My feet were cold most of the time. Even when I wore thick woollen socks to bed my feet were often so uncomfortable that they interfered with my sleep.
Since I have diabetes, I assumed that my problem was that I had one of the most common complications of our condition, peripheral neuropathy. So I focused all the more on controlling my blood glucose level in hopes of reversing my problem some day.Good strategy in general. But worse than useless when the assumption is faulty. My problem is hypothyroidism. This means that my thyroid gland isn’t active enough in producing certain important hormones. One of the early symptoms is increased sensitivity to cold.
I also had a couple more of the early symptoms — I had a slow heart rate and my skin was dry and itchy. This is because the hypothyroidism gives me a slow metabolism, which can explain why I have such a hard time maintaining my weight loss. I can hardly eat anything without gaining weight!
But different people have different symptoms, and some people don’t have any of them. “Hypothyroidism is more common than you would believe, and millions of people are currently hypothyroid and don’t know it,” says James Norman, M.D., on EndocrineWeb.