On thyroids, diets and acupuncture

The last weeks has been very busy not only because we will be adopting soon, but also since my health has taken a lot of my time as I try to prepare for the months ahead where most probably we will have a baby at home! I will need my energy!!!

I need to be strong and healthy and not only in case we get also pregnant again, but to be the very best mother to this baby and live a long time! I am keenly aware that I will be a mother of a teen ager in my post menopausal years and most probably will have a person living at home in my 60s (In Mexico we still mostly at home until we get married, not all, but still a very large percentage of people)

So I decided to get a clean bill of health during this wait and also to help in case God also decides that we are to become biological parents. This was 3 weeks ago.

I know I will be an older mother now being approved for adoption and I want to make the best of my health at 40. So I went back to the nutritionist I had been using when I became pregnant since I truly felt at my peak and restarted acupuncture.

These nutritionists are experts in something called Functional Medicine which takes adrenal fatigue, thyroid issues and many things related to Napro very seriously. Also allergies, inflammation, the works. They do vitamin, allergy, candida etc testing.

For the initial consult the nutritionist put me on a very special machine that determined my muscle mass, my fat percentage, my use of water, etc. you stand there with your hands in some electrodes and in a few minutes you get a very complete profile. One which I have tested with other doctors using other methods and its always the same, so I have learned to trust this machine.

The news were not good, actually very bad. Despite me using a size 8/10 and being at the limit of my ideal BMI (I am at 24.8, 25 is overweight) I have a very high percentage of fat and very, very low level of muscle. So much that it put me in the very obese category. Yikes!!!!

All has to do with my thyroid. When you are hypothyroid you lose muscle mass and gain fat and more if you do not exercise and even more with adrenal fatigue. My metabolism has slowed down a lot at 1380 calories a day. I am a typical case according to what she explained.

So my task for the next months: Fight inflammation with the anti inflammatory diet, limit those things that I know I have a sensitivity to (wheat, milk, vanilla, pepper), build tons of muscle mass via exercise (mainly weights) and lose the fat via aerobic exercise. I am now a Cur.ves convert. This is the very best exercise of me right now in which I need both weight bearing and aerobics in slow amounts until I build endurance. I have been doing it for almost 3 weeks now and I feel great. I will retest soon my muscle and fat ratio and hopefully there will be a change.

I basically need to lose: 9 kilos of fat and gain around 5 or more in muscle. I cannot lose any, any muscle since it would make it even harder to lose weight. Not an easy feat! 9 kilos is about 20 pounds. To me 9 kilos sounds much better than 20 pounds! Haha! But both are horrible.

The funny thing is: My blood pressure is that of an athlete. I have tons of good cholesterol and very low amount of the bad (my Mexican genes). My heart disease probability is actually very, very low. No sugar issues, nothing, nada to signal that I have this problem.

Also fat is not good for TTC since it makes hormones funny.

She also gave me some supplements that when I reviewed my book Fertilty, Cycles and nutrition are very similar. Q10, high doses of folic acid, B6, zinc, Omega 3, etc,

IF somebody is interested in this I can do a blog entry about it and the reasons behind each one in thyroid conditions and older mothers.

As I have blogged before we are completely open to life and actually TTC.

Let me explain: For me TTC at this moment in life where we are also adopting is taking the medicines that make my life better so I am actually taking very few for this specific purpose and also using days of fertility.

Only clo.mid in very very low doses which should make my eggs better in case we conceive again and B6 are my specific TTC medicines. That is it. All the rest are my normal medicines for adrenal fatigue, against PMS (HCG) and thyroid.

After the 4 months of horrible health following my miscarriage and the other 4 months of horrible cycles and infection signs Dr,. H has given us again the permission to TTC since March/ April and we have used a few days of fertility since. My cycles have become much better and there are all the signs that I am ovulating. Great P+7 results (consistently over 25), yet I am again feeling tired which is not a good sign.

I recognize the symptoms and I was asked to retest again for my thyroid.

Even on medication it did not come out great. T4 is very low. 1.9 in a range of 4.5 to 12 and my TSH is 0.42 out of a range of 0.49 to 4.67. So I am waiting for PPVI to provide me with instructions.

Also this cycle I again had Tail end brown bleeding which I had never seen in my life, only in the cycles following the miscarriage. So DH and I are again on Bia.xin which I hate since it kills with the bad all the good gut bacteria. Last time I had candida, not nice.

On the acupuncture front my grief counselor recommended a doctor to me after I told her I loved it and after several months of waiting he had an opening three weeks ago. Just in time for my health overhaul. This doctor is amazing and I really liked him since the beginning.

I love acupuncture since I had an incredible experience of it in China (they actually diagnosed me with a thyroid condition years before anybody could find a thing. Many western doctors said I was only stressed, when I fact I was fighting continous infections, horrible tiredness, weight gain,,,etc etc. It took the doctor only 5 minutes of taking my pulses and seeing my tongue to say that I had a thyroid issue. Only Dr. H was able to find it after many blood tests)

Well this Mexican doctor is actually a neurologist that witnessed an open head surgery here using no anesthesia and only needles. The patient got up right after the operation and walked. He was an instant convert and decided to travel to China and study 8 more years and then came back to open his practice.

Well this man is so well known that he closes his agenda for months and then only opens when the former patients are cured. I spoke with many people in his waiting room and heard the most amazing stories of healing. Wounds that would not heal healed after only a few treatments, asthma completely cured, etc. It was really incredible.

Still I was cautious when we met not knowing what to expect. Well he read my pulses and said I was Ok hormonally, but my thyroid needed some help and that my main problem TTC was mechanical. Blood flow issues.

And he reminded me that I needed to lose weight,. Yikes again.

Regarding the thyroid he said he would help me with the needles and then he began to explain to me that a thyroid condition was also in part due to lack of expressing ones feelings. That sometimes it happened in strong people that supported the rest of the persons without taking care of themselves and their needs or after a lot of grief. Both things made sense to me and he told me the thyroid thing without me even telling him so I was very impressed.

Regarding the blood flow thing. Well he told me that I had a couple of vertrebrae that had moved near the top of my back and that were obstructing the blood/energy flow to my uterus. That this actually was the cause of my miscarriage . He did not look at my back, he did not ask me to stand up, he just felt the pulses in my body.

Well he is correct and my mouth almost fell to the ground when he told me.

I have a slight deviation in the vertebrae he mentioned. One that my father also has.

Actually you can feel it and Western doctors have told me this after X rays (I have horrible posture and my mom wanted to check all was OK. They told me they could not do a thing).

Well he told me that he would needle the adjacent muscles and gradually shift the vertebrae using the muscles. Since he is a neurologist also he mentioned many things in western terms mixing them with eastern ones and I was fascinated.

I went again to him last Friday for the 3rd time and he said I was doing much better. Luckily many people canceled that day due to rain I think and we got to spend almost an hour talking. He mentioned to me that my chances of pregnancy were high since my hormones were very good still, I was ovulating regularly and that Dr. H had cured me of what western medicine could. My thyroid needed some help and also my blood flow, but in some weeks all would be resolved. I do not want to get my hopes up too much, but its really nice to hear that there is still hope.

The Western pro IVF culture would say I need donor eggs or ICSI or a surrogate mother since I have had only one pregnancy and a miscarriage, I am over 40 and we have male issues..

To hear the words healing, natural , the body knows, is great and what I love about the Napro and Eastern approach.

He also told me that my kidney was compromised in this last appointment. He really scared me and he then smelled my wrist, saying that compromised kidneys give funny smells. Specifically that my kidneys were working over time.

Then I told him I was taking antibiotics and he smiled. He said this was causing the kidneys to have issues since they need to filter the medicines and all would be well once I ended this dose. I was again amazed. How on earth did he know this?

He was very interested in Napro and said it made a lot of sense to him and he is also against IVF and he explained why.

He said that nature has a way of selecting the very best and the egg and mucus help select the best sperm. That man cannot possibly do it.

Well in IVF its man, in a lab, doing this and this is causing havoc in the children conceived this way. There is no natural selection of the best sperm and even egg when many are produced and this will in turn cause many children to be born with many issues, issues that we are not seeing right now, but that we will see in this generation or the next. He said that we cannot even imagine what we are doing by circumventing nature.

No religious reasons whatsoever, just by observing nature you can achieve this conclusion is what he told me.

I will blog later about more of this in case anybody is interested.