I will preface this by saying I had no idea I had a thyroid problem until March of 2018.

I was always a very skinny kid.  I gained a bit of weight in highschool, probably starting around the age of 16, and from 16-20 probably went from 135 to 180 pounds.  I am 5’9”, and I was never that big at 180, but I was more sedentary back in the first couple years of college (18-20) with less muscle mass, so I definitely had much more fat and took up more volume than I did on my second weight gain fiasco.  I blamed my weight gain on going through puberty, poor diet, and not exercising very much.  Sure, I was in marching band in high school and moving quite a bit during summer/fall, but at this point I’m not sure how active I was for most of the year.  I rarely exercised my first couple of years at college, but I did a whole lot of walking across campus, so I can’t claim I was “inactive”.  I was also a vegetarian from when I was 16 until 20, for about 4 years total.  I have assume my poor diet habits was the the cause, but I have never been a fan of greasy foods, was not eating lots of junk food or sugary sodas or juice, and I can’t remember eating much more than what I am eating now, although I do remember eating pizza more often in college. I’m pretty sure I was eating a lot less food in general than I am now, but also exercising less.  Hindsight is 20/20, and I think this was probably a big fat hypothyroidism red flag that I had no idea – it’s possible other factors contributed and it wasn’t from being hypo, but it’d be surprising if I wasn’t already suffering some mild hypothyroidism at this point.

Moving on… I was not happy about my weight gain, but I think I was more low mood and not feeling happy in general at this time of my life, and this was just one aspect of that.   Depression or low mood can be a symptom of hypothyroidism – was I really hypo at this time in my life?  I’m not sure, but it sure is a possibility (my thyroid was diagnosed as a multinodular goiter from chronic Hashimoto’s, discovered when I was 37 – most people’s thyroids aren’t nearly as inflamed as mine was when my doctor pulled it out, so I assume this had been going on for a very long time).

Fall of the year 2000, when I was 20, I was watching the Summer Olympics in Sydney, Australia, and it reminded me how much I love swimming.  At 20, I decided I would go swim laps at the pool.  I was very lucky that my university had an excellent athletic center and there were 3 pools, one was always open for “rec swim” whenever the center was open.  I fell in love with swimming again.  At this time in 2000, I also started eating non-mammals, because there is a good chance I was not eating enough protein as a vegetarian.   I only recently learned the name for that, pollo-pescetarainism, I just do my own thing and it works for me.  Anyway, I lost weight and put on muscle.  I really love swimming and would go several times (3-4?) a week.  I also started playing tennis and would play with my brother who lived in the same city as me back then.  I was not good at tennis.  My brother used to criticize me for not running after the ball enough.  So…  I started running.  When I moved to Vermont for grad school, I started swimming less because the pool was less accessible, but I kept up with the running.  I have been running ever since.  From 2001-2015 it probably has hovered around 160, sometimes a little less, not much more than that because I do run a lot.  160 is a reasonable weight for me, especially since I usually carry a lot of muscle mass from running.

I moved to the UK in 2011, and after four years there, moved back to the States in 2015.  My lifestyle completely changed when I moved back to the States, I was under a lot of stress and probably eating more throughout the day, and I gained a lot of weight in 2015 and 2016.  In March of 2017, I weighed myself and was shocked to see the scale say 188 pounds.  I have never weighed that much before.  I know for many people this is not that heavy, but I don’t eat a lot of junk food, I don’t eat red meat, I don’t eat fried foods (because it makes it hard to run the next day). 

The really weird part of this weight gain was that I gained weight while averaging 140-180 miles per month.  I was still running a lot, but packing on the pounds.  In March 2017, when I finally weighed myself, I was shocked and disappointed.  I decided that I had to get healthier if I wanted to live a long and productive life.  I came up with my own weight loss strategy, with the help of my TomTom Cardio Spark GPS watch which tracks activity as well as logging my runs.  I counted every single calorie I ate (for about a year – I don’t recommend this to anyone as a long term strategy, but it is what worked for me).  I kept track of my running, and I used my watch to calculate the calories burned.  My basal rate is around 60 calories per hour (or so I thought), and I’d double check TomTom’s math to make sure my runs were counted properly.  I’d aim for undereating by 500 calories per day (most days I was probably only at 300-400 under, but then long run days would make up for it).  I also upped my mileage from 140-180 miles per month to about 240-250 miles per month (I was really all in).  I worked on increasing my speed – I had been running really slow, and improving my speed improves calories burned.

The weight slowly trickled off, 1-2 pounds per week, consistently.  I plateaued around 165, and at this point started lifting weights, up to 12 pounds per hand weight.  Putting on a bit more muscle helped rev up my metabolism and I got down to 160 by July.  I was even sidelined by a shoulder injury in July of 2017, but was able to get down to 152 and maintain that weight from about November to March of 2018. 

At this point, I discovered I had a thyroid problem.  Basically, I think I had lost “neck fat” and saw that my neck was a bit bulgy and asymmetric.  I’ll go into more detail the process of diagnosing thyroid nodules later, but from March on, my goal has been to maintain my weight around 145-155 pounds.  I don’t keep track of calories and I know my weight fluctuates a whole lot day to day, so I haven’t really worried about it.  Now, seven months and 2 surgeries later, my weight is up to 157, but I am doing a whole lot of running, and I’m also trying to get my thyroid hormone in the right place, so I’m not going to beat myself up about being slightly higher than where I’d like.   

It sounds like I gained a little weight, lost it, gained more, lost it – and it’s not clear whether this was from hypothyroidism or just stress, poor eating, etc… this second time I definitely wasn’t eating a poor diet, maybe I was eating too much?  But I think my thyroid was bonking out at this point because I had lots of hypo symptoms, weight gain being just one big one.

I feel so lucky that I was able to lose the weight before I realized that I had a thyroid problem, and I think my weight loss definitely helped speed up my surgery recovery times and allows me to focus on just getting to where I need to be with the thyroid hormone without having to lose weight on top of that. 

I am also lucky that I love endurance running and was able to easily increase my weekly distance to help burn more calories – but I realize this is probably not the best weight loss strategy for most people unless you also have a burning desire to run crazy distances for fun.