quick question, do you do any physical activity? or if your hormone imbalance did not allow you to do it, now that you have a different medicament, have you started doing sport? Not just a walk in the evening, like minimum 3 times a week 1 hour of high intensity workout, possibly supervised?

Yes, I started doing a lot of hiking. Today I walked more than 2000 foot up to a hill and back and still felt fine and had a quick stroll along a river the evening. I shoot many pictures of mushrooms, and a friend told me I caught a rare mushroom (lycoperdon echinatum) and Thursday I am going up again with him because he never saw one.

Why?

that's great, but it's not proper training, it's a hike, fantastic activity but (especially growing older) our life is mostly sedentary and it helps a lot to do a proper sport or intense activity at least 3 times a week (i personally workout every day, but sat and sun, for 1 hour with a high intensity sport, not weightlifting). The older you grow the harder it is for the system to process the amount of stuff we eat (especially high calories, highly processed food that is available nowadays) and doing a high intensity activity (heartrate up, muscular stress etcetc) is, in my opinion, fundamental and often ignored by people.

> One of the symptoms was extreme craving to the point that

I have a kidney disorder that causes me to waste potassium. Without a supplement, I can't get enough in my natural diet without eating like 10-20 avocados a day, or 6 cups of spinach.

A fun side effect of hypokalemia is that your muscles get really sore, like you just did a full body workout. So, you can literally feel when your potassium is low.

The low salt coincides with some of the most intense food cravings I've ever experienced. I don't crave foods high in potassium, however; just foods with a lot of regular NaCl. So, my body does its best to tell me I need to eat something, triggering a psychological compulsion to get it, but the compulsion is to eat the wrong thing.

I'm just one data point, but I think this might extrapolate out to more people than just me. If you're compelled to overeat, you might be missing some key nutrient that just isn't present in abundance in your current diet. The trick is finding out what it is.

Random related thought - awhile back there was a series of blog posts that got pretty popular (I can't remember the blog's name) trying to investigate the root cause of obesity. They settled on some odd conclusions, but one of the things they noted in their meta-analysis of extant obesity research is that places with lower obesity have more of a particular dissolved mineral (they asserted lithium was the root cause, but I didn't find their conclusions convincing) in their drinking water.

It could be that there are trace elements that, if you don't have mineral-rich drinking water, are otherwise hard to get from a standard diet that drive this craving behavior that I've experienced.

I am not sure but I think my body couldn't generate enough of a specific hormone and then the body's reaction was as if I was starving because that hormone is controlling the metabolism inside the organes. So, probably nothing was missing in my food but because my metabolism was low it was like I was starving but I wasn't.