You left the appointment with a prescription and one more sentence. No gluten, no dairy, no soy, no sugar, for the rest of your life.
If you have ever stood in your kitchen that night wondering what is left to eat, that feeling was not weakness. Cutting four food groups with no plan raises your stress, and stress is one of the biggest triggers for Hashimoto’s.
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Health with Hashimoto’s is your free weekly podcast that sorts this autoimmune condition into thyroid or immune. Each episode is for informational and educational purposes. Please discuss any questions or concerns with your trusted healthcare professional. Some links may be affiliate links, marked as such, at no extra cost to you.
Your gut is one long tube and it is thinner than you think
Your gut is everything from your lips all the way to your rectum. It is one long tube that your food travels through. In many areas, that tube is only one or two cells thick.
If you took your intestines and spread them out, they would cover the size of a tennis court. All of it one or two cells thick. That is a ginormous area you get to take care of as a human being.
The first thing you can do to take care of your gut is make sure you are pooping every day. It should be soft and easy to pass. If it is not daily, soft, and easy, you already know you have work to do on your digestion and on the bacteria living in your gut.
(Is your poop normal? covers what normal actually looks like.)
Even if you are pooping once a day and it is soft and easy, you still have work to do. Every autoimmune condition has a gut component. There is always a genetic component, a gut component, and at least one trigger.
Those are the ingredients for an autoimmune disease.
How a leaky gut confuses your immune system
This might blow your mind. When you eat something, it is technically outside of your body.
That tube runs through you. Food sitting inside it is not part of you yet. It does not become part of you until it passes through the gut lining and into your bloodstream where you can use it.
What you do not want is something passing through the gut lining that was never supposed to get through. When that happens, we say you have a leaky gut.
Those particles are usually too big to belong there. Your body builds a defense against them and starts to attack. That is how the immune system gets confused and an autoimmune problem develops.
So the goal is to keep everything inside the gut that is supposed to stay inside the gut.
The four foods to avoid with Hashimoto’s
Certain foods are inflammatory. Not inflammatory for you specifically. Inflammatory for everybody.
Sugar is the clearest example. When you eat foods high in sugar, it causes inflammation in your body. We want inflammation lower, especially when we are trying to get the immune system working the way it is supposed to.
Gluten, dairy, soy, and sugar are the four most inflammatory food groups. They are also the four you are usually handed on a list when you get a Hashimoto’s diagnosis. Some people react to them far more than others.
So the foods to avoid with Hashimoto’s are not a moral list. They are a starting experiment.
Gluten is all or nothing. The other three are not.
It is a good idea to go off one or all four of these for a period of time so you can see how your body responds. Do you have to stay off for the rest of your life? That is up to you.
You might reduce or remove some of these for 90 days. Then you add one back and realize that when you eat it, you feel absolutely horrible. Or nothing happens at all, and that food is probably fine for you.
There is no one hard rule that says every single person needs to be off a particular thing.
Gluten is different. If you decide to give up gluten, you cannot do it halfway. Even a little bit sets you back and you start over.
Dairy, soy, and sugar you can reduce greatly and watch how that impacts you. Taking them out completely is ideal. Gluten is the one that does not work in halves.
Give yourself 90 days of absolutely no gluten. That gives it time to get out of your system completely. Then reevaluate.
What happened the day I ate long fermented sourdough
When my youngest was about four months old, he was covered head to toe with eczema. Eczema is usually a reaction to a food. I would not have cut those foods for myself, but I would do it for my baby.
So I went off pretty much everything. When I added foods back later, gluten was the one I could not handle anymore. Every once in a while, for a birthday, I would have a piece of cake and enjoy it and then go back off.
Then, during covid, everybody was making homemade sourdough and I got on the bandwagon. Long fermentation changes the gluten molecules, and a lot of people who cannot do gluten can do fermented. I thought this is awesome, I am going to try it.
It did not lower my migraine threshold the way gluten usually does. I did not get the stomach ache I normally get. What happened was I got so depressed.
All the way up until lunch it was a normal day. It was a fabulous day. I ate that long fermented sourdough, and within an hour I was laying on my bed wondering what in the world I was here for.
Laying there, unmotivated and sad, I realized the only thing that had changed was the gluten. For me, gluten causes depression, not necessarily gut symptoms. It might cause that for you too.
That is why a log is worth keeping. Not just how you feel physically, but emotionally and spiritually. (I have kept testing this on myself since, including the stretch where I ate gluten on purpose to see what freshly milled flour would do.)
In the Simple Habits Program we spend a couple of weeks doing exactly this. You track what you are eating, how you are pooping, and how you are feeling, so the pattern has a chance to show up. Enrollment opens two to three times a year, and you can add your name to the waitlist.
Make a plan before you change your diet
If you want to lower the inflammation in your gut and you are willing to take these foods out, plan for it first. Do not just jump in.
One of the biggest triggers for Hashimoto’s, or any autoimmune problem, is stress. Deciding today to cut four food groups and having no idea what to eat two days from now is stressful. It is stressful physically, because your blood sugar drops, and stressful mentally, because you are standing in your kitchen asking what can I even eat.
So before you make the change, make the plan. That might be Pinterest for you. It might be cookbooks.
Come up with recipes you already know you like. When you are making a big change, you want some sure bet winners. Get a few that look interesting too.
Have enough for at least one to two weeks so you can rotate them in and out and always have food to eat.
Is there one right diet for Hashimoto’s
Not really. Look for recipes that use as many whole foods as possible, as many plants as possible, and enough protein.
Do you have to go paleo, keto, Mediterranean, vegan, or vegetarian? There is no one right answer. You have to do what works for you.
I am going to say that over and over, because you are the CEO of your own health. You know what is going to work for your lifestyle, your preferences, and your family. (What to eat with Hashimoto’s walks through the same question from the other direction.)
Cookbooks are a shortcut worth using. I went to my library’s website where I request all my books and typed in autoimmune. There were a whole bunch of autoimmune cookbooks.
I requested a couple, walked in with my library card, and walked out with a huge pile. At home I looked through them and pulled out a few recipes. Typically I find one, two, maybe ten recipes I like out of a whole cookbook, so I return them and do not fill my shelves.
You can filter cookbooks by how the food is cooked, like Instant Pot, slow cooker, or one pot meals. You can also filter by type of diet. Paleo and Whole30 both mean no sugar, no grains, and no dairy.
(The AIP episode goes further into that style of eating.)
Vegetarian usually means no dairy, but you will have a lot of gluten to filter out of the recipes. Mediterranean has a lot of fresh food, plant based food, and healthy fats.
One of the biggest questions to answer is whether you can find it in nature. If you can find it in nature, it is probably going to be okay. Gluten, dairy, soy, and sugar all start in nature, and the foods made from them are often super processed, so the more plant based you keep things, the less inflammatory they usually are.
Common questions about foods to avoid with Hashimoto’s
Where to start this week
You now know why those four foods show up on every Hashimoto’s list. They are inflammatory for everybody, and in the places that matter most your gut lining is only one or two cells thick.
You also know you are not signing up for life. Ninety days, then you add foods back one at a time and pay attention to what your body says, physically and emotionally.
Start with the plan, not the cut. Pull five recipes you already like this week and put them somewhere you will see them.
And if you want to understand why the immune side of this matters as much as the thyroid side, Hashimoto’s Decoded: Thyroid or Immune walks you through both systems. Start here. $27.
