I Put Hashimoto's Into Remission Without Medication. Here's What Actually Got Me There.

Photo by Nicholas Zegel on Unsplash.

I was fifteen when I came home from school and found my mother crying in our kitchen. That wasn't usual. My parents could get loud and frustrated with each other, but sadness like that wasn't something I saw much of.

When I asked what was wrong, she told me she was afraid I was going to die. She'd watched me get off the school bus that afternoon and start up the 1.5km driveway between our front gate and the house, a walk I'd done a thousand times without ever noticing it was uphill. I'd had to stop more than once. I'd left my school bag at the gate because I didn't have it in me to carry it the whole way, and even without it, I still needed to rest.

I remember standing in that kitchen and understanding, properly, for the first time, that I had a choice in front of me. I could keep going the way I was going and my body would eventually run out of road. Or I could start eating again and live.

I chose to live. It would be another twenty years, two doctors who told me my bloodwork was normal, and a diagnosis I ended up making for myself with a privately ordered blood panel, before I understood what my body had actually been trying to tell me since I was ten years old.

A Body That Had Been Asking For Help Since I Was Ten

The symptoms started well before that afternoon in the kitchen. From around ten, I had stretches of weight gain, anxiety, fatigue, and a cold intolerance so pronounced I was always the kid in an extra jumper while everyone else was fine in a t-shirt. I was being bullied by a teacher at the time, and later by other kids at high school, and I spent years withdrawing further into myself, avoiding school where I could, watching my grades slip even though I'd been identified early as a gifted student and could still produce work I was proud of whenever a subject genuinely caught me (I once wrote thirty pages on the Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Scheme at fifteen, purely because I found it interesting).

I started menstruating in late primary school, and my periods were consistently heavy and severely painful. Looking back with what I now understand about the relationship between energy availability and hormone production, I think that was an early signal too. When a body doesn't have consistent access to enough energy, one of the first systems it reorganises around is reproduction, because ovulation and a full luteal phase are expensive to run and easy to deprioritise. Functional hypothalamic amenorrhea, the suppression of the hormonal signalling that drives a normal cycle, is a well-documented response to psychosocial stress, inadequate energy intake, or a mismatch between the two, and even short of full amenorrhea, sustained energy deficit is associated with a shortened luteal phase and reduced progesterone production well before a cycle stops altogether. I wasn't in energy deficit yet at ten. But the chronic stress of those years was already asking something of a system that hadn't finished developing.

When Eating Less Became The Only Thing I Could Control

Towards the end of year ten, I got interested in eating "healthier," the way a lot of teenage girls do, and it very quickly stopped being about health. Changing what I ate produced weight loss, and that produced a feeling of control I don't think I'd ever properly had before. Within six months I was down to two pieces of fruit for breakfast, raw vegetables for lunch, and a small portion of meat and undressed salad for dinner, running or doing Pilates most days, and no longer able to summon the energy to ride my horse, something I'd loved. That was the year my mother found me on the driveway.

I want to name this plainly rather than dance around it: that was an eating disorder, and it didn't resolve neatly after that afternoon in the kitchen. I moved in and out of restrictive eating for years afterward, sometimes going a full day without food, or continuing to exercise once my body had already spent more than my tiny meals could replace. I grew a layer of fine hair on my body during that period, my own version of the fur a starved mammal grows to try to hold onto heat it doesn't have the fuel to generate any other way.

Ten Years Of "Recovered" That Wasn't Finished

By my early twenties, from the outside, I looked recovered. I'd already been through a period of binge drinking in my late teens and very early twenties, which I think took a real toll on my gut bacteria (I was done with it by twenty-one or twenty-two), and by then I was eating a wide range of whole foods, had repaired a lot of my relationship with food and my body, and had built a stable, high-functioning life. I finished my undergraduate degree with first-class honours. But looking back, I can see what I couldn't see then: I was still eating in a way that didn't reliably meet what my body needed. I was frequently constipated, often anaemic, and showed signs of a sensitivity to gluten that nobody ever formally investigated. None of that looked dramatic enough to flag as a problem. It just meant the gap between what my body needed and what it was actually getting never fully closed. It got small enough to live with, for a while.

The Years Everything Fell Apart At Once

At twenty-six, I opened a wine bar with business partners, built around an idea I still believe in: that people who love wine can be curious about where their food comes from more broadly. The plan had been that the workload and the pressure would be shared. That isn't how it went. I ended up carrying most of the day-to-day operation myself, working well over a hundred hours most weeks, while a request I made early on for basic bookkeeping support was never approved. A chef we'd hired was spending more on produce than the kitchen was earning back in food sales, and with our bookkeeping running months behind, nobody caught it until the business was already deep in debt to suppliers and the tax office. It wasn't overspending on my part, or my partners'. It was a gap nobody could see until it had already grown too large to close.

At the same time, I was in a relationship that had become controlling and unsafe, one I didn't yet have the language to describe that way, but that I knew in my body I needed to leave. Ending it didn't end the fear that came with it. For the next few years I lived with a level of vigilance that never really switched off.

The financial pressure on the business became so severe that in 2015 I made myself homeless to cut costs, living out of my car and sometimes sleeping in the back of the shop for six months, before recognising that homelessness was making everything else worse and finding somewhere to live again. I lost that stability again a while later, moved between temporary arrangements, and spent another stretch back in my car. At one particularly low point, an acquaintance who barely knew me, and had no real obligation to help, offered me somewhere stable to stay for a while, and made sure I was eating and had some company. I think they probably saved my life. I was about as isolated and unwell as I'd ever been.

By the time I eventually closed the business and moved away to rebuild somewhere quieter, I'd been carrying financial catastrophe, professional shame, relational fear, and repeated housing instability for the better part of five years, on top of twenty years of a body that had never fully caught up on what it needed in the first place.

A Body Running Out Of Places To Compensate

The year I closed the wine bar, even after removing a lot of the pressure that had built up, my body did the opposite of settle. My cold intolerance got worse. I became intolerant of exercise I used to do easily. I developed widespread joint pain and swelling, patches of hair loss including my eyebrows, skin breakouts that wouldn't resolve, constant sinus congestion, new food intolerances, bloating, and constipation. My period, when it showed up at all, came with severe pain and pronounced premenstrual symptoms, a stark contrast to the light, painless periods I'd had during the years my body was under-fuelled enough to barely have a cycle at all. I had nightly nightmares, spells of feeling disconnected from my own body, and a nervous system that never fully stood down.

I didn't understand it as one thing at the time. It read as a list of unrelated complaints, each one its own small emergency. It's only with distance that I can see the shape of it: a system that had been asked to hold financial catastrophe, relational fear, housing instability, and unresolved trauma for years, with nowhere left to redirect the load, so it started showing up in tissue. Joints, skin, gut, hormones, sleep. Different organs, same underlying story.

Told It Was Normal, Twice

That year, I read a description of Hashimoto's that matched what I was experiencing closely enough that I asked my doctor to test for it. I was told everything was normal. Some time later, after I'd moved back in with my parents, worked on rebuilding those relationships, and started deliberately working with my nervous system for the first time (more on that shortly), things had genuinely improved, but I still had persistent brain fog, fatigue, and some extra weight I couldn't account for. I went to another doctor and asked, again, to be properly tested. They ran TSH alone, told me it was normal, and suggested I eat less and exercise more, without asking a single question about what I was already eating or how much I was already moving.

I ordered a full private thyroid panel two days later. I diagnosed myself with Hashimoto's from those results, a diagnosis a GP later confirmed formally. I want to be honest about what that moment felt like: it wasn't vindication. It was exhausting. I'd asked the right questions, in the right places, for years, and the system kept handing the problem back to me to solve on my own.

If a single TSH result being handed to you as reassurance sounds familiar, I've written elsewhere about exactly what a normal TSH does and doesn't rule out, and it's worth reading if you're in the middle of that same conversation with your own doctor.

Going Home

Moving back to Western Australia to live with my parents wasn't a simple homecoming. My relationships with my family were strained, everyone under their own financial pressure, everyone a little raw. But I made myself have the conversations I'd been avoiding, about what had actually happened over those years, rather than letting people fill in the gaps with their own assumptions. Slowly, we got closer. And as we did, some of my symptoms started to ease, well before anything about my diet or my thyroid changed.

That was the beginning of taking my nervous system seriously as something I could actually work with, rather than something that just happened to me. I started learning about the relationship between the vagus nerve and immune regulation, did deliberate, consistent work with it, and noticed my inflammation easing as I went. I've written in more depth elsewhere about that mechanism, the evidence linking nervous system dysregulation to autoimmune activity, and how to start working with it, because it deserves its own explanation rather than a summary here.

I also removed dairy and gluten from my diet around this time and noticed small additional improvements, though I want to be honest about how mixed this picture actually is, both in the research and in what I see in clinic. A recent meta-analysis of the available randomised controlled trials found a gluten-free diet reduced thyroglobulin antibodies but actually increased TPO antibodies, with no significant change to TSH or thyroid hormone levels, and concluded that any real benefit is mostly limited to people who also have coeliac disease. In the microbiome testing I now run with clients, I sometimes see elevated transglutaminase in people with autoimmune issues, and sometimes I don't. There's no single, universal pattern. Gluten removal seemed to genuinely help in my case, but it isn't a universal answer for everybody, and neither is removing dairy. For me, the value may have had less to do with gluten itself and more to do with removing foods that were adding to an already overloaded gut, at a time when very little else about my life had margin left in it.

Diagnosing Myself

It was another year and a half before my diagnosis became official, by which point I'd already made real progress but still had brain fog, fatigue, and extra weight that wouldn't shift. That's the doctor's visit I described above: TSH alone, told it was normal, told to eat less and move more. It's also the visit that finally pushed me to stop waiting for permission and order the fuller panel myself.

Three Years Of Trial And Error

It took close to three years of guessing before I found the first thing that reliably helped, and it wasn't what I expected. I tried a long list of supplements over that stretch, most of which did very little I could notice. The first one that made an obvious difference was creatine, and at the time I had no idea why.

Creatine's main job in the body is regenerating ATP, buffering a reserve of phosphocreatine that can be called on quickly wherever energy demand is highest. It's been studied specifically in conditions involving mitochondrial dysfunction, including a feasibility trial using magnetic resonance spectroscopy in myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome, a condition that shares a lot of the same energy-metabolism territory I was dealing with. I didn't know any of that at the time. I just knew it helped more than anything else I'd tried.

I also spent that stretch experimenting with how I ate. I tried a ketogenic diet early on, hoping it would settle some of the inflammation I was carrying. It made me considerably worse. Ketogenic and very low-carbohydrate diets are consistently associated with a drop in circulating free T3, most likely because lower insulin and glucose availability reduce the activity of the deiodinase enzymes that convert T4 into its active form, which tracks with how I felt on it. I tried carnivore next, which has followed the same pattern every time I've attempted it since: it feels genuinely good for the first few weeks, then stops working. I think that's largely because it's very difficult to get enough folate from a diet built entirely around animal foods, and folate turns out to matter more to this story than I understood at the time. Eventually I stopped looking for the diet that was supposedly correct for someone with my diagnosis, and settled on eating in a way that actually made me feel good, which turned out to look different from most of the protocols I'd tried.

What Actually Got Me Into Remission

Once I had a confirmed diagnosis, I made my lifestyle the priority in a way I'd never fully allowed myself to before: consistent but moderate exercise, a genuinely nutrient-dense diet, protecting my sleep, and, above everything else, working on my stress response and rebuilding the social connection and support I'd lost during the wine bar years.

But if I had to name the single biggest shift, it wasn't any one of those things individually. It was that I stopped pushing through. For most of my life, pushing through was the only mode I knew, through the restrictive eating, through a hundred-hour weeks at the wine bar, through homelessness, through symptoms I'd been minimising since I was ten years old. Getting into remission meant learning to do the opposite: to actually listen to what my body was telling me, and to treat that information as worth acting on rather than something to override.

That shift changed how I understood the diagnosis itself. I'd spent three years chasing it because I wanted an explanation, and having a name for what was happening in my thyroid was genuinely useful. It helped me know what to ask for, what to track, and what to read. But I came to see the diagnosis as something more than a label to explain my symptoms. Hashimoto's was also, itself, a symptom: a sign of the conditions my body had been living in for two decades, not a fault in an otherwise well-functioning system. Once I understood it that way, the question stopped being "how do I fix my thyroid" and became "what has my body actually been carrying, and what would it take to put some of that down."

I found a GP willing to work with me collaboratively rather than dismissively, and we tracked my thyroid properly, with both ultrasound (which initially showed nodules) and regular bloodwork, making sure I was genuinely replete in the nutrients that matter for thyroid function rather than just technically within range. Selenium was one of them. A recent meta-analysis found selenium supplementation significantly reduces thyroid peroxidase antibodies in people with autoimmune thyroiditis, and there's evidence that combining selenium with vitamin D correction produces an even stronger antibody-lowering effect in women who are also vitamin D deficient, which I was.

There's a piece of this I understand only in hindsight, and wish I'd tested for far sooner. I carry the C677T variant of the MTHFR gene, a common variant that meaningfully reduces the enzyme's activity and slows how efficiently the body converts dietary folate into its active, usable form. That's relevant to thyroid function because methylation capacity and T4-to-T3 conversion draw on overlapping biochemical territory, though I want to be upfront that the direct line from an MTHFR variant to impaired conversion is still more of a proposed mechanism in the functional and nutritional literature than something confirmed by large clinical trials. What's better established is the relationship running the other way: there's good evidence of a bidirectional relationship between thyroid function and homocysteine, the compound that builds up when methylation isn't running efficiently, with impaired thyroid signalling and reduced methylation capacity capable of reinforcing each other over time. In my own clinic, I see elevated homocysteine constantly in client bloodwork, which tells me a meaningful number of people are walking around with some version of this same bottleneck, whether it shows up as reduced T3 availability or somewhere else entirely.

I think, biochemically, my MTHFR variant is one of the threads that ties the different parts of this story together: how the chronic stress and undernourishment of my early years, and the trauma layered on top of it later, played out in a body that was already running a slower version of one of its core repair pathways. If I had my time over, methylation markers would have been one of the very first things I asked my GP to test, instead of something I found my way to years into the process.

None of this was one intervention. It was addressing conversion, nutrient status, gut health, and a genuinely dysregulated nervous system all at once, because that's what the situation actually called for. Within two and a half years of my official diagnosis, I was in full remission. I never took thyroid medication for it.

The Thing Underneath All Of It

There's one more thing I want to name plainly, because I think it matters more than any single nutrient or test result in this story. I was sexually molested and abused in my late teens, and raped at twenty. Those were significant traumas that I didn't speak about openly, or really process at all, for a long time. I only started to once I was already on the path toward remission, and doing that work changed things.

I don't think that's a coincidence, and it isn't just my own theory. The relationship between unresolved trauma and autoimmune disease is genuinely well studied, from the way sustained threat states shift immune regulation, to the specific vagal pathways involved, and I've laid that evidence out properly in the piece I linked above. What I'll say here is more personal: a body that has been carrying trauma it hasn't had the safety to process is a body that's already spending a significant amount of its capacity just staying vigilant. There wasn't much left over for anything else, including a thyroid trying to run normally.

What I'd Want You To Take From This

I don't tell this story because I think everyone's path to remission looks like mine, or because trauma explains every case of Hashimoto's. It doesn't. But I do think my case is a fairly clear example of something I see constantly in clinic in less extreme forms: a body that's been asked to carry more than it had the resources to hold, for long enough, showing up in whatever system happened to be least protected. For me, the biggest signal came from my thyroid. It could just as easily have been my gut, my skin, or my joints, and for stretches of those years, it was all of them at once.

If there's one thing I'd want you to take from this, it isn't "you can put yourself into remission too," even though I hope that's part of what you take from it. It's this: remission became possible for me once I stopped treating my body as something working against me, and started asking what conditions it had actually been living in. The diagnosis was useful. It gave me a name and a direction. But it was also a symptom in its own right, evidence of everything my body had been carrying long before a blood test could show it. Once I understood it that way, listening to what my body was telling me stopped feeling like weakness and started feeling like information.

If you've been told your bloodwork is normal and you still don't feel like yourself, I'd gently ask what your life has actually been asking of you, not just this year, but over the years that led up to now. Not as something to solve in a weekend, but as a genuine question worth sitting with. Sometimes the most useful next step isn't another test. It's finally being honest, with yourself and with someone who can help you carry it, about what your body has actually been through, and what it would take to stop pushing through and start listening.

If any part of this is landing for you, whether that's the thyroid piece, the nervous system piece, or both, I work with people one-on-one to look at the whole picture: bloodwork, nutrient status, gut health, and the nervous system underneath it all, rather than treating any one system in isolation.