Hashimotos Thyroiditis and Persistence

Do these muffins look harmful to you? Well, if it were gluten, I would say definitely YES, but these were made with coconut flour and no sugar, just grated carrots and apple to sweeten them up. Here’s the problem…I kind of know that I have a problem with coconut products but every time I would try coconut flour pancakes or waffles, I have done okay, although I definitely react terribly to coconut oil and coconut milk. So, as most of us with Hashimoto’s Thyroiditis understand, sometimes we just don’t know what we will react to.

I named this post Hashimotos Thyroiditis and Persistence because one thing I have learned over the last few years is that persistence is a trait us Hashi’s need to learn. We learn pretty quickly that we can’t just “take a pill” and forget about it. Oh how I wish it was that easy! But on the other hand, if it were, would we have changed our diet for the better? Would we be looking around the Internet on forums, blogs and websites to see what diet best suits our needs for having a thyroid problem? Or would we just “let the pill take care of it”? I’m afraid I would be geared towards the latter of the choices which wouldn’t really be a good thing considering my diet wasn’t very good, especially through my young adult years.

So, every once in a while my body reminds me of how serious this diet I have chosen to be on is and how important it is for me to take my food sensitivities seriously. See, the GAPS Diet, in the last year, has brought me through so much healing, I began to forget how terrible it could be to eat something my body just can’t take. The diet is so defined, that I literally began to eat in a way in which I never had to ask myself, “will this hurt me?” because it didn’t. I was doing too good. In fact, I am working on a post to show the difference before and after GAPS and it was going to be done around the time I had this little mishap!

But then, a couple weeks ago my husband finally decided to go on the 21 Day Sugar Detox so I thought I’d support him by cutting out something I felt I might be eating too much of.  So, I chose honey and all fruit except the fruit allowed on the detox (green tipped bananas and green apples – one a day). I thought if I came out of the detox a bit more sensitive to how much honey and fruit I might be eating, I would be doing even better. What harm could this do? Well, I began to prepare some of the recommended foods by other detoxers to help get through the detox without feeling deprived for my husband’s sake. This included a lot of coconut products which I knew I couldn’t have like coconut balls for snacking and other coconut snacks but since I couldn’t have those I stuck to pastured butter for me which I have been doing well on. But the muffins I made looked like they had a chance of doing okay for me so I ate one….well, no, I mean I ate 2. Okay, if you must know, I ate 3 of them! I was so shocked that they tasted good (no sugar for crying out loud) that I had to sample them a bit more.

Before an hour passed, I began to get a bloated feeling in my stomach and all the normal “gluten” symptoms (at their worst) began to come on. OH NO! This can’t be! I didn’t eat gluten! That was all I could say to myself. I knew it was going to be bad so I got ready for the symptoms in my head, the dizziness, the feeling of passing out, the stomach and just total misery! I thought it was “the end” which used to be how I felt all the time after having gluten. I hadn’t had a flare like this for months, in fact, I hadn’t had a flare like this for over a year! I thought I was done with this reaction. Evidently not! It has taken 2 full weeks to get over this and I am still not totally well yet.

What was it? My hunch is that I have a gluten cross-reaction to coconut flour. This is not a food tested on the gluten cross-reaction test at Cyrex Labs which I had done over a year ago (which I highly recommend). If you are eating foods that are a cross-reactor to gluten, your body does not really think it’s off of gluten so you might not feel the full effects of going off of gluten. This was such an important test for me to take which helped me know if there were any other grains or foods that I needed to avoid. Okay, it could have also been a histamine intolerance reaction but it also could be a simple sensitivity to coconut flour as well as a reaction to too much fiber all at once. Or perhaps I reacted to the carrots which I sometimes don’t do well with. Whatever it was, it was bad! And it got me good! I have eaten almond flour muffins throughout the last year with no ill effects. So I may never know what it was but I learned an important lesson. I learned that if I have a suspicion that a food is sensitive to my body, it would be best not to eat a ton of it just to find out if I was right!

So, good-bye coconut flour, at least in that quantity! Once I am done healing my gut and finishing my quest to heal through the GAPS Diet, maybe I will try a 1/2 a muffin one day. But for now, I think I’ve learned my lesson! Perhaps I can now function again after 2 weeks of misery.

I prefer to eat in the way that makes me feel good and the GAPS Diet has helped me figure out which foods that is. It’s different for everyone but the process was an awesome help and I am so glad I have a base diet to fall back to after times like this. I hope I can get that post up soon on how the GAPS Diet has been one of the best things I have ever done on this journey. In fact, I sometimes wonder if it saved my life. My food reactions were becoming very dangerous.

You can see why I named this post the way I did. We don’t always have a choice. We need to be persistent. We need to mark the “culprits” along the way and keep going. What foods are off of your list because you react violently to them? Let’s keep up the fight and move closer and closer to minimizing the affects of this condition. Have a great week!