Could stress be the 'missing link' in your weight loss program? Learn here about how stress will impact negatively on your thyroid hormones (they're the hormones that decide how fast your metabolism will run).
Your thyroid hormones are the basic regulators of how fast or slow your metabolism will run. A faster metabolism makes it easier to lose weight. But sometimes things can go wrong with your thyroid hormone, interfering with your best efforts. Read on to learn more about a little-known hormone, reverse T3, and how too much stress can produce too much of this hormone, making it almost impossible to lose weight.
HOW IT WORKS
Your pituitary gland releases TSH (thyroid stimulating hormone) whose job it is to tell your thyroid gland how fast your metabolism should be running. Your thyroid gland releases the amount of T4 your pituitary tells it to, and T4 travels through your bloodstream bound to a protein molecule, before conversion to its active form, T3, by your liver. This process needs zinc and selenium to happen. T3 can then be taken up by your cells, instructing your metabolism to produce energy.
WHAT CAN GO WRONG
But if you're under continual stress, the conversion from T4 to the active T3 can go awry, with 'reverse T3' produced instead. Reverse T3 is pretty useless, and certainly won't prompt your cells to energy. It just gets excreted by your body, and all that effort in producing TSH and T4 went to waste.
(For the biochemically minded, its called 'reverse' T3 because the iodine atom is incorrectly placed on the inside of the molecule ring, not the outside where its supposed to be.)
HOW CAN YOU TELL IF REVERSE T3 IS INTERFERING WITH YOUR WEIGHT LOSS PROGRAM?
If you're continually stressed, multitudes of your body processes will be mixed up; not just your thyroid hormone production. But if you're doing all the right things towards weight loss and it just won't budge, a simple saliva test will tell you if reverse T3 production is what's getting in your way. Your doctor or your local naturopath can arrange this for you, or ask me about comprehensive functional testing for your thyroid.
And if you find that your T3 thyroid has shifted into 'reverse', you know what you have to do.... improve your stress management and your body will take care of the rest.
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