My Journey Towards Thyroid Health – Part 1

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.

Hello!  If this post about Thyroid Health is bringing you here for the first time, Welcome!  My name is Izzy and I am a 36 year old mother of two young boys (6 and 4).  I’m sharing my experience dealing with hormonal imbalances because it’s something that I think a lot of women around my age, with young children especially, are experiencing.  It can be really hard to get a diagnosis and treatment plan for hormone issues because a lot of doctors brush things like weight gain, tiredness and foggy brain off and say that it’s normal when we are mothering small children or working a busy schedule.  I’m just hoping that sharing a little bit of my story may help someone else who is struggling with similar issues but not getting many answers.  Feel free to ask me any questions you like in the comment section and I will get back to you ASAP!

I can’t stress how important it is to be an advocate for your own health.  If something doesn’t feel right, don’t let a doctor tell you it’s “just in your head” or “it’s normal for people your age/gender/situation etc… to feel that way.  We are the ones who know our body best and unfortunately, these days, we may have to change health providers if we aren’t getting the answers we need.

Little background, I think I started experiencing thyroid/hormone imbalance symptoms in mid-late 2020, but at the time I didn’t realize that was what was going on.  When covid hit in March of 2020 my youngest was just a couple months past his first birthday and my oldest was 3 1/2.  At that point I had been breastfeeding for 3 1/2 years straight, my oldest nursed right on through my pregnancy haha and I was even tandem nursing a toddler and a newborn for a few months.  I was also co-sleeping with my youngest and he was still waking up frequently to nurse throughout the night.  

Although it had been over a year since the birth, I was still a little traumatized (emergency induction caused by sudden onset of pre-eclampsia) and I was still taking blood pressure medication and Zoloft for postpartum anxiety.  I had been at my highest weight ever (about 180) just before giving birth and had rather quickly gotten down to about 150 because of anxiety and stress that I had in the first couple months after he was born (I was having blood pressure issues and at 3 weeks old he got a UTI that spread to his blood and was hospitalized for 2 weeks on IV antibiotics, almost an hour from our house so I couldn’t regularly see my oldest).  My goal weight was about 130-135 at that point.  It’s funny because I remember my exact weight the week we all went on lockdown for Covid because we all got a stomach bug that week and I was kind of excited because afterwards I was at 149 and I hadn’t seen the 140s for a while!  I was thinking I was finally going to lose those last 10-15 pounds of baby weight.  I was terribly mistaken, haha!

Like many others, I gained weight during the beginning of the pandemic.  I was baking a lot with the kids, which meant I was also eating a ton of homemade bread, cookies and muffins.  We would go on lots of walks with the kids but I wasn’t regularly exercising much at that point.  Right before I got pregnant with my first, I was probably in the best shape of my life, running a lot and doing exercise videos occasionally.  As soon as I got pregnant I stopped running and have never really gotten back into it since then, unfortunately.  I was also drinking way more alcohol than I should have been.  At the beginning of the pandemic I wasn’t getting any takeout meals because we were too scared to have that much contact with anyone else, haha, so my eating was pretty healthy at that point.  Besides all the baked goods 🙂

A month or so into the pandemic we decided to sell our house and buy a new one at the exact same time.  It was a lot of work!  Doing all the paperwork and tasks for both house sales, making sure the house was clean for showings and inspections (thankfully we got an offer on our house the first day it was up for sale so we didn’t have to clean too much!).  It was summertime, I was still drinking quite a bit of wine and we were getting a lot of takeout food because we were doing a ton of packing and cleaning.  The last thing I wanted to do was cook a healthy meal.

By the time we moved into our house and got settled in, probably August of 2020, I was weighing about 170, which means I had gained 20 pounds in 5 – 6 months.  I was also really tired all the time.  Like, tired to the point where I needed to just let the kids watch tv so I could take a nap during the day.  Some days I didn’t even have the energy to work on this blog.  Getting out of bed in the morning was hard some days, like physically hard.  I chalked it up to just having gone through a big move, gaining weight, not sleeping well and just generally not taking great care of myself.  My youngest was still up multiple times a night and it was pretty miserable.  While I would try to eat healthier during the week, the weekends would come and I would drink wine and make poor food choices.  Basically, whatever weight I was able to lose during the week would just come back during the weekend.  

Around that time I realized that my blood pressure seemed to have gone up a little, I assumed since the weight gain. So, I just figured I had been so exhausted all the time because my blood pressure was high, google told me that was a symptom of high blood pressure, haha.  I had a phone appointment with my doctor,I didn’t actually see him in person, and we both agreed that we would up the BP meds and see how that went.  I did actually start to feel a little less tired once we did that so it never crossed my mind to go in and get bloodwork done.  

170 pounds was the highest I had ever been (not being pregnant) and I was determined to get back in shape.  We had been in the pandemic for about year at this point and I had just accepted that it wasn’t going away, haha.  I was exercising quite a bit.  I was doing my Jillian Michaels workout videos and taking the kids on long wagon rides most days of the week.  During that time, without really changing much, I gained about 7 more pounds.  I knew I wasn’t always making the best food choices and still enjoying my wine and occasional take-out so I just figured I wasn’t working hard enough to lose any weight.  

In June of 2021 I broke my ankle.  I was getting out of the hot tub, rolled my ankle on the top step and fell to the ground.  I had to have surgery and was in a cast on crutches for 5 weeks and then in a boot for another 4 weeks.  At that time I was about 178 lbs and I was really worried that being on crutches for 2 months would make me gain even more weight.  I did start trying to eat better and I didn’t really drink much while on crutches and I actually lost about 7 pounds in two months.  It’s kind of hard to remember at this point, but sometime after getting my cast and boot off, not only had I gained back those 7 pounds but I was now in the 180s.  Overall, I wasn’t feeling good.

Around this time I was required to have an in person appointment with the doctor in order to renew my blood pressure prescription.  My doctor, who I had been with since giving birth to my second, had just moved to a new office that was an hour away.  I liked him but had been kind of wanting to move to a new integrative medicine practice that I had heard good things about.  However, they had a little bit of a process with new patients filling out paperwork and then waiting for an appointment.  I needed my BP meds immediately so I decided to see the doctor who had replaced my other doctor to get my new prescription, all while waiting for my appointment with my new integrative medicine physician. 

I hadn’t had in an person visit since the pandemic had started so the new doctor gave me a full work up.  I mentioned feeling tired and having gained weight but I was kinda convinced that it was something I was doing wrong at that point so I didn’t make a big deal about anything.  She felt my thyroid and kind of made a face but then said we would just see if the thyroid blood work looked ok.  She called me a couple weeks later and said that the thyroid labs looked normal and that the only thing that was a bit alarming was my cholesterol.  I had never had high cholesterol in my life, in fact it had been on the low side last time I had it tested, so that was a little concerning.  She said we would just test it again in a year.

I continued to be extremely exhausted most of the time, I was gaining weight even though I wasn’t doing anything differently in my routine.  I also started to notice that my upper back was always really broken out.  I didn’t even put it together that that could be thyroid related until recently because it has mostly gone away.   I was also feeling pretty foggy a lot of the time, forgetting things, etc.  I’ve had stomach issues most of my life so I never thought of this as a thyroid issue but I was almost always bloated and gassy in the evenings.  Bloated to the point where I looked about 7 months pregnant.  I hadn’t gotten to the point where I was super frustrated yet because I still felt like I wasn’t completely giving it my all and that is why I wasn’t losing any weight and just overall feeling kinda crappy.

I finally got into my new integrative medicine doctor.  I mainly went to the appointment with the intention of just getting care established.  I had just had all my labs drawn a couple months before so I brought those with me.  I had never really looked twice at them once my previous doctor told me everything looked good.  My new doctor took a look over them and said that while my thyroid levels weren’t below “normal” there was still one or two of them that stood out to her as being on the low side.  She asked me if I had low energy and I was like, yeah, I’m exhausted all the time haha.  We decided to do more thorough thyroid labs and she wanted to start me on a low dose of levothyroxine, a medication used to treat hypothyroidism.  I remember this part very clearly, she said, “Either it will change your life and make you feel great or it won’t do anything and we will take you off of it”.  I really didn’t have much hope but I was willing to give it a try.  I had been feeling crappy for so long I had almost forgot how it felt to feel good.

I believe it was about one year ago that I started on a .025 mg dose of levothyroxine.  It wasn’t long after I started taking it that I started to get muscle pains and I felt really hot all the time.  I was having night sweats and just generally feeling really irritated.  The muscle pains eventually went away and I kept taking it figuring it was just my body adjusting to it.  I think I was on it for a total of 2 months when I decided I didn’t want to take it anymore.  I still felt tired, was actually gaining weight and it was making me feel pretty miserable.  My doctor recommended a book about thyroid health with a diet to follow and I decided I would try that and really give it my all to lose some weight.  I tried a very strict plant based diet and made sure to get daily exercise in for almost two weeks.  I know that isn’t a super long time to see results, but not only had I not lost any weight, I had actually gained some in that time.  I couldn’t believe it and was so frustrated at that point.  I was now around 185 lbs and felt embarrassed to go back and see the doctor.  I didn’t know what I was doing wrong.

During this time I thought I was feeling a little lump in my neck area and sometimes my throat would feel really full and like I had a lump in it when trying to swallow.  I made an appointment to go in and she felt my neck and said that she didn’t feel anything but would refer me for a thyroid ultrasound.  Thyroid ultrasound turned out looking normal with no swelling or nodules.  I decided I wanted to try thyroid medication again so this time she put me on Thyroid Armor.  I think I was on this one for about 3 months total.  I was still hot most of the time, sometimes even having hot flashes.  I was feeling much better than I felt on the levothyroxine but still having some fatigue.  I wasn’t having nearly as much stomach bloat and gas though, for some reason.  I had managed to lose a couple of pounds and felt like the scale at least wasn’t quickly going upward.  I didn’t feel good at that weight though and I just felt bloated, heavy and tired.

After taking the Thyroid Armor for about 3 months, we re-did my thyroid labs.  She also decided to test my iodine levels this time.  We got the lab results back and my thyroid levels had not really changed at all, in fact one of them had now gone down to below “normal” levels.  But, what really stood out was that my iodine levels were really low.  I think around 42 was normal and mine were closer to 20.  I immediately googled low iodine symptoms and they were very similar to hypothyroidism symptoms.  Iodine is directly related to the thyroid and if I remember correctly, hypothyroidism can cause low iodine and vice versa.  Although I was much happier on the Thyroid Armor, she made the decision to put me back on the levothyroxine and up the dose.  I also started taking a thyroid specific iodine supplement.

 

I started taking .075 mg of levothyroxine in July of 2022 and almost immediately started having hot flashes, night sweats, and feeling really bloated all the time.  I was frustrated and kinda wanted to just get off of it again, but she decided to just lower my dose to .050 mg around July and soon after that the magic started to happen!

Stay Tuned For Part 2, I should have it up by Monday!  And not trying to cause any suspense, just felt like this would be a really long post if I kept going 🙂