That's how Maria healed her thyroid gland with the help of the diet

Are you interested in how, like Maria, she learned to take control of her own thyroid? Here she tells how, with the help of superfoods and a plant-based diet, she healed herself from a range of health problems.

How did you discover that something was wrong?

For me, I noticed something was wrong when I started to feel bloated and gain weight. Trying to describe it, it felt like my metabolism stopped working. My nails became very brittle, and no matter how much I tried to wash my hair, I couldn't get it right. The hair quality felt oilier and my eyelashes became shorter and more fragile.

Another thing that happened was that my vision began to become increasingly blurry and somewhat hazy. When vision is affected, it’s common to visit your local optician, but in some cases blurry and hazy vision is due to an imbalance in the body. Every time my body falls out of balance I notice it because my vision can still feel a little blurry and hazy.

How did you realize it was your thyroid that was acting up?

We were offered a health screening at work and it was discovered during a routine check there. I got to speak with a doctor who talked to me about hypothyroidism. The doctor recommended that I start taking synthetic hormone, levaxin, for my problems. They also told me that I would need to take medication for 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 dietary changes, but that was advice I wasn’t ready to take in at the time. Instead, I started taking the tablets the doctor had prescribed and used them for several years. It worked well at first, but eventually other problems arose.

When did the regular medication stop helping?

After about 7–8 years I began to experience a range of different symptoms. One problem after another appeared, even though I had tried to live a healthy life, avoiding sweets, not eating much meat and always exercising. Despite my lifestyle, my symptoms increased and became so severe that I considered taking sick leave. I suffered from everything from vague cramps, Raynaud's syndrome (problems with blood flow to the fingers) and then urethritis. It was the urethritis symptoms that made it unbearable. That’s when I knew I had to do something different.

During a period 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 enormously important role. For me this meant removing all gluten, dairy, sugar and acidic foods (e.g., convenience foods, coffee and alcohol). I needed to cleanse and strengthen my body from the inside with nutritious, organic and green foods. An important insight was that my body was overly acidic and I ate almost exclusively alkaline foods, i.e. lots of fresh fruit and vegetables, smoothies and freshly pressed juices. After just a few weeks I began 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 began making my own superfood blends and the first one I made was Hormone Harmony to strengthen the thyroid and help counteract stress. By giving my body a chance to rebuild itself and rest, I was gradually able to reduce my levaxin. Today I have reduced my levaxin dose by over 80% thanks to the dietary changes I made. I will get rid of the last bit once I learn to stress less; that's something I'm still working on.

Something I have also done, and still often do, is detox periodically. Think of a car. You take a car to a workshop to clean the system, but few people do the same with their bodies. A detox cleanses and strengthens the body from within, and there are ingredients like green algae such as Chlorella and spirulina that help with that. That's why we created the superfood mix Detox Deluxe, just to draw out stored toxins (e.g. alcohol, plastics from food, heavy metals from diet etc.) that have accumulated over several years. The thing is that 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. That in turn affects other systems and organs inside the body, and then they cannot do their jobs either.

Why do you want to help others with the same or similar problems?

What I'm passionate about is helping others understand the enormous impact diet has on how you feel. Unfortunately, the food we buy in the supermarket is increasingly industrialized, nutrient-poor and often full of unnatural additives. Most people with problems go to a doctor and are prescribed a medication. But medicines rarely remove the real problem and are more like putting a bandage on a dirty wound. This causes many to get stuck in a negative spiral where they receive more and more medications but never truly heal.

When it comes to short-term, acute problems, Western medicine is good. But for long-term, chronic issues I believe one should turn to Eastern teachings instead — an ancient knowledge drawn from what nature has to offer, where the body is given the power to heal itself naturally.

So to solve chronic health problems, you need to try to find a long-term solution and a large part of that is by focusing on eating clean, nutritious food.

"It is that feeling I want to be able to share with others — the feeling of eating well and feeling good"

Read more about Superfood & berries here