Module 5-6 Week Hashimoto's Transformation Program

Transcription

1 Module 5-6 Week Hashimoto's Transformation Program [Start 0:00:00] Hi, Dr. Shook here! It is week 3 and this module 5. Some exciting things are happening this week. You re starting your dietary changes. You should have your plan laid out. You should know when you re going to shop, when you re going to cook, you re going to have your containers ready. You got everything ready. You got lunch box. You re ready to go. You should have supplementation to help support your foundational health and also to support your number 1 system that is most symptomatic based on your assessment form and everything that we went through in the first modules. What I want to do is now that you have everything and you re getting started, I want to make sure that we head off any potential problems. Overview What I want to talk about in this module are the things that I commonly see that cause problems as someone making these dietary changes, so let s go ahead and get started. Here we are. We are Week 3 Module 5 Heading Off Common Problems. We re going to talk about withdrawal symptoms from different types of foods. We re going to talk about dealing with and preventing constipation, which is a very common thing, and I ll explain why that is. Then I m going to talk about before you eat priming the digestive tract and what that means and why that s important. Let s go ahead and get started. Here s our favorite quote because we re all making transformation. Withdrawal Symptoms Let s talk about withdrawal symptoms. Here s the deal. There are a number of foods that have addictive qualities to them; for example, if you come to the bottom down here, caffeine, gluten, casein, and sugar. Caffeine. Caffeine, what I really want you to do is within the first weeks of the program, I want people to start weaning from caffeine because this week, you should be caffeine free. There should be no stimulants. It s really important. Caffeine withdrawal is typically headaches. It s the number thing that occurs and then fatigue, but that s something that will pass. It will pass. If you use stimulants, you re going to stress your adrenal glands and it s very hard to recover. It s not that it s gone forever necessarily but while we re trying to heal, you got to remove caffeine. Now you can click on all of these links from your guide and you can go to articles that I have written or that are specifically about the withdrawal symptoms from these different compounds. Gluten. The next we re going to talk about is gluten. When you hear about gluten is in wheat and other grains and it s due to this thing called gluteomorphin. It s an interesting name, isn t it? Module 5-6 Week Hashimoto's Transformation Program - Page 1 of 6

2 Morphin, and it s very similar to morphine, so it s an opioid compound. What happens is when gluten is metabolized, it breaks down and metabolizes into something called gluteomorphin, and it is very addictive. When you withdraw from gluten, you can actually have withdrawal symptoms due to the gluteomorphin. It is absolutely something that is real, something that happens, and you just need to be aware of that. Now before I go into the casein and sugar, here are the things that you re going to see. You re going to see things like anxiety, headaches, sadness, anger, sweating, shaking, and disorientation, and depression. Those are all things that can happen and I know that s not common for everyone, but you definitely can have some withdrawal symptoms, so that s typically going to be worse this week. I m just going to tell you. Hopefully, you weaned off caffeine prior to this, but you should be off of caffeine right now. I don t want you weaning from caffeine throughout this first week, but you definitely could still have withdrawal symptoms from gluten, casein, and sugar. Casein. Casein is a protein in dairy and the withdrawal symptoms are due to check this out -- casomorphin. Just like gluteomorphin above, casomorphin is also one of the ways that casein is metabolized and broken down. It is addictive. It is an addictive compound, so when you re withdrawing from these foods, you can absolutely have these addictive reactions, so it s something that s really important to be aware of because it won t last forever, but it can be unpleasant. Sugar. Then the fourth thing is sugar. This is really highly, highly, highly, addictive. The sugar, one of the things with sugar is that is addictive. It s been compared to being as addictive as cocaine and literally it triggers these pleasure centers in the part of the brain called the hippocampus. We know this because they ve done functional MRI studies. Just know that coming off sugar is a very, very addictive thing but you can do it. Listen, this is going to be the worst week because of these problems. Heading Off Common Problems I mean some people are having the issues but there are a lot of people that just feel like they have a lot of these issues -- anxiety, headache, sadness, anger, sweating, shaking, disorientation, and depression. Now other things can cause that, too, so you have to use your judgment. I m not telling you not go to the doctor or to go the doctor. I m just telling you that if you have symptoms, you need to go see your doctor if you re not feeling well. I m not there to assess you and I can t do that remotely. That s something that you have to use good judgment. [0:05:27] You change your diet and your diet that you re changing to should not cause hypoglycemia or other problems that are more medical emergencies as long as you re doing what I told you do: don t get hungry and eat frequently. It should not cause these problems, but I m not saying it can t. I ve seen people get hypoglycemic, which means low blood sugar. You just have to use good judgment. These are potential problems that you can see so there s a few ways that you can really help to minimize these issues. Module 5-6 Week Hashimoto's Transformation Program - Page 2 of 6

3 Dealing with and preventing constipation. What I want to make sure that you re doing is I want to make sure that you re drinking plenty of water. Now in this particular page, I m going to talk about constipation, but even with the withdrawal symptoms, drinking plenty of water, eating plenty of food, getting sunlight on your body, getting outside, breathing, moving, gentle movement I m not talking about vigorous exercise all these things can help to deal with some of these withdrawal symptoms. Now constipation is a very common problem that people report to me. They re like, You know, I m not moving my bowels as well. Here s why it can happen with this diet and here s what we re going to do about it. It can happen with the diet that I m changing you to because we are moving all of the soluble fiber. There s soluble and insoluble; soluble fiber attracts water. You primarily get soluble fibers from grains, which we have eliminated. When you remove grains, then you re not pulling water into the stool, and therefore, it s more compact and it s more hard, and you can have constipation because now we re eating foods that are higher in vegetable fibers, fruit fibers, and those foods are full of insoluble fiber. You take out the soluble fiber, you lose some of the water that comes with the stools and you can become constipated. That s the why. Now what you have to do is you have to absolutely make sure that you re drinking enough water. I mean 8 ounces of water per day is what most people need, so you need to make sure that you re drinking plenty of water. Those things are you can also have herbal tea, green tea, fruit juices with no sugar added at all. I mean that s hard to find. Those are things that are reasonable. I don t want you to be drinking a lot of sugars, though, a lot of fruit juices. Just stick with water, herbal teas, and green teas that are unsweetened. You have to keep your colon well hydrated. This is also important for healing of the gut, so drinking water and staying hydrated are very important. Now the next thing that we can do is there are stool-softening methods. Now a lot of people are like, Well, I ll just go the store and I ll get Senokot or something. I m just going to tell you there are irritant-based methods, so you see here irritant-based methods. Using senna is considered irritating to the colon. That s how it induces the bowel movement, and here you can read about them but you can go here, senna being a colon irritant and this is a study done by the National Institute of Medicine. You can click on it right there and it will show you how senna is an irritant. I don t recommend using senna because I don t want irritation of the colon. I want the colon to heal. What we do is we use water-attracting methods. What you should take, you can click on this link and it will take you to my HealthWave online pharmacy. When you go to my online dispensary in the pharmacy, you should have an account by now. You can log in and you look at my category for constipation, so you log to HealthWave, click this link, log into Healthwave, look at my category for constipation. Order the supplements that I have in there and take them as directed. Those are all water-attracting methods vitamin C, magnesium. There s a supplement there that has ground flax, ground chia. These are all companies that I trust and that I know have good products. It s not something you re buying over-the-counter that is questionable. You should not need these things long-term. You re not going to be constipated forever. It can happen initially. Then your bowels will start normalizing, but you might need this for a few weeks. Module 5-6 Week Hashimoto's Transformation Program - Page 3 of 6

4 Then if you get constipated, you can utilize these tools. Again, water-attracting method is what we want. We don t want to use irritant-based methods because we want to heal a permeable or inflamed gut. If you forgot how to log into HealthWave, you can click on this link and watch the video where I show you exactly how to log in. But once you go in there, this is a little screenshot. You can just scroll down to the constipation category and all those supplements, that s what you should order. Just take them as directed. [0:10:08] Priming the Digestive Tract. All right, all right. Moving along, now we re talking about heading off common problems, and I m going to talk about priming the digestive tract. I know when you read that, you re probably curious as to what in the world am I talking about. If you recall, remember when I draw this week 1 module 2? Remember this is a screenshot of my whiteboard when you went through my Hashimoto s workshop. If you remember, I talked about this red line here. It represents the vagus nerve. It goes from the brainstem down to the entire digestive tract. That s the colon, small intestine, stomach, gallbladder, and liver. What the vagus nerve does is it innervates, so the nerve leaves the spine. It originates from the brainstem and innervates the entire digestive tract from the esophagus to the stomach to the gallbladder, pancreas, to your entire small intestine, large intestine. What is does is it primes or it controls the digestive function, so here s the thing: most people have problems with their vagal tone, so they don't have good vagus stimulation. The reason for that is because of this stuff right here. See this is something that s involuntary. You don t control this digestive tract function. It is involuntary and it is controlled by the autonomic nervous system. You have a voluntary nervous system, which allows me to move my hand, then talk, do all of these things. The involuntary system runs all the bodily functions without you thinking about it, so the involuntary system is called autonomic and it has two divisions and you ll see here on the screen, there is a sympathetic nervous system and the parasympathetic. You notice that I ve got this on a seesaw here. Right here is the board, and then here s the fulcrum. In this example, most people what I m trying to illustrate here is that these divisions, when one is high, the other is low. When one is low, the other is high. They re never both up at the same time. They don t function that way. Typically when you sleep, the parasympathetic division is higher. When you re scared or something is happening, if a lion were chasing you, the parasympathetic would be very high because the parasympathetic is your fight-or-flight system. The parasympathetic is the rest and digest system. That s what we want to be active when we re going to eat and when we re preparing our digestive tract. When you look at this here, here s the thing. Most people in our modern society are very sympathetically dominant. It means we re stuck in fight-or-flight mode because of all the stress that we have in our lives, overuse of stimulants and coffee, and people are smoking cigarettes, and I just tell you there s no reason you can smoke anymore. It s just terrible for you, terrible for your physiology. It basically drives your sympathetic dominance, so you get stuck in fight-orflight mode. Then when that happens, your digestive tract and parasympathetic is your recovery system. The rest and digest system, it cannot function properly. Module 5-6 Week Hashimoto's Transformation Program - Page 4 of 6

5 Part of what we re trying to do here with this program is help your body to recover, and to do that, we re going to have to improve this balance. One of the things that we can do is we can actually help this system to be more active. Let me share with you how we can do that. It s really quite cool. I have training in functional neurology, which functional neurology is working with basically the brain. It s a brain-based approach to health and one of the things that we do is we can do assessments. We do all kinds of different tests if we do exams in the office where we determine if you have populations or groups of neurons in the brain that are firing with less efficiency than other areas. It s not a stroke. It s not a tumor. It s not a disease of the nervous system. It is inefficiency within populations or groups of neurons, which are nerve cells in the brain. We can do all kinds of different tests. Functional neurology is absolutely amazing. What I m going to share with you is functional neurology. Here s the thing: if your vagus nerve is not firing properly, then we want to stimulate the vagus nerve, so how do we stimulate the vagus nerve? Well we want to activate it. We want to activate it with repetition so that it can become more efficient at firing so we have better digestion. For one thing, we have to decrease inflammation and do all the things that we re doing in your diet so that it can fire more efficiently. That s one of the things: inflammation can disrupt it. But what we can do is we can actually do physical exercises to stimulate it. Guess what one of the things that stimulates your vagus nerve is? Chewing. Guess what? We re going to use something like chewing gum and I got a link here because I do not want to be using any chewing gums with regular sugar or any chewing gums especially with artificial sweeteners like aspartame. If it says phenylalanine on the back, you got a gum with aspartame. Throw it in the trash. Do not let anyone have it. I don t like artificial colors either. Do not use artificial colors, artificial sweeteners, or sugar. [0:15:13] This is a brand of gum that contains xylitol, so it s a sugar alcohol. What you want to do is you want to before you eat for about 5 or 10 minutes, you just want to pop in some gum and chew it. That chewing, what it does is it activates these muscles for mastication and it fires some of the cranial nerves; cranial nerves come off your brainstem. All of this activation of theses muscles and these nerves in your face, they fire into the brainstem at the same area where the vagus nerve starts, so the vagus nerve starts in the same area, so we chew and you activate this. You re priming, you re firing your neurons and it s telling the vagus nerve, Hey! We re getting ready to eat. We re getting ready to eat. But what we re doing by doing this in advance and especially focused with chewing gum is that you re really activating your digestive tract. Then what you can do is after 5 minutes of chewing, 5 to 10 minutes, then you eat your food and then your digestive tract is primed. Sometimes we have a sluggish vagus nerve and we don t have good vagal tone. This is a great way to kind of cheat the system and actually prepare our body and start training it to be more active when we eat. It s not something that you re going to necessarily do forever. It s absolutely a great way to improve the system, have better digestion, and start building what we call plasticity in the Module 5-6 Week Hashimoto's Transformation Program - Page 5 of 6

6 system, which means that when we start doing this with repetition, the vagus nerve becomes very efficient at firing. We make it more efficient by doing these exercises to stimulate it. Here s the deal. The other thing to use this gum is if you bloat or if you feel like you re bloating, then you might need to talk because xylitol is considered a FODMAP. You can read about them here, and it can feed something called small intestinal bacterial overgrowth. If that s occurring, chewing gum may not be the thing to do. You might need to do something like these vagal exercises here, which are really fantastic. The vagal exercises, it activates the same nerves as chewing does, but gargling with water, gargle several times throughout the day with water, it will also stimulate the vagus nerve. You don t necessarily do it before you eat, but you could and then you can also sing loudly. Singing loudly, it stimulates all these muscles and nerves here and it fires the nerves into the same area again for the vagus nerve originates in the brainstem and that will help to improve vagal tone and firing of the vagus nerve to the rest of your digestive system. That will help to improve the parasympathetic activity, so you can digest better. These are things that I want you to do. These are things that are going to help you out, that are going to help you digest better. This will help you overcome constipation, which is very common, and I think it s going to be when you can expect these things and you know what to do, it just empowers you, and that s what I m trying to do here. If you have any questions, let me know, but I hope this has been helpful and I will see you on the next module. Remember: this is going to be most likely the hardest week. Hang in there. You can do it. Drink plenty of water. Just hang in there. Follow my recommendations. Let me know if you have any trouble, but I am super, super excited to see where you re going to be in 4 weeks. It s going to be fantastic. It s going to be awesome, so hang in there. Stick with it. You can do it. You can do it. See you on the next video! [End 0:18:36] Module 5-6 Week Hashimoto's Transformation Program - Page 6 of 6