Mom Test Week Two

Off The Thyroid?

15/08/24 36.75 0 0

14/08/24 36.9 0 0

13/08/24 36.95 0 0

12/08/24 36.75 0 0

11/08/24 36.75 0 0

10/08/24 36.9 0 0

09/08/24 36.8 0 0

08/08/24 36.85 0 0

07/08/24 36.8 0 0

06/08/24 36.6 0 0.25

My last (quarter of a) desiccated thyroid pill was nine days ago on the morning of the 6th August. Since then I've consistently been waking up with a higher-than-normal temperature. It's not a fever, because I feel hot and want to cool down. If I had a fever I'd feel cold and be trying to get warmer. I've been walking around with my shirt off a lot, and consistently overheating on walks, immediately after eating, and sometimes for no reason at all. It's August and the sun is shining brightly but it's not that hot here up in the hills, about 25C during the hottest part of the day. Still absolutely no sign of sun damage of any kind, but plenty of nettle stings, insect bites and blackberry scratches.

It's actually occurred to me that I might have the beginnings of Graves' disease, but a more likely explanation is that I've still got a bit of exogenous thyroxine hanging around in my system. It takes a while to decay away, but even so, the amount must be quite tiny by now.

I've been keeping a tally of how much protein I've been eating, largely trying to avoid protein-heavy snacks like cheese, and trying to make up for high-protein meals by requesting baked potatoes the next day. Occasionally I'm finding myself craving cheese or yoghurt (and satisfying those cravings, of course), so I suspect I must be somewhere near the essential requirement level. My very roughly estimated average protein intake has been about 50g/day. That would be about right for a man of 85kg, according to various made-up numbers on the internet. I'm currently around 92kg I think.

No weird feelings of excessive hunger, but I have had a couple of episodes of suddenly getting tired for no good reason. It is just about possible to believe that these occurred after periods of unusually high protein intake, but it is very easy to fool oneself playing games like this. I might try a few more careful experiments once I get back.

At one point I got a couple of days of slight plantar fasciitis, a rather distinctive pain in both feet that's always been an early sign of chronic fatigue/hypometabolism/thyroid underdose for me, but that seems to have gone away on its own. As I write, if I concentrate very hard I can feel a very slight ache in my legs, like post-exercise lactic acid, which was always another early sign of doom. Neither of those things is consistent with either Graves' or excess thyroxine.

But I'm cautiously optimistic that my decade-long curse is at least partially lifted. It seems that my metabolism is now running at a normal speed overnight without needing to be artificially overdriven. In fact my waking temperature is currently higher than I ever felt comfortable forcing it. I think Broda Barnes would approve.

That doesn't imply that everything's actually working properly of course, just that I'm running at roughly the right speed while idling, as it were. Or possibly a little too hot.

Weight-wise I have no idea. I'm not measuring it and I don't have any intuitive sense that it's going up or down. It doesn't feel like I'm eating more or less than usual, my appetite is normal.

My mind seems to be working fine. Not the bright clarity and heightened curiosity of ketosis or carbosis, just calm and relaxed and functioning. If I want to understand something complicated then I can, but I'm not driven to thinking about complex things for their own sake. A little less clever than I would ideally like, but no complaints.

[EDIT: Because I am a fool, I completely fucked up the protein intake thing by only counting things I thought were high protein. I was probably eating something like 3000kcal/day here, and even if that was all just bread it would have been 140g of protein per day, so that 50g of protein/day above is just utter bollocks. Probably more like 180g/day. Just ignore all this. No way to back-calculate and work out what I was actually doing.]