a relationship with while I'm in a good spot. And, you know, if, if you have been there trying to, like I had was initially doing, trying to figure out, find what's going on with me and find a doctor that I can work with, um, when you're feeling really crappy, your bandwidth is just like me, nonexistent.
And so it's exhausting to do that when you're feeling bad. And so there were, there was more access in my area three and a half years ago than there had been the years before when I started walking through this issue. And so I found a functional practitioner to go work with and went to my initial evaluation. In that initial evaluation, we did a whole bunch of blood work just to kind of get a baseline. And I got the blood work back and was looking at it, and I thought it looked good. I'd been looking at thyroid blood work for years at that point. And so I was excited to have a conversation with this doctor when he called me back to kind of go over all the blood work and all the tests. And so he did, and he called me up and, and he's, we're going through everything and looking at all the, all the different levels of all these different markers that we had measured.
And he gets to the thyroid panel, Paige, and he says, Sarah, I have to tell you, if I didn't know that you had a history of thyroid disease, I would have no idea, zero clue based on what I see in your blood work. And he said to me, you know, you have done what conventional medicine says is totally impossible because you reversed a thyroid disease. All the things you're doing, you gotta keep doing them because they're working. and he said, but here's the thing, you need to keep doing them because it is true. You have a sleeping beast within you. If you stop doing these things, if you stop prioritizing taking care of yourself, um, if you stop doing all the things that you have, have, you know, incorporated into your life, the routines, the habits, the practices, the supplements, the everything. If you stop doing those things, then you can absolutely reawaken the sleeping beast that is Hashimoto’s thyroiditis within you.
I have no interest, by the way, in reawakening that sleeping beast, so <laugh>. But he said to me, you know, what you're doing is working, so keep doing it. And so I was thrilled to hear that. I'm grateful to have that relationship with that doctor still to, to this day. But at that point, it was so clear to me that the protocols and the lifestyle shifts that I'd made, they had, I, they had become simple. I had created them, to such a way to, to get to the point that it was simple making swaths to nutrition to our home. Like we weren't, it wasn't even, we weren't even thinking twice about it at that point. I had found supplements that were effective and easy and affordable and kind of boiled things down to the bare bones of what was really important and really effective.
And that was when I realized that I needed to start teaching other women to do the same thing, to take all the research and the protocols and the foods and the should dos and the supplements, and make it approachable and doable so that more women who are struggling with hypothyroidism can get to the symptom-free lifestyle or the symptom-free life that they hope for. So I wanna give you just a few things. That's my story there. That's my why the heck I started a podcast kind of tale from going from really struggling with hypothyroidism to being able to find healing myself and then kind of break it down to be an effective, strategy for creating. Healing is something that I've become so passionate about and why I started this podcast to be able to share that with others. So I do though wanna give you a couple things that you can start doing today to start moving the needle and how you feel.
My whole purpose with this episode is to just kind of tell you about my background, about the background, about where we're heading, all of that. But I do wanna leave you with a couple things that you can start to do today that can start to move the ball forward. If you are someone who is struggling with hypothyroidism, these aren't gonna be all you need to do. They're not gonna have massive impacts. But the deal is, with approaching thyroid or really any health issues from a holistic perspective, is healing comes as a culmination of small steps combined together over time to create a massive impact. And so, why not do something small today that can start to move the ball forward? So here are some small steps you can do right now. Okay? So the first one is increase your water intake by like a lot.
<laugh> Many people, I would even go as far to say as most people, are dehydrated and simply not having proper hydration. That alone can cause hormone imbalances, like full stop. So when you're, when you're not hydrated, then your cells aren't properly able to, intake the hormones that you already have in your body. And it's, it's easy. Like this is low hanging fruit, right? So pretty much, I mean, you could potentially have enough hormones in your body, but because you're so dehydrated, your cells can't put them to use. Now, wouldn't that just be a bummer, right? If it was that easy to just be drinking more water and you didn't do it. So let's get the low hanging fruit. You should, aim to be drinking half of your body weight in ounces of water per day. So get a water bottle, fill it with clean filtered water, and do the math on how many ounces that you need to be drinking each day.
So you take your weight, divide it in half. If you weigh 120 pounds, then you divide that in half. You need to be drinking 60 ounces of water in a day. So go get yourself a glass of water. That's the first thing. The second thing is to take a look at your blood work. If you've had blood work recently, dig up the results and see where you're at. What's your tssh level? What are your T3 and T4 levels? Do you have thyroid antibodies? What are the levels? Are there other things showing up that are maybe not showing up as normal as everything showing up as normal? But then again, look at the normal ranges. Are they showing up as low normal or are you like, you know, solidly in the middle? This is an important thing. It's an important, it's important to know where you're at.
So you have some data in the form of blood tests to take a look at, and we'll keep going back to this, in other episodes about how to work with your doctor to get the blood work you need. And, um, if you have questions about that, you can send me a DM on Instagram, at natural thyroid natural dot thyroid dot fix, on Instagram. But take a look at your blood work and just see where are you, because sometimes it, it's, well, it's important to know where you are so you can figure out where you're going. The third thing is assess how you're feeling. I have linked in the show notes the hypothyroid, symptom inventory, which is a subjective assessment of which hypothyroid symptoms you might be dealing with. And it's important to know which symptoms you have, because fig paying attention to both your blood work and your symptoms is really, really important.
And it should be looked at in combination when you're trying to figure out what's going on with your body. So I've got that assessment linked in the show notes. take a minute to do that. And then the last thing that I would encourage you to do is get a journal and journal about it. Keeping a healing journal is something that is really, really important. It is so easy on bad days to think that nothing is getting better, and you forget where you started and you forget where you're going and you forget what the symptoms were. And then if something different pops up, you forget that, you know, other things may have resolved or whatever. So keeping a healing journey journal is really, really helpful. So there's so many things that are connected to thyroid health. It's super easy to forget where you started.
So by doing this with a healing journal, it just helps you know where you, where you're starting, and then you can see where you're, where how you progress. So the first thing I'd encourage you to do is to start by writing down how you feel, and the symptoms that are most challenging for you. And then spend a little bit of time after you've done that, kind of take a full inventory of where what you feel like. I would love for you to spend just a few minutes imagining a future version of yourself. What would your life look like if you started to learn how to address the systems in your body that most impact your thyroid and help your body to heal and help yourself to feel better? Can you imagine how that would cha help things would change for you if you had energy?
Again, could you imagine how you would feel, how life would be different if you were able to stay focused? If you could get things done quickly and efficiently? If you had a full head of hair, if your shower drain wasn't clogged every time you took a shower, what would that make? What would that, how would that change things for you and for your family? So just imagine that, think through what a future symptom free version of yourself would look like. Take a few minutes to write that down in a journal. So there we have it. I'd encourage you to work through those, those four things that I just listed above. Click the show notes for the hypothyroid symptom assessment to start kind of connecting the dots on how you're feeling. There's also kind of a functional range of different, tests that you can, a different test that you are gonna wanna request from your doctor in that same symptom checker.
So make sure you click on the link below to be able to get to that. Okay? And then I encourage you to just think about where you're at and think about what sorts of shifts you might be willing to make to move the needle to get a little better. Real quick before you go, if this show has helped you in some way, then I know that it'll help others too. So please head over to iTunes, subscribe, and then leave a review so that women can find health and healing too. And do you know that you can have an incredible impact on the women who deal with thyroid issues in your circle? Yep, that's right. All you have to do is take a screenshot of this podcast, tag me at natural dot thyroid dot fix, and post it in your stories. Let's light a path for all the other hypothyroid mamas looking for hope and healing, and to just feel like themselves Again, I'll look forward to connecting with you over on Instagram until next time on the Natural Thyroid Fix.