Are You Just So Tired!?… Maybe it’s Your Thyroid?
Maybe it’s just the winter blues or perhaps you haven’t been as faithful with your vitamin D supplementation but you and the people around you notice you are dragging your butt and feel tired and grouchy. Well let’s look at some of the Thyroid symptoms and see how many you fall into. There are times when your TSH (Thyroid Stimulating Hormone) blood test comes back “in range” and you still have many symptoms. There are supplements that can support your Thyroid without over stimulating it.
When your thyroid gland doesn’t produce enough T3 and T4, the major thyroid hormones, to shut off the TSH signals from the pituitary gland, then it is underactive. Hypothyroidism (low thyroid) tends to develop over a long period of time, often years, and becomes more common as you get older. Nearly 20 percent of women and 10 percent of men over age 60 have an underactive thyroid function, although the symptoms are often attributed to other causes such as menopause or simply “aging”. Although hypothyroidism is the most common thyroid imbalance, it’s also the most commonly missed diagnosis, especially when the results of blood tests come back borderline or even normal.
Some people have an overactive Thyroid Gland. This is when your thyroid can kick into overdrive and pump far more hormones into your bloodstream than your body needs. Rather than feeling sluggish and slow, you feel all revved up! You have an abundance of energy, don’t need as much sleep, your heart can feel like it’s coming out of your chest, weight loss happens for no reason. These may sound like an OK kind of problem to have but this can also be very serious and is not healthy either.
Some of the Low Thyroid symptoms can be:
- Dry eyes and/or Dry mouth
- Rough course itchy flaky skin
- Cracking heels
- Missing the outer 1/3 of your eyebrows
- Hair loss
- Have trouble getting to and/or staying asleep
- Cold body temperature
- Cold hands & Feet
- Mood swings
- Irritable angry and cry easily
- Depressed
- Unexplained weight gain
- Stressed for no reason
- Constipated
- Body aches
Having symptoms doesn’t mean you have a thyroid problem it just means there is a place to start looking in your body.
Some of the supplements we use here at Boyd’s are Thyroid Plus, TSII and Thyodyn. I also always recommend to include the mineral Selenium with any Thyroid issues as Selenium is required to help balance the body’s Thyroid hormone output.
Home Thyroid Test
Dr. Broda Barnes, author of Hypothyroidism: The Unsuspected Illness, advocates this simple home test for thyroid function, and contends that it is 85% accurate…more accurate than a blood test. If you have unexplained fatigue, consider trying out the test as a precursor to consulting with a qualified health care practitioner:
First thing in the morning upon waking but before you get out of bed, take your basal temperature using a digital thermometer and record the reading, repeat for 4 days (30 for menstruating women) and average the results. Normal basal temperatures should fall between 97.8 and 98.2 degrees Fahrenheit (36.3 and 36.8 degrees Celsius). A consistently lower temperature may indicate hypothyroidism.
