To provide you with an accurate advice for weight management, we need to know what causes your weight gain on first place, Arlana and Lisa.
This may differ not just per person but also per period of your life (period of hormonal changes: pregnancy, (pre)menopause), development stage of Hashimoto’s (early stages more often changes in weight, weight loss, later: both thyroid hormones and inflammation)
But, ok, I will concentrate on the 5 most important aspects related weight by Hashimoto’s:
- Balance your (thyroid) hormones
Make sure that your hormones are balanced. Ask you physician what is the normal range he/she is using to interpret your thyroid panel.
If you taking medication just in T4 form (Synthroid, Levoxyl, Levothyroxine and Tirosint), make sure that your body converts it well to T3 – the active form. Normal T4 levels along with low T3 levels often indicate a conversion problem.
Make sure that your thyroid medication is not making you feeling worse. Some people are sensitive to the fillers and binders within thyroid medication as: corn, dairy, soy and some colours and additives.
- Stop the inflammation if you want to live in healthy and beautiful body
Anti-inflammatory diet for your body
My advice is to forget about diet and counting calories.
Eat sugar, gluten, dairy, soy and alcohol free. Drink just pure filtered water and herbal tea. Enjoy your food. Make sure you are eating healthy, in small portions every 3 hours in order to keep the blood sugar level constant. Do not eat before going to bed. The last meal should be at 7 pm. Shew well. Eat slowly. In this way your digestion will improve and you will have more a feeling when you’ve eaten enough. Stop eating when you are almost full.
Anti-inflammatory diet for your mind
Inflammation is seen as a central biological mechanism linking early adversity to a variety of health outcomes. Childhood adversity (including low socioeconomic status, maltreatment, or maladaptive early family environments) is associated with systemic inflammation in adulthood and higher chance for autoimmune condition. Find a good therapist and work through unresolved traumas.
- Adrenal exhaustion
Common warning signs of adrenal exhaustion include weight gain, fatigue, mood changes, gut disorders, and a lower sex drive. You may feel fatigued, heavy, and susceptible to illness as the body is no longer able to maintain appropriate levels of cortisol. - Sleep responsible for proper immune system functioning and vice versa some medical conditions lead to sleep problems
We spend about one-third of your time sleeping. Quality sleep – getting enough of it at the right times – is as essential to our survival. Sleep is important to a number of brain functions, including how neurons communicate with each other. Recent findings suggest that sleep plays a cleaning role that removes toxins build up while we are awake from our brain.
Sleep loss affects weight loss. It influences our ability to burn calories and the food choices we make.
When we are sleep deprived, our body makes:
- more Ghrelin, the hormone that says ‘Eat more’
- more cortisol, which can increase our appetite
- less Leptin, which is hormone that says ‘It is enough, stop eating’
We can burn more calories when we are sleeping than when we are just lying in bed. This has to do the stages of sleep, specifically REM sleep. During REM sleep brain is more active than any other stage. In some cases even more active than when you are awake. For REM sleep our body needs glucose, which is the basic building block of most foods.
REM sleep first occurs about 90 minutes after falling asleep. Eyes behind closed eyelids move rapidly from side to side. Mixed frequency brain wave activity becomes closer to that seen in wakefulness. Breathing becomes faster and irregular. Heart rate and blood pressure increase to near waking levels. Your arm and leg muscles become temporarily paralyzed, which prevents you from acting out your dreams.
The importance of REM sleep, in particular, is attributed to the fact that during this phase of sleep, your brain exercises important neural connections which are key to mental and overall well-being and health. During REM sleep certain electrical activity patterns decrease in the brain, and there is also a sharp decrease in levels of stress neurochemicals.
Research studies show that there is a reduction of time spent in rapid-eye-movement sleep in infection. So it might be that autoimmunity related to inflammation causes reduction of rapid-eye-movement (REM) sleep which prevents us from working out the daily stuff and lead us to be traumatized.
- Avoid coffee and alcohol
- Have a fixed time to go to bed and wake up
- Do not exercise at the evening
- Do something pleasant and relaxing before going to bed – take a warm bath, read, gratitude journal
- Sleep in a dark, well ventilated room, away from loud sounds, TV, computer, mobile phones
- Move daily: Arlana asks: What kind of exercise and how long is healthy without causing more inflammation in your body when you have Hashimotos? I read so many different things. I’m confused. My advice for exercise routine is: Do the things you enjoy. In general avoid long aerobic movements. Spend around 15 minutes in aerobic movement. Stretch, stretch, stretch. And 3 times per week make use of weight lifting. Start slow. Do not force. Listen to your body.
