[Anonymous January 29, 1997 at 1:21 pm Post count: 93172]

#1165255

That’s great information, Luci. Now, will you ask him WHY replacement therapy is a poor substitute for what the body used to do on its own? That’s the part I have difficulty understanding. What about those of us who never had weight loss and heat intolerance (or a very rapid pulse) with GD? I guess I still want to know more.

I just tried sending you an email, it was returned immediately to me as a bad address. Can you double check your address?

58 degrees sure sounds nice, but I’m sure you do know what HOT is!
Dianne

[Anonymous January 29, 1997 at 5:40 pm Post count: 93172]

#1057120

Okay everyone obsessed with weight loss like me…I just heard back from
a close friend of mine who is an Internist and who teaches clinical physiology
at Texas Tech Health Science Center in Lubbock. I had hit him with
a barrage of questions specific to this topic at Christmas and he just got back to
me with some explanations. I’m going to try and translate what he said
into plain vanilla because like most physicians, he tends to “speak in tongues.”
He says that GD significantly impacts metabolism, especially at a cellular level.
When you are in a hyperthyroid state, your systemic “off” switch is broken and this
throws the entire body into a state of extreme overdrive. One of the
principle side-effects of this is that it raises the core temperature of the
body to a point where you burn calories almost as fast as you can con
sume them, hence the heat intolerance, hence the weight loss. It also
accelerates brain activity to the point where your thought processes
are going at light speed, even in sleep states, hence the emotional
symptoms everyone has experienced. When you receive treatment and your
thyroid levels are brought down you are usually started on thyroid
replacement medication (i.e., Synthroid, Levethroid) in an attempt to
bring all of these body systems back into proper balance. BUT, replacement
therapy is a poor substitute for accomplishing a task that your own body
used to be able to do on it’s own before the disease struck. He likened
this to an electrical system that is now having to run exclusively on power
from a back-up generator – it will get the job done, but not as thoroughly
or as efficiently as the real thing. One of the end results of this is an
altered ability to burn fuel or calories. The only way to conpensate is to
try and augment this slowed metabolism with an additional power source
such as muscle tissue. (There’s the dreaded E-Word again…exercise)!!
He further states that in our case it is better if we eat MORE frequently
throughout the course of the day to stimulus-response train our metabolism
to run more efficiently. He suggested 3 meals (low-fat of course, but
balanced), + 3 snacks a day to accomplish this. He says the worst thing
I can do right now is to cut calories because this would only result in
a compensatory slowing down of my already sluggish metabolism. My
body will think I’m in a famine and slow fat thermogenisis to conserve
body fat and prevent starvation. Hope this makes sense – what do
ya’ll think?

PS: Thanks Bruce for figuring out that address glitch with the water
consumption article
PPS:To Dianne – It’s about 58 degrees now here in Texas – we only
have really cold weather about two weeks out of every year, so
I guess we’re lucky compared to what some people experience
in the winters. I live in San Antonio (southcentral Texas) and
have seen snow twice in my lifetime here! The flip side though is
that the summers are gruesome.

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