Thyroid weight gain

Posted , 8 users are following.

I am a 47 year old woman, I have been on a diet for most of my life..2 years ago I had a gastric band fitted and lost 6 stone..I need to lose another 5 and I'm stuck..I am eating around 1200 calories a day and I swim 3 x per week and I've lost nothing in 4 months!! I don't know what else I can do. I currently take 200mcg per day of levothyroxine and I feel it's my hypothyroidism that is causing me to  be unable to lose weight! I have been told that a combination of t3 and t4 meds may help? Can anyone give me any help or advice..I'm desperate, thank you 

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  • Posted

    It is your thyroid, because I ask my Doctor why I wasn't losing weight, she said it was my thyroid. So I am truly at a stand still also.

    • Posted

      I believe it is the medication. It shouldn't be her thyroid by itself because she is taking medication to improve thyroid function. Many people, even after their doctors have finally found their correct levothyroxine dose, will continue to gain weight due to the medication.

  • Posted

    What do you eat? I found changing my diet helped dramatically.
    • Posted

      I eat salads, seafood, vegetables, chicken and turkey. That's it, but I cheat sometimes with chips and candy.

    • Posted

      Hi Mary, my diet is really good, I eat lots of veg, fruit and salad. Because of the band I can't eat bread, cakes, pastries etc and I very rarely drink alcohol I'm at a loss to see how much healthier my diet can be I've even toyed with the idea of living on meal replacements and see if that works.

  • Edited

    Hi Kirsty, I've been through all this! With the weight, it took a full 10 weeks of   Serious diet and hardcore cardio before I lost weight. Then I dropped 7 pounds in one week. After a few more months, I'd lost more. I eventually went from a size 14 to a small size 4. Once I got the weight off, I was much healthier overall. But it was pretty rough initially and I had to constantly watch my diet. So, overall, I just got used to eating slowly, high protein, low fat, low carb diet, with lots of exercise. Staying slender became much easier over time and I loved it! I had been diagnosed with a thyroid cyst prior to losing weight, but was not given medication, and not even a full thyroid blood panel. I didn't know any better then. 

    i suspect I had hypothyroidism my whole life... Managing the weight seemed to have helped for about a decade. Then I had a burst appendix with undiagnosed peritonitis that went on for several years. I feel the bacterial infection triggered additional autoimmune disease that resulted in thyroid failure. I had to go on thyroid medication and was ok on the NDT except it seemed the dosing was difficult because of variation from label doses. It went downhill from there when my doctor convinced me to try levothyroxin. Three years of hell, massive weight gain and fibrimialgia symptoms, hair loss, completely incapacitated. My life went down the drain.

    For me, it felt like the levo didn't do anything to alleviate the hypothyroidism. Plus it had a bunch of side effects. The levothyroxin was not effective at any dose, (I was up to 200mcg), and in addition to the hypothyroid symptoms, I had massive bone loss, arthritis send fibrimialgia symptoms. 

    I finally got got fed up with the nonsense and got minor relief going back to the NDT. But now I've completely rejected the prescription meds and am doing much better on the OTC Bovine glandular. 9 pills a day of 130mg. This stuff actually works and I'm starting to feel like myself again... Slowly.

    Well, that was my solution.

    The levo doesn't work. 

    Good luck.

    Catherine

    • Posted

      thanks Catherine I'm going to see my doctor next week and going to demand he does something..anything to help me. I will be armed with all the research info I've picked up. 

    • Edited

      Kirsty, I wish you luck. Hope for the best. But maybe prepare yourself for a letdown, and have a backup plan that doesn't involve trying yet another ineffective drug, wasting time while your health continues in a downward spiral.

      Unfortunately, doctors believe that just because a medication shows its present in your blood, that it works. This obviously isn't the case with this medication, so you're stuck with both the side effects, and the hypothyroid symptoms that still aren't getting treated.  Unfortunately, doctors generally don't have much knowledge other than standardized info and what the drug companies distribute. To add to it, they also often have inflated egos to the point that they aren't open enough to listen to what a patient says. Since they have zero information on everything you've just researched, they can't even respond or answer your questions. So you may be trying to get blood from a turnip, as they say. 

      Hopefully, I'm wrong and your doctor can provide some support and reasonable suggestions. 

      Again, good luck!

  • Posted

    Check out chia seeds. They provide you with loads of nutrients and give you energy while helping to lose weight.
  • Posted

    I use to be 289lbs. I am 5'2 on a really good hair day so you can imagine I was pretty big. Ive struggled my whole live with my weight and have been on just about every diet. My last diet I ost 161 lbs. This is what I have noticed in every diet and it happens to just about everyone with or weith out Hypothyroidism (which I too have).

       When losing weight most of hit plateus. mine were at 200lbs and at 180lbs. It was frustrating for months. Didnt mater what I did It would not budge. For me , I had to lower my fat grams  and carbs even more for a short time and it seemed to work. Starving yourself only makes you store fat because your body thinks its starving and may not get fod later. Small portions a few times a day helps kick your body out of the storing fat for the starving futer mode, Once your body realizes its geting nutrition regularly it will not worry about storing it. Still stay with in your regemented calorie, fat grm carb count just devide it up through out the day . These plateus are very normal as frustrating as they are your body is adjusting to the weight loss . 

     You have mae alot of changes to your body recently give it some time to catch up and figure out whats going on. 

    • Posted

      You are very welcome I tried to post some sites that will help but I think they are not alowing it I dont know if we can PM on here but feel free to do so  also check out the ATA The American Thyroid Association
  • Posted

    Well Kirsty I used a diet for my fiancee to overcome her hyperthyroidism I at the time lived in the uk and she in the Philippines she was as she says fat and couldn't lose weight, we went to the doctors when I came to stay here in the Philippines and she was sent for a scan which I was present at and then back to the doctors where I told the doctor I would put this right and as he looked at the scan and then me, he said I am going to send you for a byopsy well I put her on a diet!

    this does work very simple, all you need to remember is that it's your immune system that is attacking your thyroid and to be able to put this right you have to stop eating these immune boosting foods which are 

    carrots

    broccoli

    cauliflower

    turnip 

    cabbage

    You need to eat a high protien diet eggs nuts organic chicken that type of of food okay 

    all you are doing here is eating foods to boost your cells to feed them and lower the immune system which is the problem and by doing this it will fix your problem as it did for my fiancee this works in about 85% of ppl!

    if you do try this let me know how you get on please!

    if not well I wish you the best of luck! 

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