Hmy Way: Food

General

Any chronic disease brings the need for a disciplined feeding, or diet. This is an occupational hazard of having a chronic disease and part of the responsibility one has to take for having brought their body to such state. I know that some endocrinologists would say that while this is the case for diabetes it is not so for hashimoto, but then that is their opinion.

Having agreed that leaky gut is a root cause for hashimoto, the importance of the diet is obvious. Another aspect is that with hypothiroidism it is very easy to pick up weight, so one must be always careful.

Diets for Hashimoto

There are several good diets, but I do not have much experience with any of them. I have tried one such diet for a couple of weeks under the supervision of a friend of mine with medical education, but at the end I decided it is too strict for me.

Instead I try to follow the following principles:

• No flower,
• No processed sugar,
• Three meals a day no snacks.

The purpose of these is to take the pressure off the guts.

My food plan

The food plans I have experience with are the one devised by Bright Line Eating and the classical low carb diet of Dr Yudkin, which can also be found in Health & Holism book.

Yudkin's diet is simple to explain: no more than 50 gr carbohydrates per day. There are many internet resources which can be used to calculate those and Dr Yudkin has worked out a simplified table for by hand calculation. Alcohol should be accounted by Yudkin's table and not as given in most online tables that underestimate it. I do not know the reason for this.

Actually alcohol is so carbo-potent than there is no way to have more than one glass per day. And in my case this is not every day, because I also like to have fruits.

Bright Line Eating system is based on planning one's meals so that emotional tranquility is achieved. The total number of carbohydrates is actually not much more than in Yudkin's system. What I did not like about this system was the cold turkey on alcohol. What I learned from it is how to do no snacks.

Another strength of BLE is their emphasis on psychological training - both self-training and in group environment. I have found such group support invaluable, especially in the beginning when the struggle is naturally higher.

Challenges

My main challenge is that I like to indulge in food and with hypothiroidism one week of turbo indulgence may well mean 5 kg up! It happened several times to me that after such "jump" I become very disciplined and follow the plan strictly for months on end, which brings good results. But I do not like this up-and-down thing.

Yet I become really worried when I follow the plan and still gain weight, because that may mean that something is wrong-er with my glands.

The trick

The trick for successful weight control is maintaining emotional tranquility. Stress does not help at all. Of course, the emotional tranquility is generally good for healing and not only for weight normalisation.

* Image by cattalin from Pixabay