In light of the recent discoveries during my n=1 experiment with nutritional ketosis regarding my cholesterol (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3), thyroid hormone (Part 1), and skin rash, I decided to take a break from nutritional ketosis to see what would happen.

We’ve already seen that the addition of carbs back into my diet made my rash go away (it’s been a few months out and still no rash, yay!).

I took another blood test to see if my thyroid hormone levels would change.  We saw on during my first thyroid test that I’m actually considered either hypothyroid or at least sub-clinically hypothyroid.  I hypothesized that:

What is probably going on is the very low level of carbs I’m eating while being in nutritional ketosis is turning off my body’s production and utilization of thyroid hormone in order to preserve energy, and my high cholesterol is just a side effect of this.  

So after eating more carbs I expected my thyroid hormone levels to improve.

Here are the results:

After about 30 days of adding more carbs back into my diet my TSH improved dramatically, and both my Free T4 and Free T3 both jumped up.  This means that I am well out of the hypothyroid range.

The only thing that I’m not quite sure how to explain is why my rT3 also went up accounting for only a minimal improvement in my Free T3 : rT3 ratio.  This may still be a carry over from the changes that occurred in my system while being in ketosis.  It will be interesting to see if this also normalizes on a subsequent lab test.

I also got my cholesterol checked at this time and will report the results on a separate post.

With what you’ve seen so far, any guesses as to what happens with my cholesterol?