-: Next up is growth hormone and thyroid hormone,
which are two very potent hormones
in terms of affecting our metabolism.
Growth hormone in particular is going to be extremely potent
in terms of nutrient partitioning.
So its main roles are glucose conservation
and the mobilization of fatty acids.
The other thing is it is an insulin antagonist.
So growth hormone and insulin
have essentially two opposite roles.
We just talked about insulin.
Insulin says to use all the glucose you want, we have a ton.
And so all the cells get to use glucose,
where growth hormone is gonna say,
don't use glucose unless you absolutely have to.
There's certain, there's certain cells
that have to use more glucose, and those are gonna be
in the brain and things like red blood cells.
So, the purpose of growth hormone is to conserve glucose
only to the things that need it.
So the other role that it has is it mobilizes
fatty acids to fuel the rest of the body.
So it doesn't put us in a place where we don't have fuel.
It just restricts the amount of glucose being used
to the tissues that use it, but it creates plenty of fatty
acids for everything else to still be able to have energy.
They just have a different source of energy.
Now they have fat instead of glucose,
whereas insulin does the opposite.
It's like, okay, fatty acids get stored,
and everybody gets to burn all of the glucose.
Opposite here.
Glucose gets conserved; everybody gets to run off of fat.
So, in terms of body composition,
growth hormone tends to be looked upon very favorably,
and insulin tends to be looked upon very negatively.
But that's not necessarily the case.
Insulin is very potent in terms of getting nutrients
into the cell for recovery, and growth hormone
doesn't necessarily make you anabolic and grow.
So let's look a little bit about how this stuff functions,
and, you know, what growth hormone really does for us
outside of just this metabolic shift,
and when that metabolic shift is extremely important.
So, one thing is if I have a good growth hormone release,
especially at night when I sleep,
or even just when I'm at rest,
what it does is it lowers the cortisol and catecholamines
that I need to have, because my demand for glucose is less;
therefore, the blood sugar regulation
becomes easier and simpler.
I need less circulating stress hormones, because my body
has shifted more towards utilizing more fat, which means
blood sugar, in a sense, is gonna stay more stable.
So, more glucose being conserved,
more fatty acids being used, less stress hormones.
You can see how this would be ideal for body composition.
It's also extremely, an extreme decrease in stress
for the liver, because if I'm conserving glucose,
well, then the liver doesn't have to work as hard
to supply glucose to the rest of the body.
That's ultimately why the stress hormones
don't need to be elevated, and, you know,
we're burning body fat in the place of glucose.
So, that's hugely beneficial.
If we look at this in terms of sleep,
so, when we go to sleep, it's about two hours
into sleep that we usually get our growth hormone surge,
but really, it's not the number of minutes.
It is the context in terms of our shift in metabolism.
So depending on what our last meal was,
how close it was to bed, that release of growth hormone
is gonna happen not because two hours have passed,
but it's gonna happen when the body needs to switch
over to this glucose conservation mode,
when it actually needs to be like, okay,
we need to switch over to fat and start saving glucose
so that we can keep stress hormones low,
and, you know, we can stay in recovery mode overnight.
The liver can focus on detoxification and stuff
rather than, you know, stabilizing blood sugar.
So that's really amazing for sleep.
We talked about what happens if, you know,
you don't have proper cortisol function.
We get a spike in catecholamines.
If I don't get enough growth hormone at night,
I don't get this glucose conservation,
I'm gonna get excess cortisol,
and I'm also gonna get disrupted sleep.
That's one of the main ways that you can
actually get to the point where you have
an inappropriate response to cortisol,
is because you are elevating cortisol all the time
because you're never doing anything to lower
those stress hormones or lower the demand on the liver.
So it's very important that we have
that healthy growth hormone release during sleep.
If I have excessive insulin, excessive inflammation,
excessive stress hormones, those are all going to compete
or inhibit the release of growth hormone,
both during sleep and also in response to training.
Now, when we look at training, the thing
that is actually going to result in a nice, big release
of growth hormone post-training is the same thing.
It's gonna be these condition where my body says,
hey, we should go into glucose conservation mode.
And the signal for that is holy shit,
we just burned a shit load of glucose.
That happens because if this cell is burning glucose
at a very, very fast rate,
it's going to release lactic acid.
That lactic acid is going into blood,
and it's gotta go somewhere.
It's gonna be basically metabolized or recycled.
One of the biggest ways that we deal with lactic acid
is actually to take it up into the liver.
The liver actually goes through a little bit of work,
recycles that lactic acid back into glucose,
which it can send into the blood.
When that process is happening,
that is a sense, that is a trigger that we just went
through a bunch of glucose.
So what would the body like to do?
It would like to then say, hey, we just burned
a ton of glucose doing this physical activity,
so likely, we should switch over to conserving glucose
when we no longer have that physical demand.
And so, post-training, we get this surge of glucose
saying, hey, let's run off of as much fatty acids
as possible so that we have a better chance at restoring
the glycogen levels in the liver and then the muscle tissue.
This muscle tissue is going to stay sensitive to glucose
and insulin if it was trained.
The effect that growth hormone has on, say,
hey, nobody gets glucose will be overridden by the fact
that this muscle tissue trained.
That means this will get glucose,
but the rest of the body will still run on as much fat.
So now we're partitioning the glucose not just to the brain
and the blood cells, but also indirectly the tissue
that actually worked today is going to be the only other
thing that's getting that glucose in that particular stage.
So, that's good for nutrient partitioning,
but it's really good for facilitating recovery,
especially from a glycogen storage perspective.
It's also a great way of training our body,
tricking our body into getting over to a more fat-dominant,
you know, metabolism.
So doing that type of training is really good
for body composition, because we're gonna say,
hey, carbohydrates are going to this lean tissue,
and this growth hormone thing is gonna tell
the rest of my body to utilize more fat for fuel.
So as long as my macros and my calories
are adjusted appropriately, I can recover
and burn body fat somewhat simultaneously, if you will.
So, growth hormone could be extremely advantageous
if used appropriately for changing body composition
and making recovery from that type of training
actually come a little bit faster and a little bit easier.
Thyroid, in a sense, doesn't affect energy in training.
I won't say that.
It does, to a point.
But its greatest impact
is it affects our energy usage at rest.
So, it's gonna influence the metabolic rate and the function
of all tissues.
We talked about this in the introduction of systems,
is that thyroid is this like, everything is okay.
Like, all systems go.
Like, we have free reign.
Everybody do what you want.
It's a bright, beautiful, sunny day.
We can do, all cells can do
all of the things that they need to do.
Nothing is getting inhibited that requires
any sort of metabolic stimulus.
If we have catecholamines elevated,
we get the opposite, right?
So that is the stress response that says,
hey, if you're not vital to survival in this instant,
you do not get to run your process.
You do not get to use energy.
So, catecholamines actually decrease the effect
of thyroid hormone and can actually decrease
your levels of thyroid hormone.
So chronic stress, elevated cortisol,
elevated catecholamines are going to then suppress
the action of thyroid hormones.
So if you have constant stress hormones,
it doesn't mean, even though those are catabolic,
it doesn't mean that you're gonna be burning
a lot of body fat or anything like that.
It just means you're gonna be getting a lot of nutrients
into the blood stream, possibly with nowhere to go,
and you get in a state of where things are getting
released and stored and released and stored and released
and stored, whereas healthy levels of thyroid hormone,
you're actually doing stuff with nutrients.
You're actually running metabolic processes.
Thyroid hormone is actually gonna affect
your sensitivity to catecholamines.
So, and a lot of other hormones as well.
So, if you have healthy thyroid levels,
you need less of a stress response for it to take effect.
As thyroid levels become lower,
because we're more stressed, and again,
this is kind of one of those like, correlation, causation,
but it always seems to happen together.
As stress hormones go down, stress hormones go up,
right, we become less sensitive to them,
but also, correspondingly, thyroid levels goes down,
and so when we look at, there's like a double biofeedback.
So healthier the thyroid level, then the more responsive,
more sensitive I am to those catecholamines,
but the more those catecholamines get elevated,
then the lower that thyroid hormone gets driven down,
which would then make me less sensitive to those stress
hormones, requiring even more of them when I need them.
So that just gets us into this, you know,
terrible cascade, again, of where we're likely to end up
in an insulin/cortisol seesaw and have cortisol sensitivity
issues, you know, so we'll get disrupted sleep.
All sorts of bad things start to happen
when we get imbalanced here.
The big thing with thyroid is it's that global signal
for metabolic health, because it says everything can happen.
If you had to look at like one hormone,
I would say, thyroid hormone would be the one I would say
when that is in optimal function, then chances are,
your body is in general good health.
Maybe your insulin is a little out of whack
'cause you're not eating quite right or something like that,
but that would be probably my second one would be
actually looking at, you know, fasting blood glucose
or insulin values, but if I had to pick one marker
that was just like, this is global health,
it would be thyroid, because it's the permissible thing
that says, your cells can do what they need to do.
And if your cells can do what they need to do,
the odds of you being healthy, the odds of you being
functional, are much higher than if certain of your
cellular processes are being inhibited by stress responses,
and that could be detoxification, that could be repair,
that could be regulating the inflammatory response,
all sorts of things that you need from a recovery
perspective, that you need from a health maintenance
perspective, could be getting shut off.
So this is why I think that's, you know,
a huge global marker for us, is to look at,
okay, how do I do, how do I get somebody's thyroid level up?
You have to decrease their stress
and get all their cells healthy.
You have to, you have to give their body permission
to do all the processes, which is why
a lot of people really struggle.
Like, oh, this nutrients is good for this.
But in reality, you have to get global health up
if you wanna improve thyroid hormone function.