thyroiditis

*** This blog is not to be prescriptive nor give you advice, merely to show you my way of navigating true health in a jungle of advice and pharmaceutical pressure. Please do your own research, ask your own specialists or contact those I have used if you wish to find out more about your personal condition and symptoms. To your very best health. ***

Once again I was bumbling along not thinking much was going on and then suddenly a wave of information comes my way, changes in how I’m functioning occur and improvements noticed to boot.

Following my visit to Kinesiology-Annette a few weeks ago I dropped several supplements that weren’t working for me and added in two new ones.

She wanted to work on the basics first. Get my blood sugar management working well again and boost my liver to start it’s job of detoxifying properly. Alongside this she confirmed that a probiotic I was taking I should continue. As it was I ran out of these a few days later and didn’t immediately replace them. After missing these for a few days I really noticed how they’d been helping with digestive health. So got those back in again pretty quickly.

For about a week after seeing Annette I slept pretty well. I was either sleeping through and waking up about 06.30 or I was waking once and going back to sleep quickly. I was pretty chuffed with this. It’s been a long time since that’s happened and it was like a mini-miracle.

Don’t get too happy for me though, within those 7 days I soon started waking at silly o’clock again. And since then I’ve found myself wide awake at anything from 02.30-03.30 and not getting back to sleep. Whilst it’s frustrating, I am not tired (much like earlier in the year) and I’ve taken to going for walks before even the birds are singing. It’s dark (the skies have been beautifully clear and star filled) and quiet (funnily enough, no cars and no people then) and a rather nice way to start my day if I have to be awake then.

Following Annette’s visit she recommended a book I might like “NAET: Say Goodbye to Your Illness” and in there it shows you how to self test. God help me, that’s all I need is something else to get interested in. So now I’m wandering around self-checking for foods before I eat them. That won’t last long, but it’s been interesting up until now.

I have identified that, for now, I really can’t do chillis. They make me cough and choke and give me an unhappy tum. This is a blow, I damn well love ’em, however I can wait until she does her work on me next year.

As I went into week 36, I made a bit of a discovery. I realised that I hadn’t needed to clear hair from the bath every other day or so. For sometime I’ve lost quite a lot of hair, but that’s stopped. It coincides with me clearing up some scaly cradlecap like stuff on my scalp my hairdresser told me about.. I’ve done two things in this time.

1. Stopped using the shampoo bar I bought in the summer.
2. Started the new supplements.

I suspect it’s mainly 1, but 2 has some part to play too.

So this is great news! Some progress 🙂

Sleep continued to elude me this week and I’ve covered some dark early miles walking in the rain and that’s kept me going.

My mood was definitely reminiscent of earlier in the year this week. I felt quite flat and ‘dimmer switch down’ again like I have before. But interestingly I’ve had some really good business meetings and that’s kept me moving forwards rather than sitting in a puddle of ‘bleurgh-ness’.

And I’ve noticed that despite following the same eating and exercise regime my weight is no longer maintainable. You know when you know? I didn’t weigh myself until today and in two months I’ve gained half a stone with most of that gain being body fat. It’s a good job I know this is temporary, it could really get frustrating.

I’ve kept myself going with my favourite phrase of the moment, “true success is what you do behind closed doors“. It would be so easy to say f**k it at times and eat whatever I want and sit on my bum and do nothing. But nope. That won’t help one bit and so I haven’t.

The really interesting stuff came on Thursday when I chatted with Nutrition-Janie about my recent adrenal stress test results. They came back in and good news my cortisol levels were behaving as they should at certain times of the day. The not so good news is that my DHEA/Cortisol ratio is low and this is going to be causing my inability to build muscle, insomnia, low mood, poor memory and cognition, low libido and immune dysregulation (ah-ha! Hashimoto’s!).

I was relieved to read this. I’d begun to think that I was making this all up and it wasn’t a ‘thing’ at all, it was all in my head. But to see that this can be fixed and these things will be improved made me cry a mixture of happy and relieved tears.

In addition to walking a lot, I’ve been continuing with the strength training and had a very fabulous session on Saturday. I may not be building muscle right now, but when I get this sorted I am very interested to see how this changes.

So in short.

• Hair loss improved
• Stress results back with answers
• Sleep not great
• Mood questionable
• Self testing myself with foods a-plenty!
• Despite this I do feel like I now know what needs to be done. It just needs time to be done. That I can live with.
• And finally, realising how much I’ve learned this year. About autoimmunity, me, the thyroid and health generally. It’s the silver lining for sure!

I thought this summed it up…