​This is just a quick add on from my last blog post which, if you have looked through my food for the day that I listed, you will have noticed I had quite a lot of pineapple juice. Which is yummy, but it was too much liquid for me, even though I was adding plenty of salt to my other food. A few days after I’d written the blog piece I started to feel quite unwell: my bowel movements became, erm, quite explosive, sleep was shallower, and I was clumsy and all over the place! I clocked what was happening fairly quickly and pondered what to do about it.

​I decided in order to get some solid food and plenty of salt inside me I’d go back to adding a little bit of rice to a couple of meals, along with some root vegetables. This did make me feel better pretty quickly but after a couple of days I was farting a bit and my lips started to go dry around the edges again.

​So I took the starch out again!! Just no need lol! I’ve just jiggled things around a bit so I don’t have a lot of liquids. I use homemade orange jelly and marshmallows quite a bit for my carbs, along with sugar in my coffee, and I’m starting to add bits of fruit in to the mix as well! 

When you are hypothyroid you lose salt quite quickly and a lot of liquid will wash you out and make you feel lousy. I add salt to everything I can, but when I’m eating fruit and I’m not keen on adding salt then I’ll just add a quarter of a teaspoon to a shot glass of fruit juice and swig it down. I also use one of Nathan Hatch’s (www.fuckportioncontrol.com) suggestions, which is to use sodium acetate: 1 tsp baking soda and 2 ½ tbsp white vinegar. You can find his explanation of making it at   http://www.fuckportioncontrol.com/blog/2017/9/18/the-cure-for-sibo. There is also tons more useful  info in his book: http: //www.fuckportioncontrol.com/new-products/ and he has a Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/Fckportioncontrol/

​I feel much better now. Last night I slept for just over 7 hours straight, but even better, when I woke up I actually felt awake. Usually it takes me 30-45 mins to wake up out of the fog!

​My next experiment is to add some casein protein instead of some of the meat that I’m eating. As I’ve said before, I’d like to reduce my meat consumption so this is where the casein protein comes in whilst I work on increasing my dairy. I’ve chosen Pink Sun Organic Micellar Casein Protein Powder as it has no nasties added. Check the ingredients before you buy things as you’ll be surprised (or not!) at what gets added to your food & supplements!

​I’ll update soon to let you know how I’m getting on. In the meantime you’ll find me mostly planting out my now pretty big seedlings, and cutting, sanding and painting wood for my chicken run! As always, I hope you’ve enjoyed my ramblings. Listen to your body; it’s clever, it knows!! Lol! It’s just that we often lose touch with it. Take care, Karen x

​It might have taken 4 long years but I am finally so so happy with how things are progressing. I feel better, my energy is improving and my sleep is pretty good (I’ve even had a few nights where I’ve slept right through the night!) I’ve been waiting to write this blog piece, as usually when I write how well things are going it lasts for a couple of days and then all falls apart! I’m happy to report that this time it seems to be legit and there’s been no fall out.

​The last time I spoke about my health on the fb page, it was to say that the increase in milk (or coffee- as it was milky coffees I was drinking) was not working and that a lot of symptoms had returned, such as insomnia, loss of appetite, sore fingers, and unpleasant odour from feet again. Not good! So I reduced the milk drinking and went back to just eating lots of rice with my meals again. Boring but at least I felt more on an even keel. 

​My fingers were getting increasingly dry again and my thumb got so bad it split open into a nasty cut. I couldn’t feel the ends of my fingers properly. I’d given up taking the vitamin A and zinc as I thought they weren’t working, and the vitamin A just didn’t make me feel too good. Anyway I decided to add the zinc back in again. It helped a bit but my fingers were still ridiculously dry. It was pretty bad as I hated to touch anything as things stuck to my fingers like they were velcro! What to do, what to do?

​Then I got my 23andme results back. The ancestry composition wasn’t that interesting! I’m 79% British and Irish, 5.9% French and German, 1.6% Scandinavian, 13.2% broadly Northwestern European, 0.3% Broadly European and 0.1% Siberian!! The other results come through in a mass of raw data. Reams and reams of genotype call data. Nothing that makes any sense! Lol! So I used StrateGene to analyse the data and produce a report. I have various gene mutations, some heterozygous and some homozygous. I have asked Billy to produce a small report in laymens terms as to what these mean and what is the best course of action, so hopefully I’ll be able to share that with you soon. 

​One of the suggestions he made, once he’d looked at my results, was to supplement vitamin A. Hmm, ok I said, I’ll give it another go. This time, maybe because I’d been taking the zinc for a little while, the vitamin A didn’t give me any problems. So cautiously, after a week of taking just one drop (2500 iu) I upped it to 2 drops. I wasn’t seeing much improvement in my dry skin though so I upped the dose some more. After a couple of days at 20000 iu my skin started to improve and I began to feel a bit better. I wondered if a lack of vitamin A had been causing my anxiety problems when I was having fruit so I decided to add in some orange jelly. Halle-bloody-lujah!! No anxiety. So it’s taken 4 years to realise that I was deficient in zinc and vitamin A and that’s what was causing my problems. Doh! It took a coupe of weeks at 30000 iu vitamin A/per day to fix the skin on the ends of my fingers but finally I have normal hands back again and things have stopped sticking to them as if they are velcro!!

​I now drink orange juice or pineapple juice. Actually I’ve been obsessed with pineapple juice lately! I much prefer that to Coca cola now, which was always my previous drink of choice. I also have lots of orange jelly and marshmallows!! Life is good.
*Stands up* *Clears throat*
Hi, my name is Karen and I haven’t eaten any starch for 2 weeks now!!!

​Whoop whoop! This is the place I’ve wanted to be in for a while but have always seemed to have problems getting there. Mind you, before this last week I did instigate potatos again for a week or two, haha! But my body didn’t like them particularly and I got weird pains in my legs. So I gave myself a bit of a talking to and because I didn’t want to eat rice (probably ever again!! Lol!) I decided to just stop eating the starchy stuff. I don’t miss it particularly either. That’s not to say I wont ever eat it ever again. I do still have a hankering for home made fries, cooked in beef dripping! Just that they wont be making a regular appearance in my diet.

As for the calcium/dairy saga, that is still ongoing! I’m still doing a few milky coffees each day and that seems fine. I tried to swap out some of my protein for cheese (instead of meat) but I didn’t feel so great, so I swapped back to a bit of meat. I also tried to add in ice cream as well but that didn’t work either. I get tummy aches or loose bowels from it (and who wants that?!) A good chunk of my protein comes from milk, fish and eggs though and I only have small helpings of meat so it’s not too bad. My aim is to gradually get to most of my protein coming from dairy.

​So this is what I’ve eaten/am planning to eat today:

A few observations then are that you can see I’ve eaten 2336 calories today. When I went to see Billy for my resting metabolic rate (RMR) test the result was 1240 calories (that I burned at rest), which is, quite frankly, PANTS! Lol!

“Total daily energy expenditure (TDEE) refers to the metric used to calculate the total calories required to function optimally…the most common used method is to multiply by an activity factor. However, these commonly accepted multipliers seem to have little evidence to support their use and the physical activity level (PAL) seems to provide a more accurate estimation of an individuals TDEE and are more in line with the suggestions made by the IDECG and FAO/WHO/UNU” – taken from the book ‘Consistent Eating’ by  Billy Craig.
​
Billy goes on to show a table that suggests standing work (e.g. housework, shop assistant) should be given a PAL of 1.8-1.9. So in laymens terms that means we should times our resting metabolic rate by the PAL  of our choosing. I’m choosing that one (1.8-1.9) as I want to be able to get busy around the house, get it tidied up, decorated, and of course I want to complete the chicken run!! So if we times 1240 by 1.9 we get 2356 (by 1.8 = 2232), so my calories are enough (as I forgot to add my raw carrot and coconut oil snack) to hit the 1.9 level. 

 ​I do feel pretty good but I have to be careful not to over do things. Last weekend I cut, sanded and painted the long roof batons for the chicken run and then wielded my new cordless hedge trimmers around the garden!!! They cut through the hedge like butter but they’re quite heavy lol! I was quite tired for a couple of days after that.

​Anyway, getting back to what I’ve eaten today. You can see I had 370g carbs, 110g protein and around 50g fat (which would actually be around 58g as I added some coconut oil to my raw carrot!) I’m totally happy with that. If I lower the fat any more than that at the moment then I don’t feel good. My feet get cold and I just feel a bit meh! Considering my fat used to be over 80g per day then I feel like I’m making progress.

My calcium is looking better but it’s still lower than phosphorus so that’s something I’ll be working on too. Calcius:Phosphorus ratio is important and you want your calcium higher than phosphorus. The only way you can do that is to have more dairy and very little meat, which is what I want to aim for anyway. The only other things that look low are vitamin E & K, which I take supplements for.

​So overall a very happy camper! Things are finally coming together. I can tell because I feel good and my sleep is getting better and better. Signals that I watch out for, that tell me things are off track, are sleep not so good or taking longer to fall asleep, feeling a bit anxious or stressy about things, not feeling motivated to do anything, strange pains in shoulder or leg, and a loss of appetite.

As always I hope you’ve enjoyed my ramblings! Listen to your body, it’s always sending you signals. I love all the things I eat now, and I’m so happy not to have to eat rice anymore. I was trying to listen to my body but I just couldn’t understand what was going on. It’s a bit of a puzzle sometimes – good job I enjoy them (puzzles that is) hey! Take care, Karen x