Comment by danso

Bad news #1:

I have an autoimmune disease. My stomach is eating itself.

Bad news #2:

2–5% of people have this, too. Likely more, because it hides.

Good news:

I'm going to try and solve it. Will share all.

As a kid, I ate sugar cereal, drank sugary soda, and gobbled down fast food. I had a few healthy years in my early 20s but then became a young father of three and began building a business.

Juggling that stress and grind, I let my health slip and gained 40 lbs. Within a few years I’d fallen into a deep, chronic depression.

Somewhere in that timeline, my body began developing an autoimmune process affecting my thyroid and then my stomach lining.

It’s called Autoimmune Gastritis (AIG).

My hypothyroidism got diagnosed when I was 21 years old with a routine blood draw. That enabled me to begin proactive management, supplementing levothyroxine and Armour Thyroid. They are the hormones my body should be producing on its own but wasn’t.

By taking these pills daily, my body was able to operate as though my thyroid was functioning properly. What I didn’t know was that something else was going on inside my body: my stomach had begun attacking itself. But there was no routine test to find out and I didn’t have any symptoms.

I just discovered it in May. I'm unsure how long I've had it. AIG causes irreversible damage: nutritional deficiency, anemia, and over a long horizon, elevated cancer risk. When AIG is discovered today, standard medical care concedes defeat, stating that nothing can be done except managing the condition, no matter how awful or lethal the effects.

Looking back over the past few years, I can now see the early signals we were picking up in measurement but hadn’t connected the dots. For 11 years, I’ve had low ferritin, without anemia. We continually tried to raise my iron levels with food and supplementation but nothing would work.

We chased the obvious solutions first. A plant-based diet means all my iron is the hard-to-absorb, non-heme kind. Hard training, sauna, and hyperbaric oxygen all raise the body's demand for iron. But none of them explained the core failure: despite me taking iron orally, trialing every formulation, and using every timing trick, none of the iron would stick.

What I didn’t fully appreciate until recently is how many stones my previous providers had left unturned. The low ferritin kept getting explained away but not fixed.