The original blog post (as seen on Undoctored Blog), video link and transcript, are now available in the PCM sub-forum:
⎆UdB: “I can’t lose weight on levothyroxine”
This thread is left in place due to the meta-discussion about transcripts.

This is an enhanced transcript of the audio track from the video posted at:
Undoctored Blog: “I can’t lose weight on levothyroxine”
Wheat Belly Blog: “I can’t lose weight on levothyroxine”

This question came up twice just in one day on the Undoctored Inner Circle but it has come up in the past on other social media like the Wheat Belly Blog and Wheat Belly Facebook page, so I thought I’d entertain this question and post it for everybody to see.

That is: “I take levothyroxine (the T4 thyroid hormone) and I can’t seem to lose weight on the Undoctored or the Wheat Belly programs, and I continue to have low energy. I sleep too much. My hair is thinning. My skin is dry and I’m constipated.”

So these are very common situations in people who take the levothyroxine or Synthroid® T4 thyroid hormone. Well, the problem is not the Undoctored or the Wheat Belly program per se. The problem’s that you were prescribed T4 thyroid hormone. Traditional thinking among my colleagues is that if you take the T4 thyroid hormone you would automatically convert T4 to the active form of thyroid hormone which is T3. (That is the T3 thyroid hormone minus one iodine molecule from T4 and that makes the active form.)

Problem: that might have been true in past but today we are all, all of us, 100% of us exposed to common industrial chemicals such as perfluorooctanoic acid; that’s the residue from Teflon®. You might have not have used Teflon for many years, but even if you used it last time 10 years ago, it’s still in your body. It’s still in the ground water. It’s still in the soil because it persists for decades.

This is true many of these compounds that are very effective at blocking your thyroid — and with the triclosan and hand sanitizer and antibacterial soaps that block your thyroid. And a lot of these block conversion of a T4 thyroid hormone to the T3 thyroid hormone, because they block the action of the enzyme 5’deiodinase. That’s the enzyme that converts T4 to T3.

And so you can take all the T4 you want but you won’t convert it to the T3 thyroid hormone, and you’ll have an inability to lose weight and you’ll feel all the symptoms of uncorrected hypothyroidism: fatigue, needing too much sleep, constipation, dry skin, thinning hair, etc.

So the key is to first, probably fire your doctor. If your doctor has allowed this to happen to you, and gain weight and feel awful, or said things like “it’s in your head” “there’s nothing wrong with you” or “you need an antidepressant” (which is very common by the way) then why would you expect all of a sudden smart answers from that same doctor?

So your best bet is to find somebody who is better informed about thyroid and perhaps somebody in functional medicine or integrative health, who will assess your T3 thyroid hormone including a reverse T3 blood level, and decide whether you’d be better off by replacing the levothyroxine or Synthroid with a preparation like Naturethroid® or Armor® thyroid and others. Those are compounds that have both the T4 and the T3 thyroid hormones. You may even have additional T3 prescribed, and then tailored to your specific needs.

And when people do that, about 80% of them will have a sudden and abrupt weight loss, a reversal all hypothyroid symptoms like fatigue and needing too much sleep. It’s very very simple.

Now, there are about 20% of people who don’t benefit from this but 80%, 4 out of 5 people who take levothyroxine, do better on these combination tablets.

But the key is to find someone who’s better informed on thyroid issues, and who will do this for you. Because there’s no reason to tolerate that kind of awful health crisis because someone just didn’t want to prescribe a better agent for you. So get the right answers and you’ll see your health all of a sudden transforms quite easily.