Tips For Healing Underactive Thyroid
Underactive Thyroid is a colloquial term for hypothyroidism, usually caused by an autoimmune condition called Hashimoto’s thyroiditis. This condition appears to be significantly undiagnosed and undertreated. There are a number of nutritional and dietary factors however which play an important role.
Common symptoms of an underactive thyroid include:
- Fatigue and low energy levels
- Weight gain and difficulty losing weight
- Fuzzy thinking and poor concentration
- Hair loss and poor quality of nails
- Intolerance to cold weather and changes in body temperature
Some tips that may help the thyroid rebuild:
- Supplement with iodine, zinc, selenium, tyrosine and B vitamins
- Important superfoods to include are maca (a South American root which balances hormones), coconut oil, brazil nuts, kelp or dulse and B pollen.
- Avoid overfeeding on soy products and brassica vegetables such as cauliflower, broccoli and Brussels sprouts.
- Eliminate refined carbohydrates and sugars so as to balance blood glucose. This includes most grains.
- Determine your metabolic type and eat in accordance with it.
- Check for heavy metal toxicity in the system and get onto a holistic protocol to detoxify these out of your system
- Look into your glutathione levels, an important cellular defence nutrient. Supplementing this is particularly useful in autoimmune thyroid disease.
- Test for intolerance to gluten grains such as wheat, oats, barley and rye with anti-gliadin antibodies and tissue transglutaminase antibodies. Once tested, trial a two to three week exclusion and rechallenge of all gluten grains to observe for adverse symptoms.
The following tests and treatments can be useful:
- Take your basal body temperature for at least one week per month and aim for an early morning temperature of 36.5 degrees or above.
- Consider a thyroid reflex test to look at intracellular levels of thyroid function
- Have your thyroid levels checked including free T3 and free T4, a “reverse T3”, DHEA and vitamin D3 levels
- In some cases, natural thyroid extract or T4/T3 combinations may be needed.
Recent observations are that in some people, high-dose iodine can aggravate the immune response against the thyroid gland and worsen a thyroid condition. It is recommended to start with low doses with iodine and monitor with ongoing thyroid testing.
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