Hi Reader,

I went back through my old blood results recently. Right at the bottom of the ferritin range, one point above rock bottom. And next to it, one word. Normal.

I remember being exhausted around that time. The kind of tired that a good night's sleep didn't touch. I put it down to my thyroid, because that's what I'd been told to expect. Nobody mentioned iron. Nobody looked twice at that number, because technically, it was in range.

Here's what I didn't know then. Your thyroid can't actually make thyroid hormone without enough iron. Iron and selenium are the two things it needs to do the job. If you're running low on either, your thyroid is trying to work with one hand tied behind its back, whatever your dose of medication says on the box.

And for a lot of us, running low on iron isn't rare. It's almost expected.

Every month, for decades, women lose iron through their periods.

By the time a lot of us reach our forties or fifties, we've been quietly running on empty for years, long before anyone thought to check.

That number on my results didn't tell the truth about how I felt. In range and enough are not the same thing. If you're bouncing along the very bottom of that range, your body can still be feeling the effects of being deficient, even while a report tells you everything's fine.

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Once I understood that, I stopped waiting for someone else to flag it and started paying attention to iron myself.

I grew up in Bury, where black pudding isn't unusual, it's just what you eat.

Turns out it's also a genuinely good source of iron. So is liver, though I know that puts a lot of people off. I fry mine with black pepper, a few spices, and a bit of salt, and it's honestly nothing like the liver most people remember being forced to eat as a child.

I didn't overhaul everything. I just started making sure iron actually showed up on my plate, and I asked for my numbers properly instead of accepting "normal" as the end of the conversation.

If your thyroid still isn't behaving the way you'd expect, even with your medication sorted, it might be worth asking what else your body needs to do its job. Iron is one of the quiet ones that gets missed.

P.S. This is exactly the kind of thing we dig into inside the Hypothyroid Recovery Hub, the parts of the picture that get missed because "your bloods are normal." If you're not in there yet, there's sometimes a free trial running if you want to have a look around: https://www.skool.com/hypothyroid/about​

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