"So, Do You Understand Japanese?"

I pondered about posting this, but thought that it may help others by making it public, so here it is! The Title is the first thing the doctor said to me this week when I went in to see him - followed soon after by a "Well, you will now." (huh????) He continued on to tell me I have Hashimoto's Thyroiditis (Oh, Japanese physician who first described the symptoms!)- short form is that I have antibodies in my body that are attacking my Thyroid gland causing it to be enlarged, and it can eventually stop your thyroid from functioning altogether - this would affect the 2 primary hormones the thyroid creates the T3 (triiodothyonine) and T4 (thyroxine) levels in your body and quite drastically effects your metabolism. T3s and T4s maintain the rate at which our bodies use the food we consume, and then also help maintain our body's temperature and control the heart rate.

Presently my T3 and T4 levels are stable, but I do get the joy of being stabbed with a needle more frequently than I'd like to check them now. I'm staying away from foods that are high in iodine also - which is essentially seafood - but I can take fish oil in capsules (on a side note, has anyone found a fish oil capsule that doesn't give you a salmon aftertaste? I'm really not a salmon fan!). My doctor has chosen to not put me onto thyroid medication - in theory less drugs in the body is a good thing - there was a 2001 study of people in the same situation as me where the antibodies were increased, but the thyroid was still functioning where half the group were given a small amount of the thyroid hormone levothyroxine - this half found that their thyroid decreased in size and the number of attacking antibodies significantly decreased, where the placebo group's antibodies either stayed the same or increased. There are some more natural solutions out there that I'm going to take a look at first though - like taking a selenium supliment and generally keeping away from things that have toxins in them (see my previous post about organic foods). And we'll see how those pesky antibodies like that!

In other news, the back is so close to being back to normal. I'm still waiting a few more days before getting back into running again, but I did do my very first ever spinning class this morning - 776 calories burned later - and I actually enjoyed it. I did have misgivings wondering how exactly sitting on a bike in a class for an hour could be anything but dull, but some good music, an entertaining instructor and the hour flies by - if this doesn't help with the bike portion of the tri's next summer nothing will!