Here’s what no one tells you about brain fog and Hashimoto’s
Brain fog has very little to do with your thyroid… it has little to do with Hashimoto’s…
I used to feel fatigued all the time, which I thought was normal as you get older. What didn’t seem right was that I would come home after work and be too exhausted to move, but when I laid down to go to sleep, I would suddenly struggle to fall asleep. My mind would start going, my anxiety would start going and I’d have insomnia.
On a good night, I would sleep four hours straight and then I would toss and turn the rest of the night. I’d wake up and walk like a zombie.
Brain fog had more to do with my inability to fall and stay asleep.
How to Get Energy with Hashimoto’s
My doctor told me that there was nothing I could do about this and that I was going to have to take thyroid hormones for the rest of my life.
That couldn’t be the case. I could not believe that with all the information we have available, that they didn’t know how to fix this problem. So, I started researching how does the body produce hormones. That’s when I started to realize that a lot of things I thought I knew about health and diet were completely wrong.
Picture this… I’m sitting at my desk searching for the raw materials the body needs to produce hormones and I start reading about how the body takes cholesterol and vitamin D and make pretty much every hormone in the body.
I was staring at my screen like a puppy with a head tilted trying to make sense of what I was reading. Cholesterol?
See, up until that point I didn’t know jack squat about cholesterol other than knowing my grandma was on cholesterol meds and I just assumed that cholesterol was bad. It was something to be avoided.
… but suddenly I’m reading about how the body uses cholesterol from things like egg yolks, butter, etc., and it uses that to make hormones??
No way!!
I couldn’t believe it, but it started to make sense why I had low energy… because hormone production is energy production… and if your body is not producing hormones then your energy levels will tank.
… and here I was thinking I was eating healthy because I was eating lean meats (egg whites) & veggies. Basically, no fat and no cholesterol.
I became willing to incorporate foods that had healthy fats and cholesterol into my diet and I couldn’t believe the night and day difference it made with my hormone production.
Hashimoto’s Fatigue Treatment
It made sense that I needed to eat more healthy fats, because vitamin D, the other raw material the body uses to produce hormones is fat soluble. That means you need to eat healthy fats so that your body can uptake and use vitamin D.
I started researching vitamin D and quickly realized that this was a key component of hormone production. I found it very interesting that doctors aren’t particularly fond of telling you about vitamin D. When I asked my doctor to test me for vitamin D, they asked me “what have you been reading online?”
They said the test results wouldn’t tell them anything they needed to know. I insisted on getting tested and found that I was low and came in at 22ng/dL. (normal range should be 55ng/dL or higher)
They then tried to give me a vitamin D3 supplement where I would have to take 3,000 to 5,000 IUs.
I found that vitamin D3 supplements are not good because your body may not be able to convert vitamin D3 into the active form of vitamin D. This is a similar problem to the body not being able to convert thyroid hormone T4 into the active form T3.
That’s what happens when you supplement instead of eating foods that contain the nutrients you need. So I went on a search for foods that contain vitamin D and the only thing I found was fermented cod liver oil.
Fermentation is nature’s way of taking nutrients in food and making vitamins. If you pick up a bottle of regular cod liver oil, you will see the nutrition label state that it contains omega-3 and other nutrients, but it won’t list vitamin D. However, if you pick up a bottle of fermented cod liver oil, you will find that it won’t list omega-3, but it will list vitamins A, D instead. Both are fat soluble vitamins so it makes sense that they can be found in fermented fish oils.
My hypothyroidism energy booster is essentially fermented cod liver oil paired with proper hydration.
To hydrate I drink…
1 quart clean water
2mL ionic magnesium
4mL SOLE salt
My sleep improved so much just by following this simple protocol that I could not help but to share it with others… and I was happy to hear back from others that they too started to improve their sleep and because they were waking up well rested, brain fog became a thing of the past.
