Are you interested in how you, like Maria, one of the co-founders of Superfood & berries, learned to take control of her own thyroid gland. Here is how she healed from a range of health problems with the help of superfoods and a green diet.
How did you discover something was wrong??
For me, I noticed something was wrong when I started feeling bloated and gaining weight. In an attempt to describe it, it felt like my combustion system stopped working. My nails became very brittle, and no matter how hard I tried to wash my hair, I couldn't get it right. The hair quality felt greasier and my eyelashes became shorter and more brittle.
Another thing that happened was that my vision started to become increasingly blurry and almost a little cloudy. When vision is affected, it is common to visit your local optician, but in some cases blurred and cloudy vision is due to an imbalance in the body. Every time my body gets out of balance, I can tell by my vision still feeling a little blurry and cloudy.
How did you understand that it was the thyroid gland that was in trouble?
We were offered to do a health screening at work and they were discovered in a routine check there. I got to speak to a doctor who talked to me about hypothyroidism. The doctor recommended me to start taking synthetic hormone, levaxin, for my problems. They also told me that I would have to take medication for the rest of my life and that was just over ten years ago today.
I remember a good friend of mine telling me that you could heal the thyroid with a dietary change, but it was advice I wasn't ready to take on board at the time. Instead, I started taking the pills the doctor had prescribed and used them for several years. It worked well at first but eventually other problems arose.
When did the usual medicine stop helping?
After about 7-8 years, I started to experience a number of different symptoms. I had one problem after another, even though I had tried to live a healthy life where I avoided sweets, didn't eat a lot of meat and always exercised. Despite my lifestyle, my symptoms became more and more severe and so serious that I considered taking sick leave. I got everything from diffuse cramps, Rynauld's syndrome (problems with blood supply to the fingers) and then urethritis. It was the discomfort from the urethritis that made it unbearable. Then I knew I had to do something else.
For a period of time I read everything I could get my hands on - books, articles, YouTube - and after a lot of research I began to realize that there are natural ways to heal the body and that diet plays an incredibly large role. For me, that meant cutting out all gluten, dairy, sugar and acidic foods (eg processed foods, coffee and alcohol). I needed to cleanse and strengthen the body from the inside with nutritious, organic and green food. An important realization was that my body was acidified and I basically only ate alkaline food, ie lots of fresh fruit and vegetables, smoothies and freshly squeezed juices. After just a few weeks I started to notice a difference.
How did Superfood come into the picture?
I started with Superfood to help cleanse and strengthen certain functions that I knew my body was lacking. I started making my own superfood mixes and the first one I made wasHormone Harmony to strengthen the thyroid gland and help counteract stress. By giving my body a chance to rebuild itself and rest, I was able to gradually taper off the Levaxin. I have today lowered my dose of levaxin by roughly 80% with the help of the dietary changes I made. I'll get rid of the last one when I've learned to stress less, it's something I'm still working on.
Something I also did and often still do is to detox in periods. Imagine a car. You take a car in to a workshop to clean the system, but there are few who do the same with their bodies. A detox cleanses and strengthens the body from the inside and there are ingredients such as green algae such as Chlorella and spirulina that help with that. From this we created the superfood mixDetox Deluxe, precisely to draw out stored toxins (e.g. alcohol, plastics from food, heavy metals from diet, etc.) that have been stored for years. It is because everything you eat and drink settles in the body. Not least the liver. And if the liver becomes overloaded, it cannot do its everyday job. It in turn settles on other systems and organs inside the body, and then they can't do their jobs either.
Why do you want to help others with the same or similar problems??
What I'm passionate about is making others understand the huge impact diet has on how you feel. Unfortunately, the food that we buy in the store is increasingly industrialized, poor in nutrition and often full of unnaturalness. Most people who have problems go to a doctor and get a medicine prescribed. But the medicines rarely remove the real problem but are more like putting a Band-Aid on a dirty wound. This causes many people to get stuck in a negative spiral where they get more and more medication but never really heal. For short-term, acute problems, Western medicines are good. But when it comes to long-term, chronic problems, I think that one should instead turn to the Eastern teaching which is an ancient knowledge taken from what nature has to offer. Where you give the body the power to heal naturally.
So to solve chronic health problems, one has to try to find a long term solution and a big part of that is by focusing on eating clean and nutritious diet.
"It's that feeling that I want to be able to share with others - the feeling of eating well and feeling well"
Read more about Maria and Superfood & berrieshere
