Hi Reader, After my thyroid was removed, I was handed a prescription and sent home. No advice. No conversation about food. No one telling me what came next. Just a box of tablets and a leaflet. I'd been vegetarian since I was 16. My husband had been vegetarian since before we even met. So when my body started struggling, I did what I'd always been told was right. I doubled down. More plants. Less meat. I thought I was doing everything correctly. Instead, I got worse. I remember a kind of...
about 23 hours ago • 2 min read
Hi Reader, After my thyroid was removed, everyone had advice for me. Cut this out. Add that in. Do this every morning. Never eat that again. I remember feeling like getting better was suddenly a full time job I hadn't applied for. Like I was meant to overhaul my whole life overnight, on top of everything else my body was already dealing with. I didn't do that. I couldn't. So I picked one small thing instead. A carrot salad. Grated carrot, a splash of vinegar, a pinch of salt. Two minutes with...
6 days ago • 2 min read
Hi Reader, I want to share something with you today that's just been published – and I think it's one of the most important things I've come across in a long time. It's a cost breakdown of Liothyronine (T3) across every UK brand and formulation, compiled by a member of the Thyroid UK forum. And once you see it, I think a lot of things start to make sense. I'm going to walk you through what it shows, and then tell you what I think it means – because I think it explains something so many of us...
9 days ago • 5 min read
Hi Reader, I remember sitting outside the doctor's surgery in the car. Diagnosis in my hand. Engine off. Just staring at the windscreen. No plan. No list of what to eat. No real explanation of what was actually happening inside my body. Just me, on my own, left to work it out. So I did what most people would do. I ate "healthy." I'd been vegetarian for over 30 years by that point. Long before any of this started. It was just who I was. I thought I had the healthy eating thing sorted. I kept...
14 days ago • 3 min read
Hi Reader, Years ago, I started reacting badly to bread. Not in an obvious, dramatic way. Just that low-level, hard-to-pin-down feeling of not quite right. The kind of thing that's easy to dismiss. The kind of thing doctors tend to wave away. But I knew my body. And I knew something in the bread was doing it. So I started reading labels. And the first thing I found was calcium propionate. A preservative. E282. Added to extend shelf life. When I looked into it, I found it had been linked to...
15 days ago • 4 min read
Hi Reader, Subject: I fell asleep at a red light with my kids in the backPreview: I still don't know how long I was out for. Subject: I looked exactly the same. I wasn't.Preview: Nobody around me had any idea what was happening. THE LIGHT WAS RED My daughter was in her car seat behind me, chattering about something from nursery that day. I was half listening, half just trying to keep my eyes open. Somewhere between one sentence of hers and the next, they closed. I woke up to a horn behind me....
19 days ago • 4 min read
Hi Reader, THE DAY I WAS TOLD IT WAS ALL IN MY HEAD I was lying on a hospital trolley unable to move. I'd come in by ambulance. I couldn't walk. I couldn't get up. The pain was unlike anything I had ever felt in my life. The kind that takes over everything. They gave me morphine. IV paracetamol. Something in the diazepam family, I think. The kind of medication that is supposed to knock pain flat. It wasn't touching it. I was still sweating through the sheets. Still completely unable to shift...
21 days ago • 4 min read
Hi Reader, I want to tell you about the week I've been having. Because I suspect some of you might be having the same one. We've had a few days of intense heat here in the UK. And despite doing everything I thought was right – staying out of the sun, drinking plenty of water, resting – I have been feeling progressively, inexplicably worse. Not just a bit hot and tired. Properly unwell. The kind of unwell that feels familiar to anyone managing a thyroid condition. 😴 Bone-deep exhaustion🧠 Brain...
24 days ago • 3 min read
Hi Reader, Somewhere between the 1970s and now, something was lost. Not misplaced. Not forgotten by accident. Quietly. Gradually. Piece by piece. And if you have ever sat in a waiting room being told your results are normal while knowing, in your bones, that something is very wrong – you are living in the gap that was left behind. People ask me all the time for book recommendations on thyroid health. There are two I come back to every time. But one of them stops me in my tracks every single...
26 days ago • 3 min read
Hi Reader, I joined a group last week that I had no business being in. A peptide group. Free to join. I went in for a nosy, because peptides are the thing everyone's talking about right now, and I wanted to see what the fuss was about. I didn't post anything. Just scrolled. And then I found a thread that made me stop. Someone had written in about a friend. The friend has Hashimoto's. And she was asking, quite innocently, what peptides might be good for her, on top of the medication she's...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read