It didn’t seem to matter what foods I ate… thanks to hypothyroidism I just kept gaining weight.
It didn’t matter how long I slept… thanks to hypothyroidism I could sleep all day and still be tired.
It was so frustrating…
… was…
Never would I have thought that food played a HUGE role with being tired all the time, my skin getting dry, nails becoming brittle, brain fog, or my hair thinning out and falling off!
I always thought it was just an underactive thyroid as I was made believe…
It was actually my hair falling off at a scary rate that made me want a change so bad I was willing to do whatever it took to figure this out to feel normal again…
I found the answer in food, but it wasn’t easy…
Here’s why…
In my email newsletters where I talk more about what I’m doing for thyroid weight and fatigue, I’ve mentioned that when I started I tried all kinds of diets, but none seemed to work…
I started out juicing, being raw vegan, fruitarian, 80/10/10, paleo, slow-carb, etc…
I was all over the place and even though I did feel better with some of those diets, I was still fatigued all the time.
This made it harder for me to believe food would have such an impact. It seemed like no matter what foods I ate, what diets I followed, good, bad, I still felt like crap.
So before I talk about the foods that helped me out the most, I have to share with you the most important lesson I learned out of all the things I tried and the thousands of hours I put into research on this topic.
It boils down to this…
If your gut is damaged, then it doesn’t matter what foods you eat.
Period!
Such a profound statement that I wish more people understood…
See, your gut houses all kinds of bacteria… both good and bad. In simple terms, good bacteria digest food for you and allow you to get nutrients from food. Bad bacteria, they steal nutrients from you and create toxins for your body (which is a huge source of fatigue!).
So you can eat all organic and healthy and all you want, but if you have bad bacteria in your gut, then you are paying extra to feed the critters that are releasing the toxins making you fat!
That’s why my wish for you is that you understand that before you upgrade your foods, you must focus on healing your gut… that means reduce the bad bacteria and increase the good bacteria in your gut.
Take Maureen Valvidia for example…
*Results may vary from person to person
Maureen Valvidia has hashimoto’s thyroiditis. As you can see from the picture above she has gone through an amazing transformation.
How did she do it?
It all started with a gut-healing diet. She learned about traditional cooking and nourishing foods that help heal your gut.
In other words, the foods she ate promoted the growth of good bacteria and helped reduce bad bacteria in the gut.
Here’s how your gut becomes damaged
This concept I’m about to share is simple and it will help you make sense of the foods I’ll be talking about below… depending on the foods you eat, you promote the growth of different bacteria both good or bad.
For example, if you eat a lot of sugar, you will be likely to have yeast growth in your gut. That’s because yeast eat sugar, so the more sugar you eat, the more likely you are to grow different types of bacteria that feed on sugar like yeast, mold and fungus…
Similarly, parasites digest meat… so the more meat you eat, the more likely you are to grow parasites in your gut…
All of this plays a huge role with food digestion, weight and fatigue!
That means that if you take care of your gut, it will make the foods I’m about to share with you much more effective because you’ll have the right bacteria to get the nutrients from them!
Here are my favorite foods for hypothyroidism
When people ask me about foods for hypothyroidism, my top foods are foods that promote hormone production, and hormone balance…
These foods are usually high in omega-3’s high in dha and epa. In simple terms, that means I like foods that nourish you with vitamin A, D, E, and K.
The vitamins listed above are fat soluble, which means you’ll find them in fatty foods. Ironically, the best foods for these vitamins are foods which most people run away from. Some people when I share these foods with them say “I’ve heard of that, but I can’t do it”, even though they’ve never tried it…
I’m talking about dairy products like milk, eggs and cheese… but NOT store bought.
This is the tricky part…
The foods I found most effective were actually RAW dairy, raw egg yolks and full fat cheese because they carry easy to absorb vitamins your body uses to produce hormones.
There is a HUGE difference, like night and day difference between raw milk from grass-fed cows and store bought milk.
If I ever drank store bought milk, I’d get more allergies, build up mucus in my gut and just wouldn’t feel good… raw milk on the other hand would almost instantly boost my body temperature and it was so much easier on digestion… the hardest part is finding a local source.
My favorite foods for thyroid fatigue
Eating more greens helped me out a lot with fatigue. It was actually a combination of greens and fasting…
I remember hearing stories of people waking up at 4 am, taking their hormones and going back to sleep. The idea being that the body absorbs some things better when it’s on a fasted state.
For fatigue, I did a lot of cleanses, but in order to make some of those cleanses more effective, I did intermittent fasting. Basically that means I skipped breakfast… but because the idea of skipping breakfast was weird to me at first, I started drinking green juice instead of breakfast and thought of it as a “light meal”.
I later learned that if you drink green juice with no sugar, your body stays in a fasted state, but because you are getting a lot of nutrition from the greens you don’t feel like fainting.
This routine of drinking green juice instead of breakfast also helped with healing my gut. My full morning routine now includes drinking green juice and taking probiotics.
My favorite foods for thyroid weight
There are two types of foods or I’m not sure what to call them, but think of them as “groups of foods” that helped me the most with weight…
The first one is fermented foods, which is what traditional cooking is all about. This I recommend you do as much as you can.
Fermented Foods have probiotics which are the “house cleaners” of the body. They literally help clean up your gut.
The second one is following a ketogenic type of diet… but not all the time. It’s best to cycle in and out as I’ll talk about below.
A ketogenic diet is high fat, moderate protein, and most importantly no sugar.
Again, when I share this with people, many of them realize one of two things…
#1 how addictive sugar is
#2 how bad their digestive system is
Or both…
The hardest thing about a ketogenic diet is that you must train your body to run on a different fuel source and learn more about how the body digests fats.
Follow me now, because when you understand this it will be the difference between continuing to struggle with weight and fatigue and finally feeling normal again.
Why did a ketogenic diet help me so much?
I had low hormone production… low hormone production was caused by a deficiency in fat soluble vitamins like A, D, E, and K.
Guess what?
Raw dairy is one of the richest sources for these vitamins! (no need for supplements!)
A ketogenic diet is a high fat diet, which means I was loading up on the vitamins I needed most for hormone production.
Foods to avoid for hypothyroidism
Just as important as getting the right nutrients for your thyroid (which starts with fixing your gut so it can digest these foods for you properly), it is important that you avoid the ones that are hurting you…
The foods I’m about to share to avoid, you don’t have to stop eating them forever, but if you take a 3-5 day break from each it will do wonders for your hormones and your thyroid. You also have to learn to upgrade these foods if you do want to continue to include them in your diet.
There’s 7 foods I take breaks from… but these are the 3 that had the biggest impact on me.
#1 Red Meat
With hypothyroidism, I had excess estrogen in the body… taking breaks from red meat helped a lot. Like I said, I did the whole raw vegan thing for a while.
Nowadays, I eat red meat very sparingly and only if it comes from good sources, grass-fed, yadda yada… I can talk about this for days so I’ll save it for another post.
#2 Grains
Funny how some of the articles I’ve read online about foods to eat for hypothyroidism tell you to eat more grains… me I found the opposite to be true.
When I cut out grains, I felt a huge relief in my gut.
I used to feel like something had punched tiny little holes in my gut because every time I ate my gut would bubble up, I’d be gassy and had a lot of digestive issues including constipation and mucus build up.
It was like the beginning of leaky gut, or IBS… but cutting out grains and understanding more about them is what helped me out… like eating REAL wheat which is called Einkorn.
Why is it that most people have never heard of Einkorn??
It’s the original wheat grain, which doesn’t have the bad gluten like modern day wheat and it doesn’t have triple the amount of chromosomes like modern day wheat…
Seriously!!
Einkorn, the original wheat has only 14 chromosomes… modern day wheat has 42…
We all know what happens when humans have a different number of chromosomes, but no one realizes they are eating frankenfoods with most modern day grains…
#3 Dairy
“Wait… didn’t you just say above that dairy is what you found most helpful?”
Yes…
… but I was referring to raw sources of dairy up there…
Here I’m talking about cutting out store bought dairy.
Similar to red meat, I don’t consume raw dairy every day… it’s actually very sparingly. Since raw milk, or what I now call “real milk”, has so much nutrition you don’t need much.
Does this make sense?
Cut out store bought dairy… and upgrade to raw dairy if you want to continue to include it in your diet, which I did since my hormones were low and this helped…
Similarly I did the same thing with coffee, fruit, and sugar…
In fact, if you want to know the #1 food to avoid for your thyroid, it’s sugar.
You can learn more about this and things I’m doing for thyroid fatigue and weight here.
