exercise

[Gilbert2023]

if I’m Underactive thyroid, levo level seems right but no t3 , if I have some exercise will I be more likely to loose weight or not , today I’ve gained no weight so far inspite of having half my calories ?

[Jazzw]

I’m not sure I understand what you’re trying to say. Weight loss doesn’t really happen on a daily basis. Far too many variables. The weight of liquid in your blood vessels, in your interstitial spaces, in and around your organs, in your digestive tract. Same goes for food in your digestive tract. And moving liquid and food through and out is hugely variable, depending on hormone levels, electrolyte levels, inflammation due to illness and injury etc.

So it’s absolutely irrelevant whether you’ve had half of your calories today. You can’t really gauge anything from that.

[greygoose]

Hypo weight-gain is rarely about calories. For the most part it's water retention. And no diet or exercise regime in the world is going to get rid of that. And halving your calorie in-take and over exercising - which uses up calories - is probably going to make the problem worse because it will make you more hypo. You need a certain amount of calories - probably about 2000 a day - to convert T4 to T3. T3 is the active hormone and if you don't have enough of it in your system, all sorts of symptoms will occur - including weight-gain/water retention - and difficulty losing it. So, by halving your calorie in-take and exercising as well, you're doing exactly the wrong thing for weight-loss.

[Jazzw]

For those with hypothyroidism, exercise doesn’t help in the way you might expect. Because we’ve lost the mechanism of making more thyroid hormone, we burn through what we take when we exercise, which can backfire and leave you feeling exhausted if you overdo it.

There’s no way of quantifying how much exercise is too much. If you want to exercise it’s probably best to build up slowly and let your body get used to the extra effort required. But exercise in and of itself doesn’t help with weight loss very much anyway.

Bodies are clever. If you exercise them, they tend to ask for more food. And if you consider that even a half hour walk can be wiped out calorie wise by eating a single biscuit, you can see why it’s not as helpful for weight loss as the media might suggest.

Exercise is for feeling better about yourself and feeling fitter, not for losing weight.

[arTistapple in reply to Jazzw]

I like this reply to Gilbert. This explains simply the mechanism which frankly traps us hypothyroids. We know we need exercise (would love to exercise) but it’s a constant trade off (for me) between doing more immediate survival stuff like procuring and making decent food, attention to hygeine, making the bed and preparing for nightfall before daily allocation of energy runs out.

Same goes for food. If I don’t eat good quality food and enough of it, things get impossible.

I did have some success with Intermittent Fasting at a point where I was relatively stable. It helped change my eating habits for the better but I then discovered I needed to keep an eye on eating enough.

Now aiming again for optimal thyroid treatment as that I am hoping is key.

[Gilbert2023]

I’m sorry , what I mean is today I’ve exercised less but gained little weight compared to days where I exercise and eat a similar amount , I’m relatively new to my hypothyroidism and weight gain is my biggest issue along with constipation, I appreciate any response

[Tina_Maria in reply to Gilbert2023]

The problem is, if your thyroid function is not optimised, you will be struggling to lose weight. Too little thyroid hormones will slow your metabolism down, this is why you feel tired and can gain weight, as everything is slower than it should be. And sadly no diet will help you lose weight, if you have too little thyroid hormones in your system, as this is a metabolic problem, not a dietary problem.

As other people have mentioned, exercise is great for your health and general well-being, but it should not be used as a means to lose weight.

What are your actual thyroid hormone levels? TSH, T4, T3? You mentioned 'levo level seems right but no T3'? Can you explain this a bit better perhaps? Most people feel well with the TSH around 1 or below, and T3 and T4 around 75% through the range, but we are all individuals and no two people are the same. Since you have symptoms, it appears that it might not be as it should. I would start to look at your last thyroid function test and see if there is perhaps room for improvement.

[Cornwaller]

As the lovely people above have indicated loosing weight is complex especially for people with hypothyroidism. Nonetheless exercise is one of the best things you can do for your health. But exercise has to be gently increased over weeks and months to develop fitness which combined with excercise will ultimately benefit your health.