I used to suffer from a very severe panic disorder as well as clinical depression since I was a small child. I spend quite literally thousands of hours researching anxiety and depression trying to find coping mechanisms and skills to help reduce the anxiety because at several points it had reached a point where I could barely manage to leave my house or even step outside without having a full blown panic attack. I was on anti-depressants which caused me to become suicidal and I had a very difficult time through my life... In and out of therapy, in the ER for an emotional breakdown, blah blah blah you name it.
At no point had I ever considered that food was the cause of my anxiousness. I KNEW that if I ate sugar I would crash. Just as I knew certain foods would make me feel "off." I would tend to avoid those things but not always. I used to have a lot of stomach issues but I thought that everyone did. I used to have chronic nightmares EVERY single night and had a lot of trouble sleeping. Miraculously I never failed anything in school but academically I should have been a straight A student but was more of a B student because I had a lot of brain fog and just overall didn't feel well.
When I was going through a fairly severe agoraphobic stage I ended up in therapy for the fourth time and they wanted me to try meds again despite my very bad reaction to them before. Apparently I had so much anxiety and stress in me at all times that I was potentially causing physical damage to myself. I almost gave in until my therapist suggested "Eating for Anxiety." In all the books I read, podcasts I read, after all the therapies, medical tests etc... no one had EVER suggested I change how I ate. So I gave it a try. I never went into it think about Gluten. I went into it thinking "I have to cut out grains and dairy so that I can live a life."
It took only a few months of being grain free before I was able to leave my house without Ativan. It was the first time in my life I actually felt alive. When it dawned on me that I might ACTUALLY, for the first time ever, be anxiety free I burst into tears because of how relieved I was. I had never, not for a single day, felt what it was like not to be dragged down by my mental condition. Looking back now, I don't know how I made it through my life like that.
This lead me down the Paleo path and researching a lot of Gluten stuff. It's true, people CAN be sensitive to Gluten. I know for myself when I eat anything that has grains in it I will gain an obvious amount of water weight. My feet swell up. I become incredibly bloated and not to get too TMI I will develop gas (which I never have otherwise) and my bowels will feel very distressed. My brain fog comes back and my ability to concentrate becomes quite a lot less. I mean, it takes about 30 minutes for some of these symptoms to begin popping up for me. It's not like I have a digestive apocalypse or anything truly alarming. However, I did experiment over the last six to eight weeks and was allowing more grain foods in my diet. The results were kind of disturbing in that my mood became VERY altered. I was unable to manage my stress. I started becoming very impulsive with my spending and my job performance started to suffer. I slipped into a very severe depression where I experienced suicidal thoughts which I haven't had now in 2 years. I actually felt worthless and like I was ruining my life. The decline in my mental health was slow but it reached a near breaking point before I snapped out of it and realized that I was getting too far down that path.
So my physical symptoms are usually manageable but the mental illness really began to creep up on me almost to the point that I started to fear I might not be able to turn back.
Now, I have read a LOT of articles over how grains (I don't like to get stuck on gluten specifically as there are many things in grains that can be problematic) can affect mental health so if anyone is interested, I can post some when I am at home.
