Thyroid Fix For Insulin Resistance? GLUT4 vs T3

[00:00:00]So, a few months back, uh, this guy comes to me, guy in his early 40s, okay?

[00:00:04]He has a gym equipment business, which is kind of funny when you think about it, right? Because you you figure this dude would be surrounded by barbells and [ __ ] plates all day. He would have zero trouble staying lean. For the majority of his life, that was kind of true. He trained like four times a week.

[00:00:18]He was eating pretty clean, like actually clean, naughty. I eat clean, but I have a sleeve of Oreos every night, you know, at midnight kind of clean. Uh, like a lot of structure. And uh problem is dude was just lot not leaning out like no matter what he did.

[00:00:32]Like his midsection specifically just wouldn't [ __ ] budge no matter what he [ __ ] threw at it. Basically just coming kind of kind of like giving him the finger, you know, even though he was doing everything right. And he wasn't he wasn't one of those guys who just like show up piss at his doctor, right? He was more just curious. He he'd been talking to his training partner between sets one day, you know, like you know, the regular kind of conversation that makes your buddy go like, "Huh?" You know, and uh his buddy just mentioned uh blood work done, right? Not not through a doctor, through one of those like self-direct consumer uh order panels.

[00:01:04]So, this guy, let's call him, you know, Mike. Mike pulls his labs out of pure [ __ ] curiosity. Not because he was feeling like [ __ ] not because anybody told him to. He just wanted to see what was going on under the hood. And what came back was pretty [ __ ] interesting, right? He was not diabetic, not even like pre-diabetic, but it was kind of elevated. His fasted insulin was going up. And his free T3, his freeT3 was in the bottom of the range. So technically normal, but functionally not even close to where I would like to see.

[00:01:33]Now, most guys, they're going to look at these two problems, the insulin and the thyroid as two separate things, right?

[00:01:38]The insulin is a thing over there. The thyroid is a thing over there. And most doctors even, I'm telling you, they would do the exact same [ __ ] thing.

[00:01:45]Then maybe they'll throw some metformin at the insulin, you know, maybe not touch the thyroid because it's in range, right? And just send Mike his way. No followup, no curiosity, and no [ __ ] nothing. And that's the problem, right?

[00:01:58]But what Mike stumbled upon without even realizing is one of the most important metabolic patterns that I run with uh constantly with my clients, and almost nobody connects this [ __ ] these two things, the the insulin and the thyroid, dude, these are the same problem. So, they're feeding off each other in the loop. And until you get that loop, you can train as hard as you [ __ ] want. You can eat as clean as you [ __ ] want. Your body's going to fight you every step of the way because it's a rigged [ __ ] game, right?

[00:02:24]Nobody nobody's going to hand you the rule book either. So, if you want the whole metabolic recovery map, all of the labs, all of the sequencing laid out in order, you know, that's what we build out inside of the op lab engine. But right here, right now, let me walk you through this loop because uh dude, you're you're Let's start with the thyroid side, okay? Because most people kind of get what the insulin does, but they've got no clue how deep the thyroid runs, like the whole metabolic rate uh and and body composition. So, I when I talk about thyroid hormone, I really mean T3, right? Triodothyine, which is the active form, right? Uh it it it basically sets the tempo for your whole metabolism. So, kind of like a thermostat in a house, right? you hold this thermostat at 72, uh the furnace is going to kick in and uh it's going to hold that temperature, right? Your thyroid does the exact same thing except instead of like heating the air, it's actually selling how fast your cells are going to burn fuel. So when T3 is where exactly where it should be, your cells are [ __ ] cranking, right? They're pulling glucose in, they're burning fat, the mitochondria's humming, your body temperature sits right, but when T3 drops, even just a little bit, even when it's technically still within the so-called like normal range, the thermostat dials down. And what happens next is part like the part that really like matters for guys like Mike and the guys like who are listening to me right now. So one of the first things that are going to shift when your thyroid output drops is how your muscle cells deal with glucose. Okay. So your muscles they have these little doors on the surface of the doors uh called glute 4. It's a transport protein. Okay. when the insulin shows up in your blood like after you eat there's a lot of insulin is basically knocking on those doors on your muscles and saying like hey let's uh let's bring some glucose in right so if you're healthy if you have enough thyroid on board the doors open very easily right the glucose is going to get shuttled into the muscles it's going to get burned for energy it's going to get stored as glycogen as well but like it's just very clean when T3 is low you actually build fewer of these glute four doors and the ones that you've got they don't open easily. So insulin is going to show up. It's going to knock and the cell is going to go like, you know, like the the glucose just doesn't get it like it should. So what does the pancreas do?

[00:04:38]The pancreas starts dumping more insulin. So loud and knocky, right? And that works for a while, which is exactly why like guys like Mike don't flag as diabetic in a panel. So their blood sugar is going to look fine because the pancreas is bailing them out by pumping way more insulin than it should have to.

[00:04:54]that jacked up insulin is is doing a shitload of damage in the background and the pancreas is also cannot keep with that [ __ ] forever. Now, there's a more fundamental layer in all of this. Your mitochondria, right, the little energy factories that basically control are inside of every cell that you've got, they run directly by the thyroid hormone. So, T3 literally it walks into the cell and it's going to control how many mitochondria you build through PGC1 alpha. It's going to figure out, it's going to decide how uh efficiently they're going to crank out ATP. So, that's your cellular energy currency. Uh the the actual like fuel that your cells run on and also how to burn uh how well you're going to burn uh fatty acids, right? So, when T3 is low, mitochondrial density drops. It's literally a cellular thing, right? So, the and the ones that you have, they don't work as well. So, your cells are going to make less energy per unit of fuel. And and what's your body to do with fuel that it can burn?

[00:05:50]It partitions it as fat, right?

[00:05:51]Especially visceral fat. So that deep belly belly fat that's around your organs that [ __ ] up your metabolism in all the wrong ways. It's a shitty deal.

[00:05:59]You didn't do a single thing to earn it.

[00:06:00]So the picture thus far is that low T3 means fewer glucose stores over time, which means insulin's got to work overtime, which means chronically high insulin, right? Low T3 also means sluggish mitochondria, which means less fat building, less fat burning, and more fat storage. And that part makes a lot of guys want to like flip the table, right? Make you going to lose your [ __ ] You can be doing everything right in the gym and and everything right in the kitchen, you still be losing this [ __ ] fight because the thermostat is set too low for any of this effort to actually show up. And the research it has really locked this in. Uh so it showed that even what is called subclinical thyroid dysfunction like your TSH looks okay, your doctor tells you're fine, but still is driving like measurable shifts in metabolic syndrome markers. So, insulin resistance, lipid changes, visceral pad piling on, right?

[00:06:50]The data on this is really, really solid at this point. And it's one of those things where the research has kind of actually been sitting there for a really long time, but mainstream medicine is just painfully [ __ ] slow to catch up and then actually pick it up and actually use this type of [ __ ] right?

[00:07:06]But but the the loop, it closes itself because everything that I just walked you through, that's only half of the loop, right? So, that is the thyroid wrecking insulin sensitivity. Now, let me show you how high insulin turns around and beats the [ __ ] out of your thyroid even more because it do, right?

[00:07:21]It does that. And it's it's a it's a feedback loop that's nasty as [ __ ] once it's actually spinning. This is why people stay stuck and they have no idea why, right? So, your body, it makes mostly thyroxine, right, from the thyroid gland itself. So, thyroxine is C4 the storage hormone is just an inactive precursor. It's got to be converted into T3 to do anything. And the bulk of that conversion doesn't happen in the gland. It doesn't happen in a single organ either. It happens in your tissues all over your body.

[00:07:47]Literally, your leg is making more thyroid hormone than your [ __ ] thyroid. Okay? Your your sceal muscle does the biggest chunk of it. Okay?

[00:07:54]Because you're carrying a ton of muscle and the enzymes that flip that active uh in that inactive T4 into T3, they're there, the Diio2. Your kidneys are also going to chip in for for for circulation, right? And your liver is a strong one as well. It's a it is a major conversion site. it has a it does a big share of the of the load as well. So that's the enzymes that are doing this stuff. They're called the iodinasis, right? They're basically the machinery that's going to clip an iodine atom off of T4 and it's going to turn to the active stuff, which is simple enough in theory. The problem is when you are insulin resistant, your liver gets fatty. So that's why they call it metabolic dysfunction associated serotic liver disease, right? Which is a [ __ ] mouthful, but basically means your liver is gummed up with fat and was never supposed to be holding. And a fatty liver does not convert T4 into T3 for [ __ ] right? those deodinase enzymes, they need a healthy liver to run, right?

[00:08:43]And when the liver is inflamed and greasy from the insulin resistance, the whole share of the conversion is going to take a hit. So now you've got a thyroid gland maybe just pumping out a perfectly fine amount of T4, but your body can't turn it into the T3 that it actually needs. And it gets worse. So insulin resistance is going to drive inflammation through your entire system.

[00:09:01]Your inflammatory markers are going to climb and those inflammatory signals are going to suppress thyroid function at a bunch of different levels at the same time. So they mess with the signaling chain from your brain that's going to tell your thyroid what to do. The hypothalamic pituitary thyroid axis.

[00:09:14]They're going to drag down conversion even further, not just in the liver, out in the tissues as well, the muscles included. And they can even make your cells respond less to whatever T3 you still have floating around. So you're getting hit from like three [ __ ] directions at the same time. You get less conversion, more static in the signal, and the cells are basically stop answering the phone whenever T3 calls.

[00:09:34]There's a some solid research showing the interplay between uh metabolic syndrome and thyroid dysfunction. How it actually builds cardiovascular and metabolic risk profiles like a hell of a lot worse than either one of its own. So we're not stacking two problems side by side and adding them up. It's it's more like multiplication multiplication, right? Which each one is going to keep amplifying the other one. Now I watch this [ __ ] play out over and over like a guy's going to go to his doctor. He's going to get his labs. His doctor is going to look at his TSH. He's maybe going to glance at like a total T4 and he's going to say, "Your thyroid is fine, baby girl." So, uh, he's not going to check free T3, just FYI. He's not going to check fasted insulin. He's just going to check fasted glucose, which is the last thing to go out of range here.

[00:10:17]Uh, he's not not going to connect the two systems at all because they get treated in two different silos, right?

[00:10:21]So, the the the the endocrinologist is going to handle the thyroid, the internet or the PCP is going to handle the metabolic stuff, but nobody's looking at the loop. That [ __ ] right? Because the loop is the actual problem. So, I can't tell you how many times uh you know a clients come to me after like seeing two or three doctors and not one not a single one of them ever pull free T3 or fasting insulin on the same panel and actually looked at these side by side. So, that's a a hard a hard no for me because it's not a complicated thing to do, right? It's just two line items on a [ __ ] blood draw. Just two, man. They still can't be bothered by just running them side by side, which is some of the most frustrating [ __ ] in this field, right?

[00:10:58]the the medicine, the way that the medicine is like carved up into these narrow low lanes, it means the conversation basically never happens.

[00:11:05]And the the person stuck in the middle, the guy just busting his ass in the gym and eating right and watching his body flip in the bird, you know, he's left thinking that he's just weak. Uh, you know, he's [ __ ] up. Uh, that that's [ __ ] right? He he uh, you know, he figures that maybe he's got to train harder or eat less or go buy another supplement. In reality, his metabolism is just caught in the [ __ ] feedback loop. Uh there's no amount of willpower that's going to break it until you actually get what's driving it, right?

[00:11:30]So you can why knuckle it all you want.

[00:11:32]You're still going to be [ __ ] stuck.

[00:11:34]If you grind harder, that's not going to fix the system that's [ __ ] rigged against you, right? That's the [ __ ] that's going to keep you trapped. Now, a lot of guys in this spot or or their coaches, they default to cutting carbs, right? Like all the way the [ __ ] down. I get the logic, uh so to speak, right?

[00:11:50]Insulin is high, carbs spike insulin, therefore eat fewer carbs. Makes sense on paper. But from what I've seen with my clients and from what I can pull from the research, this actually makes the thyroid side of the loop work, right? So your body, it needs carbs to convert T4 into T3. And your liver needs glycogen and those diodenase enzymes, they're energy hungry. So when we go super low carb, you're going to yank away the raw materials that your body needs for conversion. So what happens? T3 drops even further. And then the insulin resistance gets worse because now the thermostat is set even lower. You have fewer glucors, worse mitochondria, and more fat storage. You just [ __ ] cinch the [ __ ] loop tighter trying to fix one side. It's a classic own goal and it's one of the most common mistakes that I see. This is why with my clients, I'm a hard ass about keeping carbs up for anybody dealing with thyroid stuff.

[00:12:39]I'm going to keep them up, not like down usually a couple grams per pound per body weight as a floor. Sounds like a ton to people who've been [ __ ] marinating in keto coach for a decade.

[00:12:48]But the evidence for like carbs feeding thyroid conversion is very consistent.

[00:12:52]When you actually run it and you pair it with the right thyroid support, you're going to watch free T3 come up every single time. You're going to watch insulin start to settle down and you're going to watch your body composition finally move in a way that you've been chasing for years. So, how do you spot this [ __ ] in yourself? And more importantly, how are you going to start breaking the cycle? Because it is breakable. Good news because uh you've got to come at it from one connected systems. Okay? Uh that's how you got to do it. So, first thing is the labs. This is where most people are already [ __ ] behind, right? Because they never even had the right markers pulled together.

[00:13:20]So, at minimum, you want to see free T3, non total [ __ ] [ __ ] totals, don't matter. Uh, not just your TSH, right?

[00:13:26]You want freeT3 specifically, fasting insulin, not just fasting glucose, but you want both of them side by side.

[00:13:32]Ideally, some inflammatory markers that would be good as well. So when I see freeT3 parked down in like the bottom of the range next to the elevated insulin, dude, that's the pattern right there, right? Both sides are feeding off each other in that loop and you can't fix by hammering only one side and hoping that the other one sorts itself out because it [ __ ] won't. Now the practical side, it gets pretty interesting, right?

[00:13:55]This is where my approach is going to split with the doctor because most doctors are going to give you levothyroxine and I'm just going to give you actual T3. Like if if the just just think about what we cover, right? If the reason your T3 is low is that the conversion is broken from insulin resistance and fatty liver and inflammation, handing you more T4 is kind of like pouring water into a [ __ ] king toes, right? That's the king's problem, right? Not the water supply. You can just dump all the T4 in the world, but into a jammed up system is just going to back on you and you're going to still feel like [ __ ] There's even research on levothyroxine showing that it does bring T4 levels back. But like whether it actually restores the full range of thyroid function at the tissue level, especially in people's whose conversion is already compromised, that's way messier than the standard piety model seems to assume. The the the body's own thyroid reserve and its conversion environment matters like hell, dude, for a lot more. And even like for for whether that T4 that you're swallowing is actually going to turn into T3 that your cells are going to need it. Now from my my take here from what I can understand with the client is that T3 supports it beats T4 on its own for thyroid picture and uh when there's a metabolic dysfunction in the picture as well because you're skipping that conversion step entirely, right? You're hitting the body the active hormone just straight up instead of leaning on a conversion pathway that's going to be currently jammed. Right? So T4 it only works if you keep that good conversion environment going. And for most people stuck in this loop, they just can't sustain that. The the liver is inflamed, the co-actors might be tapped out, the inflammatory load is high, right? and you give them T4 hoping the body sorts out the way that I see that's like half a plan at best. But thyroid support on its own won't fix this [ __ ] either.

[00:15:26]Okay? Because remember the insulin resistance is driving the thyroid dysfunction at the same time. So you got to work on both sides. On the insulin side, that means you're going to handle your carb timing, not just cutting carbs. So timing them, right? Supporting your liver to to do its job. You're going to be knocking down the inflammatory load. And sometimes you can do some targeted stuff to improve how your insulin receptors respond in the first place. So, the carb piece that is something that I spend a ton of time with with my clients because it's so counterintuitive, right? You figure if if they're insulin resistant, just slash their carbs. But the way that I uh that that I run is is more about where in the day those carbs land and what shapes the body when it gets there. Right? So, post training, for instance, when the glute for doors, they're already very like open for the muscle contraction itself.

[00:16:07]By the way, that's uh independent of insulin. Okay? Uh so, exercise is going to pull glucose into the muscle without actually needing insulin to do it. So that's a window where you can shuttle carbs into the muscle efficiently even with some insulin resistance hanging around in the background. So placing your carbs smart, it becomes part of breaking the loop uh without actually triggering another big insulin dump. And then you got it the co-actors, right?

[00:16:28]Selenium because of the diagon, the zinc for hormone synthesis and insulin receptor integrity, magnesium for basically everything, right? [ __ ] mitochondrial function, glucose metabolism, thyroid conversion, and um those are not things you're just like [ __ ] shotgun blind and prey on, right? Those are that's that's how people burn a shitload of money on subs that do [ __ ] jack [ __ ] right?

[00:16:48]They're got to be dialed into your amounts for your situation, right? In the right amounts. But the the point is the same nutritional base is going to prop up your your thyroid recovery and your insulin sensitivity because of the cellular level. They're literally sharing the same machine. So the people inside of the Optim engine link is in the description here. They have figured out that you can't fix one side without the other. That's basically the whole premise of this how this uh how the coursework is built for the thyroid course. So inside of the engine, there's a thyroid metabolic panel guide that's going to walk you through exactly what to ask for and what the numbers actually mean when you actually see them together, including the free T3 window that I steer towards instead of just accepting the inrange verdict. Right?

[00:17:27]There's a a co-actor approach for thyroid and and metab metabolic support that's built around real biochemistry, not some random list of supplements off the internet. There's the full insulin sensitivity framework discovering the diet, the training, the supplement side, you know, breaking the insulin resistance without thinking your thyroid. And there's the carb titration guide made specifically for people with thyroid issues so you can find your floor and build up from there. And there's a metabolic recovery timeline so you know exactly what to expect week 2 versus week eight versus month four, right? Because this stuff doesn't happen overnight. And um unrealistic expectations are what is is kind of what kills people. Consistency, man. But here's the whole point on on on the whole the input that I haven't touched on yet. It's going to be your uh stress physiology. So the research digging into endocrine changes uh like uh in your uh metabolic spectrum. They're going to the cross talk between like your cortisol, your thyroid, and your metabolic syndrome like those are those markers are going to keep backing up uh basically like what I've watched with clients over the years. So these systems are all wired together, right? And in the old approach of treating one hormone axis at a time while ignoring cross talk, it leaves a huge number of people stuck feeling like absolute [ __ ] So the cortisol thyroid link alone is worth its own video because chronic stress can actually independently choke off your T4 to T3 conversion through the same diagonation pathway that we've been talking about. Which means you can still be doing everything right on the metabolic side and still have a conversion problem because your stress is loading the jam signal. Right? So, back to Mike. When when he first came to me, dude, Mike's free T3 was at the bottom of the range. Uh, and his fasting insulin was up, which is that classic loop. And, uh, we went after both sides at once. Uh, thyroid support to we we got some T3 or to put him in the range where he actually going to function.

[00:19:07]Carbs went up, not down, which freaked him out at first, but you know, uh, people been conditioned to treat carbs as the enemy. They're not the enemy.

[00:19:14]They're they're tool, right? And for thyroid function, they're a critical tool. As a matter of fact, we also dialed in the co-actors that support both conversion and insulin receptor function. Then we shifted his meal timing around his training to cash in some exercise driven glucose uptake. And over the few months, man, uh you could literally watch markers climb in the right direction. Like the free T3 climb, fasting insulin dropped, and a body composition that had been frozen for a solid year finally started shifting. His reaction was like, "Oh my god, you saved my life." Right? That that's that wasn't it. That's literally not how he acted.

[00:19:43]He was like, "Why the hell didn't anybody look at these two things before?" Right? And I I don't have a great answer for that. The information is out there. the research is trying to uh that's tying thyroid to uh to insulin resistance that's been stacking for years and the data is all in the in the papers here in the companion to this video. But the the the data showing that like even subclinical thyroid dysfunction is going to drive a a metabolic decline especially in men.

[00:20:07]That's not controversial, right? It's just not getting used in the way the regular people actually run into the medical system. And until that changes, dude, guys like Mike, they're going to keep grinding away in their guys in the [ __ ] gym. You're just wondering what the [ __ ] is wrong with them, right? When the the answer is right there in two lab values that nobody bothered to put on the same page. So if any of this hit home, if you're staring at your own labs, you're wondering whether there's a loop running in the background that nobody's ever caught, the Optab engine is where we're going to go deep into all of it. The course is going to break down the full metabolic recovery process step by step. And if you want somebody to actually go through your labs and your situation right alongside you, that's what consultations are for. Links are below and I'll catch you guys in the next one. Peace out.