McCall McPherson explains how to take thyroid medication effectively. Take it on an empty stomach, wait 30 minutes before eating, and keep coffee and supplements like iron and calcium at least an hour away. T3 products need morning and afternoon doses, but levothyroxine is flexible since it lasts so long.
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How to take your thyroid medication from the standpoint of a thyroid expert. So let's dig in first to general recommendations. Irrespective of which medication you're on, you want to get these, these meds in on an empty stomach. So at least an hour after you eat and then if you take your medication, you need to at least wait 30 minutes before you eat again. Okay. If you do morning meds, the easiest thing is to just do it first thing, wait 30 minutes to eat. As in regards to coffee, there's conflicting evidence. What I recommend for my patients is you wait at least 15 minutes or more to have coffee. You do not need to wait an hour. All these kind of crazy things. So keep that in mind for general recommendations for vitamins or supplements. Anything that is not activating, so like B12, mitochondrial support, carnitine, anything that's not activating, just take it with dinner or before bed. So especially multivitamins, iron, calcium, these things are best taken with dinner, far away from any doses of your thyroid medication. Let's talk about when to take your levothyroxine. T resent levothyroxine unitride. So these are all inactive thyroid medications. These are very, very, very long acting medications. Meaning if you know you stopped taking this medicine today, almost half of it would still be in your system for 10 days. Because of that, you can kind of take it whenever you want. You can take it in the evening if you want, you can take it in the morning, afternoon, whenever is easiest for you. It should not stimulate you, it should not keep you awake. But this idea that's been going on on social media that you can take whatever thyroid medication before bed is not true. So meds outside of inactive thyroid meds, so meds that contain active thyroid hormone, these are cytomel, lyothyronine, armor, thyroid, np. All of these medications are stimulating. So not only will they keep you up at night, if you take them before bed, you're also wasting the energy that you get from them during the day. So if I give my patients T3, I want them to feel good throughout the day with it. I don't want them to just struggle with sleep at night and waste all of the benefits of it. So I dose any T3 based medication in the morning and actually again around 2 to 3pm because these meds are the opposite of levothyroxine. They are super, super short acting, so they need to be dosed twice a day. So lastly, my biggest final thing is I think medicine and clinicians in general give people impossible requirements of taking their thyroid medication, almost so that no matter what they do, it's never enough. And you always feel like crap. And the doctor isn't to blame. So don't fall into that trap. This is truly realistic expectations. It doesn't have to be perfect to work.
