Want to know which thyroid medication is best for weight loss? The short answer is pretty much anything that contains T3 thyroid hormone but some of my favorites include cytomel and liothyronine. Other thyroid medications that contain T4 thyroid hormone can be used but they rarely ever help with weight loss. Here’s why:
Hey guys dr childs here today we’re going to be talking about the best thyroid medication for weight loss if you are a thyroid patient if you’ve been struggling to lose weight even though you’re trying to eat healthy you’re trying to exercise and so on this is the video for you because what i’m going to do is i’m going to break down the most effective thyroid
Medications for weight loss so if you’ve been struggling with this then this you should find this helpful if you don’t know me i’m dr childs and i help patients who have thyroid problems people who have hormone imbalances and of course people who have trouble losing weight which is really kind of what this is about we’re going to be talking about the thyroid
But we’re also going to be linking it to weight loss so let’s talk about that now a question i get asked all the time is will thyroid medication help me with weight loss and the answer is it depends now there are certain thyroid medications in certain people that can help and certainly some thyroid medications are far more effective than others at helping with
Weight loss but i want you to understand that before we even talk about all this stuff that thyroid hormone isn’t necessarily the answer to everybody’s problem with weight okay even if you’re a thyroid patient now it is usually part of the equation and it is usually a big part of the equation but it is usually not the case that you get on a thyroid medication and
Let’s say you’re 50 pounds overweight or something like that and you’re going to go from 50 pounds overweight to the your exact target weight in a matter of a couple months it usually doesn’t work like that and we’ll talk about that as we kind of go on a little bit so with that in mind let’s talk about the best thyroid medication and actually we’re going to say
Thyroid meds because we’re going to talk about a couple here thyroid meds for weight loss now without a doubt if weight loss is your primary goal the best medications are those which contain t3 but let me put a disclaimer on here and say that you can it is feasible and possible to lose weight with any thyroid medication however it is far more likely and far more
Efficient to use these t3 thyroid medications these t3 thyroid medications in fact are abused i guess is a good word to describe it but they’re abused by bodybuilders who are trying to cut um extra fat on their body now i do not recommend using it in that way okay and the way we’re talking about it we’re talking about replacing lost thyroid hormone in the in the
Person who doesn’t produce enough thyroid hormone to begin with i’m not talking about using excessive doses of t3 to artificially increase your t3 to burn more fat and to rev up your metabolism that does work but it comes at a cost and it’s not what i recommend okay so the medications which you should know about if you are a thyroid patient which help with weight
Loss include lyothyronine and i’ll talk about these as we go i’m just going to go through these real fast cytomel sustain release t3 formulations of ndt which stands for natural desiccated thyroid and also i should put in here compounded t4 t3 thyroid meds okay so you can you can actually compound t4 and t3 together through a compounding pharmacy and you can
Get whatever ratio of t3 that you want but the key is that you need to have some element of t3 now lyothyronine tends to be or well it is it isn’t doesn’t tend to be it is the generic form of cytomel so cytomel is the brand name lyothyronine is the uh generic name and these both contain pure t3 so if you were to get a prescription for lyrothyronine or cytomel
The only thyroid hormone found inside of those medications is t3 right the active ingredient is t3 that you should understand the difference here between these medications which contain t3 and medications such as level thyroxine and synthroid notice that these are not on this list okay level thyroxine and sensory are not on our list of thyroid medications which
Help with weight loss because they can contain a completely different thyroid hormone and that is t4 t4 is not the active thyroid hormone the reason these are so much more effective is because it contains the active thyroid hormone which is t3 and it skips the conversion process necessary in order to get that by your body so you’re just providing your body the
Direct and most biologically active form of thyroid hormone in this case it’s t3 sustain release t3 that comes from a compounding pharmacy as well the only difference between lyothyrone and cytomel is that this is a sustained release version whereas these are immediate release versions so sustained release tends to be a little bit better for people who um maybe
Are a little bit sensitive to lyrothyrone or cytomel you can actually give these people sustain release t3 it slows down the absorption in the gi tract and it helps the body to be able to use a lot utilize that t3 a little bit better without symptoms ndt which stands for natural desiccated thyroid and includes medications like wp thyroid np thyroid armor thyroid
Nature droid etc lots of different brands fall into uh this you know family of medications called natural desiccated thyroid um they used to be pretty good they’re they’re over here on this list because they’re not the best type of medication because they contain a lot of t4 same thing with compounded t4 and t3 medication but they still contain some element of t3
I think it’s around 20 maybe 21 something like that so when you get any dose of natural desiccated thyroid about 20 is t3 whereas 100 of these um would be filled with t3 medication so there is a difference between the two but yes they’re included here because they contain some t3 so these are the medications that you want to look for and unfortunately these are
The medications which your doctor is the least likely to prescribe for a variety of other reasons which we’ve talked about in other videos but these are the ones that you want to get your hands on um if you can number two would be uh or a couple questions i want to answer here would be relating to t would would be relating to weight loss and thyroid medications
More generally so one of the questions that i get asked a lot is can you lose weight on medications like level thyroxine and the answer is absolutely yes it is definitely possible i have seen many people who lose weight on level thyroxine including synthroid and tyrosine in other versions the difference is that for people to lose weight they must be pretty good
At what’s called thyroid conversion they must not have other issues inside their body which slow down or impair this process so if you are one of those lucky few people there actually a fair amount of people statistically speaking but if you’re one of these people then you can take that level hyroxine and synthroid turn it into t3 on your own and that means you
Won’t necessarily have to take t3 as a medication but if you have a problem converting your t4 into t3 then using a medication like lyothyronine cytomel or sustain release d3 would be preferable in that situation okay so can you lose weight yes is it likely that you’re going to lose a lot of weight for most people no but it’s worth a shot because this is a lot
Easier to get from your doctor t4 level thyroxine and synthetic are a lot easier but you do not see bodybuilders abusing t4 thyroid medication for weight loss you see them using t3 for a reason okay so the next question is how long will it take for weight loss how long will it take once i start taking thyroid medications to see an improvement to see my weight
Decrease now this really depends on the person but i would say you should see weight loss within the first four to six weeks if you are on the right type of medication if you’re on the right dose of medication um and so on so if you’ve been using the thyroid medication for six months and you haven’t seen any weight loss that’s probably not the medication for you
There’s probably something wrong with your dose it’s either not getting into your body or maybe you need to consider looking at something like some thyroid medication which contains t3 so four to six weeks is when you will start to see some benefit of weight loss okay but it may take six plus months or all the way up to 12 months in some cases for you to actually
Realize the total amount of weight loss that you will experience as you’re using thyroid medication the reason is that it just takes a while for your metabolism to rev up once you start taking thyroid medication and it takes a while for that to occur and so six to twelve months by the time you’ve been on a thyroid medication for 12 months and let’s say you’ll
You know you’re going to lose the maximum amount of weight that you probably will on that dose of thyroid medication so for the record i just want you to be aware of that now the next question is how much weight will i lose when i start using the right type of thyroid medication again this is variable but it’s going to come to come as a surprise to most people
That when you find the right dose of thyroid medication it is probably not going to normalize your weight right so the thyroid is usually only responsible for i would say somewhere between 5 and 15 pounds of extra weight so let’s say in the example i used previously i use an example of somebody who is 50 pounds overweight and i said this person is not going to
Just get on some t3 and lose all 50 of those pounds that’s not going to happen but they might lose 5 to 15 pounds effortless effortlessly within that 6 to 12 month range that i just mentioned and the reason for this is what’s a little bit complex but the idea is this when you have a thyroid problem it brings down other hormones in your body and those hormones
Then contribute to weight so of the 50 pounds that you are overweight some percentage of that is from your thyroid some percentages from your estrogen and progesterone some percentages from issues from your gut and the absorption of nutrients and some percentages from low testosterone and cortisol and so on so when you put together this picture you can kind of
Piece together how the weight is compiling to reach that total of 50 and it’s only a fraction is from your thyroid but the other the other bits and pieces of that weight come from other hormone imbalances which may have been caused by the thyroid by the way so you kind of have to put that together but realistically 5 to 15 pounds is what you should expect based
Off your weight uh you know that isn’t always true but i would say for the most part it’s somewhere around there at least in my experience so this is uh when you’re looking to get or when you’re looking to lose weight i would recommend searching for medications which contain t3 if weight loss is your primary goal now you don’t necessarily have to do this but i’m
Talking specifically to those group of people or the group of people that is interested in weight loss there are obviously natural ways that you can do this you can naturally increase your t3 levels you can change your diet you can exercise more and so on which i recommend you do all these things anyway but i want to answer this specific question um in this video
So if you have questions about this let me know in the comments below i’ll do my best to answer those and if you haven’t already be sure that you download my free thyroid pdf resources i have tons of information just like this all designed to help thyroid patients and you can get those all for free if you want down in the description below so make sure you do
That and that’s all i have for you guys today and otherwise i will see you in the next one
Transcribed from video
The Best Thyroid Medication for Weight Loss is… By Dr. Westin Childs