Food intake is so important when you have hypothyroidism.

Eating the wrong kind of food can slow your thyroid down for a number of reasons. Not eating enough can put the body into a panic. Missing out on minerals can mean the thyroid is unable to do its job, even if you’re doing everything else right.

On the flip side, eating the right kind of food can put your body into the right state to have your thyroid function properly.

But what is the right kind of food? 

While there are some general guidelines I give clients about what they should eat when they have hypothyroidism, and foods they should avoid, a lot of it is really personal and up to our individual bodies, lifestyles and circumstances.

That’s where a food diary comes in!

If you’re just starting out on your thyroid health journey, or even if you’ve been managing your symptoms for a while but feel like you’ve fallen into poor habits, keeping a food diary for a few weeks or months can really help.

I like to set up food diaries to measure three things:

1. What you ate (as detailed with the ingredient list as you can get!)

2. When you ate it (morning, afternoon, evening, night)

3. How it made you feel (again, be as detailed as possible!)

That last point is key because it can help us understand trends and it will tell you what exactly your body needs.

Keeping a food diary helped me learn that I’m not tolerant to dairy products. Every time I tracked that I ate a dairy product, my feelings column would say a synonym of “crap”. Because I always felt crappy when I ate dairy! Probably because it was causing inflammation and messing with my thyroid.

Had I not been keeping the diary, this pattern may not have become super obvious!

At the same time, many women with hypothyroidism are completely fine with dairy. Again, this is a pattern that we would be able to see when reviewing your diary.

There’s no one-size-fits-all diet for any situation, including for those of us with sluggish thyroids. So tracking your meals and how they made you feel can help us build an individualized recommendation for foods you need (and foods you really want to avoid).

From then, you’ll want to keep up with the food diary for a few more weeks to see if it’s helping. If it is, awesome! If not, the food recommendation can be tweaked until you find something that works.

While keeping a food diary can seem a little daunting at first, remember, it only has to be temporary until you start feeling better. It can serve as a tool you use every now and then to make sure you’re staying on track with properly nourishing your thyroid.

If you want help making an individualized meal program to support a healthy thyroid, reach out to me. I’d love to help.