Beat the wheat

I started this post about menu ideas thinking it would be nice and easy to write on a Sunday morning, after all I do it every week, week in week out, but it turns out it is as hard as coming up with the weekly menu plan itself! I want to share this however as a starting point to help you move away from wheat - to give you ideas on where to start your own menu plans.

The post idea came from some feedback on my facebook page so I would love it if you could please go and 'like' my page called My Thyroid Therapy - I really want it to be an online community where everyone can share experiences and ideas.

Breakfasts

Breakfasts may be the hardest to work around if you are rushing to get out the door for work in the morning but forward planning will always pay off. In this house eggs are a staple. Boiled, fried, scrambled...I have never managed to poach an egg but in the new year I might get round to it. For some reason it scares me a little, dropping an egg into water....
Fruit is another big hit for breakfast round here and can be prepared the night before - a little fruit salad cut up ready to go and then in the morning when I take it out of the fridge I cover it with some creme fraiche and then drizzle a little honey to finish off. Melon, berries, pomegranate, apple, pear, grapes....all very tasty.
Porridge will occasionally get served up if I remember to soak my oats the night before in milk. For a real tasty treat I have been known to stir in a spoonful of homemade jam and swirl in a splash of cream.

Lunches

Soups and Salads, soups and salads, soups and salads.  Sometimes I have a baked potato, sometimes I have leftovers but for the most part its a tasty homemade soup or a delicious fresh salad. Of course the trick is forward planning, and making a large pan of soup will do more than one lunch so is helpful. Salads are great and can be really filling with some meat and cheese added to it. Again these can be made and stored in the fridge overnight.

Dinners

Slow cooker stews are fantastic, easy to prepare and meat is so tender when cooked on a low heat for hours. We usually have combination mash with a stew such as sweet potato and turnip or celeriac and parsnip. You can also do a great curry in your slow cooker and serve with rice or if your being really good and grain free, some grated carrot!
Omelettes and quiches are tasty meals too, but of course it needs to be a crust free quiche. We usually have these with salad and some roasted veg like cubed butternut squash or roasted carrot.
We do try and eat liver once a week too so I am always looking for a tasty liver recipe. I started off by cooking liver in my bolognaise and then blitzing it up. We ate this with grated carrot rather than pasta but you could try a gluten free range of pasta.

So there you have it - some wheat free ideas to get you started. All I really do from here for my weekly plan is mix and match these recipes. The occasional (noodle free) stirfry and fish pie gets thrown in too. I won't lie to you, effort is required in creating your weekly plan and also preparing your food but it really is worth it. And what a great change if your current menu was as wheat-tastic as ours was previously
Breakfast: Cereal/toast
Lunch: Sandwich
Dinner: Pasta/noodles.

I pin our plan up in the kitchen so everyone knows what to expect from one day to the next too - this seems to beat the 'whats for dinner?' and then the 'oh I don't really feel like that' conversations that used to go on here.

Well its time for my coffee now for sure. I hope this has been useful and I hope to see some comments and feedback on facebook!

Anyone for T?

I have mentioned T3 and T4 previously but now want to share a bit more on the subject. Before I start, please bear the following things in mind:

• This is my story and I can only relate my own experiences
• I am not a qualified medical professional
• You should always speak to your doctor/healthcare provider about your own health matters
• I am one of the most impatient people I have ever met

On this healing journey I have made a number changes to my diet and to my lifestyle and I made these changes in the hope that I would function better physically and mentally. This worked amazingly quickly, within 3 weeks of changing my diet I was waking up easier and felt nowhere near as sluggish as I had previously. 'A good start', I thought (because I am an impatient little imp, so I was pleased with these fairly quick results).

Then I received and started taking my T3

Within 2 days my energy levels had increased and I had what I refer to in my diary as 'productive energy'. I simply meant I could get things done around the house easier. A few more days and in my diary I wrote that my interactions with my baby had changed, "I have the energy to talk to him more. It may sound crazy but before I found it exhausting". This to me was another turning point, I could see how I conserved energy to do the important things in a day - some days it would be caring for my and playing with my baby boy, other days it would be getting out to the shops for food.

Over the weeks I read a lot about T3 and T4. Through all the searching I discovered that I was not the only one whose symptoms were not entirely taken care of with my daily T4 tablet. I was intrigued.

And this is where I will leave things......for today anyway. Happy searching friends :)

Food for thought....literally.

Third post and all is well. As I sit here and wait for my baby boy to fall asleep I am trying to think of something with some substance for you to digest, so for the sake of a pun lets start with food.

They say "You are what you eat". Everyone has heard this at some point or another but how much do we pay heed to the message? I used to think I was reasonably healthy, ate balanced meals and looked after my diet as much as I thought I needed to but now when I look back I was eating all the wrong foods and actually I had stopped listening to what my body's needs were. I couldn't hear what they were for the din of the combine harvester rattling through my digestive system.

One of the first things I did for myself was to stop eating grains. Early September I stopped eating breads, pasta, rice, couscous, oats, noodles......anything that you would think of normally to make a quick easy meal was out. The decision came easy because I was so desperate to feel better and up until this point I was that person who would hear of someone else losing weight on Atkins and mutter to myself "if only I could survive without bread/pasta". Well blimey Riley, when you drop the grains you not only survive you start to thrive! I noticed lots of little things happening in my body. For a quick example, I always seemed to have sinus congestion - a little tiny thing that I had accepted as just something I had, one of my (many) quirks.Now it's gone! I cant count how many years it had irritated me and yet I never thought it would be anything serious enough to make a doctors appointment for - but its gone.

I won't go into detail with everything that changed (and believe me you wouldn't want me to either) but these little improvements have convinced me to eat as grain free as I can now. And no, its not always easy, and yes, I have to plan ahead to feed my family, and Christmas time is a minefield for yummy wheaty snacks so yes I fall off the wagon every now and again but the bottom line is I feel better for being grain free. I feel so much better for it and I hope everyone can at least think about trying wheat free or gluten free for some, if not yet all meals.

This is a huge topic though and there are loads of amazing blogs and websites dedicated to wheat/gluten/grain free information, I would urge you to investigate for yourself. From what I have read though, I understand that wheat damages your insides. And your insides are important in helping your body absorb the goodness from your food. (Please note the use of the word 'insides' as being a technical term here). So the aim for grain free is to help your insides repair themselves (that is what insides are good at).

Something else that really is a great help to me is a menu plan. A weekly menu plan can take time to come up with but is worth the effort to ensure you are not caught short for a meal and have to grab a sandwich or make another pasta meal for dinner. I read somewhere recently "Failing to plan is planning to fail" and its true in my house - the one week since September I didn't manage to write a menu plan we had wheat 5 days out of the 7. And that is with me trying to put in extra effort!!

So that's my tuppence worth for today. Baby is sleeping peacefully now so I can get on with some other jobs now but I hope this has given you something to think about. Why not make it your New Years resolution to give up the grain? Help your gut to heal and you are on your way to better health.

Overwhelmingly overwhelmed

Well, I have to say I am very happy and excited about the support I have received for my one and only post and felt I needed to keep up momentum while it's still a hot topic!

It sounds as though there are more people than I realised out there with thyroid problems. There are also those currently being 'investigated' and there will be some who suspect there is something wrong but for whatever reason have not managed to deal with it yet. So this one is for you guys....

Thyroid disorders can cause a host of what I would describe as elusive problems, from weight gain to brain fog to dry skin to name only a few. If you have suffered from any of these problems you will understand how frustrating they can be. However, perhaps even more frustrating, is the fact that these symptoms seem to present themselves so slowly that you are compensating for them so minutely each day until you eventually reach a stage where you have to ask yourself *why am I so depressed/overweight/fatigued and not enjoying life as much as I used to?* At what point do you say to yourself - enough is enough and get your doctor/healthcare provider to check you out? A lot of us put these vague symptoms down to age, lifestyle and deterioration of the body without being aware that a little known (and perhaps even less cared for) system such as the Endocrine system may be the cause.

So today my message has got to be this - please do not feel that these things are beyond your control, do not let things overwhelm you. You are the master of your own health, start your own thyroid therapy today!

And so it begins....

So this is it. My great leap into the blogosphere comes about after tea time on a Wednesday night...actually it's not even Wednesday it's Tuesday! Anyway, the important thing (I'm sure you will agree) is that I have made it here.

I want to share my journey with ...anyone who will listen if I'm honest, but essentially it's for people who, like me, are trying to live a normal life with an under-active thyroid. I have been on an incredible journey over the past 12 months, I feel like my life has been dragged out of the dense fog and I am functioning in daylight once more. My personal symptoms included extreme fatigue, brain fog, depression, dry skin, limp hair, air hunger, low pulse, itchy inner ear just to name a few. For a period of time I wrote the symptoms off as individual minor problems until my immune system seemed so horribly run down I was convinced I had something more sinister and finally went to the doctor. Blood tests revealed I was profoundly hypothyroid and I have been on my healing journey ever since.

I have to say that I am incredibly grateful to my doctor for getting my diagnosis in my first trip to see him but I need to be straight with you - I do hold some frustration with the NHS for the way it treats hypothyroidism. I have been on Levothyroxine (synthetic T4) for almost 12 months now and although I initially noticed an initial improvement in my health, my symptoms quickly came back. Thankfully a dear friend who had suffered similar problems told me about T3 and this is where my real recovery came about. Unfortunately T3 is not easily available on the NHS but I do believe it has been the real power house in my battle.

Well, baby Brown is nipping my ankles and its time for his bed so I will leave it there for tonight. Please follow my story as I want to share my trials, stories and experiences with you in the hope you will find it helpful for your own journey. I would also love to hear your story too so get in touch!