81 North Blog

The following rules are based on my own observations over the past year and a half - some of it spent hyperthyroid, some spend hypO thyroid. Almost all of it during beta-blocker usage. It doesn’t matter what your labs are, a great number of you will find yourself battling weight issues at some point during treatment.

And since we are often unable to work much, plus we have a lot of medical expenses, I’ll keep the advice as low-cost as possible.

Step One: Walk 10,000/8,000+ Steps Daily

10,000 total steps daily. 8,000 of those steps done consecutively. Those are considered to be aerobic steps and you have to walk a minimum of 10 minutes before they start adding up.

If you purchase only two things - and who can afford more nowadays? - buy a comfy pair of shoe pads to slip into your walking shoes and buy a good pedometer.

The shoe pads may be some Dr. Scholl’s at $4.00 or they may be the $10 “Orthotic” type inserts that give you more support in the arch section. That’s the kind I bought. That’s how much I paid for the Dr. Scholl’s orthotics at Wal-Mart I think. But you can get 3 pairs for $18.57 at Amazon here.

Shoe pads or orthotics are critical, at least they are for me. Whether I am hypER or hypO, I suffer from plantar fasciitis whenever my FT4 levels are not in range. Cushioning is so important. I have a pair of 1-inch thick flip-flops that I slip on when I get out of bed - they are a good cushion for walking around the house. And my walking shoes must be very cushioned. I’ll confess that I bought a pair of $100 New Balance running shoes and they were not as comfortable as my pair of $11 Wal-Mart black lace-up street shoes with extra-thick non-slip soles, which I then made better by using Dr. Scholl’s orthotics. Crazy isn’t it? But they were better because they gave me more room to insert the orthotics and then lace to my personal preference. I guess I need to be fit by a pro sometime, because I have never, not once, liked wearing sports shoes. I like regular shoes that I can customize. To me, it always felt like the sports shoe was trying too hard.

Next, order your pedometer from Amazon here - or maybe find it at Wal-Mart or K-Mart.

This is the best one I’ve ever used (the Omron HJ-112) and it counts those critical aerobic steps separately from total steps. That’s the most critical part of step one. Counting the aerobic steps - which don’t begin to add up until you’ve been walking for 10 minutes without pause). With shipping, it cost $23.81. So if you can put aside $35, or sell something for $35, do it. Buy these two items.

I have read stuff by many experts who advise you to walk or exercise for so-many minutes a day. And they also say you don’t have to do this all at once - breaking it up into smaller segments of time or exercise units will have the same benefit.

What I found to be true for me is this - I must do 10,000 steps every day, with a day off every couple weeks at best - and 8,000 at the minimum, must be aerobic steps in order for me to NOT GAIN WEIGHT. I am not talking about losing weight. I am talking about stopping the weight gain that seems so stubborn when you’re being treated for thyroid problems. That’s what a minimum of 8,000 aerobic steps will do for you. So you see, it has to be consecutive, it can’t be broken up into smaller segments like they say. Maybe it’s just thyroid people who react this way?

Before you think this is unreasonable, remember just how unreasonable the weight gain is. I can get my 8,000+ aerobic steps in by leaving the house and walking for 35 minutes, then turning around and walking back. I don’t try to walk fast or keep any sort of sports pace. I just walk in whatever way feels okay to my body. The result is no creeping weight gain. Worth it? You bet! It becomes so important to me that I let very little stand in the way of me getting that time in. And that’s because I know just how hard that thyroid-fat gain is to lose once you stop walking (yeah, how do you think I learned my own lesson?) It becomes a rhythm of life for me. It becomes the way I take my break from work (I work at home). I get up between 5:30-6:00, grab some morning coffee and go into my home office and begin dealing with the morning’s emails. I keep my pedometer on my nightstand, next to my eyeglasses. When I get up, I put on my glasses and slip the pedometer into my bathrobe pocket. It’s always with me.

At 8:00 I stop, throw on some sweats and a jacket along with sunglasses, grab the cellphone, iPod, pedometer and dog, and off we go. When I get back, I shower and then return to work.

This stops the weight gain, without altering anything else in my life. And it even stops the weight gain if I am eating crazy again, like hypER people often do even after they are on treatment - we learn really bad food habits. For me, once I began beta-blockers, all weight-loss from hyperthyroidism stopped in it’s tracks. And that’s even before I began taking anti-thyroid drugs. The beta-blocker alone can halt, even reverse weight loss for me.

So getting in 10,000 steps a day and making at least 8,000 of them aerobic steps, is critical for us. For everyone, really. It just helps the thyroid patient so much more than you’ll realize until you stop doing it. Then you get to see for yourself just how much it protected you from fat.

More?
There were definitely days when I walked more than that - I might have errands to run and groceries to buy - and so I would rack up maybe 16,000 steps during one day - though maybe only 10,000 were aerobic steps. That’s when you will find a drop in weight - again, without dieting or consciously monitoring food-intake. I could drop a pound by the next morning after that much activity. Your mileage-may-vary. And it was weight that did not come back, so I know part if it was fat-loss.

Eliminate Something from your daily Eating

Weight gain, even when we’re not dealing with thyroid issues, usually comes when we add small amounts of extra food, every day, to our normal eating. It could be that extra serving at dinner time - or maybe, like me, you got an electric bread-maker and started eating an extra slice of bread every day. Or you added a 100 calorie snack or drink, plus moved your office downstairs like I did. So you burned off fewer calories because you’re not going up and down stairs.

Weight gain comes slowly with as little as 100 calories a day. Our normal eating seems to be a series of checks and balances. We may overeat at a meal, but compensate at the next meal, or the next day, by not eating as much. But when you consistently overeat, even by 100 calories, with no natural checks and balances happening, you could potentially gain 10 pounds in a year. Baby steps to fatness. And so it’s baby steps to leanness.

Think back to a time when you were leaner. Compare it to how you eat now. Is there something different? Something extra?

For me, it was the bread-maker. I always ate bread, mind you - I am not into any kind of fad carb-restrictions, especially since my poor, frazzled, thyroid-fogged brain needs it’s primary source of fuel more now than at anytime in my life.

But I ate bread as part of meals. It held my sandwich fillings at lunch, or was the thing I toasted in the morning, with butter. I didn’t seek it out just for the sake of eating more of it, you know what I mean?

Enter the bread-maker. Now, I had ultra delicious bread. And so I would add an additional bread and butter snack at some point during the day, just because it tasted so good. I made the 2-pound loaf size, so it was a tall - massive! - slice of bread and required a lot of butter.

Holy bread-machine, Batman! I was consuming an extra 400-500 calories every single day, by eating my scrumptious snack! That has the potential for adding almost 42 pounds a year, if I don’t change anything else.

I put the bread machine away. As much as I would like to avoid stuff in regular bread, I find it easier to retrain myself by avoiding homemade bread altogether.

So find your demon food. The extra thing you consume. Stop eating it right away. If you can’t stop eating it, find a way to consistently cut out the caloric equivalent another way. You’ve got to put those checks and balances back into your life. It’s got to be something you consume every single day. That way when you stop eating it, the caloric deficit will add up and allow you to start losing weight.

It is easier than you think, and you will be highly motivated to do it if you run the numbers through your calculator and see what the fat-loss equivalent would be.

Do you eat second helpings, every day? There’s a fantastic place to start. Without increasing the size of your first serving (to subconsciously compensate for missing the second one) just eat that one serving. Don’t have another one. DOn’t change the food you eat or anything else - just start by eliminating second helpings and see how it works for you.

Do you set your table family style or restaurant style? Try dishing up controlled portions at the stove and bring them to the table, like a waitress would. Don’t have extra bowls of food sitting within easy reach.

You’ll start with just one thing. For me, it was the homemade bread with butter. That’s all I was willing to do at the time I realized what the calculations were. I began by losing 1 pound a week. I figured it should be more than that, but the rate of weight loss may have changed and adjusted itself as the months passed, if I’d waited long enough. But I didn’t wait too long. I wanted to lose 2 pounds a week for at least several months, to get a handle on things.

So I looked for something else I could change that would not affect me too badly. And the answer was to find other areas of butter use that were extreme. So I stopped using it almost entirely on my rice or cooked veggies (replacing it with some broth or just mixing the veggies with the rice) and switched to a little peanut butter with jam on my morning toast, instead of butter.

That was enough to put me on a 2-pound loss each week. I probably didn’t even have to give up the homemade bread - it was mostly the fault of overusing the butter on the bread and other foods.

What’s your food? Find out and then kick your weight loss into gear by modifying or eliminating something. Make it something that seasons or accompanies your regular food, and I bet you will not even miss it in a few days.

Eat an Apple Every Day

Just like the age-old adage “an apple a day keeps the doctor away” the eating of an apple for one of your snacks can help you in ways that may seem surprising. It doesn’t work for me when I eat bananas or berries. It may work if I ate pineapple every day, but I wouldn’t eat pineapple every day unless someone held me down and force-fed me. Apples are so easy and portable. Find a kind that you like and buy them, organic if you can. Then keep them with you. Put one in your purse or carry some in a small bag in the car. I like crisp, juicy and sweet Red Delicious.

Apples have fiber and this is going to help clean you out. Even if that’s your only concession to getting some fiber, I bet it will help you. It kept me regular and my weight loss was steadier when I ate an apple every day. You could walk down any street in the USA and think to yourself “there’s a mega-colon waiting to happen.” People are looking more and more like their transverse colons are clogging and ballooning out.

You don’t need to spend all that money on detox and flushes. Just buy some apples the next time you shop. I like to eat mine when I’m riding in the car. Prevent mega-colon using the cheapest, most natural way possible - fiber!

Besides apple’s fiber, maybe there’s other stuff going on with them that make them such a great addition to a fat-loss plan. I don’t know. I just know it works. Applesauce doesn’t. Other fruits don’t (for me, anyway). Berries don’t. Metamucil doesn’t. Rather than try to fight it, I just grab one as I’m heading out the door or entering the kitchen looking for something to graze on. Eat one and then forget about them until the next day.

Drink V-8 Low Sodium Drinks

I always feel better when my electrolytes are in balance. And V-8 low-sodium has as much potassium in it as 2 bananas, and is more readily available for me when I ingest it. I know bananas are a great food, but I digest them slowly and can’t get the same potassium boost with them then an 8-ounce glass of V8 LS. The regular V-8 is the opposite - high sodium - so make sure you get the V8 that has the bright green cap.

When I start getting heart palpitations, I drink some V8 before I reach for an extra beta-blocker. It sure helps. Many times, the V8 was all I needed, and if you drink it on an empty stomach, you’ll see results really quickly - sometimes in 15 minutes.

This potassium boost helps my energy levels and my endurance levels throughout the day. I always have V8 stocked. Years ago, I used Pedialyte when I felt like something was off - but V8 works much better for me. Sports drinks don’t work for me at all, by the way.

And That’s It…

That’s what worked for me. And when I stopped doing those things I listed, the weight crept back and then some, regardless of my thyroid labs. So now I am back on the weight loss bandwagon by following those things that worked so well. It really doesn’t take a lot if you do some detective work and get some of the empty calories out of your life, and start moving again.

The only other thing you might want to do, should you have the money and the means, is buy a treadmill for days when the weather is bad or when you just can’t face going out in public for the walk.

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