My Journey To Thyroid Health – Part 2

Welcome!  This post is about my personal experience with thyroid and hormone imbalance issues.  I am not a doctor and none of this is meant to be giving away medical advice.  If this post resonates with you, please talk to you doctor about thyroid functioning tests.

 

TRIGGER WARNING: I do talk about weight gain, weight loss and scale numbers in this post.

You can find part 1 Here.  I’m not an expert at any of this and only have my personal experience to go off of, but I’m always here to answer any questions you may have!  I would love to be able to help anyone who is going through something similar and hasn’t found answers or been validated yet.

Before I start part 2, where things thankfully do get better, I also want to acknowledge a few other changes in my life that happened around this time as well that I’m sure contributed to my starting to feel like a normal person again.  

• My youngest finally started sleeping through the night.  I hadn’t had a full nights sleep in about 3 years and that can really take a toll on you.  Even though I usually get up to pee once during the night and might wake up for a few minutes once or twice, it is nothing compared to being woken up 2-3 times a night by an angry toddler.  
• My youngest stopped breastfeeding.  As I said in part 1, by this point I had been breastfeeding non-stop for 6 years.  Obviously a toddler is not nursing anything like a newborn, but even just nursing a couple of minutes each day alters your hormones.    Sawyer stopped nursing completely around 3 1/2 years (I know that may shock some people haha!) I brought this up to my doctor at our last visit and she said it’s not uncommon for women to be able to lower their dose of thyroid medication once they are finished breastfeeding.
• I started drinking a bottle of green tea almost everyday.  This one I can’t say for sure is a reason for my weight loss, but after reading more about green tea I think it definitely played a part.  I never started drinking it to lose weight though, I didn’t even know that it could be used as an appetite suppressant.  I’ve never been a coffee drinker and randomly decided one day that I wanted to have a nice drink each morning because I’ve always been a boring water person.  I prefer cold drinks, so each day I would just brew a couple bags of green tea and then drink iced green tea all day long.  Around that time I started noticing that I just wasn’t as hungry as much during the day.  I also gotta say that before that, I feel like my appetite was out of control.  I was always hungry and could just eat and eat.  I remember frequently thinking, how am I ever going to lose weight if I’m feeling like I’m starving all day long.  I don’t know if that was a thyroid symptom or what, but I’m thankful that I don’t feel like that anymore!

So, after my doctor reduced my dose of levothyroxine I wasn’t feeling amazing but I was feeling ok enough to not give up on it so quickly this time.  Around that time I also started to lose some weight.  It was just a few pounds at first, but before that it was literally impossible for me to lose even half a pound.  I was losing weight without really changing that much about my lifestyle.  I hadn’t all of a sudden picked up exercising or started a new diet, I was eating less because my appetite had decreased but I wasn’t restricting what I ate.  I was cautiously excited!  I had always heard that while you’re breast-feeding, your body will hang onto some extra pounds so I was also thinking I might be losing weight because of that, which could have also been the case!

In August and September I really started to see the weight coming off.  Again, the only thing I was really changing was that I was eating less because I didn’t have as much of an appetite.  I was excited to be losing weight but I did still feel tired a lot, not quite as exhausted as I had in the past, but enough to notice it.  I was also still feeling hot most of the time.  Not having hot flashes or night sweats but I just felt like I constantly ran hot.  I was always taking layers off and opening windows while everyone else in the room was cold.  I had my labs re-taken since It had been a few months since I had gotten back on the levothyroxine.  This time she only did the main thyroid labs, she didn’t check the iodine but I was still taking the supplement I had started 3 months prior.  My labs looked great and she was happy with my levels and we decided I would continue to take the .050 of the levothyroxine.  Hoping that when I lost more weight I would get some energy back.  

Sometime in September or October, my husband alerted me that my breath smelled really bad.  I couldn’t smell it myself but I did have a strange taste in my mouth sometimes.  Apparently it smelled so bad to the point he was telling me I needed to ask my dentist about it.  I’ve had gallbladder and stomach issues in the past that have caused a really bitter taste in my mouth so I figured it was just something like that. 

 3 months had gone by since my last labs so we re-did them and this time she did test the iodine levels again. I saw the lab results pop up on my phone and was immediately shocked.  My iodine levels, which just 6 months ago had been really low were now 6 times the normal amount.  I immediately stopped taking the supplement and of course went to google right away, haha.  The symptoms for iodine definiciancy and iodine overload and hypothyroidism are all very similar.  But, a few for high iodine levels were: burning of the mouth and stomach, diarrhea and nausea (which I had also been experiencing but I’ve always had a bad stomach so I just figured something was flaring up).  I do feel the need to point out that most of the iodine overdose information I could find seemed to be dealing with cases of acute overdose, rather than chronic overdose.

Within weeks of stopping the iodine supplement I felt like I had way more energy, I wasn’t feeling hot all the time and my husband confirmed that my bad breath had gone away.  Since around Sept/Oct I’ve been feeling so much more like my old self.  I’ve continued to lose weight and don’t feel big and puffy all the time anymore.  I also have way more energy than I had before.  It’s funny how sometimes you don’t realize just how bad you were feeling until you start feeling good again.  

Just about three weeks ago I was having some heart palpitations, was waking up drenched in sweat and regularly getting this weird pain in my chest that I had been experiencing for about 5 months on occasion.  It was a strange pain right in the middle of my upper chest that if it would have lasted more than a second I would have been worried.  I had kind of been ignoring it since it was pretty infrequent but I’m now thinking it was thyroid related.  I had an appointment coming up with my doctor soon, so I just started cutting my .050 mg pills in half and all of those symptoms went away immediately.

My doctor agreed that I should go down in my dosage and that she trusts me to decrease it more if I feel like it is needed.  I’m going to wait a couple more weeks to get new thyroid labs drawn so my body can get used to the smaller dose before we see what the levels look like.  We are also going to check the iodine again this time to make sure it has gone down! Overall, I’ve been feeling really good lately.  I have my motivation back to post new recipes on here and I’ve even started another little online T-Shirt business that I’m enjoying.  Just last week I finally got down into the 150s and that feels like a huge accomplishment that seemed very out of reach for a long time.  I feel like a new person and just very thankful that I ended up at the doctor I ended up at.  It has taken about a year for me to feel better and unfortunately I think that is just the norm with figuring out thyroid issues.  It can take a while to get the correct dose, and in my case the medication that ended up working in the end was the same medication that made me feel terrible in the beginning.  I still don’t quite understand that!

I will have another appointment with my doctor in about a month once I get my labs redrawn but we’re hoping that I can potentially get off the levothyroxine or at least lower the dose even more.  I’m also hoping to be able to lower my dose of blood pressure medication now that I have lost over 30 pounds.  I keep telling myself I will start exercising regularly soon but I might wait until it warms up a little bit first 🙂

I plan on doing a little update in a few months and I’m also hoping to add some thyroid specific recipes on here soon!  Thank you so much for reading along with me and I truly hope that at least one person can get some benefit from hearing about my experience.