Are you worn out by stress, feel tired but wired, struggle to wake up, unable to relax and have difficulty sleeping? You may rely on coffee and sugary foods to boost your energy, crave salt or sugar, have low mood and motivation and struggle to maintain your weight, particularly around the middle?
If you’ve answered yet to any of these questions, you might need support for your stress response and adrenal hormones.
Are you are always tired, perhaps also feel the cold, generally overweight with thinning hair, water retention, and have poor skin quality? Have you been told, or suspect, your thyroid blood test (TSH/thyroxine) is out of range?
You might need support for your thyroid gland.
Thyroid disorders affect one in twenty people in the UK – could you be one of them?i
The thyroid gland is small, but mighty. It regulates how quickly our mitochondria produce adenosine triphosphate (ATP), the ‘energy currency’ of our body, and in doing so, underpins metabolism and the health of every body system.ii Its key tools are thyroid hormones that communicate with our body cells - thyroxine (T4) which can be converted to the more active triiodothyronine (T3).
If the thyroid functions too slowly, as in hypothyroidism, there is too little fuel to feed the fire and metabolism becomes sluggish. Yet, if the thyroid functions too efficiently, as in hyperthyroidism, there is too much fuel to feed the fire and metabolism starts to work too fast. As hypothyroidism is much more common, this is what we will focus on in this article.
Modern life has created a metabolic ‘energy crisis’. Many people seem to have dysfunctional energy metabolism resulting in persistent fatigue, high stress levels, weight gain and long-term metabolic dysfunction. ‘Unexplained’ fatigue is commonplace, comprising 5-7% of primary care appointments1 and is occurring in younger people too.2 Yet medical practitioners struggle to find solutions and are restricted to looking at a limited range of blood tests to identify obvious culprits such as anaemia. In fact, often the symptoms are sub-clinical and wrapped up in the complexities of energy homeostasis and the wider picture of stress and environmental demand.
Do you have persistent inflammation, perhaps with pain and discomfort e.g. in joints, skin or the gut, or perhaps you’ve had an injury that is taking a long time to heal? Or do you react to certain natural environmental substances like pollen, dust, fur, mould or even foods you eat?
You might need support to balance your immune response
