Hands down the biggest comfort to anyone with AI is to know the crazy-weird stuff they’re experiencing…isn’t so crazy-weird. Or at least, other people on the planet are going through the same crazy-weirdness.

image via 'Sweet pics dude'

The whys and how comes of AI remain, largely and bloody frustratingly, a mystery. But ask anyone with the condition and they will no doubt have a gut or emotional sense of what it’s all about. I have AI because I have lessons I need to learn. I have to slow down and enjoy life more. I yearn this and so my AI is here to ensure I get it. One day.

Someone sent me the below “letter from my disease”. As always, if you don’t have an AI or chronic illness, bear in mind that an AI is merely an extreme version of the dis-ease I think so many of us are feeling. When you have an AI, the reminders of the dis-ease are just louder.

If you’re new to this blog, you might like to catch up on some auto immune and hashimotos reading here.

The letter was originally posted on a UK thyroid support group forum and has circulated a little.  It struck me as uncanny how many AI phenomena it raises that I thought were just Me Things. Like:

* it rears its grim head on days when you’re looking forward to something

* it stems from a trauma. Yep, tick. Mine was a series of traumas that conflated.

* the Hashimoto’s roundabout ALWAYS involves seeing 23847239 doctors before you get something resembling traction.

As I wrote yesterday, I have reached another chapter with my hashimoto battle. I’d been doing everything right, but I was still having “thyroidy days” 3-4 days a week. My blood tests were also doing weird things (in the most recent case, coming back with low TSH AND low T3 and T4) and so the doctors were just shrugging at me and ushering me out the door. I thought I was at a dead end.

By Anna Hatzakis

Which was driving me MENTAL But then. I delved deeper. And I made some VERY EXCITING discoveries that I think will help many of you out there who write to me about your similar frustrations. Many of the principles will speak to anyone with an autoimmune disease, too.

I’ll be writing a few posts on some of the things I’ve found. To kick off, I chatted with Chris Kresser during the week. He’s had his own battles and understands frustration. He runs The Healthy Skeptic and is a practitioner in integrative medicine and acupuncturist (and has a wife with thyroid disease). Anyway, he’s come to specialise in hashimotos. And his info is sound and generous.

Listen in:

Chris Kesser Podcast [ 40:12 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

In the podcast we cover (and I’m outlining the details below cos it’s all very DENSE info):

The three reasons why your thyroid medication might not be working.

Primarily it’s because hashimotos is an inflammation disease, not a thyroid disease as such. But only the thyroid gets treated (with a band-aid fix – the medication)…causing the other factors involved to continue on. So

1. Medication doesn’t address the damage done by inflammation to the hypothalamus-pituitary-thyroid (HPT) axis, which is key to hashi.
2. Medication doesn’t address the damage done by inflammation to thyroid hormone receptors. If there aren’t enough receptors, or they aren’t sensitive enough, it doesn’t matter how much thyroid medication we take. The cells won’t be able to use it.
3. Medication comes in the form of T4 (this is what thyroxin is), which our bodies are meant to convert into T3 (which is the active form required by our cells).  BUT if your system is stuffed (by inflammation), it can’t make this conversion. Which is just so dumb (and the reason why I supplement my thyroxin with a compounded T3, since the drug companies don’t make it in this format…yes, DUMB!).

The six situations that might explain why your thyroid might be playing up

…and what to do.

As you listen to the six scenarios, we’ll be referring to a bunch of blood tests that will help you work out which scenario might be yours.

Below I’ve outlined the blood tests you’ll need to have on hand to do this.  If you’re feeling like crap, I suggest you go to your doctor/therapist and ask for all these to be done at once.

I posted my interview with Nora Gedgaudas last week that detailed the whole paleo diet thing. I’m two weeks in and am noticing amazing differences – which I’ll report back on.

Photo by Santiago Design

Anyway, I know a lot of readers on this site have an auto-immune disease of some sort. Nora very kindly talked me through her tips for anyone suffering AI, specifically hashimotos. It all fits. I’ve been told for years the paleo diet is ideal for AI issues. I thought you AI types out there would find it useful (apologies to everyone else…and apologies for my rambly chat…I was having a very “thyroidy” day that day…and you know how that goes…)

Remember, Nora’s out here in Australia in November with Nourishing Australia. I really recommend making it to one of the sessions.

Chat with Nora_Gedgaudas - 2 [ 40:21 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Nora then went the extra mile and emailed me to confirm many of her complex points (your head spinning much from listening to the above?). I love that she uses the word “modulation” as the approach that needs to be taken.

It’s so very much about modulation.

The primary issue at hand is IMMUNE function (specifically, a need for immune modulation).

Most if not nearly all cases of autoimmune thyroid are profoundly tied to gluten sensitivity and/or celiac disease (either as an initiating or complicating issue).  Avoiding ALL gluten and whatever cross-reactive compounds you have a sensitivity to should be 100%, immediate and permanent.  Nearly all available testing for gluten sensitivity currently is quite unreliable…so if you think you aren’t gluten sensitive you may want to seriously reconsider revisiting this though more in depth testing.  If it were me, I’d just assume an issue with gluten and avoid it like the plague.

Healing your gut is hugely important in this.  It will be impossible, btw, without generating healthy glutathione levels.

Shoot for between 80-100 ng/mL 25 OHD (vitamin D) in blood tests.

On Friday I had the indescribable joy of chatting to Nora Gedgaudas on Skype. Nora wrote the paleo living bible Primal Body, Primal Mind and is a gem of a woman.

photo via The Alkaline Sisters

In a nutshell, the premise of her thinking is this:

* our genealogy hasn’t changed since Paleolithic times when we ate fat, protein and low-starch veggies.

* our diet has changed to a high carb/sugar/starch diet, with the introduction of the agricultural period 10,000 years ago, which our bodies have not been able to adjust to…which makes us sick and tired.

Ergo:

We need to eat MORE FAT and ELIMINATE CARBS for optimal health and longevity.

Perhaps the most home-hitting point she makes is this:

Fat doesn’t make us fat, fat eaten with carbs does

and:

We aren’t what we eat, we’re how we metabolise what we eat

If you’re interested in all this, her book is seriously the go-to bible. I went crazy with my highlighter and post-it reading it last week. And for auto-immune/hashimoto sufferers…it almost caters directly to our conditions (Nora’s family all have hashimotos).

The great news is: Nora’s also out here in Australia in November speaking at universities in Sydney, Armidale and the Gold Coast. I’ll be at the Goldie to see her speak. It will be rad.

But in the meantime…our chat:

Chat with Nora Gedgaudas Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Some of you asked some questions via twitter on key points of the paleo diet. I thought I’d spell things out a little, because they’re themes that I’ve touched on a lot on this blog. My sugar quitting philosophy is similar, ditto my exercise approach.

But aren’t grains needed by our bodies?

It would appear not. They contain no essential nutrients we can’t get from elsewhere in more effective ways. They’ve traditionally been eaten when fat and protein haven’t been around (and, thus, signal to the body there’s a famine going on). Since we have the option not to eat them, why would we? Especially given the below…

I haven’t done a AI post for a while (and if you’re new to this blog you might want to catch up on some previous posts here). Which is not to say that I’m traveling swimmingly with my particular version of the disease. Nope, it’s up and down.

via pinterest.com

I’m still learning what flares things up. To be honest the biggest, lingering issue is inflammation. Which is no surprise. AI is all about inflammation. Healing AI, as well as treating it, is about reducing inflammation. Reducing flare-ups. And then de-exciting them smartly when they do happen. Which they will. I find this management process so frustrating. I flare up – which is to say I get inflammed – 2-3 days every week. It drives me mental.

my right side goes puffy, and my face and both feet. You’ll see photos of me where one day I look one size, the next a good size or two bigger. I can’t wear shoes.

my lips burn (the other day they swelled so much they split) and strangely, the skin of my stomach does, too.

I get brain fog. And can’t face talking to people.

I get super sensitive – to noise, light, EMFs, smells. I can’t cope with perfume or the smell of detergent. Even thoughts hurt.

and my digestion stops. In it’s tracks.

Below I’ll update with what I’m doing now to reduce the swell. (And remember: if you don’t have AI, the info on inflammation is key to good health in everyone!!!) I also thought it would be good to share this article by Dr Mark Hyman on ways to treat inflammation. It’s a good backgrounder on the inflam/AI link:

• Inflammation is connected to almost every known chronic disease: from heart disease to cancer, diabetes to obesity, autism to dementia and even depression…as well as AI.
• Autoimmune diseases now affect 24 million people and includes rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, multiple sclerosis, thyroid disease, inflammatory bowel disease, and more.
• Autoimmunity occurs when your immune system gets confused and your own tissues get caught in friendly cross-fire. Your body is fighting something — an infection, a toxin, an allergen, a food or the stress response — and somehow it redirects its hostile attack on your joints, your brain, your thyroid, your gut, your skin or sometimes your whole body.

Know this, Cannelle et Vanille is one of the most beautiful food blogs out there. Not just visually, but….spiritually, too (Gwyneth Paltrow is a fan, too). You can feel the love and care and whimsy from the pages of her blog. And Aran Goyoaga, a Basque food stylist now based in the US…well, she’s become a bit of an e-soul sister. We connected via our blogs and because we both have hashimotos (thyroid disease). We ask each other if we’re ok from time to time.

Anyway I thought she’d have a thought or two to share on healthy eating… and could give us a gluten-free recipe.

Aran's gluten-free purple corn and banana muffins

Everyone meet Aran, Aran meet everyone:

How the auto-immune thing started for me:

But things changed for me when I became a mother. During the course of both pregnancies, I developed autoimmune conditions (Hashimoto’s thyroiditis and autoimmune inner ear disorder) that left me exhausted, depressed, tired and even experienced debilitating vertigo attacks. I could barely function and I was adamant to find a doctor that was willing to look beyond mere symptoms. And so I did.

This is what throws me off balance the most:

I’m still trying to figure it out, really. I know that diet is number one right now. Any little bit of gluten and it’s vertigo a couple of days later (just happened recently when I had something with hidden gluten in it). But also when I’m not creative or I feel tied down, then I go into downward spiral for a few days. I just don’t know how to control those things as easily.