Getting That Weight Off
In This Chapter
- Filling up on fiber
- Recording what you eat
- Measuring your RMR and LBM
- Burning fat with T2
If you’ve been hypothyroid and then prescribed medication, you may have experienced a doctor telling you, “You can go ahead and take that extra weight off now. Good luck.” Good luck indeed.
For a fortunate 20 percent of patients, the newly added pounds are magically shed once their metabolism is restored. But if you’re like most people, all your stable condition will do is give you the opportunity to lose weight. You’ll need to actively work at getting your body back in shape. The best advice for doing so has always been “Eat less and exercise more,” and we heartily echo that. But this chapter also offers some suggestions that you may not have heard before to help you meet the challenge.
Focusing on Fiber
As explained in Chapter 18, foods that digest slowly and gradually, rather than racing from your stomach to your bloodstream, create less of a sugar jolt and less need for insulin. This puts your body into a calorie burning mode that converts the food into energy (as opposed to a food storage mode that turns it into fat).
One of the best ways to achieve this effect is to choose foods with lots of fiber. Fiber ensures what you eat stays around a while in your stomach and small intestines, making it more likely the food will be burned right away as fuel.
In addition, fiber gives you a feeling of being filled up and satisfied on smaller portions of food—which in turns makes it easier for you to eat less. And fiber makes you want to drink more water, which also fills you up and enables you to get by with less food.
Thyroidian Tip
Beyond aiding weight loss, fiber helps your intestines eliminate waste efficiently. The health benefits from this range from flushing out toxins that are bad for your thyroid to preventing constipation (which is a hypothyroid symptom) to guarding against digestive diseases, diabetes, and some cancers. As long as you adjust to it gradually—say, adding 3-4 grams to your diet every few days to avoid bloating—there’s really no downside to fiber.
According to nutritional experts, women should eat at least 25 grams of fiber a day and men at least 38 grams a day for overall health. For the purposes of weight loss, it’s a good idea to strive for 40 grams a day (for both genders).
Meanwhile, if you’re typical, you currently eat less than 15 grams of fiber daily. But that’s good news, because it means your diet has lots of room for improvement.
Delicious high-fiber foods include:
- Legumes (navy beans, black beans, pinto beans, adzuki beans, lentils)
- Whole grains (bulgur wheat, oat bran, brown rice)
- Vegetables (spinach, broccoli, eggplant, Brussels sprouts, beets, avocado)
- Fruits (plums, pears, peaches, mangoes, kiwi)
- Berries (blackberries, raspberries, blueberries)
- Nuts (pecans, pistachios, hazelnuts, Brazil nuts)
- Seeds (almonds, flax seeds)
Four high-fiber foods that are especially helpful because they help detoxify you—by flushing unhealthy chemicals and other wastes from your system—are brown rice, beets, flax seeds, and spinach. (Buy organic spinach, though, as the mainstream variety tends to be loaded with pesticides.)
Another great fiber source are adzuki beans (also called aduki beans), which are small reddish beans, typically with a white tip or streak, that are popular in China and Japan. They’re packed with magnesium, which plays many vital roles in the body, including aiding thyroid function. Plus, if you’re swinging between hypothyroidism and hyperthyroidism, magnesium is a terrific low-impact remedy for stabilizing your heart rate.
In addition, you can get fiber from supplements. One of the most popular is PGX (short for PolyGlycopleX), which absorbs a great deal of water and so is especially good at filling you up. PGX is inexpensive, readily available from health food stores and online, and can be taken in either capsule or softgel form right before a meal.
Another notable supplement is inulin, which is a natural fiber extracted from plants such as Jerusalem artichoke, wild yam, and chicory. Once hard to find, inulin is now readily available in powder form via the commercial product Metamucil Clear & Natural. It’s a soluble fiber, meaning it dissolves completely in water; and it’s very mildly sweet, so you can add it to smoothies, oatmeal, etc., and barely notice it’s there. Just take care to start off gradually to give your body time to adjust to it.
In a nutshell, if counting calories isn’t working for you, you may be able to lose weight even more effectively by counting fiber grams. For additional information on this approach, visit website FullPlateDiet.org, which allows you to read an entire fiber-centric diet book online for free.
You can also access detailed lists of high-fiber foods via this book’s website at CIGThyroid.com.
Meal Replacements
If you’re not great at judging how fattening foods are, you can opt to eat pre-made meals that have a set portion size and set number of calories, such as those sold by Weight Watchers and Healthy Choice.
The previous chapter warned against processed foods, and overall that still holds. But you can eat two meals daily packed with fresh, natural, low-calorie foods, and then substitute the prepared meal for what you’d normally have for dinner. This isn’t an ideal way to eat long term; but it can help you lose weight conveniently and sustainably for several months, which may be all you need to return to the body you had before you became hypothyroid.
A spin on this technique is to create the pre-made meal yourself. As long as you’re careful about counting calories and fiber—and if you have the patience to prepare your meals in advance—this is an even better approach because it’ll teach you the portion control needed to be in charge of your weight.
Yet another spin on this method is to eat only one major protein-based meal daily (typically at dinner). The other two meals can revolve around low-calorie liquids, salads, or even a bowl of very low-sugar cereal and skim milk, to keep you going through the day without slowing down your weight loss.
The trickiest part of this strategy is transitioning back to how you used to eat once you’ve taken off the extra pounds. But if you’re patient and proceed in gradual steps, you can both shed the weight and keep it off.
Food Logging
A large part of the reason we fail to lose weight is that we’re relatively oblivious to just how much we eat. Often someone will say, “I don’t understand why I’m not losing weight” without realizing that the morning donut and the afternoon milkshake and the post-work beer all add up. Indulging yourself once in a while isn’t a problem; what matter are the items you eat and drink regularly as part of your daily routine.
A simple way to address this is to log everything you consume. This ensures that you’re paying attention to each morsel that goes into your mouth, and it also makes you think twice when you’re about to bite into something that doesn’t fit into your meal plan.
Logging food may sound boring, but there are some great online resources to help make the process interactive and fun. Two of them are MyFoodDiary.com and CalorieKing.com. Both websites charge around $12 a month, but in exchange offer databases of over 70,000 foods. These let you quickly look up calorie and nutritional information for virtually any commercial food you can imagine, ranging from basic natural foods to packaged supermarket fare to chain food restaurant offerings; and after you decide to eat the food, the site will automate your recording of it. (For example, MyFoodDiary has a section called “The Fridge” which lets you enter a food you eat frequently with a few mouse clicks.)
Other features of these sites include tracking your calorie, fiber, and sodium intake; an exercise log that calculates your calories burned for over 700 activities; reports that gently encourage you to keep losing (and discourage you from gaining); and online communities to share tips and cheer you on.
Then again, if you do better being cheered by people who are in the same room with you, consider joining face-to-face programs such as Weight Watchers (weightwatchers.com) or Jenny Craig (Jennycraig.com) … which also encourage food logging.
Thyroidian Tip
You can buy a measuring scale, complete with a bowl for holding your food, for $20-$30 online. This is very handy if you’re working from calorie lists that define food servings in grams or ounces. It also helps you maintain objective portion control—studies have shown we tend to underestimate by an average of 30 percent when gauging food portions by eye alone.
Measuring Your Metabolism and LBM
Your body always has a base level of activity, called your metabolism, that keeps your lungs breathing, your heart beating, and your cells operating to keep you alive. A measure of this base level of activity is your resting metabolic rate, or RMR, which represents the minimum number of calories your body will burn up in 24 hours. Your RMR is responsible for burning up the vast majority of your calories—typically, 65-75 percent. And it’s RMR that your thyroid is primarily designed to regulate.
If you’re open to spending around $100, you can undergo metabolic testing to learn precisely what your RMR is. This is done via an indirect calorimetry device that’s available at both health clubs and doctors’ offices. It works by having you breathe into a tube for 10-15 minutes while it measures the rate at which you burn oxygen. It then uses this data to very accurately calculate how many calories you burn per day at rest.
You can use this information to figure out how many calories you should eat daily to reach your target weight by a certain date. A good approach is to adopt a diet that comes within 5 percent of your metabolic rate. For example, if you’re a 160-pound woman, and metabolic testing has revealed you have an RMR of 1,500 calories, if you consume 1,425-1,575 calories daily and perform light to moderate exercise, you’ll lose weight at an ideal rate of 0.5-1.2 pounds per month.
Your initial reaction may be that you’d like to lose weight a lot faster. But setting your caloric intake further below your RMR is a bad strategy. That’s because as important as your weight is, even more important is your lean body mass, or LBM, to body fat ratio. Your lean muscle continually burns calories, and so is a key component of your RMR. If you eat too few calories, though, you won’t lose only fat, but also lean muscle tissue. And the less lean muscle you have, the lower your RMR will be. So consuming too little each day is self-defeating.
You can slim down quicker. But the way to do it safely is to exercise. Performing vigorous exercise at least three times a week increases your lean muscle, which raises your RMR and burns your body fat faster.
To follow your progress in swapping out fat for LBM, you can buy a home bathroom scale that runs a very light current through your body to detect how much fluid you’re storing. Such scales aren’t 100 percent accurate, but if you get on one the same time every day, and at roughly the same level of hydration, you can get a pretty clear idea of how well you’re doing in developing your lean body mass.
One other advantage to losing slowly and steadily is that it’s sustainable. If you eat too few calories daily, you’ll put your body into a starvation mode that’ll make taking off pounds incredibly difficult; and what’s likely to follow is binging. Avoid both extremes, as they abuse your body and make subsequent weight loss even more difficult. If your hypothyroidism added 30 or 40 pounds, you shouldn’t think of the process of getting them off in terms of weeks or months, but years.
That may seem daunting at first. But if you include exercise as a major component of your weight loss, you may end up with a much better LMB-to-fat ratio than you had before you became hyperthyroid … resulting in your being slimmer and healthier than ever.
Throat Quote
There’s no easy way out. If there were, I would have bought it. And believe me, it would be one of my favorite things!
—Oprah Winfrey
If you’re on thyroid medication but—despite your best efforts—the weight still isn’t coming off, the problem could be a lack of T2. As explained in Chapter 3, most doctors treat hypothyroidism by automatically prescribing Synthroid or its generic version levothyroxine. These are superb medications, but they include only T4. Desiccated thyroid medications, such as Nature-Throid and Armour Thyroid, are the only available sources for T2 aside from the thyroid itself.
Until recently it was assumed T2 did nothing important, and so drug manufacturers had no motivation to create chemical versions of it. Then some researchers decided that if the thyroid makes T2, there’s probably a good reason for it; and their studies indicate T2 actually plays a significant role in weight loss.
Specifically, preliminary results show T2 speeds the rate at which the body’s cells retrieve and break down fats, which are the first steps in burning your body fat and converting it into energy. T2 also helps offset insulin’s effect of putting the body into food storage mode rather than calorie burning mode. And T2 facilitates the conversion of T4 into T3, which raises overall metabolism. Further, studies indicate that T4 seldom converts down to T2.
What we’ve discussed in this chapter provides a solid foundation for slimming down, and it may be all you need. If you’d care to dig deeper, though, please also read the next chapter on advanced techniques for shedding excess fat.
The Least You Need to Know
- Getting your metabolism back to normal doesn’t mean you’ll automatically lose the weight you gained while hypothyroid.
- Fiber-rich foods both fill you up and put your body in calorie burning mode.
- Logging everything you eat will lead you to eat less and eat smarter; and online services can make this fun.
- More important than your weight is the ratio of your lean body mass to fat, which means exercise should be a vital component of your weight-loss strategy.
- Try including T2 in your thyroid medications by having your doctor prescribe desiccated thyroid.