My Battle With Graves Disease, Part 5

Here’s an update since my last blog and i want to tell you about stuff that has happened and about the some symptoms which i wasn’t sure about.

Sleeping

Sleeping was/is still a bit of a problem, which is often a precursor to poor health, and i often wake up somewhere between 2 and 3 in the night. Then it often takes a while before i fall asleep. Recently i even slept very poorly three days in a row, only about 3 to 4 hours. After which i got a bad cold which luckily only last for 2 days.

And because of that i went to see the doctor and asked for some bloodwork including B12 and iron. I knew from previous bloodwork that my body doesn’t really absorb B12 well so i’m taking B12 shots every other month. The results were a bit disappointing:

• B12 was >160 pmol/L. The normal reference value is somewhere between 146-582 pmol/ for my age. So it’s on the low end
• TSH: 0.45, also on the low end since the reference value is 0,4 and 2,0 mU/l
• FT4: 18.4, this was a bit scary because this means that the value has gone up a bit every time i tested this.

It could also be stress related but the last week i slept much better. Can’t really pinpoint as to why but maybe because i started eating a bit more and/or because my wife gave a mist diffusor which sits next to my bed. For now i’ll take it!

Appointment with endicronologist

Last week i also had to take my 3 months bloodwork for the endicronologist and the results were good to my surprise.

• TSH was 0.54 which is up quite a bit from a few weeks ago
• FT4 was 16.8 which was down from a few weeks ago

So these results were uplifting and the endicronologist was happy as well and mentioned that the results can vary depending on the time of day the test was taken. But still, the last time lasted 2 years without a problem so i’m cautiously optimistic.

Weight

As i told earlier my weight (or fast loss of) is often a first symptom of trouble so i weigh myself almost daily. The good news it’s sort of stable around 95 kg. In the morning it’s 94 and at night it’s about 95.5 – 96. The thing that worries me is that i can’t seem to gain weight so i started looking at my diet and i think i simply eat too little during the workweek.

The food that i eat is healthy and i need around 2500-2800 cal but i think i only get something between 2200-2300. What i started doing the past 2 weeks going is simply eat more and i added:

• 1 avocado with a few crackers for breakfast befor my normal breakfast (nuts/seeds/glutenfree oatmeal/linesead/banana/soja yoghurt)
• 3/4 glutenfree sandwhiches for around 10:00
• a piece of fruit at around 15:00

It’s always tricky to attribute better sleeping and good results to this change but my weight has gone up slightly (+1 kg)

The other thing i’m trying is a proteinshake for after workouts to see if i can recuperate faster. Don’t know if it helps but it seems that i have less muscle strain.

Creatine (vs Goatcheese)

Another thing i wanted to try is creatine to see if it would give me a bit more energy and better results when working out. Now as i wrote in an earlier blog i skip all dairy, but sometimes i try a bit of hard goatcheese and i took some during the same time i started using creatine. I got a stomach-ache which kept me awake 1 night (and had to skip the Lowlands Throwdown Crossfit qualifier :-().

Now, i can remember that i had this type of stomach-ache 1 or 2 times around the same time i ate some goatcheese. But it could also be the creatine, however literature states that you get stomach-ache from creatine immediatly and this one only started a week after. So my money is on goatcheese, which is weird because an allergy test didn’t show this.

Final note

So as always i’m continuously experimenting with all sorts of stuff. I think that’s the only sound thing you can do because everyone is different and reacts differently to different things. But getting a clear relation between cause and effect is difficult. I’ll try this for a few months and i will write a blog to tell you about my experiences untill then.