One of the real problems about reclaiming your health is how to go about it when you don’t realise it’s slipping away from you again. It’s a real quandary! When things start to regress it affects your concentration and your ability to think properly, yet you need to be able to think about things properly or you miss the fact that you are regressing. So if you can’t see that things aren’t working for you then how do you put it right, when you don’t notice what it is that’s going wrong? I only knew that my mind was fuzzy and that I couldn’t concentrate well, i.e. when I was reading at night my mind would wander all over the place! This is unusual for me as I normally love reading. Hmmm!
I puzzled and puzzled over it but initially didn’t get too far. My sleep was becoming increasingly disturbed and when I woke I was finding it nearly impossible to get back to sleep. I became horribly intolerant of milk (especially with my morning coffee) and I was running to the toilet often. I was getting small bursts of anxiety again and I just had hardly any energy. I felt like my mind was just going to sleep and I couldn’t think. That’s what led me to my doxycycline experiment (see my previous blog post).
I puzzled and puzzled over it but initially didn’t get too far. My sleep was becoming increasingly disturbed and when I woke I was finding it nearly impossible to get back to sleep. I became horribly intolerant of milk (especially with my morning coffee) and I was running to the toilet often. I was getting small bursts of anxiety again and I just had hardly any energy. I felt like my mind was just going to sleep and I couldn’t think. That’s what led me to my doxycycline experiment (see my previous blog post).
I took doxycycline for 26 days (1 per day) out of a packet of 35. I stopped for a couple of reasons – firstly, I just forgot to take it on day 27 (!), and then I was pretty sure it was contributing to my weird sleep patterns, i.e. sleeping for a few hours but then waking and being unable to get back to sleep, so I decided to have a rest from it. I initially took it to help with the issues I was having drinking milk, but I’d also heard that it could help with concentration and just help with feeling better in general. So, did it help? Well, I can indeed drink milk like a boss now with no side effects. It didn’t help with my sleep or my concentration though, and, as always, I think that there were other things complicating the picture!
Firstly, I’m not sure that it was really the milk causing the problems. What? I know right! That’s why I took the doxy. I only ever really drank milk in my coffee (usually around 150 ml – so half coffee and half milk) so I just assumed it was the milk causing problems. The day after I’d finished taking the doxy I had a coffee and boom, I was straight back to the toilet. I was like ‘what on earth is going on?’ Just the day before I was fine with milk so surely one day hadn’t set me back like that? I turned it over and over in my mind (slowly! haha!) and eventually had an epiphany! Lol! What if it wasn’t the milk but the coffee instead? So a bit later I tried a chocolate milkshake instead and was absolutely fine.
The other thing that I think was contributing to the problem was not eating enough. I knew that taking the doxy would increase my need for calories so I had tried to add in puddings as well as my meals. I was having some fruit with a meringue nest and some cream, plus a bit of added sugar as I find most fruit quite sour! This didn’t work out so well though. I started to have digestive issues again (quite painful) and I got my weird cough back. I also lost my appetite a bit and had cut back to 4 meals, which at the time I thought I felt fine on! As I already said, I was waking in the night and really struggling to get back to sleep, and I was waking with a blocked nose – definitely a sign that CO2 production is low (that needs a whole blog of its own!! Lol!) I just couldn’t understand what I should do next to try and get myself back on track. Why was I feeling so much better a year ago and now I’m feeling like I’m falling apart all over again?
Luckily, as I often do, I was skirting over some comments on a post in one of the groups I follow, and one of the comments really jumped out at me. It said something along the lines of ‘if you’re going to use fresh produce to get the bulk of your carbs/calorie needs, then you need to eat an awful lot of the fresh produce as there are not a huge amount of calories in it’. Bingo! When I really looked at what was going on I noticed that my portions of potatoes were getting smaller and I was trying to sort of cheat again by getting lots of my calories from sugar or butter (with my potatoes). I remember that was what I first started doing on my path to recovery (all about the carbs but forgot about the vitamins and minerals!) which led me to another bad place! I know that my potassium is low (or it was on my hair test) and I do much better with more potassium. The other thing about eating more potassium is that it seems to be closely tied to sodium, and when I eat more potassium then I can eat a lot more sodium. This is a good thing as sodium is wasted in hypothyroid people and you tend to need to eat a lot of it to feel better. The trouble is that without the potassium I just don’t like eating salt. It’s amazing how your body can let you know by taste whether or not you need something, or how much of something you need. I think the ratio between sodium and potassium is important.
Anyway, I drastically upped the amount of potatoes I ate. Initially it was hard because it felt like too much food and it was a bit uncomfortable. I felt like I might pop!! That only lasted a few days though and now I can eat potatoes like a boss! The amount of salt I can get on my potatoes now before I can taste it is quite phenomenal! Finally I also have my sleep back. Yes I sleep like a boss! I still wake in the night to pee but I go straight back to sleep, and I mean straight! I sleep pretty deep as well. The problem was that I think I had been starting to run on stress hormones again, so that when I shut them off I felt so tired that I felt I could sleep for a hundred years!
Then a few days after that I started to feel crappy, like I had a bug or something. You know like when you finally relax in the holidays and sods law you get ill! My throat hurt a little and I ached a bit, and I just could not be bothered doing anything at all. So after a couple of days I thought, hmm, I still have the rest of those doxy tablets?? So I started taking them again a few days ago and not a single problem with sleeping now. I definitely wasn’t eating enough of the things that mattered the first time I took them. I also feel miles better, although I’m still sleepy, constantly sleepy! To give you an idea of just how sleepy I feel, this week I have tried to make a milkshake without putting the lid on and covered the kitchen in chocolate milk, and I have reversed my car into a lamp post turning the car round outside my house! Lol! I just need to sleep all day and all night, only waking for potatoes every few hours!
I assume that because I had lowered the amount of potatoes I was eating (which I have no clue how that happened) then my body just didn’t like the coffee. Coffee acts to give your metabolism a boost but if all the carbs and necessary vitamins and minerals are not in place then it’s not always going to be a welcome boost!! It’s probably the same reason why I just can’t take thyroid without problems. I’ll probably try adding coffee back in to my life in a little while and hopefully it’ll be fine, but actually I’m not missing it at the moment. I’m totally and utterly addicted to chocolate milkshakes!!
I just don’t know how I missed the fact that I was eating less and less potatoes. I would tell people I ate loads, and when I entered it in to Cronometer then it would seem like I was eating enough on the face of it. That’s the thing though I guess, you can enter what you like into Cronometer, it’s not going to actually make you eat it! I was leaving quite a bit of the portion on the side of my plate because I felt a bit full. Ultimately, although the goal is to eat intuitively, when you’re in a bit of a mess you often need to be a bit more structured in your approach to eating, just to make sure you don’t end up eating too little like I did!
So finally I feel like I’ve made some actual progress. I’ve been a few steps back and a few steps to the side, but hey, always learning and always trying to move forwards. I have no idea how to solve the quandary that I first mentioned but I guess the first place to start is to make sure I keep a check on whether I am actually eating enough. Once you start to lose the power of thought it’s so difficult to keep a check on what is actually happening. There are always so many factors to consider – like a big puzzle that you just can’t quite figure out! I’ll keep on trying though! I feel so much better now. My thoughts are clearer and I feel a bit more motivated, I just need a lot of sleep – then again I’ve missed quite a bit these last few weeks!
The twisty turny journey to health continues! As always I hope you enjoyed my ramblings. Please remember that we are all different and that different things will help different people. I share my experiences and experiments in the hope that you can take something from it, just like the odd comment I read that can really inspire me to have ideas about my own journey to health. Thanks for reading and if you have any comments, thoughts, or questions then leave them down below. Always love to hear from you. Take care x
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