oh, and one more thing....

Yesterday was the first day with just the three of us at home again -- J, Spense and me, being lazy and self-indulgent!  I watched Halloween movies (it was Mummy day, both ancient and modern), ate J's good quiche, had a couple of glasses of wine in the afternoon, and finished up some leftovers for dinner.  That might have been a mistake.

There were "compromise foods" in that meal -- a few cannelloni beans and LC pasta in the soup, and possibly more nightshades than are optimal for me.  I made little sandwiches from the (innocent) brisket and some gluten-free french bread which was not one of my usual recipes.  I spent the evening  with obviously inadequate digestion going on.  My bedtime supplements sat on top of it very uneasily.  I gave up trying to sleep at 11, but a nice hot epsom-salt bath made me feel a lot better; after that the night was short, but comparatively good.

My histamine issues have gotten a lot better over the last month, but this fortnight of higher stress and worse nutrition took its toll.  One of the things an "attack" does to me is dramatically lower my thyroid functioning.  If i eat/drink/breathe enough of the wrong things, i particularly experience poor digestion and a difficulty getting warm.

The tendency of poor nutrient absorption to participate in the cycle of poor thyroid function to poor digestion to poor absorption, 'round and 'round, is something i've written about before.  However, i have NOT yet spoken of the temperature issue in metabolic function, an inexcusable omission!  My only excuse is ... there are just SO MANY things to think about, when crafting one's best possible health-lifestyle!  :-)

In agreement with Dr. Denis Wilson's temperature theory, there will be a similar Vicious Circle of low metabolism and temperature and thyroid function.  It boils down to the enzymes which catalyze every chemical reaction in our bodies -- it has been found that a small variation in temperature can distort their shapes, and since a lock-and-key situation exists, an overly-warm "loosened" enzyme can't do its job well, and nor can a too-chilly "tightened up" one.

Wilson found that, in patients experiencing hypothyroid symptoms but showing acceptable lab values, just normalizing their temperatures with the use of T3 supplements was enough to get them functioning well again, even after withdrawing the thyroid supps.  No wonder i've always found that a hot bath helps when i feel crummy -- my temperature comes up to an appropriate level, and then my body is able to take over the job of climate control as it was designed to do.  No wonder that being exposed to prolonged heat makes me feel awful, and that i'll only regain decent function when i cool off.

This is a notion i've ONLY seen on his site, http://www.wilsonssyndrome.com.  But between this and the thyroid-lowering power of inadequate nutrition, a low-cal diet, histamine intolerance and CFS/ME, a lot of apparent contradictions in patient experience can be explained.  Symptoms can come from a huge variety of causes.  A mixture of hypO and hypER symptoms can come from mixed messages by the regulatory systems of the body -- fuel and toxin messages -- and NOT be a hint that one is better off without a thyroid at all, as allopathic medicine has sometimes interpreted it.  Unless a part is diseased or injured beyond repair, surely allowing it to heal in a nutritionally-replete and hygienic environment is to be preferred!  

...but of course, that takes WORK.