Thyroid Confessions

Most of the people who read my blog probably haven’t seen me in several months or even years. So you’ll just have to take my word for it that I’ve lost a lot of weight. I’m 10lbs under what I weighed before I got pregnant with Caleb. This is such a surprise to me because I never really expected to lose all the pregnancy weight, much less weight I gained 10 years ago. You can only chalk so much up to breastfeeding, so I went in to see a doctor and the suspicion is that my thyroid is fizzing out on me. It’s called hyperthyroid or overactive-thyroid and among other things, it makes your metabolism go on overdrive and unless you eat a tremendous amount of food, you just cannot keep from losing weight.

I’ve done a little reading about it and supposedly 7% of women have trouble with their thyroid after they have a baby. It’s called postpartum thyroiditis and it’s an autoimmune disease. An autoimmune disease is where your immune systems gets it’s friends mixed up with it’s enemies and starts attacking your own body. Yay.

Just for the record, there are lots of autoimmune diseases (MS, RA, lupus, and more) and so far of the ones I’ve read about, if I had to pick, I’d pick the thyroid related ones.

So, I’ve taken a blood test and will have the results later this week. Sometimes (actually according to thyroid-info.com, usually) postpartum thyroiditis just goes away. If it does not, there is no good way to treat hyperthyroidism, so the general rule is to medically shut down the thyroid and treat you for hypothyroidism (under-active thyroid).

Hypothyroidism makes it difficult to lose weight and can cause depression, and sometimes the postpartum thyroiditis manifests as this version instead of the hyper one. So I’m surprised that more women aren’t diagnosed with it – especially considering the test is a simple blood test.

I’ll post an update about all this when/if it gets more interesting.

Pregnancy is such a hard thing on a woman’s body and the after effects can be life long. It kind of makes you think…is it worth it?


Oh yeah, it is :)