Imagine this: You type the URL of a website (say, just for example (www.healthberth.com) into the address bar of your browser. And you wait. And wait. If you’re on a PC, the little blue hourglass starts to pour. And pour. If you’re on a Mac, the little rainbow wheel of doom starts to rotate. And rotate. (You fellow Mac users know what I’m talking about!)
So what do you to make your computer go faster?
You learn to type faster!
Sound ridiculous? Well, when it comes to energy, that’s what a lot of us do. We take potions, drugs, stimulants, and anything we can find to overcome lethargy, depression, and lack of energy, which is the energy equivalent of learning to type faster on a slow-as-molasses computer. Typing faster is a great idea, but if you’re frozen in cyberspace, it ain’t gonna get you where you want to go any quicker. For that you need to go to the source of the problem – the computer itself.
In your body, you hormones are like the computer.
If they’re not functioning optimally, you can “type” as fast as you like, but it’s not going to make any difference. The email isn’t going to arrive any quicker, the website won’t load any faster, and every so often the screen will freeze. Hormones are the master control center for your body’s energy factory. If they’re not in tip-top shape, you won’t be either.
The sad part of all this is that not all doctors know how to help their patients achieve optimal hormonal functioning and many, even sadder, have no idea what optimal hormonal functioning actually looks like. Physicians can read the chart that tells you whether hormone levels are normal, but failing within a constantly shifting range of lab values for normal hardly tells you whether your levels are optimal. It’s like telling you that you make an average income or are of average intelligence. We’d never accept that “diagnosis” in the areas of money or smartness, but we blindly accept it when it comes to our health.
But don’t get me started.
HORMONES AND ENERGY:
A MARRIAGE MADE IN HEAVEN
A full discussion of the way that various hormones can and do affect your energy levels (not to mention the rest of your health) would fill not one, but many books. It’s way beyond the scope of this one.
So I’m going to briefly mention just a few hormones in this chapter that can have really profound effects on your energy, with the caveat that there’s a lot more to this than I can possibly cover here. (If I left out your personal favorite hormone, please forgive me. They all work together in a giant, interconnected system, and I couldn’t go over all of them. Apologies to the ones such as DHEA, the adrenal hormones, human growth hormone, and all the other fan faves that I omitted to keep this book shorter than War and Peace).
Hormones are the master control center for your body’s energy factory. If they’re not in tip-top shape, you won’t be either.
What I’m hoping is that this information gets you thinking enough so that you dig into hormonal health a little deeper and think twice before blindly accepting a diagnosis of “everything’s normal” from your physician, especially when you think it’s not.
The Body’s Energy Engine
The thyroid is the motor that keeps your energy system running. It’s what Richard Shames, M.D., and Karilee Shames, Ph.D., R.N., call “your energy throttle”.
“How much energy people have, how well they get up in the morning, how well they sleep, and how much stamina they have for the day is directly related to their levels of thyroid hormone”, they say. The Shames ought to know. AS the authors of Thyroid Power, they’re two of the leading experts on thyroid, and they have been sounding the bell as consumer advocates for better thyroid testing for many years.
“As of 2006, experts estimate that as many as 59 million Americans have a thyroid condition, and the vast majority are hypothyroid – and have an underfunctioning, slow, or sluggish thyroid,” writes the highly respected Mary Shomon, thyroid expert for about.com. Add the Shames, “This runway thyroid epidemic seems to be striking menopausal women harder than any other group of patient. By age 50, one in every twelve women has a significant degree of hypothyroidism. By age 60, it is one woman out of every six”.
The main hormones released by the thyroid are triiodothyronine, abbreviated as T3, and thyroxine, abbreviated as T4 (the 3 and the 4 refer to the number of iodine molecules in each thyroid hormone molecule, so don’t go wondering about where T1 and T2 are; they don’t exist). The main job of these hormones is to deliver energy to all the cells of the body. When your thyroid isn’t doing its job properly – or when the hormones aren’t getting to where they’re supposed to get – you wind up with the energy equivalent of that slow-as-molasses computer.
An underperforming thyroid is your worst energy nitghtmare. According to the Shames and other leading lights in the holistic hormone replacement business, this underperforming thyroid is massively under diagnosed.
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