Hypothyroidism and Fat Loss?

What works is consistency. Eat right and exercise.

Exercise and healthy diet (as in food choices) are going to serve you best. My son's endo has him limit caffeinated drinks and high glycemic/starchy carbs. Some foods interfere with certain thyroid meds, so ask if they didn't tell you if you need to wait for a certain amount of time between eating and taking your meds or avoid things like soy altogether. It also takes about 6 weeks for med changes to start showing up in your blood work so understand it is a slow road to getting stabilized on the meds but you will soon be feeling much better My son has lost 24 pounds so far this year (has about 10 more to go). Best wishes

I was just diagnosed around the middle of June. For two months I ate 1100-1200 calories a day plus exercised as much as I could just to maintain. It took six to eight weeks for the medication to kick in, and then I began steadily losing on 1200 a day (I'm super short--you certainly may be able to lose on significantly more than that). So my advice is to be patient and give the medication time to start working. Also, make sure your doctor schedules you to come in for a re-check in a few weeks to make sure the starting dosage is working for you. Good luck!

I do. You can lose weight like anyone else now.

I've been hypothyroid for 15 years, and am now reasonably stable on 175mcg levothyroxine. I've been losing pretty much like anyone else does it, calories in < calories out. (I'm age 59, 5'5", SW in April 2015 183, CW 139, GW 130-ish). Currently eating at 1400-1500 net (plus eating around 300-some exercise calories back most days), and still losing, but am now trying to slow down loss rate to coast into maintenance. I don't eat in any special way because of the hypothyroidism, though I've been ovo-lacto vegetarian for decades, so I do eat funny.

It *does* take a while, with regular blood tests, to find your correct dose of medication. Also, I've needed dosage adjustments a few times over the years, and in some of those cases I was finding it harder to maintain or lose weight while under-medicated (harder; not impossible).

My best recommendation would be to get a food scale (if you don't already have one), then weigh & log food carefully and consistently. Even if you have a day now and then that gets out of hand, log it. Once you have several weeks of good data, you can see how much you've lost at what calorie consumption level, and tweak what you're doing to achieve your goals in a way that's tailored to your metabolism.

The advice I have is to make sure that your other systems have been checked and are doing well too. There are a lot of things that can get put out of whack with a long untreated thyroid problem.

When I finally got diagnosed, it had been about 10 years since I first suspected the issue. Don't get me started on how ridiculously frustrating that journey was. But, when I found my current doc, he checked for a bunch of other things based on my symptoms in addition to thyroid. He told me that it's common to have a lot of accessory issues and if you don't address them all, you can still have a lot of the same symptoms even when your thyroid is addressed -- and it can be pretty frustrating. I've seen this with other thyroid folks a LOT.

My symptoms were the classic thyroid ones -- difficulty losing/maintaining weight even though I was eating at a level that should have had a significant deficit, really cold all the time (especially in hands/feet), constipation, awful fatigue on and off, difficulty sleeping (constantly waking up at 3-4 am for no apparent reason), dry skin, brittle nails, dry hair. And keep in mind that I was still working and participating in life normally for the most part. Some days I was so exhausted I slept a lot, but I still worked full time and did normal stuff. I was pretty active -- lifting 3-4 times per week, walking/hiking a lot and had even ran my first (and last) half marathon. I wasn't bed bound or anything extreme like that.

In addition to the thyroid, he tested for adrenals (DHEA and cortisol -- maybe others), liver enzymes (don't remember which ones), sugar issues (A1C), and common vitamin/mineral deficiencies (iron, D, B, magnesium, iodine and probably some others). I'd never ever heard about most of these. And much to my surprise I came back with problems in my adrenals (DHEA was bottomed out), insulin resistance (totally shocking) and severe deficiencies in both Vitamin D and magnesium.

I got all those addressed at the same time as the thyroid and it was like night and day. I'd been feeling poorly for so long I'd forgotten what it felt like to feel "normal" or even good. The weight finally started coming off just as it should based on my calculated deficit. It felt amazing to not feel like I was going crazy anymore trying to figure this all out.

The last thing I'd mention is that if you have an autoimmune basis for your thyroid (like Hashi's -- which is the most common cause of hypo) is that you may benefit from adjusting your diet. Common culprits for triggering that autoimmune response are gluten, casein and lactose (both in dairy), lechtins and some say something in soy. I tried an elimination diet to see if there were any triggers for me. I don't eat much soy, so I didn't worry much about that. Luckily, no problems with lactose/casein as I really do love my dairy. But, I did find that grains were an issue. When I cut out grains from my diet, I did feel much better. I suspect it's gluten as I can eat rice and oats totally fine, but the other grains that contain gluten just don't work for me. I feel much better without them in my diet and have far fewer "attacks" of going hypo that you see in Hashi's folks.

Be your own best advocate. There's a normal "range" for a reason--there's no one number that is right for everyone. Track your symptoms, energy levels and if you don't feel better (keeping in mind a T4 takes 8 weeks to fully integrate into your system) talk to your doctor with specifics.

Know your levels, don't just let a medical professional tell you you're normal and expect you to be fine. Quality of life is as important as a TSH reading.

You made need T3 supplementation. Ask your doctor for a Free T3 and Free T4 test if one wasn't done already. Your body is supposed to convert T4 to T3 but some of us don't do it very well. I really started feeling better once I was also on a T3.

It may take you longer to lose weight, but it definitely is possible. Tight logging and exercise for me were key.