hey, here's some other stuff to think about. this is a very familiar situation, both from my own experiences and from those of my friends.
* the t4 level is a good litmus test for your doctor. if he thinks t4 = 0.9 is ok, fire him and find a new doc.
* as far as the love handles are concerned.
1/
that may just be the way you are. not to say that you can't get rid of them, but they may be the very last thing to go. you may have to get absolutely shredded before they go down at all.
you might even have an "awkward stage" during which your front abs are pretty sliced but you still have shakira hips. (sartorial tip: if you get to this point, do not, i repeat do not, wear workout shirts that are too fitted.)
2/
second, your skin might just be looser there, from whatever lifelong pattern of fat accumulation. when it comes to love handles, it can be surprisingly hard to differentiate between excess fat and loose skin.
to determine, try on a pair of jeans a size too small (you can button them, but sitting down is hard). then, see what happens to your obliques. if the jeans push them into gentle curves like a woman's, above the waistline, then that's actual body fat that you can lose. if your skin hangs limply downward, then you've just got too much skin, and that's that.
in the latter case you can still get ripped -- and you can camouflage the extra skin by destroying your obliques in your ab workouts -- but it won't completely go away (and you'll still have to think twice about fitted t-shirts).
- about the cardio, the numbers doesn't smell right.
you said 700-1100 calories burned in 80 minutes. that's only 500-800 cal/hour, which isdefinitely NOT "high intensity". if you are at 75-85% of peak hr for the whole time, these #s are nonsense.
just as a reference -- on days when i have about an hour's worth of business calls to make, i'll get on the treadmill, with my phone and a good noise cancelling mic headset, and walk up a slight incline (10-11%) at about 2.5 mph while i make the phone calls. (i work from home.) needless to say, this is not high intensity; i don't even breathe hard, and as far as my clients can tell i'm just chillin on the couch. even that burns 600-700 calories per hour, or 800-950 calories in 80 minutes. and, i weigh 20 lbs less than you. you do the math.
so, the question is, where are you getting these numbers?
- if you KNOW that's your actual burn rate (as in, "you did the math with your food diary"), then your thyroid problem is basically an emergency.
- on the other hand, if that's just what the treadmill says, you're probably burning more. (if your treadmill doesn't let you input your weight, it will assume you weigh only 140-150 pounds.)
- finally, how confident are you that your macros and calories are accurate?
i ask this for two reasons. first, your given macros are perfectly round numbers (50, 100, and 300), which just seems too good to be true -- makes them seem like ballpark guesses. second, most people just don't think about everything that has calories in their diet. (fish oil? 10 calories per softgel. chewable vitamin c? 10 calories each. that small amount of oil that your vegetables are cooked in? potentially hundreds of calories. a sprinkling of parmesan cheese on your food? 100 calories. and so on)
50c/100f/300p is only 2300 calories/day. (actually slightly less, since the average protein has about 3.85 cal/gram, not really 4.) that's less than you need to maintain your bodyweight of ~200 pounds even if you sit behind a desk all day, let alone if you actually get off your ass and work out.
still, let's assume, for the moment, that your macros and calorie counting are perfectly on point. well then....
if you really ARE eating only 2300 cal/day, AND you are burning 1000 cal/day (or probably more -- see above) with your cardio, then that's a net of only 1300 cal/day -- or even less (!!) -- which is so low that it will push your body into anorexic-chick mode. in that case, thyroid or no thyroid, your metabolism will try to **** itself, because it thinks you'll die if it doesn't.
if you are, in fact, consuming only 2300 cal/day, then lay off the freaking cardio -- you shouldn't be doing much (if any) of it. with 80 min/day of cardio on that diet, you are forcing your body to become "resource efficient" -- which is a nice way of saying that it will leach muscle to create additional fat stores, and won't bother with trifles like, say, repairing your injured shoulder.
oh, and, also, if you are starting to enter starvation mode, guess what else goes down? if you said "thyroid function", you win the prize!
although you are not an anorexic chick, your labs actually point to the first stages of this problem. see, your rT3 (reverse t3) is right in the middle of the range ... which wouldn't normally be an issue, but that's unusually high for someone with t4 levels as low as yours. there is, however, one condition that causes rT3 to rise while t4 plummets, and that is when your body thinks it's starving.
finally, you're forgetting that the entire point of following a low(er)-carb diet is so that you don't have to bother with things like cardio, and can just diet and lift. if you do any significant cardio, you need carbohydrates, period, or you'll leach muscle like crazy.
in general, you should never undereat by more than about 500 cal/day (relative to maintenance level) for more than a couple of days in a row. and if you are doing all this cardio, then you have to take that into account in determining your maintenance level.
according to what you've stated here, you are undereating by 1000 or more calories per day, so that's probably the genesis of your problem. too much of a good thing, and all that.
try doing less cardio (a LOT less ... maybe none at all), eating almost the same diet, and see what happens to your labs.
good luck.