Friday, January 4, 2013

happy anniversary to me (and my blog)

Who'd'a' thunk it!  I've been here a year and had more page-views than i ever would have expected.  Time to make plans to better myself, i think.

I've been giving credit to carnitine and pregnenolone for a lot of the improved energy i've had lately, but i don't want to undervalue the also-recently-added "dopa mucuna" for my sense of well-being.  For me to sort out WHY these supplements are so helpful, it's gonna take some time and reading, of course!  Specifics like WHICH hormones derived from the pregnenolone are making me feel good....

Another subject i want to explore and experiment with is that of GOITROGENS.  Often we're told that certain foods are bad for thyroid function because giving them to healthy people and then measuring their hormone output shows a lower concentration.  But my experience has been that a lot of things which are said to lower FUNCTION actually seem to cause the body to REQUIRE LESS thyroid.  I believe that dialing back on one's need for thyroid is a good thing!  This should be possible to test -- get on a consistent roll of feeling well-supplemented and then eat a lot of cruciferous vegetables, for example....  I often get a strong sense of being "under-powered" when my body is producing less hormone.  Testing things like fruits will be a little trickier, having their burden of sugars (and my minor fructose intolerance) to confound reactions.

Well, that should occupy me for awhile.  Keeping my fingers crossed that TIME will be kind to me in 2013....  It's no secret that as one ages, time seems to go by MUCH more quickly!  I've heard various rationalizations for it, even including the hypothesis by an engineer friend that time ACTUALLY DOES go more slowly or swiftly -- wish i'd made a point of remembering his reasoning on the subject!  ;-)  It sounded good at the time, anyway.

4 comments:

  1. Happy Anniversary. Thyroid stuff is so tricky sometimes. Good luck this year.

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  2. thanks, Karen! good luck to you (and your whole30) too!

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  3. Happy anniversary!

    Loren Cordain says in The Paleo Answer that plants like soy, millet, cassava root, lima beans, sweet potatoes and cruciferous veg can hinder iodine metabolism, but they should be fine on a paleo diet. (It's in the section where he criticizes vegetarian diets.) As we've discussed before, that concept is great for people with a good metabolism--but some of us need to be careful and/or take supplements. I look forward to hearing how it goes.

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  4. thank you, Lori! yes, the list of "shouldn't eats" for a person with an iffy thyroid is long and sometimes contradictory! what i'm finding so far, though, is that researchers confuse things that reduce the NEED for thyroid hormone with things that impair function.

    just like the big to-do about a certain level of carb intake being necessary to keep hormone production up -- Sam (and others, including my n=1) have completely busted that myth, because some people whose lab tests showed lower thyroid production with lower carb intake actually had no symptoms of INADEQUATE T. also, some people confound the reduced T output that comes with significant weight loss (i.e., starvation) with reduced T "caused by low-carbing." [sigh] alas, all a dilettante like me can do is self-experiment, because whereas i KNOW some of what i read is incorrect (from experience), i can't PROVE a damned thing....

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