Changing My Diet Cured Me of Panic Disorder

Based on my experience, anxiety and panic disorders can start from the gut, not always the mind and can be resolved through diet as opposed to psychological therapies. This is what I learned from my experience, how I ended the vicious cycles for my body, and why I believe that first-line medical care must re-evaluate their understanding of anxiety to be capable of offering the appropriate treatment.

I thought, at the age of 27 years old, I might need to go on disability.

I made it through engineering school with honors, passed my licensing exams, and landed a career in my field. All while living downtown with three lifelong friends and an emotionally supportive boyfriend, my superhero that I would eventually marry. The world was my oyster you could say. But my body was barely making it through each day.

I was told by several doctors over the years that my case was “textbook anxiety.” I suffered anxiety in early childhood, then again in junior high, but it was not until my 20s that I would experience the throes of a true panic attack. I was convinced that there was something else wrong due to the severity of my very physical symptoms; maybe a heart problem, brain tumor, mild stroke, etc. This “irrational fear of health” in-and-of-itself was apparently even a “textbook” symptom.

(A little tangent here but: To those of you who have never experienced a true panic attack, it is absolutely rational for an Anxious Patient to research endlessly in attempt to comprehend the mysterious force that took their body by storm. It is only irrational to someone who hasn’t experienced it.)

Eventually, I somewhat believed that this experience was just anxiety because that was the consistent diagnosis from several doctors over a few years. From talk therapy with the anxiety counselor and cognitive behavioral therapy with the psychologist to beta blockers from the cardiologist and benzos from the ER doctor, I exhausted all the typical treatment options to tame this beast living inside me.

Talk therapy helped me manage myself during the deepest depths of a panic attack but did not prevent episodes from happening again.

Exposure therapy helped me implement and practice thought strategies to manage the onset of a panic attack but did not prevent episodes from happening again.

I had tried anxiolytics briefly in childhood and early adulthood, but I didn’t consider this a viable treatment option for panic disorder due to the strength of these types of medications. I completely understand why people choose to use anxiolytics, but I knew that these drugs were a slippery slope. I didn’t want to rely on them for the rest of my life. All I wanted was to be able to rely on myself.

All of these approaches seemed to superficially manage symptoms as opposed to addressing the root cause of the panic. Now I know at this point if you are someone with panic disorder, you want to know more about my symptoms in terms of severity, frequency, and duration…

THE BEST AND WORST EXPLANATION OF MY SYMPTOMS

My panic attacks were pure torture, not only to my physical body but spiritually to my soul.

I experienced mild panic attacks every few days with full-blown episodes about once or twice per month for several years. Full-blown episodes lasted what felt like an eternity, but in reality about an hour (meaning the build-up and climax lasted an hour).

The full-blown episodes were like storm systems that would quickly overcome my whole body within seconds — muscle tension, shortness of breath, sweating, heart palpitations, extreme fear and climax at the height of an “impending sense of doom.” If you don’t know what that means, then you’ve never experienced a true full-blown panic attack. It is fear in its most raw biological form. Primal.

Also, there was this odd sensation in my brain that I describe as a black hole. Literally, a physical feeling inside my brain that felt like a gravitational pull and the electricity flickering in-and-out (which I thought was a stroke or something).

My mild panic attacks include all the same symptoms as the full-blown attack, except the episode ends before climaxing, meaning though I experience the fear it doesn’t quite reach the deepest depth of that “impending sense of doom.”

In the days following the trauma of a full-blown panic attack, I would feel electrical tension within my body (like a tense energy field in my muscles and chest) that prevented me from ever feeling at ease. This, I was told, was Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD). Exhaustion, headaches, irritability, sensitivity to light and sound were a few of my GAD symptoms, but the most debilitating symptom aside from panic itself was the chronic and vague (non-spinning) dizziness that clouded almost every waking hour of my day for about two years.

This particular symptom (dizziness) drove me to search for more answers and not settle with the diagnosis of anxiety.

AN UNLIKELY (AND SIMPLE) SOLUTION

I live in Chicago, home to a number of leading healthcare institutions like Rush University, University of Chicago Medicine, Northwestern Medicine, UIC Medicine, and Loyola to name a few. Despite countless visits to specialists MDs/PhDs/PsyD and a strong support network, I was unable to find answers.

I was finally so desperate to overcome this hell that I resorted to Youtube. Even crazier, I found what ultimately worked for me and it was free: the Candida Diet.

The Candida Diet is fundamentally about restricting sugar intake to reduce inflammation by starving off a pathogenic yeast overgrowth in the gut. Like many diets, the Candida Diet is highly controversial in the mainstream healthcare community.

I never had stomach problems, nausea, or IBS, and at that time in my life, I was of the mentality that the “alternative” doctors were frauds and that diets like this were fads. I initially did not consider myself someone that would benefit from the Candida Diet.

But a panic attack that brought me to the ER back in 2011 was preceded by routine blood work that included a fasting blood glucose test…

I had drank an orange glucose drink and within seconds fell to the floor of Quest Labs shaking with one of the most violent panic attacks I would ever have. The ER doctor that day reassured me that sugar was not the culprit because I wasn’t hyper or hypoglycemic. My blood sugar levels were completely normal. All my vitals were completely normal. He insisted that this was just “fight-or-flight” triggered by “my fear of getting my blood drawn that day.” Luckily, my boyfriend was with me and knew that this was a chemical (not psychological) reaction.

I felt barely alive with panic disorder for almost six years (and many more years earlier with GAD) before finding the Candida Diet, which cured me in less than one month.

There were other lifestyle habits I changed in the six months leading up to my diet that likely contributed to the successful outcomes (yoga, sleep, supplementing). But the almost immediate results of this diet, you could say, would radically convert me to “alternative” medicine.

I will never fully understand from a scientific perspective why the Candida diet worked, but it did. The diet likely just helped me get to a healthy state to support my body’s ability to function properly and heal itself.

I now believe in Functional Medicine and prefer to see holistic doctors (with an MD background) that take a systems approach and only use medications as a last resort. Today I no longer follow any particular diet, but I am conscious of my sugar intake and eat a heavily plant-based, minimally-processed diet.

I suspect that the Ketogenic Diet (often prescribed to epileptics since the 50s) might have produced the same results, which makes sense since headaches, migraines, seizures, and panic disorder might all just be derivatives of one another.

MINDING THE GUT

Our healthcare system in the United States treats anxiety disorders as if all forms of anxiety stem from negative thought patterns (behavioral psychology) or traumatic experiences (emotional psychology). We only take into consideration the mind when in fact there exists this abundance of research that proves a bidirectional relationship between our intestines and brain, meaning one can influence the other. And this research has been around since the 1950s.

Just how big is the population of Anxious Patients, like me, that are failed by our tradition medical system? That have some sort of intestinally-mediated anxiety disorder that a simple diet can make a world of difference? That maybe have a genetic, enzymatic, or metabolic issue?

It seems like suggesting a low-sugar diet is lower risk compared to psychotropic drugs, which are too often prescribed (even our children) before trying any other treatment approach. It’s hard not to believe that maybe our healthcare system has been hijacked by the Pharmaceutical Industry that profits from anti-anxiety medications. This is a market that was valued at more than $3.3 billion USD in 2014 and is expected to reach about $3.8 billion USD by 2020, according to Zion Market Research.

In hindsight, I cannot imagine what my life would be like today if I didn’t follow my own intuition about my own body. If I listened to what doctors were recommending, I would likely be addicted to mind-numbing drugs (with serious side effects) or still believe the problem was just in my head.

To be able to rely on myself makes me feel alive and spirited in so many ways. I created Anxious Patients to help people to find their answer.

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