Dr. C: Dr.

Christianson here with you, and this is going to be an extra special episode of
the Adrenal Reset Summit. I am so jazzed to have one of my all-time favorite
people and dearest friends, Dr. Izabella Wentz, here with us today. Her own
thyroid became diagnosed, affecting her health, around 2009, and since then, I
think she's done more than anyone I've known to really give people the
encouragement, the hope, and the tools to know, if this is affecting them, that
they can turn this around, and how to do so.

She wrote the New York Times bestselling guide, "Hashimoto's Thyroiditis:
Treating the Root Cause," and now, the number one New York Times bestseller,
"Hashimoto's Protocol: The 90-day Plan for Reversing Thyroid Symptoms and
Getting Your Life Back."

So, Dr. Wentz is here with us, and going to give us some insights that tie in with
the adrenal health, and I'm super jazzed to have you here. Hey, Izabella.

Dr. Wentz: Hey, Dr. Christianson, it's so amazing to be here with you. I so enjoy connecting
with you, and I'm so grateful for the work that you're doing in the world.

Dr. C: Yeah, really happy to share you, and right back to you times ten. So, tell me,
how did you go from being a mild-mannered girl to the thyroid pharmacist?

Dr. Wentz: You know, I had to. My own thyroid journey started probably a long time ago.
Probably when I was a child, I was exposed to Chernobyl, and then I went
through life feeling decent, feeling mostly human, and then sometime during
my first year in college, I came down with this course of mono, the Epstein-Barr
virus, and I was never quite the same after that.

Year after year, I would have more symptoms and lose more of myself. I would
have fatigue, and then panic attacks, carpal tunnel, hair loss, palpitations,
anxiety, social anxiety. It just was almost like a running joke that every year, I
got a new condition. And it wasn't anything like cancer. It wasn't anything
diagnosable, but it was like, irritable bowel syndrome, and then acid reflux, and
allergies, and I was like, "What is going on?"

Finally, at age 27, I'm sleeping for 12 hours a night, my hair is falling out, I'm
having acid reflux multiple times a day. I'm sleeping pretty much upright with a
wedge pillow because the acid reflux is just keeping me up almost every night. I
ended up pursuing some additional testing and learned that I had Hashimoto's. I
had high thyroid antibodies, and my thyroid was also failing, so my thyroid gland
was not making enough of its own thyroid hormone.

Dr Isabella Wentz Page 2 of 13

 I was explaining a lot of my symptoms, a lot of what I was going through, and
finally, for the first time in years, I felt validated, because people were telling me
that I was depressed, stressed, that I was in college, so that's why I had all the
symptoms. The funniest was I was just getting older. I was 25 at the time, right?

I was like, finally, I have a name for this thing that I've been going through, and
now that I have a name, and I've recognized it, what are the things I can do to
make myself the healthiest person with this condition? Can I do anything to
maybe prevent how aggressive the condition is, or make it less aggressive, or
slow it down somehow.

What do I have to do to feel better, because the medications I was prescribed

were helpful, but I only went from sleeping 12 hours a night to 11 hours. Instead
of sleeping with two blankets, I only needed one, so that was a big plus, but at
the same time, I wanted to know what I could do to get myself better.

I started to become a human guinea pig, which lead to becoming an expert,

eventually. Once I got my health back and felt human again, I thought I needed
to share this with the world, and I needed to shout it from the rooftops,
because there were so many men and women that were being told it was in
their head, that they were stressed, depressed, fat and lazy. Whatever the
messages we get from the traditional medical community about why we're
feeling off and when we're just trying to seek help.

I wanted to let people know that there were things they could do. There were
professionals they could see, like yourself, that would actually help them to
really get their health back, not just get their numbers to look normal again,
right?

Dr. C: You know, I think a lot of people have certainly had a process like that, but some
of the things that were different about you were that you were already a
pharmacist. You were very fluent, in medicine, and able to sort through
research. You also had just a certain level of diligence and tenacity. You went
through so many more data points individuals experienced, and just worked
hard to gather a lot of this together.

Dr. Wentz: Yeah, and I still work as a consultant pharmacist for people with really
complicated healthcare conditions. So, if they were on eight or more
medications, and had four or five medical conditions, they were my clients, and
I had to figure out what was going on with them.

A lot of times, they had rare genetic disorders, rare types of conditions that
didn't have best practices outlined for them, and so I was constantly doing

Dr Isabella Wentz Page 3 of 13

 research for my clients, whether that was on PubMed, or Medscape, one of the
more up-to-date, more established medical journals. As well as looking at the
experiences of patient forums and parent forums, because a lot of times, the
patients and parents would be the first ones to recognize medication side
effects, or how a particular medication was reacting with the specific condition.

When I got my diagnosis, I was like, a lot of these clients that I'm seeing, their
traditional doctors are missing a lot of things. We had children with cerebral
palsy who were clearly going through pain, and not able to verbalize their pain,
and so they became aggressive with caregivers and family members.

The doctors said, "They're psychotic, let's give them antipsychotics." My team
would say, "Hold on a second, what if this person is in pain?" They would use
physical therapy and other types of treatments to address the pain, and what
the doctors were calling psychotic behaviors would go away.

It was just the person's way to communicate what was wrong with them, and
that kind of awakened me and opened up my eyes to there being more out
there than what we just the boxes that conventional medicine puts people in.

I thought, okay, I'm going to try the methodology I used for my clients with rare
disorders for Hashimoto's, although it's not a rare disorder, it's a mystery.
Nobody really knows, in conventional medicine, what causes it, and there's
nothing else for it, other than to take thyroid medication, and one kind of
medication.

That's how I just pieced all these different things together, and figured out a
plan to get myself well, and share that plan with the world, and have had a lot
of success stories coming from that. People being more successful than I was,
even, in achieving health in a faster time, which is always so amazing to see.

When people just take the things that you put out in the world, they take charge
of their own health, they make these tremendous steps, and they're inspired
and motivated, and they take back their health on their own, with just a little bit
of knowledge.

Dr. C: It's a really incredible thing. When you talked about just Hashimoto's, and when
you were looking at more obscure conditions, and it's been such an arc. The
time that you've been at this, and the last several decades, Hashimoto's was
thought to be a very obscure cause of hypothyroidism, and now the public and
the medical world really gets that it's the prime cause of it. There's so much
more awareness about that.

Dr Isabella Wentz Page 4 of 13

 In your work of always trying to find the real big root causes, causative factors,
how would you describe the connection between the adrenals and
Hashimoto's?

Dr. Wentz: I would say the adrenals and the thyroid are intricately connected. Whenever
we have a person with Hashimoto's, there's going to be, in my opinion, at least a
90% chance that there's going to be something off about their adrenals. They
may not have Addison's Disease, but they're going to have some sort of
potential cortisol abnormalities, where their body is releasing either too much
or too little cortisol, and that can be seen across the board from people with
Hashimoto's.

In one group panel of clients I had, and these were people who did not get
better with the traditional treatments, we saw more than 95% of them had
advanced degrees of adrenal dysfunction, where they had low cortisol levels.
This is something that, in my experience and my understanding of why we
develop an autoimmune thyroid condition, it relates back to adaptive
physiology.

Human beings basically have a feedback mechanism to keep ourselves alive and
safe. Whenever we have events that are stressful to us, that sends signals to our
body that we need to conserve resources, and conserve energy. One of the
ways to do that is through suppressing adrenal function, as well as suppressing
thyroid function.

We frequently will see those two things occurring hand in hand, we'll see,
whenever a person has a thyroid condition, they will have an adrenal condition,
as well, and unfortunately, it's not diagnosed by conventional medicine. It's
considered voodoo, but it's very much true. When you do the right testing, and
you put people on the right treatments, they actually improve.

Dr. C: It's a funny thing. There was a meta-analysis from about three weeks ago on all
things related to cortisol slope. Really, what we would call more the alternative
view on adrenal health, and not Addison's, but really on salivary cortisol, and
the curves being off.

It was looking at how that ties into a big variety of physical symptoms, physical
disease states, and also mental patterns, depression, anxiety, psychosis and
sleep disturbances. The consensus was that pretty much all of these factors
were highly tied into this phenomenon of cortisol slope.

There is some strong evidence to this being real, like your patients that had
lower cortisol output. There's so much data about that being a huge factor for

Dr Isabella Wentz Page 5 of 13

 health trajectories, but there still is a subset of the conventional world that
doesn't get that, so whatever.

Dr Wentz: I think it's silly, and personally, when I was first diagnosed I came from a very
conventional medical training, and through different things, and being very
skeptical of everything, and researching it thoroughly. When somebody
mentioned adrenal dysfunction, adrenal fatigue to me, of course, I looked up
the Mayo Clinic, or one of those websites, and they said the only kind of adrenal
dysfunction is Addison's.

But Addison's is not diagnosed until 90% of the adrenal glands have been
destroyed. So, we can have a person that's walking around with impaired
adrenal dysfunction because of Addison's, but if 80% of their adrenals are
functioning, they're not going to get diagnosed.

And that's just one avenue of adrenal dysfunction. There are feedback loops in
our bodies that can lead us to not properly release cortisol throughout the day. I
know you know there's a lot of research connecting childhood traumas, like
prisoners of war, or people who have been in very stressful situations, where
their body just doesn't react to stress the way that it should.

Their body is sort of living in this different type of altered stress response, and a
lot of it is not necessarily because the adrenal glands are damaged, but it's how
they are trying to respond to the environment that they have been in.

Dr. C: Early in life the body got the expectation that bad things are the norm, so the
whole stress response was something that became almost on a hair trigger, so
to speak.

Dr. Wentz: Right, and we see a lot of that with people with thyroid disorders, and
Hashimoto's, that people continue to struggle with their adrenals, continue to
struggle with the symptoms. A lot of times we can trace back, and they may
have a history of trauma, sexual abuse and physical abuse in their lives.

We're talking about advanced things now, but in some people where their
adrenals don't get better with the regular things, a lot of times they may need
to do some deeper trauma work to try to readjust the way that they see the
world, and readjust how their body responds to stresses.

Dr. C: Any versions or strategies that your clients have found helpful for things like
that, for addressing early-life traumas?

Dr Isabella Wentz Page 6 of 13

Dr. Wentz: I really like EMDR: eye movement desensitization and reprocessing. It sounds a
little bit out there but it was invented by a psychologist named Francine
Shapiro, who found that when she was hiking in the woods and her eyes were
moving from left to right, and she would start off her hike being upset.

By the time she was done with her hike, she wasn't necessarily as upset about
the initial thing that had been really bugging her. So, she came up with this
theory that this eye movement from left to right helps us to reprocess different
traumas, and helps our brain sort of connect on both sides and get unstuck is
one way of putting it.

We found that to be very helpful for people with traumatic experiences, where
perhaps they have been lead to have certain beliefs about the world, that the
world is a dangerous place. They believe that, and their body believes it, and
when you reprocess some of these traumatic events, you can let go of those
beliefs, and you can actually have a more normal stress response. That's been
one fantastic therapy that I would highly recommend.

Dr. C: So, someone will think of or become aware of certain belief they have, or
painful memories, and as they're doing that. I know therapists guide people
through this, but are there also versions that people do on their own? So,
they're thinking about a trauma and then doing specific eye movements?

Dr. Wentz: There are trained therapists that specialize in it, which is a fantastic way to go,
and I recommend that. There's also something known as the butterfly hug,
where you can hug yourself. It's really sweet. You can think about whatever is
really upsetting you.

This works in traffic, like, not while you're driving, at home. Somebody cut you
off. You really focus on what's making you angry, and you kind of let yourself
just go there, rather than trying to suppress it, and talk yourself out of it.

As you focus on that, you can close your eyes and just move your hand from left
to right. You can move it faster or slower, depending on how you feel, and that
will allow you to process some of those feelings that you have in your head, and
you can start feeling how they affect your body, and how they affect you
overall. You do that for a little while, you do that long enough, and you can
really calm yourself down. This works really well for children, too, if they're
having tantrums if they're upset about something.

Dr. C: That's really cool. So, just hold onto yourself, close your eyes, think about the
trauma, the painful emotion, and alternate.

Dr Isabella Wentz Page 7 of 13

Dr. Wentz: Whoever is annoying you, whatever you're upset about, really think about it,
and give yourself that little hug, and give yourself the support. Give yourself
sometimes 30 seconds, sometimes a couple of minutes of doing that, you can
see that the anger and the sadness will lift away.

Dr. C: Is it intentional that you're also using a bit of a good hug, like, you're actually
putting some pressure on, too?

Dr. Wentz: I always think hugs help for everything. That's actually one of my main adrenal
strategies, is to give yourself a hug when even when you're in a horrible mood,
you try to give yourself a hug, and you can't help but to laugh.

Dr. C: Well, and the butterfly hug. Everyone uses the butterfly a lot as a metaphor for
the thyroid, so that's perfect. That's beautiful.

Dr. Wentz: Yeah, I love it. I think it's just one of those little self-care strategies that people
can do in their own homes, and doctors like you, and all of us share information
of things that worked for ourselves and for our clients, but it's really up to the
person to do it, right? Having a plan, having some self-care strategies is really
going to get you from unhealthy to healthy.

Dr. C: A couple of ideas, in terms of just chronic stressors, chronic trauma is EMDR,
butterfly hug on the spot. Not only do we have to think about the past stressors,
but more so the current adrenal function. Strategies for balancing those out in
the present, what are some things you guide people towards?

Dr. Wentz: I kind of have a little bit of a step process, where you focus on resting,
destressing, reducing inflammation, balancing your blood sugar, and then
addressing the nutrients, and adding some adaptogens. Rest is probably my
favorite one, one that I swear by. It's just making sure that you're getting
enough sleep, and you're taking enough time in between your schedule to really
have some space for yourself. Doing things that really nourish you.

For example, I love hiking and nature, and I try to hike every day with my dog for
30 minutes to 45 minutes. If I don't do that for a week or so, I start getting more
stressed out, and if I have to wake up really early for two weeks in a row, after a
while, I start getting stressed out and annoyed. So, really giving yourself an
opportunity to get the rest that you need. For some people, it might be 10-12
hours a night, when they're in severe adrenal dysfunction.

One of the things I really love, and I got this from your book, "The Adrenal Reset
Diet," is going away for a weekend, and just having a sleep holiday where you
close down the curtains in a hotel room, and you just give yourself an

Dr Isabella Wentz Page 8 of 13

 opportunity to sleep. You wake up, and you eat when you need to, and you go
to the bathroom when you need to, and make sure the curtains are down, and
just let your body reset.

Another strategy I really like is the spa month strategy, where for a month, you
de-commit from everything. Any kind of social engagements, any kind of
volunteer work, if you can take a staycation from work, that would be fantastic.
And then you kind of act like you are in a spa. You only do things that you really
enjoy.

I recommend batch cooking ahead of time, so that you have all this food to eat.
You get some rest. You get help with stuff around the house, whether that's
from family members, or even hire people to help with taking care of children or
taking care of some errands.

You just do this for a month, where you give your body an opportunity to just
sort of reset. Pay off some of that sleep debt. Pay off some of that deprivation
that you've had. A lot of us are on caffeine because I feel like it gets us through
the day, but it also makes us not get the proper rest that we need.

Dr. C: That's all awesome stuff. I think people have a sense of needing to care for
someone else when they're in a state of need, but often, they may resist the
self-care or may wait until they're too far along. Or not too far along, more than
it needs to be, and not do that soon enough, so that's powerful stuff.

Dr. Wentz: Even part of this is de-stressing, and just being kind to yourself, and taking care
of yourself. How many of us, if you were late to an interview for, let's say, a job
or something, and you were late, and you overslept, and you spilled coffee on
your shirt, and you had to change. I'm sure there's going to be, a majority of us
would go into the interview, and be like, you're such an idiot, what did you do,
you're failing at life, right?

If this was your daughter or a dear friend, they were stressed out, and they
were trying to get a new job and whatnot, you would never say that to them. I
would hope not, then you're not a very good friend if you did. It's really about
treating yourself the way that you would treat somebody that you love.

I like to think of a small, innocent child, before they become a teenager, right?
Or even my pet. Just somebody you love unconditionally and is doing their best
to be who they are, you treat yourself the same way. Just show up for yourself
with that same amount of compassion you would for others.

Dr Isabella Wentz Page 9 of 13

Dr. C: I love the idea of compassion, too. Something that stuck with me from flying,
from aviation, was they talked about cockpit resource management, which
basically meant depersonalizing yourself as the pilot, and not thinking of
yourself as you, but thinking of yourself as just a resource, and managing that
resource.

Thinking about little things like your restroom breaks, and your hydration, and
your food requirements, and not pushing that resource past its capacity. So,
acting with compassion, or if you can't muster that up, at least think of yourself
as a resource.

You often think you can just ignore your own needs, but if you're thinking about
it as something that's helping you, and helping remission, and serving your
loved ones, and in that way, you think, oh, wow, I need to give this resource
more time, more space, and more nourishment.

Dr Wentz: I love that. I have kind of a funny joke that I share with my husband. I try to take
every Friday off from work, and I'm very passionate about helping people with
Hashimoto's and helping people recover their health, but at the same time, I
had a personal story where I was doing it at my own expense. I got my health
back, and then I decided to help others get their health back, but then got
myself feeling unwell and sick again because I was overextending myself.

Now I have what I call "brand management," where I'll get massages, and I take
Fridays off. I was on sabbatical for a few months after I released the
Hashimoto's Protocols book, and released the thyroid documentary series.
Releasing a summit and a book, it's so much work to get this out into the
universe, and the easier it looks, that means there's more going on behind the
scenes. Everybody watching the Adrenal Summit, it's like, there's a lot of work
that went into this. A lot of heart, a lot of blood, sweat, and tears, right?

So, I took a few months for that off, where I just took a lot of naps. Went to Italy
for a little bit, read some silly books and stuff like that. That was a part of me
taking care of me, and making sure, like you said, that if I'm a resource for
people who need to heal, and you're a resource for your family, for your friends,
for your coworkers and clients, you need to manage that resource, because
what are you going to do if you're bedridden? You're not going to be able to
help anybody, so make sure that you take care of you.

Dr. C: You know, in the adrenals, we talk about how our life demands, our early life
stressors, our day-to-day situations are just so huge towards them. But there
are also some big fundamentals that can affect them and throw them off. You

Dr Isabella Wentz Page 10 of 13

 touched on blood sugar. What are some of the real big fundamentals that
people need to think about along this line?

Dr. Wentz: Any kind of inflammation in your body, and this could be foods that are
inflammatory. These could be exercise, if you're doing too much of it, that can
be inflammatory. There could be people that are inflammatory for you.

Dr. C: I've heard people being called toxic before, but not inflammatory, but it makes
perfect sense.

Dr. Wentz: Yeah, getting rid of inflammatory people is just as good as getting rid of
inflammatory foods. The biggest things we see are going to be a food sensitivity,
potentially some infections that are chronic, low-grade, like H. Pylori, that can
cause inflammation in the body. Any kind of pain and blood sugar abnormalities,
I call people stressors, those could be inflammatory, too.

What's interesting, that I don't think a lot of people are aware of, is cortisol is
actually an anti-inflammatory hormone. Part of the reason when we have
cortisol that's too high, that could be because it's trying to manage
inflammation, and cortisol that's too low can mean that we're not properly
managing the inflammation that's within our bodies.

Often we'll see unchecked inflammation in people with adrenal issues, and they
have to work double-time to try to reduce the sources of inflammation in their
body to help them get back into balance because their body's just not able to do
that on their own.

Food sensitivities, gluten, dairy, and soy, are some of the biggest inflammatory
foods I've found in people with Hashimoto's. I think, generally, in the Western
diet, because these are the most common foods that we're typically eating,
they're going to be the most likely we're going to react to. Then blood sugar
issues, that's going to be a really big thing, where we're eating too many simple
carbohydrates, and not enough good proteins, fats, and fiber. We're not staying
in balance, and that can lead to weakening the adrenals, as well.

Dr. C: That's all awesome stuff. Super helpful. Before the event, I reached out to you,
and I said, hey, you've got so much content, are there some things you could
put together that we could just share with people in this summit, so they can
learn more from you, and connect afterward. You put together a gift for us, I
understand?

Dr Wentz: Yeah. We have a quick starter guide for people, and it talks about getting off
some of the most inflammatory foods, and balancing the blood sugar. This is

Dr Isabella Wentz Page 11 of 13

 just something I really wanted to create because when I first learned about
adrenals, and food as medicine, I did it all wrong.

I knew that I was supposed to be gluten-free, but instead of going real food and
balancing my blood sugar, I did, like, the gluten-free junk food diet, where I was
like this is gluten-free cookies, these are so healthy. Unfortunately, I put myself
on a blood sugar rollercoaster and had some not-so-pleasant things happening.
Anxiety, palpitations, feeling more tired, increase in thyroid antibodies, hair loss.

So I don't want people, especially if they're starting off on trying to do the right
things, to just not know the fundamentals. It's kind of interesting because it
goes against the traditional school of thought. It's not something you're going to
see from Subway commercials, or however else we get our nutrition
information nowadays in America.

Dr. C: We can find that at thyroidpharmacist.com/gift. We'll have that in the show
notes, too.

Yeah, blood sugar is so critical. If you can do nothing else but help your blood
sugar, you will go so far towards improving your adrenals. We call cortisol a
glucocorticoid, and its prime role is just regulating blood sugar, so the less strain
that requires a bit for that, the more it can manage life and everything else.

Dr. Wentz: Absolutely.

Dr. C: Doctor Wentz, thank you again so much for your time. Where should people go
if they wanted to see more about you?

Dr. Wentz: They can come to my website, thyroidpharmacist.com, and I have fantastic
articles that are little snippets to help guide you on your journey. Then I have a
couple of books you can find on Amazon, "Hashimoto's Protocol," and
"Hashimoto's: The Root Cause." If you have Hashimoto's these are going to be
great guides for you. Of course, thyroidpharmacist.com/gift is a great place to
get started and get a quick start guide.

One thing we didn't talk too much about was nutrient depletions, and I'm sure
that you'll cover that throughout this. I also have a chapter on nutrient
depletion, and what role they play in overall health, and adrenal health as well.

Dr. C: That chapter's in which of the books?

Dr Isabella Wentz Page 12 of 13

Dr. Wentz: This is a chapter from my "Hashimoto's: The Root Cause" book, and you get it
for free when you sign up at thyroidpharmacist.com/gift. You get recipes, and
you get a diet quick starter guide, as well as a little guide on nutrients.

Dr. C: That is so awesome. That will be very helpful. Great stuff. Dr. Wentz, thank you
again, and everyone here, great session today. I'm really glad you got to hear
about Dr. Wentz's work, and get some of these insights. Stay tuned, we'll be
back with more really soon. In the meantime, take great care of yourselves. Bye.

Dr Isabella Wentz Page 13 of 13