A lot of people couldn’t believe that I gave up coffee and tea. After all, anyone who knows me well, knows I loved coffee. yummmmmmmmmm Not the caffeine, I just like the taste of coffee and tea was my beverage of choice in the evening. Does not matter what kinds, flavored, plain, herbal, decaf….. I just loved wrapping my fingers around the warm cup and the peace it always brought.
I loved my collection of mugs, my pretty china cups that I used on special occasions. I loved stopping for coffee before a shopping trip or meeting a friend for coffee on a day off. I loved sipping coffee on my planning periods at school. Tim Horton and I have been great friends for a lot of years. But when I watched Dr. Jack’s webinar, he talked a lot about how coffee can actually cause problems for thyroid issues.
When I started with Dr. Jack, he told me that caffeine was causing some problems with my Hashimoto’s Disease, and it was best to give it up. I wasn’t thrilled but I would have done anything he told me to in order to find relief. I wasn’t addicted to the caffeine, I just liked the way it tasted. I unashamedly admit that for a while I use to drive by Tim Horton’s and wave, missing him sadly.
When people started asking my why I wasn’t drinking coffee anymore, I said that my doctor had recommended it. They always asked me what Dr Jack’s objection was to it, and I understood what he told me but the truth was that I wanted to totally understand it, not just use what was told me to me as an excuse. If I was going to make this part of my lifestyle, I had to understand completely why this was so bad for Hashimoto’s patients.
I am one of those people that when someone plants an idea in my head, I need to get online and look at the research that goes with it. It wasn’t that I didn’t believe Dr. Jack, just that I needed to read more about it so that the idea totally cemented itself in my head. I realized that if I did that, then when opportunity approached, I wouldn’t skip it for any other reason than I didn’t want it because it was bad for me. Well, turns out that although tons of people think that coffee and tea are perfectly fine for thyroid patients, I am no longer convinced of that.
Did you know that coffee spikes your blood sugar? There is a study in the US National Library of Medicine, ncbi.nlm.nih.gov . When you read their conclusion it says that caffeine increases blood sugar levels. Lots of Hashimoto’s patients are also insulin resistant. So all that coffee and tea I was enjoying so much might well have been a part of the problem. I had been diagnosed years before with insulin resistance. I was on medication for that, and yet no one had ever bothered to tell me that my consumption of caffeine could well have contributed to the problem. That made me look even further.
Then I stumbled on this great article on Hypothyroid Mom’s site: http://hypothyroidmom.com/11-ways-coffee-can-impact-your-thyroid/
50% of people with gluten sensitivities also experience cross reactivity with other foods, including casein in milk products, corn, coffee, and almost all grains, because their protein structures are similar. Cyrex Labs provides a test for gluten cross-reactive foods.
Many people report having a similar reaction to coffee as they do to gluten.
Coffee impacts the absorption of levothyroxine (the synthetic thyroid hormone); this is why thyroid patients need to take their hormone replacement pill at least an hour before drinking coffee.
The indirect but important point is that coffee contributes to estrogen dominance, cited above, and estrogen dominance inhibits T4 to T3 conversion.
Any functional or integrative doctor would say the majority of modern diseases are caused by inflammation – a smoldering and invisible fire found on a cellular level.
This study found that caffeine is a significant contributor to oxidative stress and inflammation in the body.
Exhausts your adrenals?? Impacts the T4 and T3 conversions? Inflammatory?? Isn’t that the whole problem with Hashimoto’s? Inflammation is the key to the entire thing?
So all this time, when I was sipping away, I had no idea that I was actually part of the problem. Hello ME!! I was part of the problem. I was causing some of my own inflammation and that was hindering my weight loss, maybe not all of it, but hindering just the same. I started wondering what else had I done that I thought was doing no harm at all, when in reality? I was making things soooooo much worse. I started thinking about how often, in trying to cut calories, I would just have some coffee or tea.
When you don’t know what you are doing wrong, you can’t blame yourself. It really isn’t your fault that you didn’t understand. But when you do have knowledge and don’t use it? That is your own fault. If you really want to get better, you have to make conscious choices. I do want to get better, so you do what you have to do. There was no way I was going to work so hard at all this and cut my possible success for a few sips of something warm. It wasn’t worth it to me and so I made an educated decision that all the caffeine had to go, and take its decaf friends along. This whole journey is about more than food. It is about education.
Do I miss it? Sometimes. If I could go back and just have it, would I? No… way too much at stake right now. Knowing that it could,kick in symptoms? No thanks.
Healing tastes much better than anything in a mug. Sorry, coffee, we can still be friends. It’s not you, it’s me. We have to break up. We just can’t share that same special bond we used to. Peace out Coffee…. It’s been real.