← The Thyroid (and Hormone) Fixer Podcast: Thyropause, Menopause, Metabolism and How to Fix It
The Thyroid (and Hormone) Fixer Podcast: Thyropause, Menopause, Metabolism and How to Fix It
646. Why GLP-1s Will Never Fix Your Metabolism — But T2 + Glutathione Can: The Cellular Truth About Thyroid Optimization Nobody Is Telling You
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GLPs are a piece of the story when used properly, but everything has to work together. The mitochondria, at the end of the day, have to work. And GLPs don't make your mitochondria work better either. The antioxidant system has to work. The cells have to be able to hear that signal and have the resources to act on it. And that is the philosophy behind everything we build, everything I teach every patient that we treat. Welcome to the Thyroid and Hormone Fixer podcast. If you've been told everything is fine, but you're gaining weight despite doing all the right things, struggling with brain fog, mood swings, low libido, or feeling like a stranger in your own body, you're in the right place. I'm Dr. Amy, the thyroid Fixer. And I want you to know right now, I see you, I believe you, and you don't have to figure this out alone anymore. Going to do this together. But I'm also not here to play nice with bad medicine or empty promises. This show is meant to disrupt the entire health space. We're gonna challenge the status quo, connect all the dots other providers miss, and give you real, practical, science backed tools you can use. Today, you're not going to get any more recycled biohacking advice, just truth, strategy and hope. Let's get you back to feeling like the badass human you're meant to be. So if you've been listening to me for a while, or hey, even if you're new, you will soon learn that I am just brutally honest and very, very straightforward. So here goes. Are you ready for this? If you are struggling with your doctor, if you can't get your doctor to order the labs, much less even listen to you, about the fact that you, you now know that your thyroid needs T3, you now know that you have to look at the master gland. Because the thyroid literally determines whether or not you're going to lose weight or lose your hair or gain weight or have energy or even be able to use your brain on a day to day basis, that's the thyroid. It's not your gut, it's not your adrenals. You don't need another detox. You need to fix the master gland. And oh, by the way, those beautiful hormones, estrogen, progesterone, testosterone, yeah, they play in the same sandbox as the thyroid. So if you ignore those and you say, well, I'm just going to age gracefully, then you're just going to get disease sooner. When your thyroid is low and your hormones are low, the bottom line is not only are you more set up for weight gain, constipation, fatigue, hair loss, brain fog, but you're also set up for a greater risk of Alzheimer's and Parkinson's cancer and heart disease. You can prevent all that and live an amazing life at the same time. So what are you exactly waiting for? I'm just curious. Are you waiting for next year to feel better maybe two years from now? Why don't you just do something about it right now? We prescribe to all 50 states. We do it the right way. We are specialists, true, honest to God, functional medicine, specialists in thyroid and hormones. You don't just go to a functional medicine practitioner who's a jack of all trades and masters of none and is going to sprinkle adrenal fairy dust on you. You're going to be highly disappointed and you're going to be out of money. Go to dramy.com, click the big button at the top that says become a patient and just book a free call to find out what you can actually do to get better. We can do it for you. We do it every single day. We have helped tens of thousands of people live their best life ever. And, oh yeah, that's right, prevent diseases that will kill them. Don't wait another day. We don't know how long we have on this planet. We better take life by the reins and live it and live it to its fullest. And we can't do that when we're sick. So it is your choice. Continue being sick and be set up for disease or make a call to literally change your life. Now stop waiting. Do you want to burn fat while just sitting around? Do you have extra weight to lose? Do you want less inflammation? Do you want to reduce your oxidative stress? Do you want to improve your lipid panel, maybe become more insulin sensitive and once again burn fat while you're sitting there at rest at your desk or on your couch watching Netflix. Well, now you can, with the power of T2 that is in Thyroid Fixer. Now, Thyroid Fixer is not just for those with a thyroid problem. It's for everybody, anyone looking to lose body fat to improve their metabolism to have better energy. Thyroid Fixer actually works at your mitochondrial level, so it is stimulating your metabolism. It's also activating ATP, which gives you more energy, nice and steady through the day. Here's the other really cool thing that Thyroid Fixer does. It turns on a gene that prevents fat from. From accumulating all over your body. So that means, yeah, if you slip up and you have the Oreo cookie or the sweet potato fries which are my two favorite. They're my downfalls. That is not going to put extra fat on your butt, your hips, your thighs and your abs. Oh, and your arms. You don't want those jiggly arms. So why don't you just improve your fat burning potential and actually turn on a gene that prevents fat from accumulating on your body with the power of Thyroid Fixer. So as a listener of the Thyroid Fixer podcast, your first time purchase, you can use the code LISTEN20L I S T N2 0. We'll put that down in the show notes and if you've already purchased it, but you just want to save a little something, something extra, then use the code listen 10L I s t e n 10 and grab some thyroid fixers. Stock up today because it will help you burn extra body fat and who doesn't want that? I need you to hear this before you take one more dose of Ozempic, Manjaro, Zepbound, Tirzepatide, Retatrutide or any of the GLPs that we are injecting weekly into our body. Those GLPs do amazing things. Reduce inflammation, they help with fatty liver. I've gone over that multiple times in other podcasts. However, today we are talking about your metabolism. And one of the false assumptions of these GLP medications is that they're actually going to fix your metabolism. That's not the case. They're actually doing the opposite. And I know that's not what your Instagram feed is telling you. I know that's not what the nurse practitioner at the med spa told you when she handed you the prescription and wanted to upset you on a glp. But the data is now in and it is brutal. In the step one trial, the big semi glutide trial that I talked about in previous episodes, 40% of the total weight that people lost on that drug was lean muscle mass. Muscle, the most metabolically active tissue in your entire body was lost in the Surmount 1, the Charepatide trial. I talked about that in a previous episode. Participants lost an average of 9% of their lean mass, their their muscle mass over 72 weeks. And then a brand new systematic review of 35 GLP1 trials published in the Annals of Internal Medicine found that the median person on these drugs is losing somewhere between 25 and 40% of of their total weight as muscle, organ and bone. So now we're seeing bone loss as the next kind of thing. We had oic face. We have the loss of lean muscle tissue where people are looking like shells of themselves. And now we have bone loss or the advancement of early onset osteoporosis. So what are we going to do about it here? Two of the three trials blew past what researchers had even predicted muscle loss would be. We initially heard like 20. Now we're getting upwards of 45%. And here's one that should really just stop you cold in your tracks. 2025, 2025 Study in nutrients on tirzepati combined with a low calorie diet found that participants did not just lose muscle. You ready for this? Their resting metabolic rate dropped significantly. Their metabolism dropped. The drug that everyone is calling the metabolic miracle is actually lowering your metabolic rate. So this is new for 2025 and nobody's talking about it because that might take money out of their pocket. Now again, at the Advanced Thyroid Hormone clinic where we prescribe to all 50 states and we do thyroid hormones the right way, we prescribe GLPs, we do all the time, and we're doing it with you as a patient and we're telling you how to do it the right way so that you don't lose the muscle, you don't lose the bone, you don't downregulate your metabolism. But I mean, 99% of the people out there aren't with us at the clinic and they're using this willy nilly and they are literally dropping their metabolism. And this is exactly why almost everyone who comes off of these drugs regains the weight you, yes, they're going to eat more because their appetite comes back in full force, but they never did anything to increase their metabolism in the first place. So whether you are on a GLP1 or you're not, this episode is for you. Because the bottom line is if you're on the glp, then you better listen up because you need to do something to actually increase your metabolism and protect your metabolism when you come off of it. And if you're not on a GLP and you're like, I just really don't want to spend the money and I don't want to go on one and I don't want to risk the side effects, but I really need a better metabolism, I need to lose this damn fat, then this episode is for you as well. So we know these GLPs, they're going to make you eat less. And here's the thing, your body, being smart, responds the way it always responds to starvation. It burns muscle, it slows your Thyroid output, It drops your body temperature, it lowers your overall metabolism, it lowers the engine speed to keep you alive. You know, if you're revving the engine all time, you're going to wear out the engine and your car is going to die faster. Same with your body if you're revving your engine all the time. If you're starving your. Your car, I don't know if you can starve a car, maybe drive it without gas in it, but if you're starving yourself, your metabolism is going to drop. Even if you decrease your caloric intake by a little bit, you might be like, I'm not starving myself. I'm still eating all day on my glp. You're eating a lot less. And your overall metabolism is going to downshift to match the amount of calories that you're taking in. So if you're taking in 900 calories, 1200 calories, your body kind of down regulates, it downshifts and it goes, you know, this person's only taking in 900 or 1200 calories. We don't need to burn 2000. We need to lower our metabolism, lower the burn. Because we're only getting 900 to 1,200 pounds of fuel, calories of fuel into the body at one time every single day. So we really shouldn't be burning more than that. So let's lower the metabolism a little bit to, you know, keep this person from wasting away. Meanwhile, your body doesn't really realize the fact that you have 20 extra pounds to lose. It's just going to downregulate your metabolism. Now, if you're a thyroid patient and you already have a slow metabolism, and you stack a GLP on top of that, what you are doing is dismantling the very machinery that is supposed to be making you feel like a human being again. So, okay, there's a better way. And it works at a level that no GLP one ever touches. We're going to talk about working inside the cell, and we're going to talk about the difference between suppressing your appetite and actually fixing your metabolism. Because once you understand the difference, you stop chasing the wrong tool. You stop buying into the Instagram posts feeding you misinformation every single day, and you actually start working with the only system in your body that was actually designed to control how much energy you burn, and that's your thyroid at the cell level. So by the end of this episode, I'm going to walk you through exactly why I put two very specific molecules together, T2 and glutathione. And why that matters with your metabolism. How does that tie into what we just talked about? Why that combination does what no GLP one can do. It talks directly to your mitochondria. Okay? So stay with me. This one is going to change how you think about your thyroid and every weight loss drug you've ever heard of. This is a refrain that most doctors and every single GLP1 prescriber never, ever gives you. Now, we give this to our patients, but most GLP1 programs out there, the Rose, the hims, the hers, the whatevers, are out there to make money. They just want your money. Give them money for the GLP and we'll call it a day, thank you very much. They're not teaching you how to use it. They're not caring whether or not your thyroid and your metabolism shits the bed. So let's care about that, shall we? Because I care about that for you. Okay? The thyroid. Now, you've heard me talk about this over and over again. The thyroid makes T1, T2, T3, T4. It makes those thyroid hormones. And the hormones that the thyroid makes enters the bloodstream. And that's what we test. When we test your thyroid labs, we are testing that thyroid hormone that is in your blood. That's why we draw the blood and we test it. But that's not the end of the story. Your thyroid hormone in the blood goes into 30 to 40 trillion different cells. Think about that number for a moment. 30 to 40 trillion cells need thyroid hormone. Now, that T4 to T3 conversion actually starts to happen inside of those tissues, inside of the cells, where it binds to a receptor and then actually does something inside of the cell. So if you picture T4 converts to T3, T3 gets down to that mitochondria cell level, T2 gets down to that mitochondrial cell level, gets into the cell itself, attaches the receptor site, gets pulled in and starts getting like, into the center of the cell, the mitochondria powerhouse, and literally starts doing its job inside of the cell. If one of those steps breaks down, whether it's the production step of t4 to t3, the conversion step of t4 to t3, the entering into the cell, the binding to the receptor site. Do you have too much reverse T3 blocking the cell? Are you pulling your T3? Do you have enough T2 on board to get into the mitochondria and give you a metabolism? If any one of those steps breaks down, you feel awful. Like, your labs can actually look pretty in some instances. You might be one of those people. Now, most of the time, we will see a little bit of a change in the lab, like a low free T3 or elevator reverse T3. But some of you are out there going, like, listen, my labs look darn good. Like they're actually falling into the optimal range that Dr. Amy talks about in her book. Well, you might be having a cell problem, and this is the conversation that you need to hear. Many of you have been told that your labs look normal, your labs are fine. But we, you know, we look at the labs, we go, no, that's not fine. But you know what? We're not going to treat you like a number. We want to treat you like a person and figure out exactly what is going on with you. So we're going to start thinking about energy and mitochondria today. Here's the mental model I want you to install. Your thyroid hormone isn't the destination, it's the messenger. Hormones are messengers. You know, hormones deliver a message to the cell. So basically that thyroid hormone is sending a message to your cell saying, hey, this person sucks at fat burning. So we want to kick some things up a little bit, give them metabolism, burn some fat, and that's the message that it gets. And if the thyroid hormone goes to, let's say a hair follicle, it talks to that hair follicles. You know, this person's been dealing with a lot of hair loss lately. So we really want to kind of kick things up, get the nutrients of the follicle and grow this hair and protect it from falling out again. So that's the message that it's giving. So the destination, the place where metabolism actually happens, is inside every single cell in your body, specifically inside the mitochondria in those cells. So when someone comes to me, comes to us at the clinic with the classic stack, they're exhausted, cold all the time, hair falling out, can't lose the weight, brain fog, you know, they can't even remember why they walked into a room. Constipation, anxiety, depression, joints are ach. You know, we don't immediately ask that person what's preventing yourself from responding to thyroid hormone. Right. We want to look at where is the breakdown? Is it at your gland level? Is the thyroid not producing enough because you have Hashimoto's, or is it all the way down? Like the. The message is getting to the cell, but the cell isn't hearing it, that mitochondria isn't hearing it. So mitochondria one on one and, and why Your endocrinologist isn't talking about mitochondria. Every cell in your body has these tiny organelles called mitochondria. You probably learned this back in like 8th grade biology, right? That powerhouse of the cell. We learned it back then. We never thought about it again, but we're bringing it back into the conversation right now. Mitochondria are where energy is made. They take oxygen and fuel, so fat, glucose, ketones, whatever, and they crank out ATP. ATP is the actual currency your body spends to do anything, to think, to breathe, to make hormones, to digest food, to grow your hair, to repair tissue, to contract a muscle, to fight off a virus. If you don't have ATP, you have no life, literally. And here's the part that might shock some of you. T3 and its little sister hormone, T2, the forgotten thyroid hormone, which we're about to get to talk directly to your mitochondria. They tell them how hard to work they control, how much fuel gets burned, I. E. Calories gets burned. They influence how efficiently those mitochondria turn fuel into ATP versus just heat releasing from your body. There are even thyroid hormone receptors that live inside the mitochondria themselves. So we have thyroid hormone receptors on the outside of the cell. Just like I say, every. Every cell in your body that 30 to 40 trillion. Those 30, 40 trillion cells have thyroid hormone receptors on the outside of the cell. But now we know that thyroid hormone receptors live inside of the mitochondria too. So the powerhouse inside the cell, the mitochondria. 8th grade biology. Picture that little mitochondria having little receptor sites on it for thyroid hormones. Those receptor sites are actually called P43 receptor sites. It's a truncated inversion of the thyroid hormone receptor alpha that sits on your cell. So this P43 sits in the mitochondria matrix, directly regulating mitochondrial gene transcription. So it's telling your mitochondria exactly what to do and when to do it. And honestly, that. That blew my mind the first time I read it. Like your thyroid hormones just don't. Don't bang on the cell door from the outside. They get inside, they walk past the nucleus of the cell, they reach all the way to the power plant and start flipping switches. That's how I want you to picture it. They get all the way in and they start. Just start going to town. That is real thyroid action. TSH Thyroid stimulating hormone goes from your brain to your thyroid and just goes, hey, thyroid gland make more hormone. Now, what I just described to you, right, you can see why why do we even test tsh? We're not even looking at the amount of thyroid hormone that can get to the outside of the cell and attached to that receptor. And we're not looking at do we even have enough thyroid hormone to get into the cell to do its job. So, yeah, why are we even testing tsh? Don't know. Has nothing to do with what's actually happening at cell level. Now, many, many, many practitioners, both conventional and functional, will stop at TSH if it's within the normal range, within normal limits. And then you get prescribed Synthroid, maybe some Levothyroxine, maybe a little bit of Li and 5 micrograms, but we won't go over that. Right, and those are the practitioners that fake you out that they're treating your thyroid, but they keep you sick. Right. Then we'll recheck your TSH in six weeks, send you on your way. But what if your mitochondria are sick? Damaged from years of stress. Who doesn't have stress? Inflammation, infections, bad sleep. Hello, I'm talking to you. Alcohol, environmental toxins. What if the receptors are downregulated? What is? The antioxidant systems that protect those mitochondria are just tank. They're in the toilet. So then you can have thyroid hormone floating around in your bloodstream all day long and your cells still won't hear it. Having thyroid hormone is not the same as responding to thyroid hormone. I'm going to read that again. Having thyroid hormone is not the same as responding to thyroid hormone. So we have to talk about the exhaust. We have to talk about the part that nobody is warning you about. Every time I need to talk to every woman who's been told your labs are normal while your body is screaming at you and rebelling against you. Fatigue, brain fog, the weight that will not come off, mood swings, hair loss, feeling dismissed, frustrated and confused. I get it. And that is exactly why I wrote my new book, the Thyroid Fix. The no nonsense Guide to Fix Fatigue, Fogginess, and fat that won't budge. That just says it all. And it is now available for pre sale. So I need your help to spread the message. I am giving you an ask as my listener and a promise at the same time. If you pre order the Thyroid fix, my promise to you is to continue delivering all kinds of free advice, information, content, education, empowerment. Because that's what I love to do. Whether it's here in the just fix your thyroid Facebook group or I'm on live, I will give you everything I possibly can. If you do me one favor which will be a favor for yourself as well. And pre order the thyroid fix. Now. This book is not another list of supplements, vague advice. It's not a diet plan. It's not filled with recipes. It is a clear, honest guide. It is the Thyroid Bible. It is the last thyroid book that you will ever need because it teaches you how to read your own labs. No other book has done that. It teaches you what medication and dose you need. No other book has ever done that. It will help you to understand why you are being misdiagnosed, why you're being under treated, and why you can't talk about hormones, weight loss or menopause without talking about the thyroid. I called it Thyroid Bible because like I said, this is going to be the thyroid book of the next few decades. When you pre order, you're not just supporting me, you're telling the publisher. This message matters and it needs to get out to the world and it needs to get into the hands of women who have been ignored for far too long. So will you go to thyroid fixbook.com and pre order a copy of yours today? It'll be shipped to you on May 12th and you will get free entry to our all day live event where I will be there answering your questions live, teaching live, and bringing in amazing guests for you to also connect with and ask your questions too. So thyroidfixbook.com pre order yours today. Your mitochondria make energy. They produce exhaust. Just like a car. Burn more fuel, make more exhaust. In biology, that exhaust comes in the form of reactive oxygen species or free radicals. Ros. If you want to really get nerdy, you've heard of that before. Ros. And before you go, wait. Aren't free radicals bad timeout? They're not the villains the supplement industry has made them out to be. Your immune system actually uses those free radicals to kill off pathogens. Your cells use them to communicate. And the wild part is your thyroid literally cannot make thyroid hormone without them, without those free radicals. So the problem is not the existence of the free radicals. The problem is when production exceeds what your body can neutralize, and that is oxidative stress. And oxidative stress is at the heart of just about every thyroid problem that we see. So your thyroid runs on hydrogen peroxide. Okay? Like, listen to this breakdown because it's, it's fascinating. And even if it sounds like it's over your head, it's really not. We learned this back in school, I promise you. Now you might not have ever heard because I Haven't seen any IG influencer talk about this. Who thinks that they're talking about the thyroid the right way? Your thyroid runs on hydrogen peroxide. And here's the fact that floors people when I explain it. Your thyroid intentionally makes hydrogen peroxide. Yeah, the. The same hydrogen peroxide that's in the brown bottle in your medicine cabinet, right? It has to. Without hydrogen peroxide, you cannot make thyroid hormone. Did you know that? Now, here's the chemistry. So an enzyme called tpo, or thyroid peroxidase, which we test on the lab, right. Uses hydrogen peroxide to attach iodine onto tyrosine inside thyroglobulin. I'm going to say that again because it's kind of complex, but I'm enunciating certain words because I always talk about the importance of iodine. L. Tyrosine is a key amino acid that's in thyroid fixer. Metabolism fixer to help your thyroid gland make more thyroid hormone. So an enzyme called TPO, or thyroid peroxidase uses hydro hydrogen peroxide to attach iodine onto tyrosine inside thyroglobulin. That's how T4 and T3 are built in the first place. That's how they're built in the first place. Again, no peroxide, no hormone. And here's the catch that I want you to really like. Let it sink into your soul. Hydrogen peroxide is also one of the most destructive molecules that your body produces. It chews through proteins, it damages DNA, it oxidizes lipid membranes, like that beautiful fat membrane on the outside of your cell that is so protective, it oxidizes that. Think rust oxidation, rust. It rusts your lipid membranes. So then picture this. Your thyroid is sitting there every single day building hormone with the molecular equivalent of a blowtorch. But it needs the torch. But it can't control where the flames go. I love using analogies. Bear with me. It just burns the house down. So that's exactly what's happening in Hashimoto's. Now who cleans up the mess? This is where glutathione walks onto the scene. So glutathione is what biochemists call the master antioxidant. You might have heard of this before. And unlike most supplement industry buzzwords, this one actually is. It's earned. It's earned. It's. It's. Well, it's well given, okay? Every single cell in your body makes glutathione, and every mitochondrion needs it. It's the primary detox and redox Balancing molecule inside the cell. Now here's what it does in plain English, When a free radical is created, glutathione comes in and hands it an electron, neutralizes it neutralizes that free radical and gets converted from its reduced form of GSH into its oxidized form, gssg. Then enzymes like glutathione reductase recycle it back to the active form so it can do it all over again. So that GSH to GSSG ratio is one of the best snapshots we have of how much oxidative stress you are actually under. And in your thyroid, Glutathione, together with a glutathione dependent enzyme called glutathione peroxidase 4 or GP x4 GP times4 is one of the main things cleaning up the hydrogen peroxide that your TPO enzyme just generated. Now you might have to go back and listen to this like two or three times to really let this all sink in because I told you we're getting a little bit nerdy, a little bit geeky, but I'm going to tie it all together. I'm going to tie it all together. Now here's something even newer in the literature that I find fascinating. A 2026 paper in Biomedicine and pharmacotherapy actually proposes that one of the ways thyroid cells die in Hashimoto's like, because your thyroid is always being destroyed with Hashimoto's, so your thyroid cells actually like get killed off. One of the ways that thyroid cells die in Hashimoto's is by a process called feroptosis, iron derived lipid peroxidation when GPX4 activity falls too low to keep up. So the translation when your glutathione system can't keep up, your thyroid cells start tearing themselves apart from the inside out. They start like exploding. They start dying. So when you have Hashimoto's and your antibodies are you 300, 500, 800, 1200, your thyroid is on fire. Remember I always say that those antibody numbers, those are how many soldiers are going out and beating up your thyroid gland on a daily basis. Or think about it as those numbers are the amount of fires being placed on your thyroid, like your thyroid's on fire. Glutathione is the fire department and we can have like the hot guys, like the hot firemen, you know, like the calendars. Glutathione can come shirtless in a fire department kind of outfit. Okay, I digress. Sorry guys, if you're listening to this, but hey, we all have our fantasies, so. And what we see, and what we see in the study is that Hashimoto patients have a lower reduced glutathione and lower glutathione peroxidase activity than someone with a healthy thyroid. But even when, yes, even if your TSH looks normal on paper, we're not talking about tsh. We're talking about overall thyroid health, thyroid function, where we look at all of the markers and we look at your symptoms and treat you like a human being. So if you have a lower defense, right, you have less walls up around your thyroid keeping out the invaders, keeping out the fire, then you have a higher attack. Then all those soldiers can get in, they can start attacking, they can start killing. Your thyroid cells die off. That is the Hashimoto reality. The Hashimoto's vicious cycle. If you have Hashimoto's and everyone, almost everyone listening to this either has it or has someone in their life that does, this part matters the most. Hashimoto's is your immune system attacking your thyroid. That attack creates inflammation. Inflammation creates oxidative stress. Oxidative stress damages thyroid tissue. Damaged thyroid cells spill their contents, including TPO and thyroglobulin, into the surrounding area. That's what we can test. That's why we test TPO antibodies, thyroglobulin antibodies. We test that to see how many soldiers you have. So what ends up happening is that those thyroid cells spill out basically their garbage under stress. They, like vomit, they spill their contents and they're spilling out TPO and they're spilling out thyroglobulin into the surrounding area. And those contents look like a threat to your immune system, which sends in more immune cells, more soldiers, which creates more inflammation, which causes more oxidative stress. And the loop is exactly why simply giving someone Synthroid doesn't stop. Hashimoto's even giving you the right combination of Synthroid and T3 or Armor and T3 or T3. Only it doesn't stop the Hashimoto's destruction. You still have to do something else for that. It doesn't even slow it down. Replacing thyroid hormones the right way is vital for you enjoying your life, but it doesn't slow the destruction down. You are replacing the hormone, sure, but you're doing nothing about it in the bonfire that's still burning in your neck. That study, by the way, is just a quiet little bombshell. Researchers took hypothyroid patients, some Hashimoto, some not, got their TSH into the normal range with T4 only right. Which proves that, yeah, you don't have to be optimized to improve your thyroid. These people, poor people, were on T4 only. And then they measured oxidative stress markers, and the result, oxidative stress was still elevated. The labs look great of their TSH look great, but their cells were still on fire. And that's the huge gap. And that's the reason why you might be on your medication. If you're on T4 only, you're not going to feel good. But even if you're on the right combination of medication, you're still not quite hitting that mark of feeling your best. This might be the reason why. So now let's talk about T2. For most of you listening, you've heard of T4, you've heard of T3. Nobody talks about T2 except for me. I have a couple different podcasts on it as well, but I'm bringing it into this one. 3, 5 Diodo L thyronine, or T2, is one of the natural metabolites your body produces when it actually breaks down T3. So T4 becomes T3, T3 can become T2. And for years it was dismissed as just like a. Just like a leftover, like, oh, that's just a byproduct. We'll just ignore it. But it turns out that that byproduct is one of the most metabolically active molecules in your entire endocrine system. And here's what 30 plus years of research now shows. So T2 acts rapidly where T3 has to go into the nucleus and change gene transcription over hours to days. T2 has been shown to act on the mitochondria within an hour, increasing oxygen consumption and ramping up the electron transport change, I. E. Ramping up your metabolism in the first hour that you take it. It increases resting metabolic rate. In the rodent studies that we have and in the limited human data that we have, T2 administration raised resting metabolic rate significantly. That is the amount of fat that you are burning just sitting here. That is your metabolism. Resting metabolic rate cannot be raised by a GLP. Now, in one human pilot study, T2 increased resting metabolic rate by about 15% and reduced body weight roughly over 28 days without changing TSH free T3, free T4 blood pressure or heart rate. And that is huge. A 4% reduction in body fat is huge. Now, T2 will preferentially burn fat. It won't burn your muscle. Oh, right there. It makes it better than a GLP because it's leaving your muscle alone. Alone it actually improves your fatty liver disease. One study showed that this was done on rats. Yes, but on rats on a high fat diet given T2 stopped accumulating liver fat and still lost visceral adipose, meaning the the fat on your body still lost fat even on an incredibly high fat diet. Now, when I talk about this particular study in different conferences, when I'm on stage talking about it, I always point out the fact that the amount of fat that they use was abnormally high. It was crazy, crazy, crazy elevated. It would be like us taking in like 300 grams of fat. We're not talking about a carnivore keto diet. We're talking about an abnormal amount of fat that really anyone would probably gain weight on. The rats lost the weight. It improves insulin sensitivity and skeletal muscle. It protects mitochondria from oxidative damage. This is all just T2. In a 2025 study on lung cells exposed to cigarette smoke, T2 pre treatment prevented the drop in ATP production, enhanced cytochrome C oxidase activity, and reduced hydrogen peroxide and superoxide levels. And this is huge. In a 2024 hypothyroid rat model, T2 specifically shut down the GCAS inflammatory pathway driven by mitochondrial damage. T3 did not do this. T2 did. That's why I call T2 exercise in a bottle now. It's not a replacement for the gym. Nothing is. But it activates a lot of the same metabolic machinery that exercise activates. Mitochondrial biogenesis, fat oxidation, insulin sensitivity, anti inflammatory signaling. And it does it whether or not you crushed your workout that morning. Okay, so why did we put T2 in a cream form? And why with glutathione? So this is our new T2 cream by the fixer. Talked about it in the thyroid fix book and now it's finally out available on fixer formulas. So this is where we're going to connect every dot. And now you can see why. This is the anti GLP1 approach. GLP1s work top down, shut the mouth, shrink the meal, force a calorie deficit, and let the body burn whatever it has to burn. Muscle absolutely included. T2 works bottom up, walk into the cell, hand the mitochondria, more work to do. Metabolism rise from the inside. Yeah, okay, that's interesting. Those are not the same strategy. They're not even the same philosophy. If you take T2, then you're actually working on increasing your metabolism from the cell level up. And a transdermal cream, if you have GI issues, we get to skip that and get it right into the bloodstream in a bioavailable form. Who doesn't want that? Who doesn't want that? So we are increasing your metabolism, we are decreasing inflammation, we are literally protecting your thyroid from the inside out. And we're delivering the message to the mitochondria that it needs to hear. T2 tells the mitochondria to work harder, to burn more fuel, to make more ATP, to produce more heat. And as a built in consequence to all of that hustle, those mitochondria are going to generate more reactive oxygen species. And that's not like a glitch in the system. That's normal cellular physiology. So when I sat down with my formulator and asked, what else does the cell need when we're driving metabolism this hard? The answer was so obvious, it almost felt like boring. But the cell needs protection and it needs a healthy redox environment. It needs the glutathione tank topped off so the increased ROS doesn't damage the very mitochondria we're trying to wake up. And in a Hashimoto patient, which is the majority of my hypothyroid audience, that glutathione tank is already running low. That is exactly why glutathione belongs in this formula with T2. One ingredient turns up the energy, the other one keeps the engine from burning itself up. I say that again. One of them turns up the energy and the other one keeps the engine from burning itself up. And to me, that pairing wasn't. That wasn't a marketing decision. That's basic physiology. That's why we put it together. Now, a word about the patients and who never feel better on meds. Have you ever known someone, or maybe you're this someone who's free. T3 finally gotten into a great range. Tsh looks perfect. You know, maybe your endocrinologist is patting themselves on the back or your functional doctor is patting themselves on the back and they. You, you still can't lose the weight. You're still waking up tired, you got brain fog, you still feel cold. That phenomenon is exactly what we just spent this whole episode explaining. The hormone is there. The cell is not receiving it properly. The mitochondria are sluggish, the antioxidant defense is just shortened, and inflammation is. Is humming in the background. Reverse T3 is going up because the body is in this conservation mode. In a body like that, we don't need more T4. Might not even need more T3. You got to repair the environment. The hormone is actually working. In. That's what cellular thyroid optimization actually means. And this is why I keep screaming this from the rooftops about optimization. So thyroid optimization is so much bigger than your medication. Medication matters. Yes, it matters. And a lot of you need it. Getting your free T3 into the upper half of the range matters, but so does your iron, your ferritin, your selenium, which, by the way, is a trace mineral that runs your deiodinase enzymes and your GPX for antioxidant enzymes. Selenium is doing double duty for your thyroid every second of the day, so you need that. Zinc, magnesium, vitamin D, gut health, liver, insulin sensitivity, cortisol, sleep, muscle mass, inflammation, antioxidant status. Every single one of those influences how well your thyroid hormones actually work once they show up. And that's why chasing TSH is such tiny piece of the puzzle. Tiny piece of the puzzle. So let's bring this all the way back to where we started. GLP1s, they lower your appetite. They decrease your appetite because they slow the gastric emptying of your stomach. They do not raise your metabolism. They actually lower it. Sorry, didn't want to hear that. I know you want to put earmuffs on, but that's the reality that we just have to face right now. They do not raise your metabolism. They eat your muscle while you're taking it. Now, again, I have to say this like 5000 times. I feel I am not anti GLP. I've said it before in this episode. I'm going to say it again. We prescribe GLPs in our practice at the Advanced Thyroid Hormone Clinic, but we do it the right way. We make sure that you're doing it the right way and we make sure that you have proper expectations, because these GLPs are not going to raise your metabolism. They're going to increase your insulin, they're going to lower your A1C and your glucose, and they're going to decrease the amount of food that you ate. They're going to slow gastric emptying so that you feel fuller, longer. They're going to work on the receptor sites in your brain. They're going to lower inflammation. They are not going to raise your metabolism. And the studies are just out whether you like them or not. When you go into a little bit of a higher dose, outside of that micro dose, you are looking at burning muscle, period. And then there's the whole fear and the reality that when you stop taking them, your body, now with less muscle, has a lower resting metabolic rate than when you started. And that's really why people are regaining weight. Yeah, some of them are just eating more. They take a glp, they decrease the amount of pizza they're eating. Instead of eating three pieces, they're eating one. Then they stop the GLP and they go back to eating three pieces of pizza. Sure, that can happen, but even people that use the GLP to change how they eat, they come off the glp. They're continuing to monitor and control their food intake, but they start gaining. That's because the metabolic rate slowed down. That's not optimization, people. It's not real metabolic optimization happens at the cell level. It happens inside the mitochondria. It happens in an environment where the antioxidant system can keep up with your metabolism. With a metabolic system, it happens when your cells can actually hear the thyroid hormone signal and they have the resources to respond to it. That's the difference between shrinking a person, which is what a GLP does, versus actually healing a person's metabolism, which is what real thyroid optimization does, and giving that person the ability to burn fat, which is what real thyroid optimization does. Now, you know, GLPs, hormones are a piece of the puzzle. It's one piece of the story. GLPs are a piece of the story when used properly. But everything has to work together. The mitochondria, at the end of the day, have to work. And GLPs don't make your mitochondria work better either. The antioxidant system has to work. The cells have to be able to hear that signal and have the resources to act on it. And that is the philosophy behind everything we build, everything I teach every patient that we treat. If you got something out of this episode, share it with a friend who is on OIC or Manjaro, who's ordering Tzepatide from an Instagram influencer, and who cannot figure out why she is still cold all the time, why her hair is thinning, why she's more exhausted now than she was before she started, and why she can't lose the damn weight. She needs to hear this. And she needs to hear it from you, not from me. So share this episode with your friend or take it in yourself whether you're on a GLP1 or not. This is for two sets of people today. These are for my peeps that are on a GLP1. Hope to God you're doing it the right way. Hopefully you're working with somebody like my team to microdose it perfectly for you so you don't get the muscle loss. So you don't get the metabolic shutdown. But if you are on a GLB and you're not working with us and you're like, I'm white knuckling it here, I'm not quite sure whether I'm losing muscle or not. I'm starting to see my mom's arms with loose skin. Then I want you to re listen to this episode and realize what you need to do. You need to work on your metabolism and T2 will increase your metabolism. So I highly, highly, highly recommend. Highly recommend. Can I say that again? Highly recommend that anyone on a GLP, add in T2, add it in. Whether you take my thyroid Fixer, Metabolism Fixer, T2 Cream by the fixer with glutathione that we were talking about today, add in that T2 because the GLP1 is actually damaging your metabolism and you need something in there to support it. And if you are not on a GLP1 because you don't want to, because you don't want to risk the side effects, you don't want to risk the bone loss, you don't want to risk the muscle loss, you don't want to risk the ozempic face and the flat butt or it's just cost prohibitive. Then add in T2, add it in. If you don't like taking a capsule, do the cream because it has the glutathione in it. Parathyroid fixer with T2 cream by the fixer. Rub on that cream with the glutathione. Take a thyroid fixer pill orally to get that T2 in there and a little bit of L tyrosine to kick up production of thyroid hormone at the thyroid level and support your metabolism. People, support your mitochondria. Pay attention to the health of your cells. So no matter where you are in this journey on a glp, not on a glp, just want a better metabolism and a better body and a better functioning cell. Then re listen to this episode, add in some T2 with Glutathione, get the T2 cream by the fixer with the glutathione and love on your body. Love on your body instead of damaging it. Love on it. I'll see you in the next episode. The information shared on the Thyroid Fixer podcast is intended solely for informational and educational purposes. It is not a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Always consult with your physician or other qualified health care provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition, treatment or before making changes to your health care regimen, including medications, supplements or other therapies. Use of the information provided in this podcast does not establish a doctor, patient or client provider relationship between you and the host or between you and any other healthcare professionals featured on the show. 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