My Thyroid Gland

My Thyroid

(Im going to start off with some background info about my own experience with thyroid issues and that will help you to understand how i got to the place that i did with my thyroid.  I don't recommend stopping any meds without consulting your doctor.  The reason i go into detail in this post is so that you can parallel my experience to yours and see if anything makes sense in your situation as well.  Maybe you'll get a lightbulb moment like i did.  Then in another post i will go into more medical information about the thyroid that i discovered including why doctors say we're in normal range and why the synthetic meds don't seem to work.)

One of the reasons that i found that i had not been feeling better even after starting a gluten free diet was my thyroid.  It took a couple of years to discover this though.  Unfortunately i discovered this without the help of my doctor, which if you are also having thyroid issues you will probably understand.  You see a couple years before i was diagnosed with Celiac Disease i was put on Synthroid a synthetic version of T4 hormone for my thyroid.  I was told by the doctor that i wasn't hypothyroid or hyperthyroid and that my TSH levels (Thyroid Stimulating Hormone levels) were in the normal range.  So why put me on the hormone then?  Well he told me to supress the nodules that were growing on my thyroid  and stop them from getting bigger.  I was feeling so miserable with a whole host of syptoms so i took it for granted that the doctor knew exactly what he was talking about and started on the med.  I was told that i would more than likely have to continue on the meds forever once starting them. I was also told i'd never be able to take the generic version of Synthroid which is Levothyroxine because the effectiveness wouldn't be the same.

I was so desperate to feel better i thought, fine give it to me.  Im losing hair, i'm not sleeping, I've gotten fat (30lbs overweight) and i had absolutely no energy!  What i didn't know at the time was that if i had just realized (or if the doctor had just realized) that this was my Celiac i wouldn't have had to start the meds and once i got off gluten hopefully after 3-6 months the thyroid may have normalized.  Now i'm not saying this is a sure thing that would have happened but there are studies that prove that many Celiacs that have thyroid issues seem to get relief from thyroid symptoms after stopping the gluten.  Remember gluten causes inflammation in the body and inflammation affects the thyroid negatively.

After being on Synthroid for a couple of years i still wasn't feeling well.  Finally i received the Celiac diagnosis and i thought everything would finally be all good.  My family and friends were also expecting this of me.  I did feel really good for awhile.  I had more energy, my hair was growing back and my weight was normalizing.  I was sleeping better and i wasn't so angry all the time.  This was great!  Finally i had the answers i had been waiting for.  Time kept passing i was being very careful, of course stumbling here and there as does anyone who is newly diagnosed with Celiac disease.  Of course there's so much to learn about this disease, cross-contamination, food, auto-immune issues etc.  (I'll be getting into those more later as well) That's why i started this blog to help others going through these issues.

Anyway, one of the big things that i noticed right away was the fact that i was still dealing with acid reflux issues.  Don't get me wrong the reflux had subsided greatly, because it was really, really bad.  Now it was more annoying than anything else.  You see, everything i was reading was saying that i should be feeling good being off gluten.  I shouldn't still be dealing with acid reflux and hair falling out.  Although many of my symptoms had gotten better they hadn't completely gone away.  I was still taking my medications as well.   Now when i say medications I'm talking a lot of medications.  I'll talk more of those later though.  Right now i just want to deal with the relevant ones so as not to confuse you because this is a lot of information.
So please bare with me. : )

Ok, so a couple of years had gone by and i'm now completely off of gluten and feeling better than when i was eating gluten but not feeling great.  Why not?  I kept going to doctors for follow ups and they had no clue.  They continued to check my thyroid and i was still "within normal range".  What does that even mean?  Within normal range for whom?  They developed this thyroid blood test in the 70's with a test group of a couple hundred people.  It was now 2012 at this time and things have changed dramatically.  By now family and friends are growing quite annoyed with me because i'm still not feeling well and i should be because according to them i'm off gluten and that should fix everything, right?  Not right!  Remember this is an auto-immune disorder not just an allergy.  It's not easily fixed but because i'm sick of feeling sick i'm not going to stop looking for answers.   So i began doing my own research since i was getting no answers from the doctors.

During my research I figured out the issue with histamine intolerance (see my post on histamine intolerance) and began eating low histamine foods, supplementing with vitamins such as vitamin C, D, calcium/magnesium, zinc, potassium, vitamin B complex (vitamin b's did hurt my stomach) and i was feeling some relief.  I also started taking DAO enzyme that helped with the digestion of the food i was eating.  You see, just a quick explanation for the DAO enzyme is that in your small intestine is the place where DAO enzyme is made.  This DAO enzyme is what helps a person to digest high histamine foods or pretty much any food because all food contains some amount of histamine.  Being a Celiac damage has taken place in the small intestine and so it made sense that this enzyme was lacking.  Supplementing this enzyme and eating low histamine foods and taking the supplements i listed above did help.

Now remember all during this time i was on the synthroid and even on levothyroxine at one point because of my insurance company changing me.  Now i did say earlier i was told that the levo wouldn't work the same as synthroid.  I don't think this really mattered though because even while on the synthroid i still felt bad. Anyway, as i did research on the histamine dao enzyme i found that the synthetic thyroid meds i was on blocked the production of this very important enzyme.  At the time i was getting headaches, rashes, nose running, coughing while i ate.  I tried everything to minimize these issues because i was finding that more important than anything else was the need to eat and get my nutrition.  What i did next i do not recommend to anyone without consulting your doctor first.  I stopped my thyroid medication.  I was feeling crappy anyway and now it seemed to be messing with my food intake.  Food is our source of life and nutrition, so it took awhile but after doing this i finally started feeling some relief with the histamine issue. I was eating better, eating healthier foods, staying away from processed foods (gluten free processed foods) and i was starting to feel somewhat better.  Not all was better though....

Time passed and although i was feeling some histamine relief in other areas i was feeling horrible. By this time things had progressed for the worse, my energy levels had dropped drastically, I had become horribly chemically sensitive, my hair was falling out in the front of my head and my stomach was hurting all the time. I was having stomach cramping, dull pain in the right side of my abdomen and still had bad acid refllux when i ate.  My periods although came every month were sometimes heavy sometimes light.  Then they started to come more frequently and never the same time every month.  One morning when i couldn't drag myself out of bed and i was waking up in night sweats and my throat felt like i had swallowed a golf ball, a light bulb went off,  My Thyroid!  I need to figure out how to fix my thyroid without going back on those synthetic hormones!
In another post on thyroid i will tell you how i started to do this.
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