Thyroid Health: What Is It & Why Is It Important?

We have all heard this from someone as an excuse as to why they can’t lose weight or even know someone who can legitimately say this, “I have a bad thyroid.” What does “having a bad thyroid” even mean though. Also, what exactly even is the thyroid and what does it do. Why is the reason why so many people do have some trouble losing weight and others have learned just to use as an excuse?

In this blog I want to reveal all these answers to you. I want to do this for a few reasons. By sharing this info with you hopefully we can all learn what the thyroid even does and how can we keep it healthy. Knowing this information may also help you to realize if you do indeed have a thyroid issue, which many women 25 and older unfortunately do have, and get the proper help to fix it!

Do I Have A Thyroid Problem?

Let’s talk about health. Now when you think about health and being healthy what comes to mind? If you’re like me and most of the population things like, nutrition, going to the gym, healthy skin, teeth, heart along with many other things all start to come to mind.

Now let’s reverse that. When we think of things that get in the way of us being healthy what are some things that pop into your mind. Do things like snacking, lack of exercise, and even having a slow metabolism pop into your mind? Having a slow metabolism usually gets people talking about their thyroid as that can cause issues with weight loss. If having an unhealthy thyroid is a problem, well then let’s talk about what we can do to make sure it stays healthy!

How Does My Thyroid Affect My Health?

Before we get into how to keep our thyroid healthy, we should first go over the basics of what our thyroid does.

Did you know that the thyroid plays a major role in our metabolism? It actually helps a lot with the growth and development of our bodies and regulates many functions that go on inside our bodies. How does it do this you may ask? The thyroid releases a steady amount of thyroid hormones (T3 & T4)  into our bloodstream. These hormones play a role in our weight, energy levels, our internal temperature, as well as the growth of our hair, skin, nail and many other things.

So as you can see the thyroid handles many important jobs in our bodies!

With the Thyroid controlling and aiding in many things in your body I think we all agree the more we can do to keep it healthy the better. I know many people don’t know about something simple that aids the most with your thyroid. Your Iodine levels.

Iodine is the element needed for your body to make Thyroid hormones. Like I said previously those hormones affect a lot of functions in your body. So we need to make sure we’re getting that Iodine in, especially since it’s essential and our bodies don’t produce it. So how do we get it?

Most Common Sources Of Iodine

Well thankfully Iodine is found in many food sources. Iodine can be found in seaweed, cod, enriched breads, eggs, greek yogurt and even Iodized salt. If your household is like mine you don’t have a problem with having that Morton’s Iodized salt that gets added to almost every meal we eat.

So if you eat or add any of these things to your daily diet then chances are your levels are just fine. If you don’t eat any of these or do so less often, maybe start incorporating a bit more into the diet, just to be sure! It can’t hurt to add a little Iodized salt to a meal or two a day or have a greek yogurt at night versus that bowl of ice cream.

When it comes to energy and weight I’d rather it be easy to handle that then have issues with my thyroid that make these things difficult to deal with. Wouldn’t you?

Now of course there are some issues that are a bit more concerning and you should probably see a Dr for. I just wanted to help bring one useful prevention measure to keeping your Thyroid as healthy as possible.

It’s easier, and usually a lot more cost effective, to take preventive measures to help avoid unwanted issues then to have to pay to fix them later. Plus, if keeping my energy levels up, my metabolism burning and my hair a skin looking shiny and new with adding a bit more Iodine in my daily meals, then by all means sign me up.