Reducing serotonin... How to support energy?

kineticz

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I am having positive results with lowering my serotonin (aspirin, ionizer, etc) but I am finding that beneath the surface my energy without serotonin is poor. Dopamine precursors only last for a short while then I feel like my dopamine receptors are further downregulated afterward.

I still have eye floaters (this all started after taking a DHT blocker) if anyone can help with that.

I am finding copper and pregnenolone very useful for exercising. I feel all my life I have relied on fatty acids for energy into the mitochondria. The only alternative seems to be gallons of sugar.


By the way, unlike many with hypothyroidism, my estrogen E2 is virtually zero. I'm also trying to raise that.

Thanks
 

BobbyDukes

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Lowering tryptophan from dietary sources. Raising gelatin intake can help too, if you can find a source of gelatin that doesn't give you negative effects. I always notice a boost in libido when I cut down on milk (large amounts are definitely stressful for my metabolism) and start replacing some of it with gelatin.
 

tara

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Hi kineticz.
How is your diet these days? Did you take the plunge and increase carbs, esp. sugar? If you want your system to not just run on stress hormones, I suspect you'll find you need to move to more carbs than you were eating before. Also all the other nutrients - enough protein, all the vitamins and minerals. If you want to keep running on fat with little carbs, I think that will give your system no other option than to keep stress hormones high (until you run out of reserves and can't keep them up either).

I think low levels of E2 in the blood along with low progesterone and low thyroid hormones can sometimes happen from prolonged under-eating. Also, sometimes there is lots of estrogen causing trouble in the tissues, but not showing in a blood test (http://raypeat.com/articles/articles/ti ... ogen.shtml). I am not aware of any benefit to raising E2 levels specifically.

Have you been reading/listening to Peat's articles/interviews to get more of an idea how he sees things?
 
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kineticz

kineticz

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Hi Tara.

I feel for a long time my estrogen and ACTH were running the show, but with the use of pregnenolone and aromatase inhibitors, I went too far the other way - zero estrogen in my case increases stress hormones as it allows more thyroid to circulate and the body ends up liberating fatty acids to compensate. I really feel that estrogen is a compensatory mechanism in this situation.

I read that estrogen can promote norephiprene, and copper, both of which stimulate ACTH, which makes use of fatty acids for pregnenolone, but doesn't support thyroid activity across the cascade.

I am stocking up on Orange juice, and need to buy some better protein. My protein powder is from a very reputable brand but it contains flaxseed and CLA, which I understand are not recommended via the Peat protocol.

I'm in an awkward situation where my progesterone is actually high, so I guess I just need to work on reducing the cortisol pathway in order to generate hormones again.

Like I say, my prolactin is high, but my progesterone is also high. I have high TSH, but high FT3. My E2 is zero, my cortisol is high. It's all quite contradictory to what you'd expect, but I did mess up with pregnenolone and aromatase inhibitors.

I have eye floaters - I read in Peat research that serotonin can cause cataracts. My dad has this but he's twice my age, and fully bald. :-( I have receding hairline but I always have since teens, no vertex balding but my brother has vertex balding. My mother is hypothyroid, and my gran has kidney failure, so it appears I'm working against all odds in terms of glandular capacity and synchronisation to optimise my health.

Unfortunately I took Dr Peat's repeated criticisms of Estrogen too literally. Zero estrogen is far worse than normal or even high estrogen in my experience. It practically quadruples my need to replenish the entire body, like trying to climb out of a hole that keeps getting deeper (fatty acid buildup due to insufficient pregnenolone).
 

tara

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Peat generally recommends getting protein from milk, cheese, gelatine, some non-oily fish, shell fish, occasional liver, gelatinous cuts of ruminant meat, and potato protein.
The only protein powders I'm aware of that are generally considered reputable in this forum are good quality gelatine or collagen hydrolysate, eg Great Lakes. Dehydration tends to damage food, but if you are eating dehydrated proteins anyway, skim milk powder is probably more balanced than many other commercial powders.
Other protein powders are often based on whey protein, which has high tryptophan - many of us try to limit tryptophan.

Orange juice is great, but some people find it hard to get enough sugar in that way without over doing the water component - very variable from person to person.

As I understand it (definitely not an expert), if your thyroid was accumulating stored thyroid hormone under high estrogen conditions, and you then knocked your estrogen levels down quickly by aromatase inhibition so that your progesterone:estrogen ratio increased significantly, this could be expected to allow the thyroid gland to released the stored thyroid hormones more quickly than it was. (I don't know anything about the drugs used for aromatase inhibition.) According to Peat, this can sometimes result in a temporary hyperthyroid state before things balance out again at better levels. Unless it is severe, he doesn't recommend doing anything about it other than enjoying it. (If it is severe, there are things that can slow it down - not a problem most of us seem to be having. :) )

You seem to be saying that you have too much thyroid circulating - do you have clear hyperthyroid symptoms? Body temperature? Do your lab results confirm this? Has this been going on for long?

High thyroid hormone and low fuel (or other nutrient) intake can be expected to increase stress.

I'd recommend Peat's articles on progesterone, estrogen, and thyroid (http://raypeat.com/articles/) if you haven't already read them.
 

tara

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tara

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If I'm understanding it right, you have been trying supplement interventions before addressing basic nutrition. From my PoV, it is good to get nutrition up first, because sometimes that is enough to resolve the other issues, and if it is not sufficient, it is still needed as a basis to support intelligent supplementation.
 
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kineticz

kineticz

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tara said:
If I'm understanding it right, you have been trying supplement interventions before addressing basic nutrition. From my PoV, it is good to get nutrition up first, because sometimes that is enough to resolve the other issues, and if it is not sufficient, it is still needed as a basis to support intelligent supplementation.

What happened was I applied TD Preg for a while and completely left out thyroid support. I found that over time it seemed to downregulate my norepiprene due to increased cortisol, and my ACTH. Over time this made me less and less motivated, so I thought estrogen might be high, so I took aromatase inhibitors, then I thought DHT might be high, so I took saw palmetto.

All the cardinal sins in terms of hormone treatment, I did in a very short space of time. I just lost the plot quite frankly.

And then the final end to the tail was the use of oral pregnenolone. I went through hell, total numbness.

From my experiences, norepiprene, estrogen, and ACTH, are far better than low estrogen, low thyroid. In my case, prolactin is independently stimulating cortisol, regardless of ACTH or estrogen. Ray Peat doesn't mention this scenario at all from what I have researched.

When I had high estrogen, high norephiprene, and high stress exercise routine, oral pregnenolone induced excellent results on my wellbeing, but it was always short-lived down to the negative feedback of cortisol on ACTH. Ray Peat prefers thyroid to stimulate pregnenolone but a strong ACTH signal itself stimulates pregnenolone, even in hypothyroid state, as does LH.

Interestingly, DIM makes me get low blood sugar and induces torpor, but a prescription aromatase blocker will hike my feelings of irritability and low patience. Both are estrogen blockers, so I would be interested on some views on why DIM has a different effect. I've never had hyperthyroid symptoms.

It was suggested to me on another thyroid forum to try T3, they said despite high FT3, my cells could be desensitized to T3, and T3 supplement will convert my high progesterone into increased metabolism.
 

tara

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How much carbs and protein are you eating every day? Calories? Have you cut PUFA reasonably low? Are you meeting at least RDIs on all vitamins and minerals (except lower iron would probably be good).
I would be very cautious about trying to tweak hormones without adequate food. You can put your body into the situation of having to make difficult trade-offs in its adaptations to the resultant stresses.

This may not be an issue for you - you may be eating well - but the last thing I saw you write about food was about reluctance to eat a reasonable amount of carbohydrates, and if you have given an overview of your diet, I've missed it.

If you are not eating enough calories, I think the body often tries to defend itself in various ways, including possibly by producing more RT3 to counteract T3. This helps defend against depletion and starvation caused by burning through reserves too fast.
In fact, undereating calories or carbs seems to often function as an effective way to drive down metabolism. Also, increasing metabolism can deepen other deficiencies, because most nutritional requirements are increased by higher metabolism.
Peat generally favours getting as much nutrition from food as possible, though he does also suggest some specific vitamin and mineral supplements for particular contexts.
It seems to me there is not much point in trying to drive up metabolism without also attending to nutrition, and it doesn't make any sense to me to discuss hormone supplements without discussing diet.
 
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kineticz

kineticz

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You're absolutely right and I have put my thyroid meds away now with just serotonin blockers to use.

My diet is not good enough, I live a high stress lifestyle in business with a high anxiety mindset (mother's side - dad is stubborn - so I have high anxiety but Type A mindset - very difficult to control).

What advice can you give for making diet as convenient but as Peatarian as possible. I just cannot imagine standing in the kitchen 6-7 times a day, nor can my wallet.

Also, I find a thyroid supplement makes me initially feel good for about two hours then I feel worse afterward.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Higher-Nature-T ... id+support
 
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kineticz

kineticz

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My diet is usually:

Glass of milk and cornflakes for breakfast with energy drink
Chicken and rice for lunch with a snickers
I used to guzzle 2l spring water a day but since all this happened my thirst has collapsed
Probably 5 x diet coke a day
Beef stir fry and chips for dinner or sometimes fast food
Half a litre of orange juice a day
Teaspoon of salt before bed
Macaroni cheese pasta with plenty of milk before bed

Can multivitamin supplements not make up for a relatively poor diet?

Also, I have put on a lot of weight around the abdomen - will thyroid hormone not eat through this for energy?
 

tara

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You could put this into cronometer to quantify nutrients. Without doing that, my guess is this diet is lowish in calcium, potassium, magnesium. Acc. Peat, aim for calcium:phosphorus between 1:1 - 2:1. Can't tell about adequacy of protein, carbs and calories without quantities - you can work out the quantities.

I'd suggest as beginning relatively low effort changes, if you want you could try some of these:
- Replace the diet coke with some each of real sugar coke, more milk, more OJ.
- Drink the coke with your beef meal.
- Cook your stir fry and chips in coconut oil, not PUFAs (maybe you already do this).
- Try to avoid PUFA fried fast food as much as you can, in favour of low PUFA options.
- If your stir fry contains a lot of crucifers/brassicas/other greens, cook them thoroughly (soggy not crunchy).
- Don't know what the quantities are, but if you are up at reasonable carbs and calories, you could see if adding more sugar in the form of coke, OJ, milk etc. reduces your appetite for pasta. Some people find reducing or eliminating wheat makes a big positive difference. For others less so. I wouldn't try to cut it too low or eliminate it unless you can replace it with carbs in other forms.
- Vary your beef muscle meals with: liver (once a week - good multi-vitamin, usable minerals, etc), oysters (once a week or so, good for zinc), non-oily fish, shell fish.
- add a grated raw carrot salad once a day between meals to help sweep out endotoxins, excess estrogen, etc.
- I'm not sure what's in snickers, but maybe replace with good chocolate, pref soy-free?
- Only drink pure water if you really don't need fuel and you are actually thirsty for it.
- additional salt to taste if you enjoy it.

I'd suggest making changes somewhat gradually to allow your system to adjust, and observing whether they seem to serve you, so you can back-track if they don't.

Manufactured vitamins are of variable quality. If I understand it, putting all those vitamins and minerals in one pill increases the likelihood that you get surplus destructive iron (I haven't seen a multivitamin without iron next ), and that some of the minerals react with and damage some of the vitamins, and that you get some destructive binders and/or fillers. They often have carotene instead of usable vit-A, which may not work in hypothyroid state. Whether it would provide a net gain to a poor diet, I don't know.
Personally, I do supplement with some individual vitamins, but not all together in a single multi.
You can read about particular vitamin and mineral supps in the Supplements sub-forum and in Dan Wich's toxinless.com website.
Putting your usual diet through cronometer will give you an idea of whether you have particular gaps to fill.

For calcium: milk, eggshell, oyster shell in order of preference if they agree with you.
Potassium: more OJ, other fruit/juice
Magnesium: OJ, coffee, greens
Copper: liver, chocolate
Zinc: oysters
Vit-A, vit-K: liver

I don't think it's as simple as thyroid immediately and selectively burning off abdominal fat for everyone. If you get into a catabolic state, eg by lower energy input than requited for maintenance, the body seldom just burns the fat. More often, depending on the severity of the deficit, it does a combination, which varies from person to person, of catabolising proteins from other organs to produce sugar, reducing metabolism, reducing temperature, gastroparesis, increasing stress hormones, and maybe burning some fat. Sometimes it figures it should hang onto the fat as much as possible, ditch the muscles and thymus, and store more fat to insulate the essential organs as soon as it gets a decent feed again to help survive the next famine. If you are trying to run a deficit to create weight-loss, then I'd suggest keeping the deficit small, and making sure you cover all your other nutritional bases. For reference, I think the average weight-stable non-dieting man eats about 3000cals.
CI=CO, but you don't have full control over either CI or CO.
Restricting calories for weightloss is not always a health-promoting strategy.
There are threads discussing weight-loss, and not everyone sees this the way I do.

I think there is a recently transcribed interview with Peat on the subject of weight-loss. I have not yet read/listened to it, but from what I have read, he favours building muscle with a little concentric exercise (but not overdoing it), sugars over starches, low PUFAs, reasonable low fats, and making sure to get enough protein, sugar, and minerals, including lots of calcium, potassium and magnesium.
 
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kineticz

kineticz

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Amazing advice. I am going to take it slow and build up my nutrients.

Incidentally what is potassium good for? When I ingest potassium, I get salt cravings quite quickly. Potassium does seem to lower my blood pressure though.
 

tara

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Potassium is safest in food form - fruits and vegetables. Too much can be a problem ()potentially dangerous), as well as too little, but as far as I know you can't get too much from food, only from supplements. It seems to be important for metabolising sugar, and no doubt other things too. If you haven't read Peat's articles on sugar, I'd recommend them.
 

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