I felt disgusting and that I had lost control of the one thing that I used to be very in control of. Yes, I went from a very healthy and in-shape size 3/4 to a tired, miserable, and flabby size 13/14.1 hated what had happened to my body as well as my mental well-being. During the time period that my thyroid was all out of whack when I was going through all the ultrasounds and biopsies to determine cancer or not, I gained 40 pounds. Jody was diagnosed with thyroid cancer at age 21 and had a complete thyroidectomy followed by one radiation treatment. Not true. Some doctors will suggest that thyroid cancer, either in its early stages or after treatment, doesn't cause weight problems.

My weight went up to 175. It was insane. After RAI, there was a 2-week period where I literally gained 10 or 15 pounds. When I had RAI, after a year of Tapazole, I think I was about 150. When I was diagnosed, I was about 130 pounds. More likely is the loss of a few pounds, usually water weight, as the water retention of hypothyroidism starts to abate, then nothing.

But these accounts are few and far between. There is always the story of the thyroid patient who started taking his or her levothyroxine or natural thyroid and lost 20 pounds in a month. Still, even with a TSH at a hyperthyroid level, you may find weight piling on or impossible to lose. It's usually started right away, and levels of thyroid hormone replacement are high enough to suppress thyroid hormone production, which means that you will be kept at a hyperthyroid or nearly undetectable TSH level. And if you've had thyroid cancer, doctors do not typically wait until you become hypothyroid and your TSH levels elevate before they start thyroid hormone replacement. But it's not guaranteed that you'll gain weight in this situation, because total thyroidectomy is most often done for thyroid cancer patients. After the surgery, I could only thank God for getting me through it all and I could call myself a cancer survivor.