Re: Six weeks now on mineral/vitamin supplementation and feeling great!

Just wanted to post another update! I've had two rounds of blood work done since my last post above. To recap: My TSH was 2.9 in early June, three weeks after stopping tea. My TSH was 9.5 on August 15. Then it went to 6.2 on September 25th. The latest TSH was 3.7 on November 22nd. All three times my FT3 and FT4 have been normal. BUT, my LDL cholesterol went back up to the June values! As did my liver enzymes!

I'm still doing all of the things I was before, but I have also started taking a B12 methylcobalmin sublingual. The first time I tried it (1000mg) it kept me up all night. I got a headache the next day. This kept happening and so I backed off the B12. My heart palpitations came back and so I tried the B12 again, except this time I broke it up into tiny pieces and spaced it out over the day. Slowly I've built up to taking more and more and it's made a HUGE difference in my mental focus and mood. Also my heart palpitations have completely gone.

The other thing I discovered, after trying some beef liver, is copper. I had already been taking some in a mineral supplement, but I think I was pretty deficient in copper, maybe for years, and the RDA was not enough. Beef liver has 10mg in a 4 oz piece. After having some for lunch, I felt like a super hero the next day. It was similar to the time in August when I ate sushi and felt like a super hero. Pretty incredible. A copper deficiency would explain so much for me, including my low white blood cell count, and my periodically high liver enzymes and LDL from June and November. Incidentally, both happened after eating oysters which are extremely high in zinc and zinc excess blocks copper absorption.

So now (it's only been a week) I'm taking 6 to 8mg of copper a day. I have so much energy now it's ridiculous. I'm not sure what to do with these extra hours I'm not sleeping.

I do have a new symptom. Almost immediately after eating the beef liver, I started having a pain in my upper chest behind my breastbone. My first thought was heartburn but experimenting around that idea has me convinced that isn't it. I had pain in this area before this past July and had a complete cardiac workup but everything with my heart is fine. And it doesn't feel like my heart. It's too high up. It feels like my thymus gland. The thymus gland differentiates all your immune cells. A copper deficiency lowers white blood cells. Maybe eating all that copper at once affected the thymus. The thymus gland can shrink and grow, just like the thyroid. I'm thinking my thymus gland is reacting to the copper. I googled sweetbread nutrients and found out that the thymus of beef is high in selenium, so I've increased my intake of selenium to see if that helps. Taking more B12 seems to help too. It's hard to know though. I could be overanalyzing. It's hard with all that has been going on for me not to pay attention to every little feeling.

I'm working out more now too, and finally starting to feel like my old self. Since starting on high B12 and copper, my join pain has gone away. I'm running again!