Start Here Blog Post #1

I was fifteen when a doctor put me on levothyroxine and sent me home.

No explanation, no context, just a pill and the understanding that something in my body was working against me. I was also being food-shamed at home at the time, so those two things landed together and food became my enemy. For the next twenty years I cycled between starving myself and eating emotionally, because those were the only two modes I knew.

In April 2022, my husband and I lost our soon to be son.

We were expecting him, and then we weren’t. My body held all of it — the grief, the shame, the anger at a body I felt had failed me. Throughout that pregnancy and after, my OB kept talking about getting my thyroid regulated. I was confused, because I was taking my medication every single day, not eating junk food, still gaining weight at an unreasonable timespan. After we lost him, I was desperate to loose the weight gained with him - so a coach asked to me track my caloric intake. I was hovering around to barely 500 a day and yet, I was still gaining. Devastation reigned in - I felt like I was loosing my mind.

Then my cycle started deteriorating. I passed out because of it, eventually ending up in the ER. That experience led to an embolization, which finally led me to a doctor who actually sat with me — 45 minutes, the whole story, no rushing. She ran my labs and they came back different, even though I hadn’t changed a single thing. Same medication, same food, same everything, but my thyroid markers had done some significant shifting - and that's when I was finally given a diagnosis - Hashimoto's in February of 2025.

With no real framework for how to live well with it and tried of trying and failing, feeling like crap every day. I became desperate - focusing solely on the weight gain I was determined to get on a miracle weight-loss drug. But something nudged me in a different direction, I opened up and had honest conversation with my husband in the car where I said: "I need help. I don’t know how to do this."

He didn’t try to fix me. He just asked how he could support me. My answer was the smallest thing I could find: "I think I need to eat breakfast before work."

That’s where the Hash Eating Project started. One shift. Then another. Then another. Not an overhaul — a direction.

If you’re just finding this, start with the free scorecard on the website, join our community, be kind to yourself. Start small. That’s how this works.

So glad you are here,

Elena