Wednesday night was never just about thyroid....

Happy Sunday.

On Wednesday evening, Sarah and I hosted a live thyroid training. Seventy-five people registered!

I was nervous beforehand. I will not pretend otherwise. Not nervous in the way I used to be, the old version of me would be nervous and darn afraid of being too much while simultaneously terrified of not being enough. I have shed a lot of that over the last three years, although I am human and that child version of me does show up from time to time to see what I am going to do. But this was not her. No, what I felt Wednesday was different. It was the weight of knowing that people were coming into that room because something in their health was not adding up. Maybe they have been exhausted for years and nobody can tell them why. Maybe their hair is falling out and their TSH came back "normal." Maybe they are in perimenopause and cannot figure out which symptoms belong to their hormones and which ones belong to a thyroid that has never been properly evaluated. Maybe they are a coach watching this play out with their clients and feeling like they do not have enough answers to actually help. These are not hypothetical people. I know them. I work with them. Some of them are reading this right now.

I wanted to sit with each one of them individually. I wanted to look every single person in that virtual room in the eye and say, "I see you. And I am going to give you everything I have for the next ninety minutes

So that is what we did.

Sarah and I each took about forty minutes. We had slides, thank God, because without them I would still be talking right now. Brevity has never been our strong suit and we have made peace with that. But the slides held us. They kept us anchored to the structure while still giving us room to teach the way we actually teach, which is with depth, with context, with honesty about what the research says and what it does not say, and with the kind of clinical nuance that does not fit into a fifteen-minute appointment.

We did not hold back. And I want to give you a taste of what we brought, because this…this needs to live beyond Wednesday night…it has to

We talked about why a single TSH in isolation tells you almost nothing about what is happening at the cellular level and can fully miss what your thyroid gland is doing. A TSH is a suggestion. Your TSH can sit perfectly within range while your Free T3 is low, your Reverse T3 is elevated, and your body is functionally hypothyroid in ways that no one is catching because no one is running the full panel. We walked through what the full panel actually includes: TSH, Free T4, Free T3, Reverse T3, TPO antibodies, thyroglobulin antibodies. Six markers. Most people are lucky if they get one.

We talked about the nutrient connections that rarely make it into the conversation. How selenium supports the conversion of T4 to T3, and without adequate levels that conversion slows regardless of what your TSH says. How zinc, iron, and vitamin D each play roles in thyroid production and signaling that are quietly foundational and almost never assessed. And how supplementing blindly, based only on a singular line of knowledge such as the one I just dropped, can do more harm than good. Too much zinc displaces copper. Iron supplementation without a thorough understanding of why iron is low in the first place creates oxidative stress. Nutrients are not innocent bystanders and they are not interchangeable. A supplement shelf built on a wellness blog is a guess. A targeted protocol built on real data is a completely different conversation.

We talked about what happens when thyroid dysfunction collides with perimenopause, and this is the part I wish every woman in her late thirties and beyond could have heard this part…. Because the symptom overlap between the two is staggering. Fatigue. Brain fog. Hair changes. Sleep disruption. Weight shifts. Mood instability. Difficulty concentrating. Cold intolerance. Anxiety that seems to come from nowhere. These symptoms live in both categories, and the number of women who are told "it is just perimenopause" when their thyroid has never been fully evaluated is something that keeps me up at night. It is also true in the other direction, where thyroid dysfunction is being blamed for symptoms that are hormonally driven by declining estrogen and progesterone, and nobody is looking at the reproductive panel either. The reality is that both can be happening simultaneously, layered on top of each other, compounding each other, and if no one is untangling which is which then no intervention is going to fully land. You are not going to supplement your way out of a problem you have not accurately identified. And you are certainly not going to wait your way out of it.

We brought real clinical scenarios. We talked about what goes wrong when glandular supplements are used and the sad fact of inconsistency with formulations even in the best of efforts by the best of companies. 

We wrapped the teaching portion. And then something happened that I was not expecting as we entered the discussion portion…

A retired nurse who I know well spoke up. She has had tremendous experience working in endocrinology. She is also a thyroid health patient herself. And in front of that entire room she said that working with us taught her more than she learned in nursing school. She asked why this level of nuance was taught… and she said it with conviction. She said it like someone who has spent years inside a medical system and has watched the gaps from both sides, as a provider and as a patient living inside those gaps.

Then a clinical dietitian spoke. She works in a hospital setting with transplant patients. People on twenty-plus medications. Immunosuppressants. Prednisone. Statins stacked on top of vitamin D deficiencies that nobody is addressing because the medication list is already so long that one more conversation feels impossible. She said she came to the webinar originally for herself, for her own thyroid concerns. But sitting in that room, she said she was having a "life revelation" about her patients. She talked about how much of what we covered she could take back into her clinical practice. How the functional lens we were teaching through was something her field is underutilizing. How she wants to advocate for different testing and different approaches now.

I looked at Sarah. Sarah looked at me. And THIS IS IT. This is the entire reason we do this. Not the content. Not the slides. Not the clinical depth, although that is the vehicle. It is the moment when someone in that room, whether they are a practitioner, a coach, or a person who simply wants to understand their own body better, takes what they learned and carries it forward. Into their own health decisions. Into conversations with their providers. Into the way they advocate for themselves or for someone they love. That is how this grows. That is how the people Sarah and I will never sit across from still get a bigger conversation about their health. Wednesday night did not stay in that room. It left with every single person who showed up

I keep coming back to something, though….

While I was speaking on Wednesday, I saw faces. Not just the ones on my screen. I saw every client I have ever worked with. Every consultation I have ever sat in. Every person who came to me already years deep into something that nobody had caught, or something that had been caught and never fully explored. I saw my own family. I saw the people I have NOT reached yet. The ones who are sitting in a body that is sending signals while someone with a clipboard tells them their labs are normal, or “this is how it is”, “welcome to getting older” and sends them home.

I also saw the people who I was not the right messenger for. Because that is reality also. I am not everyone's person. My delivery is not what every single human needs to hear at the right time to make a change. Some people need a different framework entirely. Some people are looking for a ten-week fix to something that has been building for a decade, and I am never going to be the person who promises that but it does not stop me from being a human who wants to reach them

I walked away wanting to do it again immediately. I wanted every single one of those seventy-five registrants there. I wanted a hundred people in that room. Because the conversations Sarah and I have, this webinar, all of our webinars, what Fortify is built  around, is one that most people will never get inside a conventional appointment. And everyone deserves access to it.

So here is what I want to say.

If you were there on Wednesday: thank you. Thank you for giving us your evening. If you were not there: We missed you, but it is a-okay!  Life is life and 6 PM on a Wednesday is a big ask. But I will tell you this. If something in what you just read stirred something, if you are realizing that there are questions about your own thyroid, your hormones, your health trajectory that have not been fully answered, please do not sit on that quietly. Do not sit and wait for life to be less messy, more ideal, less ‘busy’.... Boo bear, you will be waiting until… well let’s just leave it at that.

If you are a coach or a practitioner who wants this level of depth in how you support your clients, our mentorship program was built for exactly that. A community of like-minded, service-driven professionals who want to hold the full conversation, not the abbreviated version. [MENTORSHIP INQUIRY LINKED HERE]

If you are someone who wants to understand your own health picture with the kind of thoroughness that Wednesday night represented, our 1:1 strategy sessions are where that begins. [INQUIRE ABOUT A STRATEGY SESSION HERE]

And if you missed Wednesday and you are reading this thinking, "I wish I had been there"... I want to know! Because if enough of you want it….we will do it again! We’d love to hear from YOU!  Reply to this email with a YES if you’d want us to host this webinar again. Just a yes…Sarah and I will make it happen because we truly want you to have this opportunity!

I cannot express how much you all mean to us. How much what we do lights us up, even on the days it is heavy, and yes there are heavy days. Wednesday night confirmed what Sarah and I already knew: the need for this is real, the hunger for it is growing, and we…..We are just getting started.

With love and a whole lot of fire behind it

Mere and Sarah