From Diagnosis to Silver Medal: What Six Months of Discipline Taught One Athlete About Her Body
On the morning of May 9, 2026, Jana Radojčić was getting ready for the biggest day of her athletic life. Hair curled, makeup done, competition tan painted on. Her hands, by her own account, were shaking. She was so nervous she couldn't keep down a single grain of rice.
A few hours later, she stepped onto the stage at the Balkan Cup in Kragujevac, Serbia, in the IFBB bikini fitness division. She left with a silver medal.
She also left with Hashimoto's thyroiditis, the autoimmune condition she had been managing throughout her preparation. For Radojčić, that detail is the whole point of the story.
A dream that started at 17
Radojčić grew up in sport. She played basketball, swam, played volleyball, and danced, but the gym was always where she felt most at home. In high school, she trained so consistently that a friend nicknamed her "Jana the Gym." At 17, she was squatting 100 kilograms.
Around the same time, she discovered bikini fitness competitions online and decided she would compete one day. Seven years later, she did.
Between that first dream and the stage came a career, a busy life, and a Hashimoto's diagnosis. Today, Radojčić runs Living with Hashimoto, a wellness platform for women with the condition, and is the author of The Hashimoto Cookbook. Her competition was, in part, a personal argument against the idea that the diagnosis sets the limit.
Six months of structure
Competition prep left little room for improvisation. Radojčić describes a day that was "set in stone": wake up, thyroid medication, cardio, breakfast, work, lunch, more work, pre-workout meal, training, post-workout meal, an evening meal, and sleep. The same sequence, every day, for six months.
Her nutrition was precise, her supplementation was planned, and inflammatory foods were removed entirely. The result surprised even her. She reports that her cycle became regular, her usual symptoms disappeared, and she reached the end of prep feeling that her body was finally working with her.
Her takeaway is not that everyone should live like a competitor. It is that routine itself is powerful. When the decisions are already made, there is less room for stress to creep in.
The lesson about stress
The hardest lesson of her prep, Radojčić says, was one she learned "on my own skin" rather than from a book: stress can erase in two days what took two weeks to build.
A short night of sleep, an argument, a looming deadline: her body seemed to treat them all the same way. With Hashimoto's, she found the reaction was amplified. Two difficult days could bring water retention, facial puffiness, and fatigue unrelated to training. Recovering took two weeks of careful sleep, nutrition, and patience.
Her response was to treat stress like a macronutrient, something to plan, measure, and manage. That meant small, unglamorous habits: putting the phone down in the evening and protecting sleep as non-negotiable.
"With Hashimoto's, you don't lose because of one bad meal," she writes. "You lose because of the stress you allowed to linger."
Why extremes don't last
Radojčić is clear that competition prep is an extreme, and that extremes are not meant to be permanent. On stage, a fraction of a percent can separate first place from second, so prep demands total commitment. But giving 100% to one area of life always takes something from the others. For those six months, her work, social life, and rest absorbed the cost.
Outside of competition, she follows an 80:20 rule: sticking to her plan about 80% of the time and allowing flexibility for the rest. That flexibility, in her view, is what makes healthy habits sustainable for years rather than weeks.
Her broader message for people with Hashimoto's follows from there. If her body could handle the demands of contest preparation, then a calm, ordinary, healthy life is well within reach for others with the condition. Her detailed write-up of the nutrition, sleep, and training lessons from her prep makes the case that people can do great things with Hashimoto's.
What readers can take from it
Most people living with Hashimoto's are not aiming for a competition stage. They want to wake up rested, have steady energy for work and family, and stop feeling defined by a diagnosis. Radojčić's experience points to a gentler version of the same approach:
Build one routine. A consistent wake time, first meal, and bedtime give the body predictability.
Protect sleep. She calls it perhaps the most important factor alongside stress control.
Treat stress as a real input. Plan for it the way you plan meals.
Choose 80:20 over perfection. A plan that can be kept beats a perfect plan that gets abandoned.
Her advice on where to begin is the same advice she gives in her own writing: "Start with one thing. Not all ten."
Radojčić says she would do the competition all over again, ten times over. Not for the medal, but for what it showed her. A diagnosis can be one chapter of a person's story without becoming the whole book.
This article describes one person's experience and is not medical advice. Talk with a doctor before making changes to your diet, training, or medication.