Hypothyroidism and it's Effect on ED and Health

The semester before high school. I started to be very tired all the time. I would get up, go to school, come home, work out, sleep, do homework, sleep, get up, go to school, etc... The docs ran blood tests and quickly found out that I was hypothyroid. My thyroid gland wasn't making enough hormone, so my brain was sending it panic signals to tell it to make more.

My mom had had thyroiditis in the past (hyper, then hypo, then normal) and had become severely depressed. She stopped eating and lost a lot of weight. She slept all the time. So I knew the havoc thyroid could wreak on a life. But they put me on meds, and I was told I would be fine.

We made many trips to the doc with many blood draws. Now I am horrified of needles. I start shaking and hyperventilating and I'm often a ball of nerves for about an hour afterwards. So I would go on a run to burn all the energy off. It also felt good as a stress reliever. I would do yoga at home also to relieve stress (though that was mostly to relieve stress from the endo). 

I remember my mom telling me to be careful because Aunt B and Aunt M (2 overweight aunts) had gained a lot of their weight when they became hypothyroid and went on birth control. I needed to be careful to not gain weight. Weight gain was bad, and it would creep up on me if I wasn't careful. At that point, my "healthy eating" was right on the edge of an eating disorder. This comment is what I believe pushed me across the line, though I would never tell my mother that.

Later I manipulated my thyroid meds to speed up my metabolism. I pretended to get tired again and mimicked the symptoms of hypothyroid so they would raise the dosage. While I was never able to get them to make me hyperthyroid, I did put myself in a position where I had artificial energy and I could stay up late and eat less and move more. My mom called it "legal speed".

I don't know if my parents knew what was going on with all that.

It was also good for me in other ways though. I found out my friend Ryan had been hypo before, and that's when I started talking to him. We became good friends and he became a vital source of support, even talking me down when I was suicidal. This summer, he was an absolute guardian angel. I would go and stay at his house until 2am watching horror movies and playing chess when I just couldn't handle anything else. And he let me talk. And he just listened and didn't pass judgement.

So I guess good and bad came from the hypothyroid. I've been on supplementation for 5 years now and probably will be for the rest of my life. I'm tempted to try and bump up the dosage again, but my parents know how little sleep I get, so that wouldn't fly. Disordered thinking.