WEIGHT LOSS: HYPOTHYROIDISM, THE UNDERLYING ISSUE: RADIATION OVERLOAD

It took years for one of my colleagues who suffered from low energy, low body temperature, and other symptoms of hypothyroidism to discover that her thyroid gland was weakened. She recalled her teenage years when she received acne treatments. Every week her entire face, neck, chest, and back areas were bombarded with radiation. Of course, her thyroid gland was irradiated along with her face. Now she's dependent on supplemental thyroid hormone treatment to compensate for the damage done so many years ago in the course of "standard medical treatment."

How many full sets of dental X rays did we receive as children, with no protection offered to the thyroid area? In the fifties, the levels of radiation in dental X rays were many times higher than they are today. Combine frequent dental X rays with radiation released during testing in the forties and fifties from the nuclear industry, X rays from television sets that were much higher in radiation in that era, and the low-level radiation to which we are all exposed today, and it's easy to see that many of us are at high risk for thyroid dysfunction.

Current levels of radiation are increasing year after year, and we seem content to accept this environmental anomaly because we enjoy so many of the benefits that radioactive conveniences offer. After all, could we give up our cell phones, microwaves, and computers for the sake of health issues?

"If anybody tells you they cant succeed on this program, they haven t tried!

Carols program is so easy, it makes so much sense, and my body feels so good on it that there is no excuse for failure. I will never go back to my old way of eating."

KAREN

Several years ago documents released by the United States government showed that between 1944 and 1947, 400,000 curies of radioactive iodine were deliberately released into the atmosphere. (This is about 26,000 times more radiation than the radiation released in the Three Mile accident in 1979.) That particular government experiment will cost thousands of people their lives due to increased incidence of cancer, but the effect on the thyroid glands of possibly hundreds of thousands of people exposed during that time period may never be known. We simply know that radiation exposure damages thyroid function, possibly beyond its ability to recover.

In his book Solved: The Riddle of Illness, Dr. Stephen Langer lists other possible causes of pandemic subclinical hypothyroidism, including the following:

Environmental pollutants in drinking water

Fluoride (particularly in low-iodine regions)

Certain prescription drugs (barbiturates, sulfa drags, antidiabetic agents, synthetic estrogen, cough medicines, aspirin, and other salicylates)

Oil of wintergreen used in rubbing liniments

Cigarette smoke

Excessive intake of foods from the brassica family (cabbage, cauliflower, kale, turnips, mustard greens)

Excessive consumption of soy products, millet, and walnuts

Regarding the impact low thyroid has on weight control, Dr. Langer further writes:

In order to be in good health and lose weight, you must have normal thyroid function—or appropriate supplementation—to realize full values from your food. Even if your diet contains all essential micronutrients (vitamins and minerals) in proper amounts, you may not be getting full nutritional benefit from it.

Food must be broken down and absorbed through the gastrointestinal mucosa. This process is often impaired in hypothyroidism. Next, food must be processed by pancreatic enzymes and converted by the liver in order to become biochemically active. Assimilation is often faulty in hypothyroid patients. Then the digested food must be transported by the circulatory system to the sites of use at the cellular level and successfully enter the cells to provide nutritional fuel. Lack of certain nutrients retards the process.

After all this, wastes have to be efficiently eliminated from cells and carried by the circulatory system for detoxification by the kidneys and liver and thrown off by the bowels, urinary system, skin, and lungs—all of which function below par in hypothyroid individuals.

In hypothyroidism, a decreased rate of oxygen use and a diminished rate of heat production translate into a decrease in metabolism and an inability to lose weight, no matter how hard we try…

Dr. Calvin Ezrin, author of The Endocrine Control Diet, states that low thyroid in itself does not necessarily cause obesity, a fact that is echoed by Dr. Langer. Langer reflected that about 40 percent of his hypothyroid patients are indeed underweight. But in the person already struggling with excessive weight, an underactive thyroid may make weight loss even more difficult to achieve, in much the way that your car just won't drive as fast if only one cylinder is firing.

Let's take a more in-depth look at the thyroid gland from the perspective of the yo-yo dieter.

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