How I Accidentally Found a Method That Helps 80% of Hashimoto’s Patients in 2 Weeks

Introduction and Hashimoto's Background 0:00

I've tried a bunch of testing, supplements, and diets for Hashimoto's, but still not feeling well. I want to share a method I accidentally discovered that helps to get 80% of people feeling better in just two weeks. Hi, I'm Dr. Isabella Wentz. Host of the Thyroid Pharmacist Healing Conversations, also known as your thyroid pharmacist. I'm a Hashimoto's expert by my own life experience being diagnosed in my 20s and being able to put the condition into remission. And I am also the New York Times bestselling author of Hashimoto's Protocol.

Now, my book Hashimoto's Protocol was based on a protocol I accidentally discovered with my clients who were not getting better. I'm going to take you back on the little journey back to 2013. investigative work. I did a lot of functional medicine testing. Did a trial and error in figuring out which supplements were most likely to help me and gone through a variety of different medications. And I was able to write that all in a guide for people. And just work with others with Hashimoto's in an effort to get them into remission as well.

And I have a lot of success with my initial methods with people where we would do root cause testing and we will find out what triggers they had and then we work on getting them better. But I had a subset of clients that just were not getting better. One of my clients was seemingly like nothing was getting for her, so I would be recommending different supplements. I'll share about three particular clients. None of the dietary changes made a big difference. She went gluten free, dairy free soy free autoimmune paleo, but still had different symptoms.

Another one of my clients was trying different supplements but tended to react to everything, even like benign supplements like the B vitamins. And then another one my client was just getting really frustrated because she was working with me and investing in all kinds of functional medicine testing, which is expensive and not covered on insurance and takes a while to do the test and then it takes awhile to get the results back. And it was like months before we were really doing anything to make her feel better.

At that point, I was thinking to myself, you know, was really feeling stuck because I really wanted these individuals to get better and I wanted to help them. I didn't want to waste their time.

Why Some Clients Weren't Improving 2:37

And I came across a protocol known as the liver protocol that I initially utilize and I've changed it over the years. But what happened with that was incredible. I put two of these individuals on the Liver Protocol because I was like, if they're reacting to these vitamins, maybe maybe there's something going on with their liver, and maybe if they are very sensitive to everything, maybe that's because they have a high degree of toxins within their system, right? We didn't really have the tests to prove it at the time, but that was kind of a theory we were going.

And lo and behold, within two weeks of utilizing targeted liver support, I got a message and this individual had been sick for such a long time, struggling with their health, so many Hashimoto's symptoms, brain fog, fatigue, irritability, tons and tons of pain in their bodies, and sensitivity to seemingly like random things was all of a sudden better. They had more energy, they were able to like go into the mall, which they hadn't been able Maybe there's something to this. I knew this before I started working with the liver reset, but there is a big connection between toxins and thyroid health.

One of the reasons why I believe we have higher rates of thyroid disorders is because we're exposed to so many different environmental toxins. Some of them might include things like pollution outside, right? There was a big nuclear fallout in Chernobyl that I was exposed to personally that was documented to increase the rates of thyroid disease, including Hashimoto's, in people who were around the vicinity of that nuclear accident. There's jet fuel, there are things like mercury that we can get from dental amalgams, even from seafood, There are endocrine disruptors that can we get using lotions and potions, and makeup, even indoor toxins like mold and mycotoxins.

All of these toxins can really overwhelm our bodies and the research suggests that people who live in more toxic areas are going to have higher rates of Hashimoto's. Now I could probably go down a list of every toxin and somehow tie it back to Hashimoto's tie it back to autoimmune dysfunction, tie back I wasn't as knowledgeable as I am about different types of tests that I'm now and there weren't many tests available to begin with, but it was kind of like a game of whack-a-mole where I was like, I want to see what toxins they have and then we could put them on the protocol.

When I did this liver protocol, it kind a catch-all regardless if you had mercury toxicity or arsenic toxicity, or if had mold or mycotoxins in your system. or if you had toxicity from metabolites of your digestive process, all of those toxins, when you support our natural ability to detox, the body can clear them much easier. And so this was like a really big aha moment for myself and for a lot of my clients. So we're exposed to so many different toxins in our environment, right? And these toxins sort of just build up in Many people with Hashimoto's, they don't really realize this, but they're walking around with a huge, huge toxic load.

And what does that toxicload mean? That means that we're going to have brain fog, we are going have fatigue, and we can also have weight gain because our many toxins are actually fat soluble

Discovering the Liver Reset 6:32

and our body in an effort to protect us can actually expand its fat stores to allow for the toxins to become more diluted. There is a saying that says solution to pollution is dilution, And I fully believe that when people are riddled with toxins, they do tend to gain weight. I've seen this time and time again. Also, commonly, people might have skin issues when they are walking around with a lot of toxins. They might multiple chemical sensitivities, allergies, asthma, irritability when having a ton of toxin stored and circulating in their bodies.

Now, Not many people realize it but Hashimoto's sort of creates a perfect storm for carrying around these toxins. This is because when we are hypothyroid we're less likely to sweat so that's one of the ways that we get rid of toxins We also tend to be more constipated, which is another way we get rid of toxins. And so we end up essentially being relegated. The toxins essentially end being left to our liver and our kidneys to handle and add in if people are not hydrating properly, then the liver essentially gets all of these extra toxins to hand and detox.

And what happens with time is we create a bit of a liver backlog. A lot of the cofactors and nutrients that we need to get rid of toxins become depleted and then people just end up feeling very, very bad walking around with all of these toxins. The other thing that happens when we have this liver back log is that, we impair our ability to activate our T4 hormone to the more active T3 hormone. A lot of that activation, actually, a large percentage of it happens in the liver. And then we also are at risk for circulating some of those bad estrogens that you may have heard about or the metabolic byproducts of various hormones, the various metabolic bi-product of digestion.

So we end up walking around with this crazy, crazy toxic load. I saw such incredible results with the first clients that I put on this liver program that i decided i'm just going to do this for everybody like initially I was thinking that people with multiple chemical sensitivities were going be my sweet spot of people and that's definitely like if somebody has that even if they don't have Hashimoto's I'm like okay you need to support your liver but I ended up figuring out that just about everybody with Hashimoto's could

Toxins, Symptoms, and Thyroid Stress 9:20

benefit from the liver reset process. Now I'm going to share a little bit about what it is. So what exactly is the Liver Reset Process? Let's get into it. It's actually four different elements and one of the first ones is to like lower your toxic exposure and I am not talking about like going all crazy but figuring what are the sources of toxicity in your day to day life. It could be makeup or personal care products. So you know what we do? We stop using them for two weeks. Maybe we go makeup-free, maybe we don't put on lotion every day, right?

If you're more ambitious than that, then you could look into getting less toxic makeup and less-toxic personal-care products, but if you want to save money, we basically just stop utilizing them. We unplug the Glade plugins, we get rid of the scented candles, We minimize all of those chemicals like all the fragrances. We just stop using them for a two week time period. we may also consider investing in an air purifier in our home. I love the Jasper or the Air Doctor air Purifiers. Those can be really big game changers for cleaning up our air.

we can also look into getting a water filter or getting fresh spring water delivered to us. This reduces fluoride. Fluoride is a potential thyroid toxin in our water supply that we're exposed to daily. It was initially utilized as a thyroid suppressing medication before we had more effective medications, but it is dose response. The more fluorides you take in, the higher your rate of thyroid hormone suppression is going to be and when you're hypothyroid and you have Hashimoto's you don't necessarily want extra thyroid suppressing chemicals in your day-to-day life.

And the other things that I might recommend is figuring out if you are exposed to plastics, right? So if your microwaving your lunch in a plastic container. Maybe instead we store our food in jars like mason jars and we heat it up on the stovetop. These are just some of these low-hanging fruit that you can start utilizing. Oh, one one really good one is actually cleaning products. Recently, I saw a study suggesting that women, when they used more chemicals in their home for cleaning, they had higher rates of asthma and breathing issues.

And I really fully believe this, and I believe in cleaning up your cleaning product routine. This might look like making vinegar your best friend and utilizing vinegar to wash your floors. I also love the company called Branch Basics. which has a whole line of less toxic cleaning products that actually work. So this is going to be one path, right? One thing to kind of do your homework over the next two weeks is figure out where your chemical and toxic exposures are coming from and minimize them.

You know, the goal isn't to being perfect and lead the least toxic life in the whole world. The goal is to stop adding to your toxic burden. The second step of the liver reset process is to remove some of most common triggering foods. Gluten, dairy, soy, sugar, alcohol, these are going to be some my top foods that are gonna be reactive for people with Hashimoto's. I know I don't think I need to go into detail about the benefits of not drinking a lot of alcohol every day, but we do know that it is metabolized by the And when we are drinking alcohol, even that high quality glass of wine, that is going to impact our ability to detox other stuff, right?

And so for two weeks, we give up wine. We give out gluten, dairy, soy and sugar. And we try to focus on eating more of a blood sugar balanced diet. This really lowers the amount of inflammatory foods that get into our system. This limits the number of things that our liver has to spend extra time to process and metabolize, and that liberates the liver's ability to detox.

Step 1: Reduce Toxic Exposure 13:42

I love to add in supportive healing foods. One of my favorites is going to be hot lemon water first thing in the morning. So after you take your thyroid meds, you would squeeze a little bit of maybe half a lemon into a cup of water that is warmed or hot like you, would you know, let's say you were making a Cup of tea. You can add some sweetener like maybe some stevia or maple syrup or honey for taste, make sure it's not too hot, right? And then you can sip on that throughout the day. This really helps to support our digestion and our detox pathways, allowing us to lower that toxic backlog by not adding to it.

I love to utilize cruciferous vegetables, so these are your broccolis and your cauliflowers. Many times they get a bad rap because they are called goiterogens because of their glucosinolate content. Glucosinalase can essentially block the absorption of iodine into the thyroid gland, which can be an issue if you are iodine deficient. So if were living in a developing country, that might be the case. And if your were to eat pounds and pounds of them in the raw state, right? And so I will say for most people with Hashimoto's and hypothyroidism, these foods are going to be not problematic and actually beneficial to support liver detox.

and we can basically steam them a little bit or cook them just to break down those glucosinolates so they do not impact thyroid function. I also love to utilize blueberries. They are a rich source of myoinositol, which has been shown in studies to normalize and optimize thyroid functioning and thyroid antibody levels. I also love to utilize beets. They are great for supporting our methylation pathways, which help us detoxify. Fiber helps to really balance hormones, and it's a natural binder that gets rid of various toxins from our bodies.

Utilizing green juices and green smoothies, as well as sprouts and seedlings, These are all really helpful foods that you can incorporate into your diet to help your body naturally detoxify. Okay, last but not least, we're going to support the liver's ability to detox. So you may have heard words like detox or cleanse where somebody goes on a pure juice cleanse for a few weeks or a Few days and they claim like this can help detox I think it can work well for some people, but for people with thyroid issues, it could really crash their adrenals, right?

So I'm not a big proponent of that. Some people may advocate for coffee enemas. I've seen people perforate their colon, so I am not necessarily going to be excited about recommending that for most people without medical supervision. Then there's like chelation therapy or using high dose iodine or spirulina, where I've just seen people react really poorly to that. Even myself, I have tried these things and they don't work so great. Sometimes the toxins can recirculate, sometimes you can end up with more symptoms than you had.

I ended up like with giant papillary conjunctivitis, which is like giant pimples on the inside of my eyeballs and I could no longer wear contact lenses. from utilizing spirulina to detox. There's a lot of case studies of this happening. I've had clients who utilize high dose iodine to the detox heavy metals from their thyroid glands, and they've ended up bedridden with super elevated TSH,

Step 2: Remove Trigger Foods and Add Supportive Foods 17:28

skyrocketing thyroid antibodies. This is not the way, right? So you don't want to do like a forceful detox where you force your body to get rid of toxins. Rather, you want work with your own body, not against it. So in order to work your with body we have to think about how does the body naturally get of rid toxins? one of them is through sweating, right? So a lot of people with hypothyroidism actually don't sweat or they sweat very very little. Nobody ever complains about this. I will say like everybody's like has a list of 100 symptoms and not sweating is never like a big complaint of theirs.

nobody wants to sweat more but this is a really important way for us to get rid of toxins. Some toxins are sweat soluble, which means that's like the best way of clearing them out of their bodies. You know, our skin is the body's largest elimination organ. And so you want to induce sweating when you have hypothyroidism because you're probably not doing it on your own. Even if you're walking and exercising, doing things that like normal people would react with by being super sweaty, you probably are not sweating.

And so you wanna be intentional about this. You can do this through hot yoga if your able to. you can through doing some Epsom salt baths. This is gonna be a great way to get some of those toxins out. I would recommend maybe like a cup of Epson salts in a bath. And you can also utilize sauna therapy. Doing sauna, therapy, I would say 30 minutes three times a week for two weeks. If you work that into your routine, just in the course of those two week, you could see a lot of toxins get eliminated.

I've done tests on people before and after, with sauna therapy, just doing that, and that can be such a big game changer for clearing out some of these toxins. Now there's a lot of different brands out there. I'm going to link some my favorites, including Sunlight and Saunas, into the show notes. There's going be a little bit of a discount for you guys if you click my link. And I also like the TheraSage Portable Infrared Sauna. which are a bit more affordable, so they're not going to be as fancy, but they still can help you move some of the toxins out of your body.

And you don't actually need to have a sauna in your home or anything like that. You can also go to a gym and get a membership where you sweat in the sauna and they clean it up for you and you just pay them a fee for that, I do have to say I have, to warn you, tried that when I lived in The Netherlands and I did learn that in that saunas are co-ed and everybody goes in the nude so I was not super comfortable with that and I prefer having an in-home sauna. Although I think many other countries you might be able to rent a sauna just for yourself or maybe you know with the same gender if you're comfortable and you can just wear a towel or perhaps a swimsuit or whatnot you don't have to go fully nude.

So just a quick disclaimer there if and might have some concerns like I did. The other important detox pathway is going to be through our elimination. People, I'm talking about poop here. A lot of people with hypothyroidism, they are constipated. And when you think about if you're not sweating, if your not pooping, these toxins they go back to your liver and that's one of the reasons that liver gets backlogged. So we really want to working on constepation and getting that resolved. One of the easiest things in my experience that works for about half of people is utilizing magnesium citrate.

There's so many different ones out there, but I find this one is probably the most thyroid-friendly for people with hypothyroidism because it supports anxiety, it helps us sleep, helps move our bowels, and helps with cramps. It's also been shown to normalize thyroid function on ultrasound, although it's got to be used for like three to five years to see that,

Step 3: Support Detox Pathways 21:38

so I can't say that I've necessarily tracked that in real life, though the research does show that. So magnesium citrate is going to one of your best friends if you're looking to poop. I will also say getting rid of food sensitivities, we talked about gluten and dairy and soy, Sometimes just getting off of those foods can help a person's issues normalize with constipation as well as adding more fiber and beets to your diet. These are also great ways to help move your bowels. The other things that I might recommend is proper hydration.

So, urination and our kidneys are also another great way to get rid of toxins. Many people don't realize that they are walking around dehydrated. They are relying on caffeine and they're relying, you know, on willpower to go through their days. So as part of the program, we minimize the intake of caffeine, and we utilize a lot of green juices. We might utilize electrolytes. And we just have various tonics throughout the day to help hydrate people. so that they're properly getting rid of toxins through that pathway.

I will say in some cases people do tend to not be very very happy about having to cut out or limit caffeine because people can go through withdrawals when they are used to drinking caffeine. They might get withdrawal headaches. or other symptoms when they they got off of it. I have a method that I like to use where we minimize it little by little every day. We don't quit cold turkey because been there done that cold Turkey can be quite uncomfortable with caffeine detox. There's also a wonderful substitute called dandy blend and it's a dandelion tea.

It kind of looks like coffee and some people say it smells and reminds them of coffee, but it helps detoxify the liver somewhat as well. So that might be a stand-in for people when they're weaning off of caffeine. And then oftentimes I might recommend additional supplements. I really love an acetylcysteine. i often times run functional medicine labs through mosaic diagnostics and they have toxin labs. that test for, I don't know, maybe 60 to 70 different toxins. And majority of the toxins, the best way to get rid of them is going to be through sauna and N-acetylcysteine that supports our liver's ability to detoxify.

I also might utilize methylation support. Many people with Hashimoto's might have the MTHFR gene mutation, and that just means that they tend to build up certain toxins in their body. Their liver can become backlogged and we oftentimes providing a few key nutrients can help the liver overcome that backlog. I also oftentimes utilize liver and gallbladder support, supportive amino acids, and herbs like milk thistle, as well as extra protein to help support the body. When we think about the liver pathways, they're actually very much dependent on a few core things to work.

So what the livers does to our toxins is that it processes them, right? And so it breaks them down. Initially, it starts with fat soluble toxins, and it has to prepare them for elimination via our urine, bile, or stool. And some of these nutrients or cofactors that are needed for that phase of metabolism to happen would be the B vitamins, such as riboflavin, which is B2, B3, folate, calcium, glutathione, and acetylcysteine, milk thistle, flavonoids, quercetin. These are all things that can support that pathway.

Once the liver does its job there, it changes these fat soluble toxins into intermediary metabolites, which are also very, very important to eliminate. It's actually a two phase process. In phase two, the liver takes those intermediaries metabolite and converts them to water-soluble waste so that this can be eliminated via the urine, bile, or stool. And this also requires certain nutrients, including sulfur metabolites such as your cruciferous vegetables, again, folate, a lot of amino acids like methionine, cysteine glycine taurine glutamine, choline, l-carnitine lysine and l glutamate.

And then it also things like MSM, B12, b5, alpha-ketoglutarate, magnesium, glutathione, these are all going to be things that are going be helpful to eliminate that. So as you can see, you know, giving your detox pathways a little bit of support. A lot of times people will say like, oh, well, your liver does all these things on its own and you never need to support your lever. But I will that just makes no sense because I do tests on people and oftentimes they're low on magnesium or they are low in folate or their low B12 or, you know, N-acetylcysteine or glutathione or glutamine and if they don't have enough of these nutrients on board, how are they going to be providing them to the liver to properly do its job?

And so just supporting your liver with these gentle nutrients can be a really big game changer.

Supplements, Liver Support, and Detox Biochemistry 27:28

So I've had thousands of people go through this program at this point, and I fully outline it in my book Hashimoto's Protocol. If you need a little bit more details on it, I'm also going to link an article to it for more detail. And we're also gonna be doing a cohort of a group of People going through the program again in the fall. if you wanted to join that, find out more information at thyroidpharmacist.com slash reset. What happens with this program. I mean, it's incredible. People get symptom relief in as little as two weeks.

Better energy, focus, mood, sleep, and digestion. Their joint pain reduces. They're weight improves like sometimes five to six pounds in two week. It's been incredible anxiety and brain fog lift. So we have to think about the liver helps to activate our T4 to T3. And this is something that happens. I have people who report less joint pain, they have better sleep, their cravings are gone, and they are able to have more strength in their bodies and less fatigue. I personally went through this program myself every six months before I was pregnant.

just to keep up with my community whenever they were doing it, give my body a little bit of a reset. And then I didn't do it again for the time I was pregnant and when I were breastfeeding, which ended up being a very long time, let's just say that, and I ended having skin breakouts, feeling kind of old and groggy, having some excess weight. I went through the liver program the whole thing again over the course of two weeks and holy cow like my skin cleared up, I had more energy, my hormones seemed to balance.

I actually have before and after labs of myself and I have some mold toxicity in my system before I did the liver reset and that was gone after the livers reset. A lot of these toxins that I can test on mosaic diagnostics testing and i can link to the testing that i do in the show notes, a lot those markers I would say all but one of them like were gone and I had done that test on an annual basis and it wasn't getting better. It was in fact getting worse and within just those that two-week process of supporting my liver a lot of those toxins moved out of my body.

I have a little bit of TMI but I remember my bowel movements would smell like tar. And it was the strangest thing, but a lot of these toxins were mobilizing. The other strange thing that happened is I was holding on to some anger and some, I guess, resentments, as we do sometimes. A lot those kind of went through me during that two-week process where I able to forgive.

Results, Personal Experience, and Program Invitation 30:18

a lot of family members through just that tweak process and it wasn't like we were having heartfelt deep conversations. It was almost like those emotions were stuck in my body. Sometimes people say the liver harbors anger and grief and after that point I was like, wow, there maybe is something to that. And then the other thing that I also found is my muscles. just all of a sudden felt like they were activated, where it's really, really hard to explain, but I felt more muscular. And at this point, I was a little bit overweight and I actually lost weight that I wanted to lose.

In prior times when I did the liver reset, was at my ideal weight and didn't see any changes in my weight. So this is something that can be helpful on your healing journey. Again, I have it fully outlined in my Bokashimoto's Protocol. If you want to grab a copy of that, i've tried to do my best to outline it on my website, so I'll be linking to that. And of course, if you wanna join the RESET program, we are gonna be offering it to people to join. You can go to thyroidpharmacist.com slash reset.

Definitely if you want accountability, if things broken down in a course format, and if want some support as you go through it, that's going to be an option, but you can do it any other which way. I have put it out there in numerous ways to support you on your healing journey. I don't do any gatekeeping. I want to make sure that as many people as possible get their health back and get there lives back with Hashimoto's because I know what it's like to feel awful and feel like nothing is helping and you're wasting your time and money.

And so I hope this can be a part of your healing journey. Until next time, this has been Thyroid Pharmacist Healing Conversations.