Читать книгу Why Am I So Tired?: Is your thyroid making you ill? - Литагент HarperCollins USD, Martin Budd N.D. D.O. - Страница 23

Overweight patients frequently ask me for a calorie-controlled diet or a ‘special foods’ diet. Many are convinced that weight-loss would occur if they could only find and follow their ‘ideal diet’. They believe that such a diet exists, and that the appropriate volume, variety and combining of foods will solve their weight problem. This view has contributed to a vast array of diet books by celebrity authors, each of whom offers their own unique programme for weight loss. Unfortunately, effective and lasting weight loss depends on three elements. These being:

1 An efficient and healthy metabolism.

2 Regular activity and/or exercise.

3 A nutritionally balanced diet that is appropriate to our age, our lifestyle and our health history.

I find that many patients with mild hypothyroidism have great difficulty losing weight and perhaps more significantly, maintaining any new found slimness. Their metabolism can be so inefficient that I have known patients to increase weight even when following a low calorie diet plan consisting of no more than 800 calories daily.

Very low calorie diets tend to depress the metabolism and if the thyroid is already underactive, any weight loss on such a diet can only be very temporary. The weight loss-weight gain pattern so common to ‘crash’ dieting often tends to lower self-esteem, self-confidence and general vitality. The consequent frustration can lead to comfort eating and further depression, guilt and despair.