Why am I always so tired?

Provided that you're eating enough and sleeping enough, it could be an iron or other vitimin defficiency. I don't eat red meat etiher and was diagnosed with iron defficieny. If you're an active female who doesn't eat red meat you're pretty much in all the risk catagories for annemia so definitely worth a trip to your Doc for some blood work

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You have too much starchy carbs in your diet. Carbs will make you sleepy for sure. Go for complex carbs instead and have whole grain or whole oat option. When you eat these starchy foods, your body has to work harder at breaking them down, therefore you'll feel more tired in the process.

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Perhaps the vitamin idea might be worth trying , but ultimately you want to find out what's causing your fatigue.

i'd suggest given the amount of exercise you are doing, 7 hours sleep per night is not enough. Make it 8 or a bit more. Go to bed earlier. Take more rest breaks during the day.

Any chance you could be a little bit depressed or even under chronic stress? Lowered seratonin levels make you tired. And lack of nutrition can lower seratonin levels. By lack of nutrition here, i'm talking micronutrients, not the macros which you are probably getting enough of. Too many carbs will not make you tired. That's a flat out false statement since the function of carbs is to give you energy.

To maximise nutrition, eat a wide variety of whole foods, especially fruit and veg. We should be eating from over 30 foods types and groups each week. so if you are meat eater, that means a variety of those, varieties of fruit and veg, dairy, etc etc.

Worth checking out the sleep apnoea thing. Just record yourself sleeping and play it back while you are doing something else because its going to take a long time. If you do find yourself snoring a lot in your playback, get yourself checked out properly at a sleep clinic. But maybe you can just ask family members if you snore? of course if your fatigue is new, it won't be related to that.

TSH levels vary during the day. The best time to get a blood draw to detect hypothyroidism is first thing in the morning. Also, as I said, many docs (esp. family practice) and labs are using outdated criteria for determining whether your thyroid is in spec or not.

Getting tired before the day is over is not a textbook symptom of hypothyroidism. But it happens that it was one of *my* symptoms of hypothyroidism.

It may serve you well to get your thyroid retested, find out what the actual numbers are, and look up the guidelines used by the endocrinologists. If by their criteria you are out of spec, bring the reference to your doc and argue for a trial of thyroid medication.

At low doses you can't be made *hyper* thyroid because your body will simply down-regulate it's release of thyroid hormone to keep you at your body's preferred level (your TSH and TRH will be lower--TRH is not tested though because it varies too much). So if you are normal it won't make any difference to how you feel and you can wean back off it without ill effect.

But if you are hypothyroid, then you will feel better on the added thyroxine and your body won't down-regulate its own production until your dose starts to exceed your need (which means you are at the right dose).

Basically they start you on a low dose then raise it every few weeks and drive your TSH level down to 0.5-1.0, then call that your proper dose.

So much bad advice?!

OP. You're bouncing about in classes all day, you're not eating enough. 4 lbs in 3 weeks is a pretty swift loss. Eat more. Make sure you get around 100g protein per day then eat whatever the hell else you want to your calorie total.

If you eat more fruits and vegetables and protein rich foods then the amount of starchy carbs you're eating will be fine....so yes, she is eating too many starchy foods compared to someone who eats balanced meals. Up your fruit, up your vegetable intake and up your protein...eat eat eat.

Aye your maintenance level is probably about 500 - 600 more than what you actually eat. Perhaps a bit more. So you could afford to eat some more. Also as others have suggested focus on nutritious food. You can get very tired if all you live on is sugar and carbs. Try and eat more fruit/veg, lean protein and nuts/olives/avocado.