Thai actor Nadech Kugimiya says years of punishing gym routines left him with a thyroid condition he will manage for the rest of his life. He takes medication every morning to replace a hormone his body no longer makes properly.
He gave the account in an interview on the Thai podcast On the way with Chom. Thai media carried it widely on Monday, October 27.
It started in his mid-twenties. He slept at midnight, woke at 5am for the gym, and repeated the cycle for months.
By 28 the bill came due. He could not get out of bed for filming, and the state lasted nearly a month.
“My eyes were hot, my face was hot, I could not get up, I was sleepy all the time,” he said. He went to a doctor, afraid he was about to faint.
The diagnosis was Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, an autoimmune condition that attacks the thyroid, leaving it underactive. The result is hypothyroidism.
“I have hypothyroidism, which means the gland that burns energy in my body is wrecked,” he said. “I have to take a pill every morning to adjust my thyroid hormone, because the gland does not work.”
He calls it a second chronic condition, on top of the asthma he already had. His warning is that the mind can push harder than the body can take.
“Sometimes we overload the body so much that the machine breaks,” he said. “You cannot repair it. There are no spare parts. We have no spare organs.”
A second health scare came years later, in his early thirties. He had finished shooting the horror film Thee Yod 3 at 80 kilogrammes and had one month to reach 70.
He cut to 1,500 calories a day, ate one meal a day and trained three times daily, combining boxing, running and weights.
His weight fell in the first week. In the second it climbed, which he puts down to inflammation and a body that began storing fat rather than burning it.
Blood tests followed. “Testosterone, male hormone levels, vitamins, minerals, stress hormones, everything was wrecked,” he said. “Like someone around 60-odd, when I was only 30-something.”
The most extreme moment came on his last day of filming. He went without water for two days so that a shirtless convulsion scene would show the definition he wanted.
“The first meal I ate after that scene, I threw up badly,” he said. “I have been through a lot. I learned right and wrong on myself.”
He has since changed his approach. He eats three to four meals a day, controls his diet without starving it, and no longer trains to exhaustion. His weight settled, his body fat fell and his muscle stayed.
He also describes bouts of binge eating when his calorie limits run too low. Pizza and ice cream arrive late at night, he says. Guilt then sends him into a fast the next morning, which he knows is the wrong answer.
Nadech still wants to be bigger, without steroids, and would like to enter a Men’s Physique contest one day. For now he is cutting lean again for an upcoming film.
Next year he plans to enter HYROX as a mixed double with his wife, the actor Urassaya “Yaya” Sperbund. The pair have yet to train together.
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