Starting iodine

It’s exciting to find iodine and it’s benefits.

But.. how do we get started?

This page is an attempt to put this question into perspective. 

This page is a complete rewrite from an old version https://whyiodine.com/should-i-start-iodine/

Have you seen iodine’s benefits?

I’ve mentioned iodine’s connection to over 60 diseases and ailments.

With this much ability to heal.. this is potentially going to become complex.

So, in an attempt not to scare anyone away from starting iodine due to information overload, I’m going to do my best to make this part easy.

The short version of starting iodine

Actually starting iodine is pretty simple. Take a few nutrients and start taking iodine. But understanding what we’re going for and what to expect is where we can get into some confusion.

Dr. Brownstein came up with a protocol of nutrients that go with iodine. This is a set of nutrients that he observed helping his patients. But he was working with these people to resolve outstanding issues like stomach acid or other major imbalances. Plus, the amounts he mentions in his protocol are just recommended amounts someone might work towards etc, its not necessarily what we want to start at. This stuff all depends on us and how we handle each day.

I lay out info about Dr. Brownstein’s Iodine Protocol here whyiodine.com/iodine-protocol

And instead of depending on a doctor, I learned how to support my own stomach acid and other imbalances. I share how I learned how to do this on my other site sickoftired.com

Once I learned a bit about these other nutrients, I started taking one of each about weekly for a few weeks. I like the taste of salt so adding that to my food was an easy one.

Then I put 1 drop of Lugols on my arm. I used 2% but a single drop of 5% should be fine for most if that’s all we have. If we know we react to supplements easily, we may want to figure out how to apply less than a whole drop.

I waited a day to see if I might wake up with a headache or have any other healing or detox reactions.

I added 1 drop to a glass of water instead of applying it to my skin. Then I continued adding 1 drop to a glass of water daily. Each week I increased this amount by one drop.

I started pausing 1-2 days per week just to see how my body did without iodine. If I ever felt detox symptoms, I paused iodine and looked for a nutrient that might help the symptoms. 9 times out of 10, increasing my unrefined salt intake, or salt-loading would help. This is because bromine detox is very common when starting iodine.

I slowly made my way to about 30-35mg per day when I started running into detox symptoms I was not able to get around. I wrote about that situation here whyiodine.com/low-and-slow

The long version of starting iodine

I will be rather blunt and to the point in order to keep this short because there is so much more to this situation.

If a person is still:

  • eating processed food
  • using fluoridated products
  • takin lots of medications
  • stressing
  • and potentially ignoring dozens of toxic inputs…

Iodine is not going to be fun or easy.

Even if a person has addressed:

  • stomach acid
  • electrolytes
  • histamines
  • oxalates
  • and just about any nutritional deficiency..

Iodine can still be a pain in the butt to get started with.

Why is iodine such a pain for some people?

Keep in mind that this is more of a friendly warning than a serious call for safety. Some people don’t handle iodine well at first and starting slow makes is much easily to back off without having to wait for levels to drop again.

Some people go right to high dose to attempt bypassing detox, but there are a handful of issues with this. The main one is the chance of high dose to drop all of the toxins its dislodged randomly and unexpectedly. I’ve seen this happen to others and I witnessed a bit of it myself. I will write a page on this soon.

The reason iodine makes us feel poorly is due to dislodging toxins. Some people claim its adrenal fatigue, thyroid issues, or just the lame excuse of “iodine poisoning”. We ignore unmetered amounts of fluoride, bromide, and chlorine.. but watch out for that iodine poisoning! You might get healthy! (what if ‘iodine poisoning’ is actually ‘fluoride, bromide, and chlorine poisoning’ as iodine is pushing it all out?)

There are a handful of situations where iodine is not able to function properly and people may claim it is dangerous. But the issue is not so much the iodine, it’s the lack of nutrients required by our system.

This is where it gets complex

When I ran into detox with iodine that I was not able to get around, the community just says take more iodine, lots more! Salt load, try a nutrient or two.. you just aren’t taking enough iodine!

Well, taking more didn’t work out for me and it knocked me on my butt for about a week. But it allowed me to learn one of the coolest things ever.

I figured out how our system works. We are cells that are made of nutrients which then process the nutrients we consume so we can build more cells and convert more nutrients into what we call life. Forget the insane complexity of this and think about how many nutrients are required to build and maintain trillions of cells that can do this.

Iodine is this magical nutrient that allows our body to do insane stuff, which is why we’re hearing about it. But it’s doing this magic inside trillions of cells that are made of nutrients. There is a huge gap between the main iodine community and overall nutrition, which is why I’m doing all of this.

I have seen iodine doctors, authors and group admins say some of the silliest things about nutrition. I’m not here to judge anyone, but this information is important, so I pay attention.

Witness this for yourself

Something that helped me tremendously was following others in these groups. I would friend a person if we’ve communicated, or just make note of a few people. Over time I started to notice some patterns.

I noticed a lot of little things that are either difficult to describe or sound like I’m nit-picking people. But one example that I found very important was this situation where people would create rather dramatic posts about detox reactions that they were smacked in the face with out of no where either several days, weeks, or months into iodine. Over time, I figured out what was likely causing this.. too much iodine too quickly. This isn’t a race, but for some reason a lot of people assume it is as they start flying through more and more iodine. This is why I have always been of the mindset that going slow and pausing when we hit detox is the way to go. But this was just an example.

Follow a few people for a while as you either start slow or learn more about iodine. I don’t want to tell you what to watch them for, but I’ll mention one very important aspect I watch. Does a person assume iodine mostly by itself is the solution or are they looking at whatever various nutrients might be involved in something while also moving forward with iodine?

Want to read more about getting started?

Here is another version of this current page whyiodine.com/should-i-start-iodine/ where I attempt explaining how we’re all different and it’s not easy to tell a person whether they should or should not start a certain healing regimen.

The next article in this section https://whyiodine.com/beginners-protocol/ goes over what I’ve covered here but it more detail.

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November 16, 2022

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