When I started learning about hypothyroidism, I was clueless. I didn’t even know what the thyroid was or where in our body it was located. All I knew was that I was sick, not feeling good, and started to research my symptoms.
I got to point where my hypothyroidism got so bad, I made the decision I was going to get better no matter what it took!
I literally dedicated an entire year to researching full time. Nothing else mattered at that point. So much that I almost lost a business, and nearly had to file for bankruptcy because I literally did nothing else, but take care of my health.
Actually the first couple of months, I couldn’t work if I wanted to. I was too tired to function. I experienced for the first time being thyroid tired. So I had no choice but to do something about my health.
I was putting in on average about 14 to 16 hours daily researching and trying out things to get rid of hypothyroidism. Practically every waking moment I had was devoted to researching this thing.
I share this because when people ask me to give them specifics about what I did (and still do for hypothyroidism) there is so much that comes to mind. So many things I can think of that I could write a book about it. I’ve put in my 10,000 hours into this and I do my best to condense my knowledge in a clear concise way that’s easy to understand and apply.
Part of the purpose of this blog is to organize my ideas so I can better explain what I’ve learned in the last few years about this.
I received an email and did my best to summarize the way I think about hypothyroidism and what to do about it.
This is from personal experience and with the understanding that there are many causes of hypothyroidism.
The email read:
Hi again Jorge,
So Juicing I am doing, I fasted for two day without eating anything and just juiced.
What… Give me names of Probiotics did you take. Foods my food consist of a Banana and a hard boiled egg for breakfast, lunch a small portion of chicken, with rice I make myself and a veggie. I do not eat dinner, have not for years as I gain weight too easily.
Help me with specifics if you can. I am willing and able to follow directions well.
Celeste
As I read this email, some thoughts came to mind. The first thing I think of is the scripture of The Two Foundations… are you starting out like the wise man who built his house on rock, or the fool who built his house on sand?
Clean gut = rock foundation
Toxic gut = sand foundation
I’d been eating bad foods for over 28 years!! To clean my gut, I knew I was going to need more than just a couple of days of fasting.
Frankly, I was terrified of not eating solid food for days. That’s how “asleep” I was… It just sounded unhealthy at the time.
I set out to do three days of juicing and just see how that felt. In the back of my mind, however, I was afraid I may not last more than a day.
… but again, I had MADE THE DECISION that I was going to do whatever it took no matter what.
I juiced for 3 days, when I woke up the 4th day, the first signs that I was getting my energy back started to appear. I felt so good those 3 days of juice fasting turned into 7 days. One week turned into one month. One month turned into 90 days!!
Now hear me out.
This is no coincidence that I started by building a strong foundation.
90 days of juice/liquid fasting allowed me to HEAL MY GUT.
That was the most important thing I ever did. Lay a strong foundation. It wasn’t the magical recipes, or the ingredients I chose. It was giving my gut a break long enough for it to heal itself.
Since then, I have seen a parallel between success when it comes to health and success in other areas of life such as financial.
The most accurate way I’ve heard of achieving success is
Prolonged focused sustained effort and energy in one direction.
I learned it from Eben Pagan, great mentor of mine who teaches about business and productivity…
Hehe, I was chubby…
Anyways…
Here’s a clip from one of the courses I attended… It’s about business, but when you watch it, replace the theme business with health and more specifically thyroid health. What it takes to have a healthy thyroid:
This is me sharing how I think and why I did what I did the way I did it. I’m being as genuine and real as I can be. I want to give you all the details of what I did to get better!!
For starters I would say, focus all of your energy and effort into healing your gut to lay a strong foundation.
Juice fasting helped me a lot in the first 90 days… after those 90 days, I didn’t stop juicing or fasting, but I went into “maintenance mode”
It’s hard to juice fast for 90 days. Even now that I’m better, I usually can’t fast more than a day or two. It takes a lot of effort and energy to say “no” to food.
Instead what I do for maintenance is fast one to two days a week.
I did a lot of research on fasting, and came across a really good resource that talks about a better way to fast so you don’t have to go a full day without eating by doing intermittent fasting…
The way it works is simple. The day before you fast, you eat your last meal around say 6pm. The next day, you fast until 6pm essentially fasting for full 24 hours, but you still get to eat that day.
My thinking on this is, I did bad stuff to my body for over 28 years… I’m spending the rest of my life doing good things to it.
The main message is this. You can’t juice for a day or two, and then go back to your old ways. For true change to happen, your old habits must go away, and be replaced with new habits.
Look at juice fasting as something that will be a habit… take a season out of your life and juice fast. If 90 days seems too long (trust me I thought so too), do at least five days or a week the way Drew Canole teaches. After that juice fast, take on the Eat Stop Eat method (I do) with the mindset that this will require prolonged, sustained effort and energy in one direction. Meaning don’t try it for a day or a week… shoot for at least 90 days… I’m going on over 2 years!
Next, probiotics.
The ones I started using were the probiotics by Dr Mercola. This was after reading a book in Spanish Despertando Salud by Hugo Robin.
In that book, he talked about the importance of having a CLEAN GUT. He recommended using a product oxypowder to do a colon cleanse and speed up the gut healing process.
I used oxypowder during the first 6 months of me doing my cleanse. Now I use it sparingly when I eat stuff I’m not supposed to. I am human afterall, I am exposed to bad foods through social interactions so don’t think you’ll have to be 100% strict… but understand that I’ve already layed a strong foundation and I spend most of my time cleansing my body than I do eating bad foods I know I’m not supposed to eat. I am still focused and putting a lot of energy and effort into making my body function at its peak.
There are levels to cleaning your gut… on one hand you are getting rid of anything that may be stuck there, but there may also be a need to get rid of bad bacteria, parasites and other things that may be living there and that are not good for you.
During my fast I was taking probiotics for this reason. Taking probiotics helps because they tend to do the job of getting rid of bad bacteria for the most part. While I personally used the ones from Dr Mercola, I have found a new brand that I’ve been wanting to try and they are the Mega Potent Renew Life.
You may need to do additional cleaning depending on what’s living within you.
This is really just the beginning though.
You can fast, but if you don’t change the foods you are eating, you’ll end up back where you started. When it comes to food, it’s been a long learning curve.
Take the example of Banana and a hard boiled egg for breakfast…
One thing I’ve learned about hypothyroidism is that a big part of it, which I don’t talk about much, because I barely understand it is that we have a huge hormone imbalance… we must take special care of hormones like stress hormones, pregesterone, estrogen, etc, which is stuff I became aware of when I went through Hypothyroidism Revolution.
What I do know is that your hormones need your body to be well hydrated, and it needs its different sources of foods like good fats… One of those sources of fats comes from seeds…
So when I hear someone saying that they eat fruits and vegetables, my first question is “what kind?”
When someone tells me they eat bananas in the US, that’s a red flag, because it’s hard to find REAL bananas here… The thing I’ve learned about food is that eating “organic” is not enough. Does the fruit have seeds and could you grow a fruit tree from that seed?? with bananas in the US the probability is not likely, which is what hurts us most.
Here’s what a REAL banana with seeds looks like
If you think of it, seeds in fruits are like our reproductive system. The “life force”, the hormones, everything comes from there, and most people are eating foods with “no life”…
Most people eat fruits that are seedless which means they are sterile and can’t reproduce and then wonder why they have hormone imbalances in their bodies.
That’s why I look for living foods. Foods that have life in them!
It takes life to give life… and not all fruits and vegetables have “life” in them just like this little girl explains in her experiment:
… did you notice how even the organic stuff was not exactly the best for reproduction?
So for me, some of the best foods will have seeds that have “life” in them. Stuff that is able to reproduce. If I eat bananas, I have to make sure they have seeds and that the seeds are good. If I eat apples, same thing… Avocado, same thing. Good food for me is not just that it’s sold as organic, but if I were to take the seed and plant it, it should sprout, grow and MULTIPLY.
What about eggs?
Most eggs sold at stores are sterile… that’s why I buy mine from someone who raises their own chickens… look at their different color, sizes, shapes… these are REAL eggs!
They are fertile eggs that give me the right kind of nutrients my body needs to make hormones. I won’t go into detail, but here’s a good short primer on how Testosterone is made and notice how the body uses Cholesterol to make testosterone… (hint: eggs have cholesterol)
This is part of what I did to fix my own hormone imbalance.
So I can say I eat bananas and eggs, but I’m getting better and others are not… why? the difference is that mine are fertile, theirs are sterile.
Most people don’t pay attention to that.
This was my advantage that I’ve been brewing beer and fermenting stuff, which is basically growing yeast and bacteria which happen to be probiotics (probiotics, yeast, and other living organisms are the same thing that makes a seed sprout and grows plants and trees, and us)…
When I understood this, I realized that the source of foods was very important, but I took it up one level and that was to make sure that the foods I was eating were “living foods”.
I came across Wardee Harmon rather indirectly because she cooks foods in a way that keeps all the probiotics alive… I was reading up on how she makes Kombucha (one of the liquids I drank during my fast which has a lot of probiotics and helps CLEAN the liver and gut).
Then I noticed in her video she talks about a lady with Hashimoto’s and how she got better just by the way she cooked her food… the Wardee way.
Basically all cultured or lacto fermented foods which have probiotics and naturally help clean your gut, liver and other filters your body needs to keep clean.
Are you seeing the pattern??
Everything revolves around gut health. Fermented foods are digested or fermented by the same probiotics that live in your gut so when you eat it, it’s pre-digested and it doesn’t feed the bad bacteria… if you don’t pre-digest it, bad bacteria will feed off that same food releasing toxins and other stuff not good for you. Which is why you want to clean your gut and why this food helps with that as well.
Now there’s another level to what I did.
Again, I can write a book on this, so I’ll keep it as short as possible.
Because of brewing beer and working with grains I understand one thing.
A seed will sprout. The sprout will grow roots and that will turn into something (grass, plant, tree, etc.)
Fermentation is essentially a continuation of the sprouting process. When a tree is growing is because bacteria are digesting (fermenting) food in the soil at the root.
Our body is no different. Our gut bacteria will ferment and digest food for us and that’s how we grow/regenerate.
The way our body heals is by regenerating itself. If you have a bad thyroid, you need to help it regenerate.
If you cut yourself, your body will regenerate new skin over the cut. The process starts in your gut.
So that’s when I realized that if we treat our bodies like plants, we can make them grow and be healthy just like them. I came across this video by Dr Cassar:
… and I realized that the real food we need is not stuff like eggs, bananas, etc.
It’s minerals.
If we eat a banana, what’s going to really nourish us is going to be the minerals in it. Seedless bananas have little or no minerals… seeded bananas grow in the wild, because of minerals!
Personally I had to watch and rewatch videos like this one from Dr Cassar:
I would watch all of Dr Cassar’s videos if you can… I have watched them all and some multiple times.
Soon you’ll start to see the pattern that everything revolves around gut health… things like cleaning up your body, minerals, probiotics, etc.
So in summary, I constantly:
Clean my gut
Restructure my gut flora
Get minerals
Eat fruits and sometimes seeds with “life” in them
Eat stuff that feeds the glands and makes them produce hormones (maca, tribulus terrestris, tongkat ali, fats, etc.)
Again, fats have to be the right kind. I didn’t understand the difference between good or bad fats or hormone imbalances until I went through Tom’s Hypothyroidism course
This is definitely a tough journey, but it can be done!!… I’ve been doing this for 2 years… and I’m still going strong! 🙂
Hope this helps you!
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