Kiss My Goiter, Dr. Phil

An Open Letter to Dr. Phil McGraw, of the Oprah Show, About Hypothyroidism

Celisa Dyan is a humorist and thyroid patient who periodically pops in to the About thyroid site to "tell it like it is," and usually with hilarious but often quite on-the-mark results!!

On a recent Oprah broadcast, Dr. Phil made a comment which makes me ache from my thyroid gland all the way down to my ever-widening backside. I'll summarize for you, since direct quotes and the upswing of my wrath never go hand-in-hand.

Dr. Phil seems to be of the opinion -- bless his poor little uninformed heart -- that hypothyroidism isn't a major factor in weight control. He mentioned that we can't walk around with a sign on our backs reading "Fat, but bad metabolism" -- or words to the effect of that idiotic statement -- so that, I assume, others will know we're not the Ant Eaters of the human world rapidly sucking up whole cheesecakes through our snouts. (I don't know about Y'all, but I really don't care what strangers think of my retreating rump -- as I told my former private Christian school principal who commented years ago as to the tightness of my then-size-three jeans, "Well, Joe, if ya hadn't been starin' at my posterior, you wouldn't have noticed, would ya?" Further, how many folks do y'all know who WANT to walk around with their medical history printed on their backs so nobody will think they're pleasantly plump by overfeeding their own bodies?)

Dr. Phil validated the upscaled difficulties of weight loss in certain thyroid situations, but expressed his opinion that it's not about metabolism, it's about what we eat. Well, Doc, pull up a chair, enjoy a plate of the rabbit food which is my only diet day-in-and-out while hypothyroid, and allow me to educate you on your unfortunate misconception of the effects of this disease.

Since the age of twelve, my thyroid gland has done a Polka back and forth between hypothyroidism and hyperthyroidism -- at age 37, that Polka's turned into a slow Tennessee Waltz, but that's another gripe-fest for another time. For the past year or so, I've looked like a cow being fattened for the kill. Nothing takes the weight off, but everything puts it on: I've been there, done this, and grown out of that T-shirt so many times that the moment my hypothyroidism steals my eyebrows --usually my first sign -- I go on full weight control alert. I cut my caloric intake to 1000 a day, tune up the old treadmill, and declare war on that first frightening ten pounds. I swear to myself that I will not gain another ounce, thyroid gland be damned -- for such a tiny gland, that sucker sure does fight dirty!

Two weeks later, I drag out the scales, stepping carefully onto them so as not to shake that needle to one ounce more than I actually weigh. I do this newborn-naked because I'm not sure how much my drawers and over-the-shoulder-boulder-holder will add to the horrifying reading I'm about to recieve from "Judas," as my new bathroom scale is affectionately called. Despite my daily cross-country treks on the treadmill, the many 50-pound bags of horse feed I haul atop my shoulders across vast acreage daily, and that temperament-destroying diet of 1000 calories a day, I find that I've gained five pounds. I open my bathroom closet door and kick old Judas where it hurts, hard enough to knock his betraying base into the closet -- I slam the door while calling him everything but a helpful weight-management tool. I then cut the calories back to 800 a day, add a couple more miles a day to the treadmill routine, and decide to re-fence my pasture -- not because it needs new fences, but because it's great, sweaty exercise and I need to win the next battle in this war against my own body.

Judas, of course, betrays me again a couple of weeks later: when I'm ready to take the battery right out of Judas' "heart," I notice a culprit far more cruel -- a golf-ball-sized goiter forms at the base of my neck, looking much like recently ingested snake food. My vanity tries to convince me that the goiter weighs twenty of my overweight pounds, but I know better each time I have to make a run to Home Depot to buy a wider mirror. By the time true desperation strikes, I've gained 40 pounds while exercising as if I'm Tom Hanks preparing to do the film Castaway and eating nothing but garden salads without dressing, croutons, or even those neat little fake bacon bits -- I'm down to 400 calories a day and my horses are as wide as their barn simply because I needed the added caloric burning of hauling heavy bags more frequently. I have deliberately concentrated this paragraph on the weight issue alone because it is that to which you referred on Oprah: as you'll see later in this rant, with this disease, the hits just keep on coming.