THE LOW CARB DIABETIC

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THE LOW CARB DIABETIC

Promoting a low carb high fat lifestyle for the safe control of diabetes. Eat whole fresh food, more drugs are not the answer.


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    The Thyroid Saga

    chris c
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    The Thyroid Saga Empty The Thyroid Saga

    Post by chris c Mon Dec 12 2016, 21:48

    I think it was a couple of years back now that my thyroid first started going south. My TSH came back at 0.001something (normal is around 1, which I always had in the past when it was tested, and the lower this is the higher the T3 and T4 which were correspondingly high but I don't recall the numbers).

    Anyway I was stable on 20mg carbimazole for ages, the symptoms had all gone away and my arteries which got completely shredded improved markedly, I went from hobbling to walking five miles or so, not entirely without pain but what do you expect since I now know I was blasting the poor things with alternating baths of glucose after eating followed by insulin in huge quantities for most of my life.

    Don't even think of mentioning "cholesterol" or even LDL, the thyroid drove my LDL down by EXACTLY as much as the statin I no longer bother to take, yet that was when my arteries got blocked, and when my LDL went back up again as my thyroid came under control, that was when they improved.

    Then I suddenly started feeling bad for no apparent reason. The light went on when I noticed the outer third of my eyebrows had vanished and my hair was coming out in armfuls. I stopped the carbimazole and had another thyroid test which showed my TSH had gone up to 12, at which point I felt like a corpse.

    After a while I started feeling differently worse, and my TSH had gone back down to 0.001 and my T3 and T4 were through the roof again, neither I nor my doctor expected the changeover to be so rapid. At the same time my arteries clagged up and I was reduced to hobbling again.

    I restarted the carbimazole and initially the symptoms got worse. One day I was only standing up in the shower but my heart was pounding like I'd just run a marathon and I was getting bouts of shaking and trembling. I had to sit down in the bath until I'd recovered.

    For about a week I took an extra carbimazole in the evening as the pounding heart and tremors were coming back about twelve hours after the morning dose. When this stopped happening I went back to the original 20mg which had worked so well for so long. I tinkered with taking it afternoon, evening or at night until the doctor helpfully pointed out the tabs were scored so I could split the dose morning and evening, which worked well except every so often one pill would explode into a pile of tiny rubble which I'd have to divide into two piles and lick up.

    This time the recovery in terms of symptoms was far more rapid, I soon got back to walking 2 - 3 miles.

    Collected the form for another test but by then I'd noticed some of the hypOthyroid symptoms were beginning to return so I waited a bit until they seemed to have stabilised. Good grief! My TSH was 38! At which point I was a bit surprised I was still alive, yet I didn't feel nearly as bad as previously at 12. Um, I wonder if it was a lab error or if the receptionist missed out a decimal point, 3.8 seems subjectively more likely.

    I cut the dose back to half a pill per day and have another test coming up at year's end, currently I'm feeling much improved but my eyes still feel a bit bulgy, a symptom of high thyroid (remember Marty Feldman?) Maybe three quarters of a pill will turn out to be the sweet spot? (to be continued)
    Jan1
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    The Thyroid Saga Empty Re: The Thyroid Saga

    Post by Jan1 Thu Dec 15 2016, 17:32

    Part of what Chris said "I cut the dose back to half a pill per day and have another test coming up at year's end, currently I'm feeling much improved but my eyes still feel a bit bulgy, a symptom of high thyroid (remember Marty Feldman?) Maybe three quarters of a pill will turn out to be the sweet spot? (to be continued)"

    Interesting to see what your end of year test is,
    Look forward to hearing/reading more

    Take care

    All the best Jan
    chris c
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    Post by chris c Fri Dec 16 2016, 19:44

    Well so far so good on the suggested half pill a day. I'm taking it in the afternoon or evening as I sleep better. It seems to take a while for the dose change to show up as symptoms or not. I'll have to quiz her further as to why the thing is jumping from extreme to extreme so rapidly, current theory is that it is autoimmune, and similar to what my father had when he was young (Graves Disease) but there may be some other factor in play either upstream or downstream of the thyroid itself.

    At least it hasn't been blamed on my highly dangerous diet! You know, the one I've been eating for nearly twelve years now that has improved or reversed all my symptoms and "health markers".
    graham64
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    Post by graham64 Fri Dec 16 2016, 21:20

    chris c wrote:Well so far so good on the suggested half pill a day. I'm taking it in the afternoon or evening as I sleep better. It seems to take a while for the dose change to show up as symptoms or not. I'll have to quiz her further as to why the thing is jumping from extreme to extreme so rapidly, current theory is that it is autoimmune, and similar to what my father had when he was young (Graves Disease) but there may be some other factor in play either upstream or downstream of the thyroid itself.

    At least it hasn't been blamed on my highly dangerous diet! You know, the one I've been eating for nearly twelve years now that has improved or reversed all my symptoms and "health markers".

    It's a tough gig for you Chris lets hope your thyroid settles down, I've got it relatively easy by comparison apart from my sodium level which is not really an issue I don't have any other underlying problems
    chris c
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    Post by chris c Sat Dec 17 2016, 21:03

    I didn't, apart from ageing. Can't really complain, it's the first thing I've ever had not directly related to the insulin-glucose axis since my " childhood infectious diseases" mumps chickenpox and measles almost back to back.

    Even my predisposition to colds, flu, skin, eye, sinus, gum and fungal infections, and thrush, has pretty much gone away since my BG stabilised, the current abscess excepted of course. Oh and the gallstones which I was told I didn't have for about five agonising years and which were then blamed on "eating too much fat".

    Reminiscing, I passed my first gallstone while eating an Ornish-style high carb low fat grain-based vegan diet at college (I put it down to food poisoning at the time), I also had the first of two attacks of gout then too. Both times that was only in the top joint of my left thumb and was put down to "a trivial skin infection".

    Anecdotally I knew several people who developed gallstones on a low fat diet. Only when I read a post by Andreas Eenfeldt, and subsequently an earlier post by Michael Eades. did I realise how common this is, and the mechanism - low fat reduces demand for bile so the gallbladder stops contracting and the unused bile crystallises into stones. AFTER this happens eating fat is not so good, when the gallbladder contracts it propels the stones into the bile duct. After the gallbladder is removed you are always told to eat low fat for life but frankly I digest it without any problem at all, unlike carbs and especially wheat.

    Even my "diabetic dyslipidemia" was blamed on "too much fat". Too many one-note medics.

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