No one understands hypothyroidism unless they’ve been through it. Outsiders think we can simply follow a diet or exercise plan and be fine… but anyone who’s been there knows that is just not the case.

Personally I kept gaining weight out of control no matter how hard I tried to diet or exercise. My energy levels kept plummeting to an all time low! and the problem was it didn’t all happen at once...

The symptoms of hypothyroidism began to creep up on me during my mid 20’s… at first I chalked up each symptom as one more thing that would happen to me due to aging...

… but then, normal life became something else… a struggle, if you could even call it that.

It was well beyond that.

Well beyond...

Depression began to set in and I didn't see it coming.

See, I used to be an avid homebrewer… and getting a beer belly seemed logical...

Actually, it was expected of me.

However, I’ve always had a knack for being healthy by watching what I ate and going to the gym.

I never had to worry about my weight until I bought a new set of jeans size 34 (up from size 32) and found out literally just a few weeks later my jeans didn’t fit!

My belly began to hang over my jeans and stretch out the buttons on my shirts!

I’d been watching my diet, exercised regularly, yet I was gaining weight…

So I did what any logical person would do in my situation...

I still gained weight.

No matter what I did I just couldn't seem to lose weight.

Although at this point weight gain wasn’t really what made me look into my health…

My mind had become foggy... I just couldn't think clear.

I had a hard time focusing on my daily activities and felt extremely drowsy.

I had zero energy.... but it was worse than that!

I found myself needing a nap every single day and still felt like I couldn't function!

Even working out became a struggle because recovering took longer than usual…

Again, I thought I was simply aging…

I figured laying off of beer would slow it down... but when I realized that beer wasn’t the cause, I began to ask questions…

See, on top of everything else my skin had been extremely dry. Every morning when I woke up I would look in the mirror and see my face almost peeling… skin was scaly… like it was the beginning of psoriasis or something…

My body temperature was cold, especially hands and feet.

I remember being ashamed of shaking hands with people I’d meet because they’d always make a remark about how cold my hands were.

I used to always have warm hands!

Something was definitely wrong, but I had no clue…

One day, while taking a shower, it happened.

I was lathering up my hair and something felt weird. I began to feel this “texture” on my hands and when I opened my eyes to look down at my hands I was shocked to find hair all over my hands and all over the bathtub!!

My jaw literraly dropped as I stood in the shower scanning the tub and watching my own hair all over it...

This was definitely not normal hair loss! - not at my age.

After meeting some people with hypothyroidism, I was discouraged to learn that they’d been on medication for over 5 years (one had been on it for 20 years!!!) and still had not gotten better.

Are you friggin' kidding me?? 20 years and still nothing??

Was hypothyroidism some sort of cruel fate dealt to me?

No way… I was not going to go down just like that. Not without putting up a fight.

So I began to try EVERYTHING.

Starting with my diet.

I was determined to do whatever it took to get better, but there was a bigger problem no diet seemed to solve.

Everything I ate seemed to make my stomach bubbly… at first I figured it was because I was eating mostly at breweries (pub food)…

… but the day I ordered a stripped down salad, “skip the dressing, skip the croutons” type, yet still had digestive issues, I knew then this was not going to be an easy battle.

So I began to try all types of diets…

Low carb diet
Slow carb diet
Gluten-free diet
Paleo diet
90/10 diet
Gaps diet
Raw Vegan
Juicing!

… but no matter how hard I tried to diet, the scale kept going up and jeans not fitting.

I literally felt like someone had hooked up a compressor to my body and was inflating me… it was a weird kind of weight gain!

I was at a point where EVERYTHING became suspect!

Nothing worked, and everything seemed to affect me. Until I found something that did work.

One day, I saw a video of one doctor explaining hypothyroidism… and what he said clicked instantly!

All of a sudden I was steered in the right direction.

One of the many things that stuck out was that your thyroid gets first dibs on iodine. If your thyroid is low on iodine, then so is the rest of your body!

... and here's the thing... iodine is needed to produce stomach acid…

That’s why my body was having such a hard time digesting any type of protein and most food for that matter… low stomach acid

That’s why I became sensitive to gluten and other proteins…

That’s why I was so “inflammated” and borderline IBS…

… and it gave me the clue that I may not have as much fat as I thought… rather my body was filled with mucin - mucin my body developed to protect itself from all the undigested protein in my body!

As a home brewer, I knew a thing or two about digestive enzymes... pineapple and papaya have some of the best protein digestive enzymes!

So I came up with my own anti-inflammatory, anti-mucin smoothie…

1 cup fresh squeezed orange juice
1 cup papaya
1 cup pineapple

… ahhh

Relief, at last…

But it was only the beginning…

I still had to get my thyroid to work!

I had already added some supplements to my diet like:

… but everything changed when I added healthy fats like coconut oil to my diet… and was introduced to probiotics and fasting...

Not just any coconut oil, centrifuged coconut oil.

I ate it and also rubbed it on my skin around my thyroid…

Coconut oil is a good oil… not to be confused with other oils from foods which you must avoid… especially foods with Polyunsaturated Fatty Acids or PUFAs as some call them…

What I ate was not as important as what I avoided...

I avoid nuts, seeds, and starch (grains) unless you get them organic, truly raw, and sprout them…

This is a tough battle, but it can be won and I hope this helps you get there!

I got most of my finding in early 2013. There are many things I have changed in my diet over the last year or so… many of this still applies, but there are some things I wish I’d known before I started on my journey.

The whole “blame it on genetics” when nothing else works makes me mad. What I did is too sensitive to be posted publicly here…

You can learn more about my journey and my changes here: