How to Get an Autoimmune Disease: My Journey with Hashimoto’s Thyroiditis

Last week I spent my “blog hours” watching The Thyroid Secret, a docuseries produced and hosted by Dr. Izabella Wentz.  It has confirmed my suspicions about a lot of the problems with conventional medicine’s approach to treating the thyroid (and autoimmune conditions in general), given me some additional tools to help me get my disease successfully regulated and into remission, and fired me up about dialing in my diet for a little while (a particular part of treating my thyroid that can be hard and certainly inconvenient at times).

I thought I’d use this opportunity to share a little more about my journey with Hashimoto’s and how I suspect I got the disease.  Dr. Wentz attributes three things to how one develops an autoimmune condition (and what may trigger it to “turn on” in our bodies and start attacking us).  I’ll be detailing those factors below and what that looked like for me.

1. Have a genetic predisposition for autoimmune disease. 

You don’t get to pick your parents!  My mom (and I suspect my grandma and a few of my aunts as well) have autoimmune diseases, so my chances of getting one were higher than normal.  I never honestly gave this a second thought until now.

Now, this has been a bit of a sore subject for me for quite a while in that many people just chalk a condition up to being genetic, throw their hands up in the air, and say, “There’s nothing I can do about it!”  However, lots and lots of research regarding epigenetics is showing compelling evidence that genetic expression can turn off and on as a result of environment.  So, while I may be predisposed to an autoimmune condition, I’m not a helpless victim to it!  However, it does help to explain why I ended up with an autoimmune condition.

2.  Have intestinal permeability.  

The lining of your gut is only one cell thick!  I had no idea it was this thin!  Think about your skin which has seven layers—quite a difference comparatively.  So, when we encounter toxins, infections, viruses, and foods which aren’t made out of food, the bacteria in our gut get to work fighting them.  But, sometimes we don’t have enough “good guys” to fight all the “bad guys,” the bad guys start to win, kill off the good guys, and all that inflammation starts to thin the lining of the gut wall into it has holes in it.  Gross.  So then the bad guys get back into our bodies, creating mass amounts of inflammation.  Sometimes these bad guys look a lot like the cells in our own bodies (gluten proteins look a whole heck of a lot like thyroid cells!), and so our immune system gets to work blasting thyroid cells thinking it’s still fighting the bad guys.

There’s a lot more to it than just this, but suffice it to say, the research is overwhelming that if you have an autoimmune condition, you almost always, always have a leaky gut.

So how did I get such a leaky gut?  Like I said, this condition can occur for a variety of reasons.  Things like viruses, parasites, etc. can wipe out your good bacteria.  Antibiotics, while fighting bad bacteria that you have in your body if you get an infection, also wipe out the good guys.  Certain foods can also be the problem.  For me?  I lived on gluten for the first 22 years of my life!  Let’s be honest.  Gluten?  It’s delicious.  I love carbs.  Here’s the other thing: conventional advice for distance runners is to eat a ton of carbs.  So, every night before a race I ate pasta (and I’ve run a lot of races!).  I ate a bagel every single race morning.  I seriously lived on pretzels and animal crackers throughout all of college.  All I ate was gluten.  Sheesh.  I thought I was being so healthy because I wasn’t eating fast food or candy.  Instead, I was slowly putting holes in my gut lining and opening myself up to autoimmune disease.

I should mention that I was constantly struggling with constipation, gas, and bloating.  I can’t believe I thought that was normal!  (Common?  Yes.  Normal.  By no means.)  If you are struggling with any sort of digestive issues, it is very important to investigate the health of your gut microbiome.  Not only will you feel a TON better if you have a working digestive system, but you will reduce your risk of autoimmune disease (and just stay healthier in general!  Your immune system is housed in your gut!).  Hippocrates said: “All disease begins in the gut,” and I completely agree!  But that subject deserves a post all its own…  On to point #3.

3.  Encounter environmental stressors.  

These environmental stressors could be all kinds of things.  Relationship stress, financial stress, physical stress—it’s all stress to our bodies.  I honestly feel kind of guilty when I think about what my stressors were because for one, they were completely avoidable and all of my own volition, and two, other people have really hard, real life things that create stressful environments for them (think rape, abuse, divorce, etc.).

So what were my environmental stressors?  Well, mine was a too intensely packed schedule of activities in high school and college.  Combine 40-50 miles per week of running, with 6 hours of sleep per night (maybe 8 on the weekends, maybe 4 on an exam night), several performing music groups, and a way too egocentric view of my GPA and being the best at everything, and you get a pretty stressful environment.  I was so tired in college that I could fall asleep and wake up from a dream in three minutes!  I even skipped lunch for a couple years of college when I realized that during the hour that my colleagues went to the cafeteria, I could be in the practice room “getting ahead.”  Oh golly.  But yes, add all that up, and you get a recipe for autoimmune disease.

Living with a disease you don’t even know you have.

So then came the year after college before getting married when I had my first full time job.  I started having symptoms of thyroid disease right around this time—constantly exhausted and feeling depressed.  Then I got married and experienced more symptoms—still extremely tired (and fell asleep pretty much any time we sat down to watch a movie) and basically non-existant libido (super fun when you first get married!), starting to get breakouts for the first time in my life, and continued constipation, gas, and bloating.

Somehow we’re so trained to think all this is normal (or just to reach for some coffee or laxatives to treat our symptoms!) that I didn’t even put all of this together as abnormal.  And then my hair started falling out.  In huge handfuls.  I thought it would never stop.  I thought I would just go completely bald.  I knew this was not normal (even though I didn’t connect it with any of my other symptoms at the time).  So, I went to my doctor, who tried to tell me I was just stressed (I had grown up a bit by this point and was no longer killing myself with a ridiculously busy schedule, so I knew I really was not stressed at all).  I insisted that something was wrong, and she ordered blood work.  Sure enough, I had hypothyroidism.  (I did not get a diagnosis of Hashimoto’s for another three years.)

Looking back, I can’t believe how shocking this news was to me.  Knowing what I know now, of course I got an autoimmune disease!  But four years ago, I just couldn’t believe it.  People with hypothyroidism were overweight (so I thought).  I was a personal trainer!

And so my journey toward recovery began.  I refused to believe that my thyroid would never heal (as my doctor assured me was the case).  I’ll write another post detailing my journey toward recovery at a later date.  Right now I’m wondering, do you or a loved one have an autoimmune disease?  What were the triggers in your life that began your journey?