Are you eating enough calories?

[Bearo]

Are you eating enough calories? Article from Dr Westin Child’s:

“The truth is that you should NEVER reduce your calories if you have hypothyroidism for any reason.

Why?

Because calorie reduction, especially in hypothyroid patients, will result in the combination of 'metabolic adaptation' and 'thyroid damage'.

The term 'metabolic adaptation' is the actual scientific name for what occurs during calorie restriction (1).

Under persistent calorie restriction, your body responds in a number of ways:

#1. It reduces your Free T3 dramatically (18 weeks is enough to drop your free T3 by as much as 66% (2)) - This is obviously incredibly important because T3 is the most active form of thyroid hormone in your body and free T3 is directly correlated with your ability to lose weight and keep it off.

#2. It increases your reverse T3 by as much as 27% - 50% (3) - Reverse T3 is the marker that your body creates when it is under stress and when it can't convert T4 into T3.

High levels of reverse T3 slow down cellular thyroid function.

#3. Your free T4 levels may stay the same or increase (4), most likely owing to a reduction in T4 to T3 conversion.

#4. Your overall metabolism will drop from metabolic adaptation.

#5. Your TSH may stay the same or actually get lower (5) - This may sound good at first, but the fact that your TSH does increase is probably due to the fact that your hypothalamus is being suppressed and can no longer produce TRH which stimulates TSH. “

Sorry I’m unable to add the references without losing the post!

I’m aware that his ideas on reverse T3 are counter to this group. What about the rest of it?

[Lalatoot]

Bearo what you post here regarding Rt3 is not against the beliefs of this group. T4 does convert into Rt3 for many reasons. What we do take issue with is the old- fashioned, disproven belief that Rt3 blocks the T3 receptor cells causing problems.

[SeasideSusie Remembering]

I believe this is the article:

restartmed.com/calories-hyp...

[Bearo in reply to SeasideSusie]

Thanks, SS, I’m not sure why I couldn’t post the link, but it didn’t work, hence the summary copy and paste.

[tattybogle]

I agree with the logic of it .. but think it's to strong to say you must never reduce your calories for any reason if Hypo.

If you have a habit of eating comfort food with empty unhealthy calories in then you probably should reduce calories... Hypo or not.... and replace them with nutrients

But if you basically eat healthily, then severely restricting your calories will probably have exactly the effects he describes.

... makes sense to me .. body thinks "oh .. not enough food around .. better turn everything down to 'Go Slow' mode..." so it basically tries to hold on to the fat you've got cos it thinks it might need it in the winter.

[Jazzw]

In my ponderings on this subject, I’ve often wondered: Which came first, the dodgy thyroid or the diet?

I have a bit of a theory, you see. Probably wrong and maybe it’s more correlation than causation.

But hear me out. More women than men have hypothyroidism. And I think it’s true to say that more women than men have gone on (sometimes drastic) diets to lose weight. So could prolonged dieting be a cause of hypothyroidism?

Many of those women were never overweight to start with. Many got a little chubby around puberty and someone, either maliciously or indeed well-meaningly felt the need to tell them to lose weight.

That’s my story. When I was 9 going on 10, I started to get a bit rounder. My periods actually started when I was 11. But my mother, overweight herself from a similar age (although in her case it was attributed to having surgery for a club foot and not being able to move about during the months in plaster) panicked and recommended I went on a diet. The diet mantra at that time was very low fat. When my mother had attempted to lose weight at the same age, she’d survived eating only apples for weeks on end, to the point where her periods stopped.

Mine didn’t stop but it sent them absolutely haywire. My cycles varied between 30 and 70 days—I used to live in a state of permanent fear that I’d get “caught out”. My breasts stopped growing. I stopped getting taller. But hey, I lost weight, so who cared, eh? Of course, it didn’t stay off. Sooner or later, your body begs for nutrition and you eat all the “forbidden” foods again. I’ve yo-yo’d ever since, been miserable about how I look and feel ever since.

And I wonder what would have happened if I’d never gone on that diet. Would that chubbiness have smoothed itself out as I got taller and developed curves where I was supposed to develop curves? The only clue I’ve ever had was when I first discovered low carb dieting in my early 30s. To my utter astonishment, as I lost weight my breasts got bigger—guess my body really needed the nutrition from that higher fat intake. Guess I needed the fat to make the right hormones? And for the first time in my life, I had regular periods.

I am furious at the diet industry for ruining my life yet I still get sucked in, without fail, at least once a year. I now have a terribly unhealthy relationship with food. The idea that I could be slimmer is so very alluring. I hate feeling fat and frumpy. But worse still, what damage has all that dieting done to me? What disruption has it made at a cellular level? And what has all that high calorie/low calorie yo-yo-ing done to my pituitary-thyroid axis?

Maybe though, my thyroid was always sub par. Maybe I got fat because my thyroid was never going to work well. But maybe my thyroid stopped working effectively because it didn’t get what it needed to function.

I don’t know.

[jrbarnes in reply to Jazzw]

I've also wondered this about my diet as a child and teen. My mother never prepared well balanced meals. She bought a lot of snack cakes. She even fed me sugar toast or sugary cereals for breakfast. I was extremely thin. In school my lunch was a bag of crisps and a pop. In my 20s I got into exercise and health but I still didn't realize that I needed to get enough calories. I wasn't restricting but I wasn't too hungry and unintentionally didn't eat a lot. In my mid 20s , while working on a cruise ship, I had to visit the Dr because I got gastro intestinal illness that was going around the ship. The nurse pokes her head out of the window, after taking my blood, and asks me if I'm on a low carb diet, which confused me because it certainly wasn't something I thought about. To this day I can't remember what she found in my blood but she said it was high or low and was usually found in people on low carb diets. My time working in Hawaii was the only period that I never felt symptoms of hypo. I was always walking out in the sun and going to the beach everyday and it's never cold in Hawaii. It wasn't until I left the ship that I started breaking out in awful cystic acne, fluid retention and within the year an adenoma on my thyroid gland. Previous to the ship I had suffered from slight fatigue, blood sugar issues, and cystic acne but I wasn't aware of any thyroid problems. I think lifestyle, climate, and diet can play a role in thyroid disease. I went from a colder climate to one that is warm year round with lots of sun for vitamin D and was more active and thrived. Left that place and everything went downhill quick. Years later after my partial thyroidectomy and going on levo I had another period where I wasn't eating as much and my TSH went from 1.3 to 2.5.

[Hidden in reply to Jazzw]

Have you read "In Defence of Food"? I'd recommend it; it's a really easy read and is a great book to balance diet culture and the way we can get bogged down in nutrient counting.

I found it helpful because my childhood diet wasn't bad in that it wasn't full of sugar but it wasn't good because it was short in fruit and veg and salad. When I started looking into dietary changes I started to get tied up in making sure we were eating enough of the right foods and micro and macro nutrients and it was miserable.

In Defence of Food really helped change my thinking.

[radd]

Bearo,

This is a great basic and easy to understand article on what happens when calories consumed are insufficient for the needs of good thyroid function.

His references to RT3 are correct, scientifically proven time & time, increasing D3 & down regulating D1, etc, etc. Of course normal levels of RT3 are healthy but anything above stops certain good stuff happening and will continue to induce further negative change.

The forum is generally not pro in using RT3 to analyse test results because it doesn't tell you the reason why RT3 is elevated. If people are on this forum it is usually because they are ill and meds aren't working as they should so it is kinda expected that RT3 levels will be inhibitingly elevated anyway.

There was also a fashion for calculating thyroid hormone amounts required using RT3 ratios but again there was so many other dependant factors and wide margins for error in all except the most experienced practitioner who knew his patient's history inside out, and again failed to address the reasoning for the elevated RT3 in the first place.

And then there was the blocked T3 receptors debacle that is still believed by many except the most avid readers.

Thank you for posting.

[jrbarnes]

I agree with this. One period in my life I wasn't eating many calories, unintentional, and lost 10 lbs. My TSH went from 1.3 to 2.5.

[Cooper27]

Low calorie diets do have an impact on T3 levels: pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/234...

It does worry me a bit - I recently started tracking my food intake to check how much protein I was taking in, but discovered I was only eating an average of 1600 calories per day, which probably explains why my T3 is always a bit lower on tests.