He explained to me that severe Iodine deficiencies will lead to goiter, while mild iodine deficiencies usually result in an "underactive" or "sluggish" thyroid leading to hypothyroidism.

Iodine can be found in sea vegetables such as kelp and seaweed, or wild caught seafood that feed on seaweed or kelp on the ocean floor. But if your diet is lacking in these freshwater marine vegetables, and you don’t consume fresh wild caught seafood daily, then there is a good chance that you may have an Iodine deficiency. In the Midwest (Columbus, Ohio) we don't have access to fresh wild caught seafood.

This is one of the reason's why that began to fortify table salt with iodine. Where natural levels of iodine in the soil are low and the iodine is not taken up by vegetables, iodine added to salt provides the small but essential amount of iodide needed by humans.

Iodide-treated table salt slowly loses its iodine content through the process of oxidation and iodine evaporation. This is why taking a Kelp supplement can help with iodine deficiencies.

I had a 30 year old female client who kept a food journal that showed she was only consuming protein and veggies, with the occasional serving of berries for a sweet snack. She also trained 6 days a week and sometimes doing two-a-days and still couldn't drop the body fat.

She went to her "female doctor" had some tests ran and found out her T3/T4 levels were low, but they weren't low enough to require medication. When she added in the kelp supplement she started to drop 3-4lbs of body fat a week and her abdominal skinfolds decreased significantly as well (6mm decrease in two weeks). She's Puerto Rican and stored most of her bodyfat in her midsection. On her 5'1" frame she's dropped 16lbs of bodyfat over a 12 week period, fat loss came slower after the first 11lbs of fat loss, and she actually started to train less.

But my intent was to get to make sure that someone with a "non-science" degree or background could understand their physiology and biochemistry. With that I'm actually working on an article to break down leptin as well, but I wanted to lay the foundation with these four first.

Aside from athletes, I also work with a lot of women, most of which who are mothers, who have had altered hormonal states due to years of taking birth control, hormone replacements due to other female health complications, or different medications that just wouldn't allow for them to lose excess body fat.

I based this article on conversations that I've had with my adult clients who may only have 2-4 hours/week to train due to personal and professional commitments and responsibilities.

We constantly preach that diet is 80-90% of the big picture and I wanted to practically explain how the body's hormonal responses are connected to both training and food choices.