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Welcome to The Autoimmune Wellness Podcast Season 2!

Bonus Ep: Hashimoto’s Protocol and Thyroid Wellness w/ Dr. Izabella Wentz is our first episode in nearly 6 months (!) and we’re treating it as a little surprise introduction to Season 2. In this episode, we interview our close friend Izabella Wentz, also known as the thyroid pharmacist. We dig into her experience hacking her own thyroid disease, as well as the ways in which she is now giving thyroid disease patients the power to take back their health.

Topics we discuss include the uniqueness of Hashimoto’s in the chronic illness world, the importance of self-care, and most importantly, the multiple root causes of Hashimoto’s (Izabella’s specialty). This is a powerful episode with one of the foremost voices in the Hashimoto’s community, perfect for folks with thyroid disease who are looking for answers. Scroll down for the full episode transcript.

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Full Transcript:

Mickey Trescott: Welcome to the Autoimmune Wellness podcast, a complimentary resource for those on the road to recovery. I’m Mickey Trescott, a nutritional therapy practitioner living well with autoimmune disease in Oregon. I’ve got both Hashimoto’s and Celiac disease.

Angie Alt: And I’m Angie Alt, a certified health coach and nutritional therapy consultant, also living well with autoimmune disease in Maryland. I have endometriosis, lichen sclerosis, and Celiac disease. After recovering our health by combining the best of conventional medicine with effective and natural dietary and lifestyle interventions, Mickey and I started blogging at www.Autimmune-Paleo.com, where our collective mission is seeking wellness and building community.

Mickey Trescott: This podcast is sponsored by The Autoimmune Wellness Handbook; our co-authored guide to living well with chronic illness. We saw the need for a comprehensive resource that goes beyond nutrition to connect savvy patients, just like you, to the resources they need to achieve vibrant health. Through the use of self assessments, checklists, handy guides and templates, you get to experience the joy of discovery; finding out which areas to prioritize on your healing journey. Pick up a copy wherever books are sold.

Angie Alt: A quick disclaimer: The content in this podcast is intended as general information only, and is not to be substituted for medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Onto the podcast!

Topics:
1. Introducing our guest, Dr. Izabella Wentz [2:36]
2. Hashimoto’s Protocol book release [9:58]
3. The uniqueness of Hashimoto’s [16:41]
4. The liver support protocol [19:36]
5. Self-care: You cannot pour from an empty cup [26:20]
6. The multiple root causes of Hashimoto’s [31:09]

Mickey Trescott: Hey everyone! Welcome back to the Autoimmune Wellness podcast. Mickey here, and Angie and I are super excited to be back with you guys. We’ve taken 6 months off from our podcasting adventure. Can you believe it’s been that long, Angie?

Angie Alt: No, it feels like it was just a few weeks ago that we were releasing everything.

Mickey Trescott: Seriously.

Angie Alt: I mean, honestly we don’t really know how podcasters who have regular shows do it; putting all of this content, editing, and all the details. It’s kind of a lot of work, you guys! {laughs} We do much better producing and releasing our podcasts in batches and seasons. And we hope you guys are enjoying the seasonal format, too.

We’ve actually already recorded our entire second season, which we can’t wait to share with you guys. Because the format is going to be a little bit different this time around, we wanted to bring you two pre-season bonus episodes featuring interviews with two incredible women doing great work in our community as a way to whet your appetite for what’s to come. Mickey, do you want to tell your listeners about our first incredible woman?

1. Introducing our guest, Dr. Izabella Wentz [2:36]

Mickey Trescott: Yeah; so, our guest today is none other than Dr. Izabella Wentz, also known as the thyroid pharmacist and leader of the root cause rebels. Lest you guys think that is a clever band name; it actually stands for community of people who have successfully hacked their thyroid disease. Izabella has made quite a splash in the thyroid community in the last few years since the release of her bestselling book; Hashimoto’s Thyroiditis, Finding and Treating the Root Cause. And the release of The Thyroid Secret documentary series, which you guys, probably, if you’ve been following on our email list or have been on the internet at all in the last 3 months have heard about; hopefully you guys participated in. It was a really incredible experience for everyone. So informative.

And Izabella’s newest book that came out this week; Hashimoto’s Protocol. Izabella is definitely a lady on a mission to spread the word far and wide about healing from thyroid disease, and we feel absolutely blessed to call her a friend and have her in our community. Welcome, Izabella!

Dr. Izabella Wentz: Angie, Mickey, I’m so excited to be here with you ladies today. How are you?

Mickey Trescott: We are awesome.

Angie Alt: We’re great!

Mickey Trescott: Yeah.

Angie Alt: Even better with you on the show. So maybe we’ll just kind of get started. Izabella, you are fresh off the launch of your Thyroid Secret documentary; woot, woot! We promoted it and heard from our followers that it was one of the most thorough and informative resources on thyroid disease they had ever seen. You interviewed literally hundreds of experts as well as patients all over the world; it was really incredible. Can you tell us what inspired you to do a project on such a massive scale?

Dr. Izabella Wentz: Of course, and thank you for being a part of The Thyroid Secret, as well. We, of course, interviewed Mickey as part of that, and it was fantastic to have her share with people how effective the autoimmune paleo diet can be, and how important it can be as part of a healing protocol for people with thyroid disease.

Really, my big passion is ever since I got my health back; I was diagnosed with Hashimoto’s in 2009 after almost a decade of some pretty debilitating symptoms, and kind of mystery symptoms, and I was told they were all in my head and all that good stuff. Until I actually took charge of my own health and was able to recover my health. From that point on, I wanted to spread the message to the world that recovering from autoimmune disease is possible, and that you can feel like yourself again, even if you’ve been diagnosed with Hashimoto’s or Graves’ disease. And really just trying everything that I could do to get this message out there.

The documentary series; I’ve written a book about Hashimoto’s; Hashimoto’s, the Root Cause was my first book, and I have Hashimoto’s Protocol which just came out this week, which is a protocol based book. But I wanted to get together with a group of like-minded individuals; so health care professionals and experts like you ladies, as well as patients who have taken back and recovered their health to create this community and create sort of a movement to share the best practices, to share our stories; to share our research, and inspire and really get the world moving and excited about health recovery, and giving them; raising that awareness and giving people and opportunity to understand and see that people are recovering from thyroid disease every day.

That was really my big motivation behind it; I wanted to get this message out into the broader world; and I know some people with thyroid disease, the brain fog prevents them from reading wonderful books such as ours, and even reading blogs, but sometimes just watching something on a screen can be really helpful in helping people absorb the information.

Mickey Trescott: Yeah; Izabella, I think that the documentary format is just genius because it’s really visual. A lot of people are really visual learners, and seeing you interview and ask these questions, and seeing all these experts and hearing from all these patients; it’s so much more moving to a certain type of person; a certain type of learner that I think that connection is a lot deeper. And then it spurs action, not only in people’s own lives, but then the conversations that they’re having with their friends and family; maybe that’s even sharing the documentary and getting some validation in what they’re going through. And then going into their doctor’s offices and being informed; and saying, you know, “you’re not the only doctor on the planet that doesn’t believe in this. Look; there’s a whole movement of people out here that are fighting for our care,” and it just really empowers them. So it’s really, really awesome; they loved it.

Dr. Izabella Wentz: Yeah, my goal is to create 10,000 success stories with The Thyroid Secret documentary and with my Hashimoto’s Protocol book, and it’s been really, really exciting to see the ripple effect of this. As your listeners know, nutrition is a really, really important part of recovering your health. I was really excited about one story; it was a woman who watched The Thyroid Secret; in episode 5, we focused on nutrition. Right after that episode, she changed over to the autoimmune paleo diet, and by episode 9, she said shew as feeling completely transformed. She had gotten her energy back, and joint pains, and all these symptoms started shedding away from her. And it’s like; the more we can spread awareness about all of these interventions that can change a person’s life, change how they feel, and prevent the progression of autoimmunity; then let’s get this out in a big way, right?

Angie Alt: Yeah, I love that. Those kind of stories; they don’t get old for me. It still gives me goosebumps to hear it, it still makes me; you know, I’m a crier, but it still makes me on the edge of tears. It’s dramatically changing people’s quality of life is such an awesome way to spend your life work, you know? You’re doing a great job on that massive scale. I love it.

Mickey Trescott: And you know, the social media, and implementing this kind of online business stuff; you and your husband have been really, really good at leveraging that tool that I think a lot of us get really burnt out and exhausted trying to get the word out through the online environment. It can be a little bit toxic at times; so you guys really figured out how to kind of hit that where you got people’s attention, you got a lot of building this massive community and people really excited about it, because this is what we need to change the symptoms. You know, we need a large movement of people that are ready to kind of go to battle and get that awareness out there. So it’s awesome.

Dr. Izabella Wentz: Mm-hmm. Yeah, absolutely. We’ve reached 500,000 people with the documentary series; and it’s all a collaboration of our work together, and we’re all sharing our best practices with that.

2. Hashimoto’s Protocol book release [9:58]

Mickey Trescott: That’s just incredible. So, right on the heels of this massive launch, you also have a new book out. You sound like the same kind of crazy person cut from the same cloth that Angie and I are; called Hashimoto’s Protocol: A 90-day plan for reversing thyroid symptoms and getting your life back. So for any of you guys who are listening who may have read Izabella’s first book; you will know that she is very detailed, and there is a ton of information there. I remember when I first got my hands on that book, I was like; holy cow. This is a lot. So what inspired you to write the second book, and how are they different from each other?

Dr. Izabella Wentz: {laughs} So it was a reader, a Pilates teacher, and a discovery of liver support; plus all of my experience with working with over 1,000 people with Hashimoto’s.

To make kind of a long story short; my first book, Hashimoto’s, the Root Cause; it was me recovering my health, and the book was about my story and all the research that I did to help myself. And I just wanted to put it out there for people and say; “Hey, I don’t know every single root cause, and I don’t know what triggered your condition. Here are some things that worked for me, and these are some additional things that may work for you. These are all of the different things that I researched that could potentially help with autoimmune thyroid disease. Some of them work for me; others did not.”

So that was my first book. And I started speaking about Hashimoto’s after that point, and I started working exclusively with people with Hashimoto’s, and just really made it my life’s work, and my focus, and of course, my passion. And I was speaking at an event in Chicago; this was in 2014, early 2014. And I met this wonderful woman named Teresa, and she said, “You know, I really love digging for my health.” My first book talked about the dig at it approach, where you figure out what your individual triggers were, and you kind of dig for these triggers. I try to create a funky acronym, right? {laughs} For it, where it was digestion, infections, gut, adrenals, toxins, inflammation, so on and so forth.

And she said, “I really enjoy digging for my health; but I really wish you would just give me done for me protocols where you tell me exactly what to do. Tell me what I need to eat; tell me what I need to change. Can you give me a plan?” And at first I was like; yeah, I could give you a plan, but I don’t want people to think I’m biased, or I have all these competing interests or whatnot. And I’m like, I think maybe it’s best for people to learn as much as they can, and then pick out what works for them, right?

Then, a little bit after that I had a Pilates session with a pretty intense Pilates instructor who kept telling me which muscles I was using; she gave me Pilates homework, she tried to quiz me in anatomy. And at that point I was like, “oh. Well I don’t want to be a Pilates expert, I sort of just want to be in good shape.” Right? And then I realized that maybe not everybody wanted to necessarily be a Hashimoto’s expert, which my first book sort of taught people to be their own experts. The second book focuses on giving people protocols; so this is exactly the steps you need to take to recover your health.

And the steps I developed came from my work with clients, and these are the protocols that have worked for about 80% of people; we saw very positive significant results. One of these protocols is actually the very first of my fundamental protocols in Hashimoto’s protocol called the liver support protocol. This focuses on helping people support their liver through removing the low-hanging toxic fruit, adding specific nutrients to help themselves detoxify better, and removing specific foods, as well as adding other types of foods into their regimen, and what I’ve found is within 2 weeks of doing the liver support protocol, people see significant difference in their symptoms.

I first discovered this when I was working with a client that was really just reactive to everything; so I would recommend a B-vitamin to her, and she would say, “oh, I had a negative reaction.” Or a probiotic, and she had a negative reaction to that. And she had multiple chemical sensitivities; a lot of joint pains, very high thyroid antibodies and brain...