Thought some of you might be interested in one of the items on the last ATA (American Thyroid Ass) newsletter with regard to Levothyroxine and weight loss.
They trialled a small number of people after being newly diagnosed and medicated with Levothyroxine. It was found that on average they lost 4.5kgs in weight after 1 year (lucky them) however 3.8kgs of this was lean tissue (muscle). The full report is on this link, its not long!
What a crock of s@&t dont you think , If only I would be nice and slim instead of being like a beached whale .
Jan Xx
I totally agree! If we all lost that amount we wouldn't exist any more.
where do they get this from ! I would like someone to do some research on me , I would love for them to get me to loose the weight and feel like they say you should , I have been feeling better lately and then get told I have sleep apneoa FGS what else can our thyroid do to us , they don't tell you that do they !!!!
The problem is they don't want to be responsible and think for themselves. They just look at the numbers and do as they are told.
When i first started taking Levothyroxine 14 yeays ago, my weight was out of control, i was very unwell I can't put in to words how ill i was. My Doctor told me it would take 6months to start feeling better. It took a good year, but once the tablets kicked in my weight did change i lost a couple of stone. But when i fell preganat with my last child i put the weight on. Not to much but enought for me to notice. After i had my baby they kept my level's up for 6 weeks and i lost a lot then, due to being on too much. My weight goes up and down, but i have now joined slimming world and the weight is slowly coming off. But i do believe that Levothyroxine does make a differance, well it did to me. Like i said i was really unwell. It take's time of our bodies to adjust to the dosage, and what doesn't help is that we under treated, by our doctor's. I was only told to take my tablets and come back every 6 wks until they got the dosage right. The rest i had to look up myself. As for vitmin tablets i take mine with my evening meal never in the morning as i feel the effects within days my whole body starts to slows down. And the other thing is be kind to yourself, take one day at a time. makesure you rest,drink plenty and eat the correct diet. In this every busy world we live it is not easy. Like i say i've had my thyroid problem for 14 year's and it i still get days when i don't want to get out of bed.
I have read this link 'Lies, damned lies and medical science' by Dr John Ioannidis who has spent his career challenging his peers by exposing their bad science. The 8th para is particularly interesting.
theatlantic.com/magazine/ar...
This is a a quote from part of this article:-
In the late 1990s, Ioannidis set up a base at the University of Ioannina. He pulled together his team, which remains largely intact today, and started chipping away at the problem in a series of papers that pointed out specific ways certain studies were getting misleading results. Other meta-researchers were also starting to spotlight disturbingly high rates of error in the medical literature. But Ioannidis wanted to get the big picture across, and to do so with solid data, clear reasoning, and good statistical analysis. The project dragged on, until finally he retreated to the tiny island of Sikinos in the Aegean Sea, where he drew inspiration from the relatively primitive surroundings and the intellectual traditions they recalled. “A pervasive theme of ancient Greek literature is that you need to pursue the truth, no matter what the truth might be,” he says. In 2005, he unleashed two papers that challenged the foundations of medical research.
He chose to publish one paper, fittingly, in the online journal PLoS Medicine, which is committed to running any methodologically sound article without regard to how “interesting” the results may be. In the paper, Ioannidis laid out a detailed mathematical proof that, assuming modest levels of researcher bias, typically imperfect research techniques, and the well-known tendency to focus on exciting rather than highly plausible theories, researchers will come up with wrong findings most of the time. Simply put, if you’re attracted to ideas that have a good chance of being wrong, and if you’re motivated to prove them right, and if you have a little wiggle room in how you assemble the evidence, you’ll probably succeed in proving wrong theories right. His model predicted, in different fields of medical research, rates of wrongness roughly corresponding to the observed rates at which findings were later convincingly refuted: 80 percent of non-randomized studies (by far the most common type) turn out to be wrong, as do 25 percent of supposedly gold-standard randomized trials, and as much as 10 percent of the platinum-standard large randomized trials. The article spelled out his belief that researchers were frequently manipulating data analyses, chasing career-advancing findings rather than good science, and even using the peer-review process—in which journals ask researchers to help decide which studies to publish—to suppress opposing views. “You can question some of the details of John’s calculations, but it’s hard to argue that the essential ideas aren’t absolutely correct,” says Doug Altman, an Oxford University researcher who directs the Centre for Statistics in Medicine.
Sounds all too feasible to me. The number of papers that have glaring errors in them is worrying - let alone the issues Ioannidis refers to which tend to be rather more subtle.
Thanks for posting that.
Rod
On the day this blog got posted I was at my GP's telling her that I'm losing not weight but tissue, and that it must be to do with the tablets. Before I was taking levothyroxine I was a size 8-10, quite a dew months down the line I'm now a size 6-8 and feel like a skeleton I eat very well and not junk proper meals and nothing will help the fact that my skinny trousers are now falling off my legs and bottom abd my boobs have shrunk to never never land. I wish to god I could gave my curves back. It makes sense to think I should lose weight when on these tablets. But the pharmacist and doctor keep telling me it's not the tablets.
when you say that it makes sense to think I should lose weight when on these tablets I have read so many times that people have gained weight when taking levothyroxine.
Would it be worth asking for Eltroxin (if you don't already take it) as this is the superior brand of levo.
If GP's say that it isn't the levo then ask them what is causing it then?
As you know, Dr Lowe's rebuttal letter to the British Thyroid Association regarding similar errors has been completely ignored, as has his follow-up letter:-
Its likely the cortisol system as you can`t have subsections of hormones is at fault. Blocks on the various natrually occuring steroids which become more apparent as we get older. That relate to Oestergen DHEA hydoxcortisol.. Infection processes; low level infections, if your glands are inflamed it can make you put weight on.. However many of these infections are not detctable by standard tests I think largely because the incubation period is not long enough. But there is also more than one strain of infection. For example they now say diabetes is caused a viral infection. Like wise ovarian cancer is caused by a viral infection. Its the chicken and the egg. Succesive infection can also activate the immune system. As there is a genetic componet to where the weakness is in our bodies these infections gradually build up and turn the immune system off. Its attrubuted to the ageing process:
There are various ways round it.......
Even so call scizophrenic mental health problems have an infection process which is not being recongised..
Levothyroxine 
Levothyroxine and weight gain
Anyone else lost their appetite and losing weight on levothyroxine?
Weight and levothyroxine dose
Weight loss
