How to use this planner
Step #1: List your prescription medications
Enter each one and the time you take it now. Spelling matters here, because the planner matches on the actual drug name.
Step #2: List your supplements
Same idea, in the second box. Include anything you swallow, even the things you would not call a supplement, like antacids or a fortified plant milk you put in your coffee.
Step #3: Set your day and build the schedule
Tell it roughly when you wake, eat breakfast, finish dinner and go to bed, then build the schedule. You do not need a thyroid medication for it to work.
Understanding your results
Keep and Move
Every item comes back tagged. Keep means it already sits where it should and you can leave it alone. Move means it is worth shifting, and the reason is written next to it. For most people, most things stay exactly where they are.
The things spacing will not fix
Some medications lower your absorption no matter what hour you take them, so they appear in their own section instead of on the clock. Acid blockers and oral estrogen are the common ones.
Frequently asked questions
Thirty to sixty minutes, if you take it in the morning. That window is what lets the tablet clear your stomach and reach the small intestine before food arrives and slows everything down.
If you dose at bedtime instead, the rule flips. Give it at least two hours after your last real food, and longer if dinner was large or high in fat, since fat is what slows your stomach emptying.
Yes, just not straight away. In one study, espresso taken at the same moment as levothyroxine lowered absorption by 25 to 57%. The same study found no interference at all when the coffee came 60 minutes later.
If waiting an hour is never realistically going to happen in your house, that is a reason to look at bedtime dosing rather than a reason to give up. Dose at night and your mornings are completely free.
Most vitamins only need to be outside the 30 to 60 minute window, and that covers the large majority of what people take.
The exceptions are the ones that physically bind to the tablet: calcium, iron, soy, fiber supplements, antacids and a few prescription binders. Those want roughly four hours.
Calcium and iron are the two that matter most, and both have real evidence behind them. Soy, fiber supplements, antacids, sucralfate and the cholesterol binders belong in the same group.
The ones people miss are the hidden sources. Tums is calcium carbonate. Most multivitamins carry calcium and often iron. Prenatals almost always carry iron. Almond and oat milk are nearly always fortified with calcium, and that usually goes straight into the coffee you were already timing around.
Yes, and for a lot of people it is easier. Some studies suggest absorption is actually better at night, partly because your gut is not pushing things through as quickly as it does in the morning.
Bedtime is not automatically better. It is better when your mornings are crowded, when you cannot give up the first coffee, or when something else in your routine wants that same empty stomach. The planner above works out which one collides with less of your day.
As a rule, no. Nothing goes in with it, and that is true for prescriptions as much as for supplements. Water only, then wait.
A few medications have their own requirements that clash with it directly. Bisphosphonates for bone density also need an empty stomach first thing, and acid blockers work best in the same pre-breakfast window. Those are the cases where something has to move.
About four hours. Calcium carbonate measurably reduced levothyroxine absorption when the two were taken together, which is why the gap is longer than for most things.
If you also take iron, separate those two from each other as well. Iron and calcium compete for absorption independently of anything to do with your thyroid.
Far less than most timing charts online suggest. The only trial that exists gave magnesium at the very same moment as levothyroxine, and absorption fell 7 to 12%, with the citrate arm not even statistically significant.
Nobody has ever tested a four hour gap for magnesium, and the largest review of supplement interactions contains no magnesium study at all. So taking magnesium at night for sleep and your medication in the morning is already fine.
Yes. Biotin does not affect absorption at all, but it interferes with the assay most labs use to measure thyroid hormone. It makes TSH read falsely low and free T4 and T3 read falsely high, which looks like an overactive thyroid on paper.
Stop it 2 to 4 days before any thyroid blood draw. Check the label on your B complex and on any hair, skin and nails formula, because that is where most people are getting it without realising.
One rushed morning will not undo your treatment. Levothyroxine has a long half life, so a single day where you ate too early barely registers.
What matters is what you do most days. If eating too soon is happening several times a week, that is worth fixing, and it is usually a sign the morning is the wrong slot for you rather than a sign you need more willpower.