Forever, Jane and I have had two eggs, two pieces of Canadian bacon for breakfast. Now it seems—we can’t.
We have to take Levothyroxine on an empty stomach, without calcium or magnesium or soy for at least 4 hours.
Now we also have to avoid anything that’s high cholesterol. We cannot have Eggbeaters, because we are allergic to onion—which Eggbeaters contains in sufficient quantity to cause problems.
We cannot have cereal, because we can’t have the milk, or soy, and almond milk is fortified with calcium.
We cannot have either eggs or bacon because of cholesterol.
We are now having Eggos. I got some nice muffintops but we can’t have those either, because they’re reinforced with calcium.
Sardines are out: there’s no way either of us could choke down one at 7 am. And besides—Jane’s also on a low sodium diet, so that would be out, too.
I tell you, this is a poser. I can cope with lunch and supper and bring us down to nearly zilch in cholesterol…but! breakfast! Wah!
At least the ricotta desserts still work.
Interesting. unsweetened coconut—low in everything, no cholesterol; this could be good. Quinoa, flaxseed meal—we might go there.
Huh, wouldn’t have thought of the cranberry juice in the oatmeal. I’ll try it. Come to think of it, add a spritz of orange juice, and you’d have a hot, thick, liquid cereal version of cranberry-orange oatmeal cookies/muffins. Say, that sounds good! (Now the breakfast cereal people can all pay me a royalty. 😉 ) Hah, but Closed Circle readers get it for free. :grins: Think I’ll ‘speriment. Omit milk so as not to curdle, likely…. )
I recently bought some barley, in the soups aisle, but boxed dry grains, since I’d had some in a nice couple of recipes recently. One was a soup, the other, part of a crumble topping for green beans plus, I think, grapes mixed with berries in a jam or sauce.
Try taking the new med at night. That’d preclude (I hope) the irksome limit on your eating habits.
My grandmother’s neighbor surprised me with a nice gift subscription to Cooking Light. Some nice recipes there, several tasty, to try out sometime soon.
Oh, and the peanut sauce arrived. I’ll get to try the chicken, spinach, and peanut sauce recipe this weekend. I’m expecting it to be a personal hit, and will see how my grandmother likes it too. It might be a way her low-acid, low-fiber diet can handle nuts, after all. (Chopped nuts and seeds are an issue; she has diverticulitis.) Nothing wrong with the nut proteins or oils, if they’re in, say, peanut butter or sauce or ground into meal/flour.
I can’t remember how you are on capsicum of any colour. Anyway, here’s an interesting recipe that you could do using egg whites. http://www.skinnytaste.com/2010/05/red-pepper-egg-in-hole.html
Well, I meant to say scrambled egg whites.
As I recall, peppers are a 2 thumbs up in CJ and Jane’s household. No onions, though, and garlic is ok in moderation.
Medium chain triglycerides (eg. in coconut) are something to check into as long as you don’t have a food sensitivity to coconut. A simple IgG antibody panel will help you there. Right now I’m doing no baked goods/grains(except oats & quinoa)/beans but I’m not planning to do that forever….and so things like coconut oil and flour are interesting ingredients to consider.
The talk about peanut sauce a few threads ago tweeked my interest, but the processed version has too many inflammatory triggers, so I’d need to come up with something home-made and organic. I stick with peanuts sole-sourced from Arizona and grown organically. I can see it over quinoa with baby spinach, leeks and chicken breast bits.
You can do interesting things from-scratch with peanuts; the purest peanut butter we’ve found is Adams, a northwestern brand. But a blender and an acceptable form of oil will do it, no sugar, no preservative.
Add powdered chili pepper and cocoa to peanut butter, if you can, and you have mole, a sauce for chicken, with various peppers.
Instead add peanut butter to ginger and soy, some 5-spice, and you have a nice peanut sauce: combine with coconut milk and it goes further.
Holy cats! On a completely unrelated note, I expect to see an old man come by with a big boat sometime soon, and try to wrangle a pair of mongooses aboard. You can’t tell where the mountains are; you can’t even see across the street, the rain is coming down so hard!
We just got fog here—we used to joke that we’d moved to Tolkien’s Misty Mountains, because it can fog for, oh, two months straight in spring.
So this is a sign things could be shifting.
In the Cooking Light issue from a friend, a suggestion for an onion substitute was fennel, which I haven’t used before. If I can remember, I’ll look up the issue and page number for the text.
I have an interesting vegetarian cookbook “Laurel’s Kitchen” by Laurel Robertson, Carol Flinders and Bronwen Godfrey. It was published in 1981 and I bought it for the interesting vegetable dishes. If you can find it, even from the local library, it may be worth perusing for ideas.
And I’m not a vegetarian by any stretch of the imagination.
As others have said, that 4 hour restriction is garbage. You don’t have to wait that long. Here are the details on the med from the NIH.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmedhealth/PMH0000684/#a682461-how
I don’t understand why you can’t have cholesterol, is it a thyroxine thing or that’s what your doctor told you?
The cholesterol level is one symptom of thyroid malfunction…but…what we’re doing with diet isn’t enough. The latest reading were not, shall we say, optimal, with what we are/were doing. So we are changing what we are doing. We were not paying attention to it, hoping the thyroid meds would take care of any problem. It got worse.
So now we are officially:
low sodium: [the doc]
low cholesterol [the doc]
low fat: [South Beach]
low carb: [South Beach]
low calorie: [South Beach]
no to low starch: [South Beach]
We use only olive oil and occasionally peanut oil; we read labels on everything; we limit bread severely; we take vitamin and mineral supplements.
And then there are our allergies: onions, lately garlic; and preservatives in onion/garlic powder—zilch for those; tomatoes, potatoes, paprika, bell pepper must all be in extreme moderation. For the thyroxine, we have to watch milk, cheese, and other calcium-containing things; we have to watch a list of veggies including cabbage, cauliflower, broccoli, et al, the same as the calcium stuff, not before noon,— as if we’d want to have cabbage for breakfast—but!
Then there are the likes and dislikes: Jane physically gags [to put it delicately] on coffee, liver, sushi, eggplant, and various exotic seafoods including shellfish, and is not that fond of shrimp. I detest almost all fish, except salmon and Long John Silvers whitefish, and chicken [on which I have lived for the last year]—and I am getting to where I don’t like beef that much, mostly because Jane doesn’t like ribeye and wants sirloin; I hate sirloin and prefer ribeye…but we can’t have it because of the fat content. No gravy. Why have roast, then? We both love meatloaf, but can’t have our preferred recipe because we can’t have cornflakes (carbs).
Well, heck, at least we have ample food, we are still losing weight, we get by, and our boohoos over our diet are merely the oh-woe of two people who have everything to be thankful for and only a few inconveniences in life: but just now and again when I am standing in mid-kitchen wondering if I can get by with baking a loaf of bread and looking at nothing but salad and chicken for the next, oh, year or so—I do sorta sigh and wish we’d hurry up and lose the weight faster! But then we’ll be in ‘holding’ pattern, so we can’t go crazy either. So—I learn one more way to do chicken stir-fry! If you pour enough hot sauce on it, anything is edible!
Sigh.
I’m sorry to say I abandoned the South Beach. I stayed with it so faithfully for 50 days and all I lost was 50 days. So, now I’ve had a wallow in excess and feel pretty bad. It’s time to drag up the boot straps and try something else. I am hoping the longer, prettier days of spring might spur me into more exercise. I tell you, if I don’t find something that works, I don’t know what is going to happen.
Well, our next-best was Atkins. You go strictly meat, milk, cheese, eggs, for 2 weeks, then when you start getting a bad taste in your mouth (ketosis) you can add 20 grams of carb a day: get them mostly from vegetables and avoid starches. It can work, and you can have a lot of bacon and pork chops: for bread, use low carb tortilla wraps.
We lost 20 lbs on Atkins, but couldn’t get further.
I might try that. I think that decades of yo-yo dieting have really just ruined any chance of success. Years ago I followed the Carbohydrate Addicts Diet and had some success. My metabolism is older and more stubborn now, but I might research that one again.
Egad. Well, there is a fair body of evidence that the cholesterol numbers are less important than the triglycerides when it comes to predicting mortality, heart attack and stroke. And having cholesterol too low correlates strongly with cancer.
I hope you can get to your goal quickly and go on a maintenance plan instead.
I take thyroxine too, I was warned to avoid RAW cabbage, but told cooked was fine. On your advice I don’t take the magnesium near it any more. Gosh I really hope my food life stays relatively simple!
I just ran the “4 hours” question past the manufacturer that produces my hypothyriod medication (I take T4 and T3, since I cannot convert one to the other anymore). The manufacturer says that normal food can be taken within 20-30 minutes after taking the Levothyroxin/Liothyronin pills – it does not matter if you take a single med or combined pill. You can drink milk, eat psyllium and whatever you want after 30 minutes.
What you should not do is take a dietary supplement that provides highly concentrated calcium etc. There you should wait till lunch until you take the other stuff.
Of course, I got that information on the basis on German foodstuffs; here the only “fortifying” that is going on with raw products is iodine in salt (which is bad enough for Hashimoto and Basedow patients). But I would suggest you call the company producing your Levothyroxin for clarification before you change your diet. They have the most up-to-date data and studies. Too much stuff has been changing in the last few years.
(Some stupid nameless Gynecologist actually told me to forego my thyroid medication during pregnancy – which certainly would have killed my baby. I never went there again!)
–Thea
Herzogenaurach, Germany
Interesting! Well—I’ll start doing some internet inquiry here. and i’m so glad you questioned that gynocologist’s advice. Besides, if we do EVERYTHING rather than have our endocrinologist up our dosage to compensate [which is what response it takes, since what, say, calcium does, is sop of 40% of the dosage—I’ve been reading, based on some other hints given above] then we starve—or miss some nutrients, though we’re supplementing calcium later in the day. Since both of us are on a collision course with no-thyroid, ultimately, me with Hashimoto’s and Jane with a non-producing thyroid, we don’t want to get there prematurely by forcing the dosage of help higher and letting our own thyroids go dormant or dead, but— we want breakfast for the rest of our lives, too! So we and the doc have had one hurried talk (he’s very good about phoning us on his nickle to answer an inquiry) but when we are in his office, on our nickle—Jane will be, in about a month, he will talk at length, and these are things and tradeoffs we want to discuss with him.
The hypothyroid medication is a substitution, true, but it does not cause addiction or dependance. You should use a dosage that lets you live comfortably. If you need a higher dosis for drinking milk (which I think is unlikely, based on my own experience), then let the doctor up the dosis till you are in mid-range for your fT3/fT4 and TSH – and feel comfortable besides.
Keeping the dosis too low in order to get your thyroid gland to produce more is not helping a damaged organ. At the beginning of my therapy (pre-pregnancy), I took about 150µg T4. During pregnancy, I needed 100µg T4 and 38µg T3. Now, post-pregnancy, I am down to 75µg T4 and 15µg T3 (equals roughly 100µg T4). So, somewhere in between start of therapy and now, my thyroid gland got better. I do not believe that it would have been better to keep it on produce-at-all-costs mode. If your system gets less load, the glands may recover, too. The difference is holding a not really necessary diet (you can make your life easier by adjusting the medicine to your diet, after all) and being constantly on the edge or being comfortable.
Since I have stress enough, I went the “easy” way. At least for my thyroid gland, it worked fine. I am better than before: Medicine-abstinence is not always the best choice.
But the most important thing is to have a dosis that *you* feel well with – energetic, relaxed, moderately stress-resistant. Having high blood pressure (too much meds) is bad, lying on the sofa for lack of energy (not enough meds) is as well. BTW, the “maximum” dosis of T4 that a human should take (if the tyroid gland is not working anymore) is at about 300µg. There is a lot of air till you reach that maximum.
–Thea
Herzogenaurach, Germany
Most of your issues would be solved by Caldwell B. Esselstyn’s system of eating. I follow it and I never think about calories or carbs, etc, but I suspect you are both hard core carnivores.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1583333002
I have an almond milk/blueberry/banana/hemp protein smoothie for breakfast each day. It ain’t Canadian bacon but it makes me feel good and I don’t have to worry about my weight or lipemia.
If Bill Clinton could make the switch, you could, too. You might see many of your food allergies go into remission and I guarantee your cholesterol will be very low.
dunno about the hemp, but the other sounds real good1
I’ve done OK (maintained my target TSH) by limiting goitrogenic veggies to 2x per week and make sure they are cooked. Cooking doesn’t deactivate the goitrogens 100% (sigh). I LOVE my broccoli so this is hard. I could eat it daily. Cabbage….not so much. I avoid soy and tapioca/manioc totally. Now I just wish I could find more about how to reduce the percentage of reverse T3 my body makes instead of T3 (sigh).
I’m an animal protein person also….I can’t really see any logical reason for eliminating my intake of non-fat yogurt, salmon/wild-caught fish or organic free-range poultry. In contrast, I’ve found way too many plant-based foods that show IgG reactions and/or are inflammatory foods (sigh). By minimizing all the plant-based ‘toxic-to-me’ foods, I’ve made substantial progress in minimizing my own inflammatory response, regaining leptin sensitivity, and in the process, losing weight.
I’m an animal lover, but I figure any fish swimming upriver to die is fair game; it’s had its life cycle, and beyond that, it’s up to the ones that *need* to get through to perpetuate the species, and it’s between me and the grizzly bears who gets the salmon first. Did you know the lovely NW forests are partly dependent on the salmon runs—and bear poo?
same with nonfertile chicken eggs; not a qualm–
unfortunately the goitrogenics are the ones most recommended on our diet, but i try to offset them by using lettuce and such…not such a terrible issue for us, so long as beyond the 4 hour limit, apparently.
It’s amazing how many people have these issues—some of which i think are confused with aging. if i just sat back and never had gotten tested, my energy would run low, my hair would thin, skin would suffer, i’d have weight gain and lethargy and depression—
sounds like the description a lot of people give of aging, to me.
but I’m back on the ice, with enthusiasm, now.
I also love fresh snow peas direct from the garden, and gourmet green beans…too tender to go to market, but make it fine from the container gardens on my deck to my kitchen. I can hardly wait until they are in season again! And I really need to hire out some help and get some raised beds built at this new place!! I’m bartering goose eggs with a neighbor who is an avid organic gardener….she’s doing snow peas just for me! For now, I’m using lots of leeks (not as harsh a flavor as other onions), whole containers of organic baby spinach slathered over whatever is hot and ‘melted’ right in, and sneak in the broccoli as often as possible. I’m trying to experiment with radish (not my favorite flavor) as a zinger in avocado/yogurt style ‘dressing’, which I’ve been slopping on top of my salmon….on a bed of organic mixed baby greens. Raw cucumber works too. I’ve been trying to reintroduce tomatoes but I still seem to react to them via inflammatory response (joint pains). Peppers are out as well. Red onion seems to work as a raw zinger as well (I have no bad inflammatory response to onions). After a few months of doing basically the same foods, you start looking for new flavors to jazz things up….sound familiar??
I am hypothyroid and had high cholesterol. We got my cholesterol back down by switching to a natural thyroid hormone (NatureThroid) and cutting way back on sugar. My MD says that high cholesterol generally indicates inflammation and that it is often caused by sugar.