that um anytime i get to go to a wedding which is like once every three years now i used to be and go to like there's like the time of life where you go to weddings like every other weekend for like three years and all your friends get married. And then you go like five years without one. And then maybe your best friend gets remarried. And then you're the second, you're the best man again. But now every time I go to one, I'm like, did you throw a party for me? You want a band and you want me to get dressed up for a really nice date night. Thank you. All I have to do is go to this little ceremony thing at the beginning. How friendly of you. Such

a party for me. I love that.

Yeah. All of your married friends that are going to show up that have kids, that's what they're thinking. Just a little insight. They're excited because they finally get to breathe for a night. Today on Barbell Shrugged, less about me, more about you. We're going to be talking about all things functional medicine, cortisol specifically, but we're talking briefly. I'd love for you to introduce yourself. And then we're going to dig into a little bit of mold toxicity, which is something we haven't done on the show for a very long time, but I'd love to get a little background. Introduce yourself to the people.

Yeah, of course. Thanks so much for having me on. So for your listeners that don't know about me, don't know about me. My name is Lacey Dunn. I am a functional medicine dietitian living in Jacksonville, Florida right now. I'm obsessed with everything functional medicine. Like you could throw me in gut, cortisol, hormones, PCOS, mold, Lyme, everything. I love it all. And the reason I got into functional medicine was through my own cortisol issues. I created my own hypothyroidism issues from chronic stress, high cortisol, and then that filtered down later down the road and developing mold toxicity, candida, H. pylori, parasites, you name it. So I've been put through the ringer myself. And I think that's a huge reason why I'm obsessed with everything functional medicine is because I've been through it. I understand my clients and I'm able to, in my opinion, be able to help them, but also understand what they're going through at the same time. So I love it. I am so excited that the world of functional medicine is rapidly expanding that you guys are in it here to help people too, because a lot of times, a lot of people are getting lost in the sea of confusion for other people's own opinions. And we're here to make sure that people understand how to fix their bodies and understand their bodies from the inside out. So I absolutely love what I'm doing. And I got my master's degree at Texas Women's University. I got my bachelor's at UGA. So go dogs. And that's, you know, a little bit of insight about me used to do bodybuilding. But now my main focus is just loving my workouts, loving my life and having fun. Tell

your cortisol Genesis story here. How did you end up having those issues? So

I thought I could do everything. I was competing or trying to compete, getting a master's degree, doing a dietetic internship, which is basically an unpaid job working 40 hours a week on top of doing a master's and online coaching. So I was working online and getting a master's doing all that together. And I essentially just developed my own hypothyroidism. It started with like me kind of having like this weird waking and I'm a tiny person. So waking automatically, like you could see it, puffiness, hair loss, literally lost my eyebrows, terrible digestive issues. I couldn't sleep bad acne. I felt like crap. And I just couldn't figure it out. I went to the doctor and I had through my nerdiness through my classes, we were learning about iodine and learning about iron. So I dove into, Hey, iodine iron that is in relation to the thyroid. So I started reading and looking to Aviva Rom. She has an adrenal thyroid revolution. Started reading her book and everything that she said, I was like, this is me. So my doctor, I asked him to check my thyroid levels. And unfortunately, in conventional medicine, doctors just pull, as you guys know, a TSH maybe to check and see, quote unquote, hypothyroidism. Well, that doesn't tell you the full entire story. And I knew from my own research that I needed a TSH, free T4, free T3, reverse T3, TPO, TGAB antibodies to see the full entire clinical picture in regards to what was going on with my thyroid itself. So I did that, got that done. And lo and behold, terrible hypothyroidism. Then they started me on thyroid-based therapy, lipothyroxine. That did nothing, didn't budge anything. They started me on T3, didn't budge everything, anything. And then I started digging deeper. I was like, okay, what are the root causes of why this hypothyroidism could have developed? And also what are the root causes of why I'm not responding or absorbing this thyroid medication? And that's when I started to get into functional medicine even more and started diving into gut, cortisol, environmental toxins, inflammation. And through all that, that's when I was able to figure out additional things causing my hypothyroidism and able to heal that. But I truly believe the key trigger was cortisol and stress, hands down. So

for people that aren't overly familiar with cortisol, it's kind of a pop culture term in many ways. And the way that's probably used in normal conversation isn't like the most scientific. It's like this general stress hormone. If you're feeling stressed out or you're feeling kind of overwhelmed, you say like, my cortisol is high. You're not really truly measuring it. It's like just how people talk. Like what, what really is cortisol and what is it? It's an effect in your body physiologically. Yeah.

So I love cortisol. It's being demonized a lot. And there's a lot of quote unquote, like hype to like cortisol drinks and lower your cortisol, but cortisol is a beneficial hormone outputted by your adrenal glands. And there's a lot, we could talk more about it, but cortisol is essentially important to reduce inflammation, get your body to run away from a tiger, a stressor. And that stressor can be under eating, over exercising, toxins, inflammation, you name it. But cortisol is made as a fight or flight hormone to get us to run from the tiger internally or externally, suppress the inflammation to support our immune system. And then it does a lot of other things, especially when it comes on to the metabolism. So cortisol essentially helps our body go into gluconeogenesis. So we're converting protein amino acids over to glucose. It's basically dumping blood sugar because cortisol helps your body to dump that from your liver. So it's increasing your blood sugar and then also makes you catabolic. So it makes muscle wasting happen and also releases fatty acids into your bloodstream. So with cortisol, it does a lot of things that way with your metabolism, but it also impacts your vasoconstriction, your blood pressure. We have this impact in regards to digestion as well, because the body doesn't want to push all of your energy into digesting your food if it wants to run away from a tiger. And so cortisol past all that also impacts your body's communication, which with the HPA axis, there are hypothalamic pituitary axis and the thyroid, so the HPA axis. So it can cause downregulation and suppression in regards to thyroid hormone output, thyroid hormone conversion. It can cause imbalances or a miscommunication in regards to testosterone creation, estrogen creation, progesterone creation, ovulation, or sustaining progesterone. So essentially anything wrong with cortisol will impact the entire body, whether that's your metabolism, your thyroid, your digestion, your sex hormones, it's demonized a lot, but cortisol, if you think about it, is there to try and help you. And I think that's one of the most important things is in a chronic stress period, you want cortisol to be there to suppress that inflammation and to prevent you from getting sick or ill. But long-term cortisol is when we start developing these issues. What

is, what is like the relationship there between the like menstrual cycle? Um, you kind of briefly touched on that on like the symptomatic side. Yeah.

So there's a lot of different connections in regards to that. So in regards to women in particular, what high stress first will do, um, high cortisol will do is it will prevent the body from ovulating. And ovulation is the only way that you're going to be able to get a period and potentially have pregnancy. Not only that, but it will decrease the amount of progesterone that you can sustain. Cortisol and progesterone are, you know, counter, they're, they counterbalance each other. Stress will deplete your body of progesterone. So essentially what you could see is menstrual cycle irregularities, infertility, but there's a huge connection with lack of ovulation, lack of sustaining progesterone in women particularly. So

progesterone is a precursor to cortisol, correct? What? Progesterone is a precursor to cortisol? No,

no, not per se. So cortisol comes from the adrenal glands and it's going to be a byproduct of, we start with ACTH filtering down into our adrenal glands, making cortisol. And then that will filter down into telling our body, our pituitary to then signal. So we've got GnRH, which is coming from the hypothalamus, then signals LH and FSH, which signal estrogen and then progesterone production. So it all starts from the brain and then the cortisol, which filters down into our sexual hormone creation.

Gotcha. I know also with cortisol dysregulation, it can radically affect your sleep-wake cycles. Like you want to have a higher cortisol. Hands

down. Our circadian rhythm.

It'll fail off throughout the day. And it's kind of the opposite for melatonin. Can you tell us about that? Yeah.

So cortisol, when you wake up in the morning, it should be highest in the morning and lowest in the evening. And that's because when we wake up in the morning, we're supposed to have what's called a cortisol awakening response. So that first 60 minutes upon awakening, we should have this rapid roller coaster up down in our cortisol. This is very important when it comes down to fighting inflammation, apoptosis, which is like the killing and destructed red blood cells, autophagy, all that. So cortisol is very important to be highest in the morning, lowest in the evening. And what can happen is if you have a dysregulated nervous system, whether that's, you know, from chronic stress or night shift or blue light exposure, essentially you can have low end range cortisol throughout the day or high or whatever it is, but there's this inverse connection with cortisol high and melatonin in the evening. And so what you want is cortisol highest in the morning, lowest in the evening, because if cortisol is high, it's going to counteract and prevent your body from producing enough melatonin, which you need to fall and stay asleep. But also it plays a big role with your immune system and your fertility as well, your body's ability to combat different infections. So yeah, huge correlation there.

What are some ways to ensure that, to ensure that the cortisol is highest in the morning, lowest in the evening? That's

a great question. Light, using light as therapy. So I always recommend using sunlight if you can to try and get your body to really have a healthy circadian rhythm. So getting sunlight access as soon as you wake up in the morning is extremely helpful for that. That way you have that cortisol awakening response, getting your body access to sunlight in the afternoon and reducing red light, reducing blue light. I almost said red light because I'm on a red light kick right now, reducing blue light exposure and overall artificial light exposure in the evening, because that blue light and the artificial light can increase cortisol or suppress your own melatonin production. How

quickly in the morning with the sunlight, like, you know, right away, like, so walk outside. Yeah.

As soon as you wake up in the morning, it's the best because that cortisol response, the cortisol waking response is when that within that first 30 minutes is when you have that rapid spike. So you want to try and get that as soon as possible. Does

it matter? Like some people are like, they love to wake up super early. Some people like to wake up. Is there, is there a perfect wake up time for people? I

would say the perfect wake up time is whatever you, you gotta do to do your, live your life. There are, you know, studies or some people say that like, there's this window of opportunity from when you sleep and when you wake up that could be better. I don't truly believe that because there's different types of people. Um, but I like to say like, you need to try and get that sunlight in. And if you can't, there's happy lights that mimic sunlight, that UVA light, uh, that could be helpful to produce or mimic that cortisol awakening response. But if you don't have that, um, that's called a flatline car, flatlined cortisol awakening response. And that's when a lot of people start developing these long-term inflammatory issues, chronic pain, chronic digestive issues, chronic autoimmune diseases, chronic gut issues, things like that. Um,

on those like overall stress side of things, uh, I feel like a lot of times people get uh there's there's kind of like maybe two sides of it of the lifestyle stress like my business my family my kids like the things i need to do etc um but then the full like stress load on my body is also all of the things that aren't perfect internally, whether that's like nutrition, supplementation, and for the lifestyle side of things, like maybe I can go like meditate away some of my problems, but how do people know if this is like a lifestyle stressor that they need to be dealing with that's causing issues or there's just deeper internal health issues that is just wreaking havoc on their immune system that's causing most of the stress. Like if they've got all the lifestyle things handled, but they still have a lot of issues and then tracking those problems down.

That's a fantastic question. And that's a lot of people struggle with this. They do. I like to say, a list of things in your life that are energy drainers and energy fillers first, figure out what in your life could be contributing to giving you love, joy, happiness, makes you feel good versus things that are draining you. That's the first thing that you could do in regards to, you know, your lifestyle. And if you feel like overall you're checking the boxes and there's not like toxic people, all that, you're not overtraining, overworking, then you can go into, okay, what are the additional things that I have not addressed in regards to, okay, how's my diet? What's my toxic bucket overload? And then you can question, okay, what's my environmental overload in regards to things like mold or maybe metals in my water or gut infections, because let's be real, there can be things going on in your gut that can increase cortisol and then cause you to have that high stress or cortisol response from that. But I always do like to say there's a root cause to why we develop these imbalances in our body. We develop hypothyroidism. We develop gut issues. We develop a suppressed immune response from something. And a lot and many times it's from a dysregulated nervous system and some shape or form, some shape or form of cortisol dysregulation. I'm not saying everybody's got high cortisol, everybody's got low cortisol, but there is always a nervous system component to everything.

I mentioned mold a couple of times now and Anders mentioned that at the beginning of the show, like, how does that play into this?

So mold is an extreme environmental stress.