[Mini] Functional Thyroid Health with Nicole Sivba | Ep. 61

Unlock the secrets to optimal thyroid health with our special guest, Nicole Sivba, a certified functional nutrition consultant and founder of True Potential Wellness. This mini episode of "I'm Hormonal" is your quick guide to understanding the complex world of thyroid hormones and their vital role in women's health. Nicole shares her expert insights into how stress, sleep deprivation, and poor blood sugar regulation can wreak havoc on your thyroid function. We unravel the mystery of symptoms like brain fog, fatigue, and period irregularities, and why your annual thyroid panel could be your best friend.

Join me, Bridget Walton, as I explore my enlightening conversation with Nicole, focusing on the gut-thyroid connection. We discuss how inflammation, leaky gut, and sensitivity to foods like gluten and sugars can cause imbalances, and why maintaining a healthy gut lining is crucial for a well-functioning thyroid. This episode underscores the importance of blood sugar balance as a cornerstone of thyroid health—a topic I'm passionate about. Whether you're battling unexplained fatigue or emotional highs and lows, this episode is packed with actionable advice to help you reclaim your hormonal balance. Don't miss the chance to learn from Nicole's expertise and take control of your thyroid health!

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:04

Hey and welcome to this week's mini episode of I'm Hormonal. I'm your host, bridget Walton, women's hormone coach, and this week, on the longer episode that came out on Tuesday, I had an interview with Nicole Sivba. She is a certified functional nutrition consultant and the founder of True Potential Wellness. She's here in the San Diego area and works with clients, virtually focusing on supporting women and parents who struggle with hormone and thyroid imbalance and getting things all turned around by addressing their gut health. So check out the longer interview, that conversation back on last episode. But of course, today in this mini episode, I'm going to recap what we talked through. So you've got the main points. This can be a good resource for you to come back to. If you want to refresh your memory or if you want to check out this mini first, then go on back. This will be the last week that I do this disclaimer, since these mini episodes are kind of new, and next week week we will just jump right into it without all of the administrative notes. In our conversation about thyroid health, we talked about how factors like stress, sleep and blood sugar regulation are really important to focus on and can be very impactful on your thyroid health. So if you've been here before, that's not totally new, right? You know that blood sugar regulation is critical, right? That can be really stressful on your body. A lack of sleep also creates stress, and then, when it comes to just like overall stress mental, emotional, physical stress that could include under eating or over eating those are all going to be problems for your body. And so when our body is all inflamed, when we have leaky gut, maybe when we have digestive issues, or if you are consuming foods that are irritating your gut like gluten is a trigger for a lot of people. Nicole also mentioned other grains. Of course, sugars can be irritating for our gut, and so sometimes these like tight junctions or they should be tight junctions in our gut lining. They should be only big enough to really let through the tiniest particle, like the tiniest component of our nutrients, our food's nutrients, rather, to get through. But when we're inflamed and irritated, those junctions loosen up a bit, and that can allow for larger particles to enter our bloodstream, and that's what our body starts attacking.

Speaker 1: 2:46

Let me take a step back, though, to let you know where your thyroid gland is. It's located in your neck, right on the front side of your trachea, and your thyroid produces. You guessed it thyroid hormone. You might be familiar with TSH, which is thyroid stimulating hormone, maybe T4 or T3. And these hormones are really essential for almost all of the processes that go on in our body.

Speaker 1: 3:12

So when thyroid levels are low, that can result in brain fog, fatigue that can look like exacerbated perimenopause symptoms, that can look like period problems. Similarly, though, when thyroid levels are really high, that can also come to fruition in the form of period problems, meaning heavy bleeding, irregular cycles and when oh, anxiety that's the other one I wanted to mention so like anxiety, depression when thyroid levels are off. So you're like Bridget you just said 87 different symptoms. And what's the takeaway there? If there are 80 million things that thyroid imbalance can present, as what I would say to you is, see about getting a thyroid panel done and your checkup with your doctor each year when you go get your normal kind of labs done. If you think that something is wrong, though, if you have some sort of situation that you just can't seem to figure out, can't seem to shake the fatigue or whatever else is going on, then finding a provider like a naturopath or somebody who will do the digger investigative did I say digger, do the deeper investigative work with you. That could be a really good resource for you or, of course, somebody like Nicole who really knows a lot about thyroid hormone, who can help you understand what's going on with your gut and how supporting your gut health and some of those other areas we mentioned before can be really essential for your thyroid health. When I asked Nicole what she thought the most important thing, or one of the most important things, was to focus on for thyroid health, it's really comes back to blood sugar balance, blood sugar regulation. You guys know that I love to talk about this, so I was happy to hear it.

Speaker 1: 5:14

When, yes, there is a genetic component to thyroid imbalances, if your parent or parents had or have thyroid imbalances, then that is something that's going to be printed into your genetic composition as well. However, epigenetics is basically how our lifestyle and diet choices impact our gene expression. So, by making healthy diet and lifestyle decisions, like getting good sleep, minimizing and mitigating stress, supporting stable blood sugar levels, like moving your body all of those things that can impact whether or not those genes are actually expressed Nicole gave a much better description of that than I did just now, but basically the takeaway here is that when it comes to thyroid health, whatever happened with your parents or your family, that's not necessarily your destiny. There's a lot you can do. As I always say, there's a lot you can do to impact what's going on with your health there through diet and lifestyle. But going beyond the kind of basic panel that your doctor might offer you, that could be a really good tool for you in getting to the bottom of your symptoms, whether it's period problems or energy levels, weight retention, maybe even weight loss if you have hyperthyroidism. You know that's going beyond that initial panel, could be a really good tool for you.

Speaker 1: 7:01

The last thing I'll mention for here, and then we'll wrap it up, is that Nicole mentioned about gluten. This is a topic that a lot of people love to talk about, or maybe even not. Are we in the backside of talking about gluten guys? Anyway, gluten can be an irritant for the digestive system for a lot of us. However, or in addition to that, rather sometimes, if you have Hashimoto's, then what happens with gluten is that your body is, you know, recognizing this gluten and starting to attack it, and then it's doing that same attack on your own thyroid hormone and so it's impacting how you can actually release that hormone. So the TLDR here is that if you have Hashimoto's and you are still consuming gluten on a regular basis, then that would be something to work with your provider on or consider learning more about, to see if making that change in your diet will have a positive impact on how you feel and your energy levels and all that good stuff that I want for you.

Speaker 1: 8:13

So that's the mini episode for today. Thank you, guys, so much for listening. If you know somebody who is trying to figure out what's going on with your for listening, if you know somebody who is trying to figure out what's going on with your thyroid, or who you know they feel like they've gone down every avenue to understand what's happening with their period problems, send them this episode and I know that they will appreciate it and I would so appreciate you helping me to grow the I Am Hormonal community. So thanks for listening. I will see you here again on the next one.