Clinical Nutritionist Rachel

I found a photograph of myself last Tuesday. It was in a box in the spare room — the kind of box you fill with things you mean to sort through and never do. Birthday cards, old batteries, a broken watch, the photographs from before everything went digital. This one was from my sister's fiftieth. Eight years ago. I'm standing in her garden holding a glass of wine, laughing at something someone said just before the shutter clicked. My hair is thick. My eyes are bright. I look like a woman who has just arrived somewhere and is glad to be there. I stood in that spare room for a long time looking at that photograph. Then I went and sat on the edge of the bath and I cried in the way you cry when you're trying not to make any noise. Not because I was vain. Not because I was mourning my younger face. Because I couldn't remember the last time I felt like the woman in that photograph. And I couldn't tell you exactly when she left. My name is Margaret. I'm 57. I live in Bristol, I ran my own bookkeeping practice for eighteen years, and I have been on levothyroxine for five years. Five years of being told my levels are perfect. Five years of not recognising myself. It didn't happen all at once. That's the thing nobody warns you about. It's not a before and after. It's a slow subtraction. A little less energy here. A little more weight there. The hair that used to take twenty minutes to dry now takes five because there's simply less of it. The face in the mirror that looks like you but tired. Always tired. Tired in a way that sleep stopped fixing years ago. I stopped accepting invitations. Not because I didn't want to see people — I did. But because I never knew until the morning of whether I'd have enough in me to actually go. And cancelling at the last minute is worse than not accepting in the first place, so I just stopped accepting. My sister stopped asking after a while. I don't blame her. I wouldn't keep inviting someone who always said no. I stopped wearing the clothes I used to wear. Not consciously. They just slowly migrated to the back of the wardrobe and stayed there because they didn't fit the body I was in or the energy I had or the person I seemed to have become. My husband Robert kept saying, you should talk to someone. And I knew what he meant and I understood why he was saying it and I didn't have the heart to explain that this wasn't depression. I knew what depression felt like — I'd had a bout of it in my thirties after my mother died and this was different. This was physical. This was my body running on the wrong fuel. This was like trying to drive somewhere on an empty tank and being told by everyone around you that the gauge must be broken because they filled it up. My GP had filled it up. The levothyroxine was in my system. The number said so. But I was still standing in that spare room crying at a photograph of a woman I used to be. Now I need to tell you about my neighbour Janet. Janet is 63. She's a retired district nurse — thirty-one years in the NHS. Her husband Colin had been on blood pressure medication for seven years when he had a stroke eighteen months ago. He was 64. He was cutting the grass on a Sunday morning and Janet looked out of the kitchen window and he was on the ground. She called 999. He was in hospital for eleven days. When they discharged him one of the consultants told Janet something that she passed on to me over the fence one afternoon and that I haven't stopped thinking about since. He said that the kind of slow systemic dysfunction that comes from years of undertreated or partially treated hormonal imbalance — thyroid, adrenal, metabolic — puts a sustained and invisible load on the cardiovascular system. He said it doesn't show up dramatically. It accumulates quietly. It shows up in the numbers that nobody is measuring because everyone is looking at the one number they always look at. He said, the tests we run tell us what's in the bloodstream. They don't tell us what the cells are doing with it. Janet told me this and then she said — and this is the sentence I keep coming back to — she said, Maggie, you've been telling me for three years that your medication isn't working. I think you should stop waiting for someone to believe you and start finding out why yourself. She was right. I went home and I started reading. And what I found after three weeks of forums and patient groups and research papers was something that nobody — not one of the seven GPs I had seen in five years — had ever mentioned to me. T4 to T3 conversion. Levothyroxine gives your body T4. That's the storage form of thyroid hormone — the raw material your body is supposed to convert into T3, which is the active form. The form every cell in your body runs on. For energy. For metabolism. For temperature regulation. For the brain that used to work the way yours used to work. For a significant number of women on levothyroxine that conversion is impaired. Not broken completely. Just running at a fraction of what it should be. Your TSH looks fine. Your T4 looks fine. But your cells are starved of T3 and everything downstream of that suffers. Nobody tests for it routinely. Nobody treats it with the standard prescription. And nobody in seven appointments over five years had once mentioned it to me. I found Purevanta through a patient forum. A woman who had been on levothyroxine for six years described it as the thing that finally made her medication actually work. She said it was designed specifically to support the conversion pathway — the gap between what levothyroxine provides and what your cells actually need. She wasn't selling anything. She was just a woman on a forum at half past ten at night telling other women what had worked for her. I ordered it the same evening. I need to be careful here about what I say and how I say it because I am a bookkeeper and I deal in what is accurate. The first two weeks — I noticed nothing I could quantify. Week three — I woke up on a Thursday morning and I lay there waiting for the usual heaviness to arrive. The weight behind the eyes. The negotiation with my own body. The calculation of what I had enough energy for that day. It didn't come. Not fully. There was something different — lighter — and I didn't trust it enough to mention it to Robert. Week four — I accepted an invitation. My sister asked me to her daughter's birthday lunch and I said yes without thinking about whether I'd have enough in me on the day. I just said yes. The way I used to. I went. I stayed for four hours. I drove home and I wasn't destroyed by it. By the second month Robert noticed. He didn't say anything at first. He just watched me. And then one evening he said, you seem like you're coming back. I said what do you mean. He said, I don't know exactly. You just seem more like yourself. I went back to that box in the spare room. I took the photograph out and I looked at it again. The woman in the garden at my sister's fiftieth. Holding her wine. Laughing. And for the first time in five years I thought — I think I'm on my way back to her. I want to say something directly before I give you the link. I'm not affiliated with Purevanta. I'm a bookkeeper from Bristol. I have nothing to gain from telling you this. I'm telling you because Janet told me something I needed to hear and I didn't have anyone to tell me sooner and if you've been standing in spare rooms crying at old photographs of yourself then you deserve to know that there might be a reason — a specific, addressable, physiological reason — that nobody has told you about. The T4 to T3 conversion is not a fringe theory. It is basic thyroid physiology. And if yours is impaired, no amount of adjusting your levothyroxine dose will fix it. Purevanta is a liquid thyroid supplement. A few drops under the tongue each morning. Designed to support the conversion pathway alongside your existing medication. Not a replacement. The piece that completes it. They have a money-back guarantee. Sixty days. No paperwork. No phone calls. If you take it for two months and feel nothing, you get every penny back. That's what made me try it. And that's what makes me comfortable telling you about it now. 👉 https://getpurevanta.com/products/the-missing-piece-for-levothyroxine-users P.S. I called my sister last week and accepted an invitation to her Christmas lunch. She went quiet on the phone for a moment and then she said, are you sure? And I said yes. And I meant it. P.P.S. I still have that photograph. I've moved it out of the box. It's on the windowsill in the kitchen now where I can see it when I'm making coffee in the morning. Not as something I've lost. As somewhere I'm going back to. P.P.P.S. The sixty-day guarantee is the only reason I tried it. I had spent five years and hundreds of pounds on things that did nothing. The fact that I could get my money back if this was another one of those things was the only reason I said yes. It isn't another one of those things. But you don't have to take my word for it. That's what the guarantee is for.