Elimination Diet Update!

It’s been barely two weeks (15 days!), and while I’ve screwed up and added things back in too early and accidentally eaten things I didn’t mean to, I feel like I’ve already learned so much!

The biggest thing I’ve learned so far is that I’m not anxious all the time. I was beginning to think that I was. I had so many ailments and sensations every day that didn’t seem to make sense, and I was grouping them all under “ANXIETY”. There were days when I’d feel so awful, I was sure I was just going to end up going completely nuts.

After tracking my food and my feelings and symptoms for the last two weeks, despite the fact that I haven’t stuck to the diet properly all the time, there are three very clear groupings of symptoms that are arising:

1) Specific symptoms that happen after I eat certain foods, which I’m beginning to assume means that I have some sort of mild allergy or intolerance to that food:

- nausea
- gas, cramps, bloating
- heartburn
- headaches
- irritability
- fatigue, an extreme version of “brain fog”
- joint pain and muscle soreness (often the next day)
- eyes feel “hot” (weird one, I know, but it happens)
- lights begin to feel too bright (often occurs with headache, though not painful enough I’d consider it a migraine).

2) Symptoms of panic and anxiety (I have an anxiety disorder, there’s no denying that):

- sense of doom, fear, extreme anxiety
- rapid heart rate, pounding heart, palpitations
- shaking, tremors
- dizziness
- chest feels tight, like the muscles are a band around my body pulling way too tight
- palms begin to sweat, the rest of me gets clammy
- blood pressure shoots up

3) Symptoms of low blood sugar:

- a sort of “shakiness”, a feeling that I could fall into a panic attack at any moment, lacking in physical stability.
- a light and “deep” sort of headache
- hyperfocus on something I’m working on, so that I’m ignoring a lot of physical signals (like right now I’m working on this post without having eaten breakfast yet – I’m resisting stopping to go eat, but I know if I don’t, I’ll end up in trouble soon….)
- strangely: repelled by the idea of eating, nothing sounds good, I don’t know what I want, and I’m too busy to think about it, and get annoyed by anyone asking me to eat (see last item!).
- irritability (heh!)

Part of the problem with having an anxiety disorder is that you become hyper-attuned to your physical state. A person without an anxiety disorder will often ignore strange or unaccounted for physical symptoms, or feel unafraid of them, finding them annoying at worst. They only “panic” and feel fear or real worry when something serious happens, like that abdominal pain doesn’t go away in a few days and the doctor says they have appendicitis. In other words, they have (generally) reasonable responses to bodily sensations. 

Someone with an anxiety disorder, however intelligent and rational they may be most of the time, can be plagued with an irrational hyperfocus on their body’s sensations. This is especially true with panic disorder, because panic attacks are terrifying, and someone who experiences them on a regular basis will basically go to any length not to experience another one. This is why people with panic attacks often become agoraphobic; they avoid places where they had attacks before. It’s also why they’re especially prone to hypochondria. I have issues with both; my agoraphobia manifests as difficulty driving long distances and difficulty being away from home for long periods, and my hypochondria manifests as a fear that there’s something wrong with my heart. 

What I’m realizing through doing this diet, is how the food that I’ve been eating and the way I’ve been eating it have been impacting and triggering my anxiety. Eating things I’m intolerant to cause symptoms that, while not producing a panic attack on their own, contribute to my hyper-focus on my body – asking myself, “What’s wrong? Why do I feel this way? What’s happening?” – and do nothing but increase my own sensitivity to physical sensations, which increases the likelihood of an attack being triggered. 

I used to think that I was just anxious 24 hours a day, but when I went on the diet, all the food intolerance symptoms went away. I began to actually feel good most of the time. I realized I wasn’t anxious all the time; I was anxious some of the time, and I was very likely reacting to my food the rest of the time. 

So what foods are problematic? Here’s a breakdown of what I know or strongly suspect so far: 

DAIRY: evil, evil, evil. 
On June 30th, Greg and I went out for a date night, and I wanted to just enjoy myself so badly, and I’d been so good, and I thought I’d just experiment and eat one meal with dairy and see what happened. Well, within about 40 minutes of eating two kinds of cheese, I began feeling almost all the symptoms of intolerance, as well as the symptoms of lactose intolerance. The next day, I had the worst panic attack I’ve had in six months. This is consistent with my notes from eliminating dairy a few years ago, when I noticed that it took about 12-48 hours for the panic attacks to hit after having it. I don’t know why, but it has happened that way repeatedly, for years, even during times when I didn’t know I’d eaten dairy. Many times during that trial I’d have attacks that hit out of the blue, I’d look back on what we ate, we’d see no evidence of dairy at all, and then we’d dig deeper and find that, oh yeah, that margarine has “milk solids”, or that soy cheese has “milk proteins”. 

Dairy just needs to go OUT. Completely. Permanently. 

SOY: seems okay.
Doesn’t seem to be an issue in the “light” forms I’m eating it in. Right now I have some small amount of soy in a protein powder I use, and I use soy sauce in cooking. I don’t notice any problems or symptoms of intolerance. I’m still not eating soy meats or other highly processed soy foods, and I likely won’t start for some time. They’ve always made me feel lethargic and nauseous, and I don’t feel like I need to “test” that right now. 

WHEAT: okay in small doses, so far.  
I need to do more testing with wheat. In small doses, like when wheat is an additive in something (a breading, or croutons on a salad), I don’t notice any food intolerance symptoms. When I eat a lot of wheat, I begin to notice symptoms from group #1. I’m still not sure how much of a problem wheat is, I’ll keep working on that. For now I seem to find myself gravitating toward gluten-free items. 

SUGAR: okay in small doses, but hard to only have small doses. 
Sugar in general doesn’t seem to give me any symptoms of intolerance, but it HUGELY contributes to low blood sugar issues, which are very triggering for anxiety. I also notice that if I don’t eat a lot of sugar for a few days and then eat, say, a small pastry or cookie (there are some great gluten-free cookies I was trying), that the cravings for MORE sugar become incredibly intense. I think my body really has the habit of using sugar as a mood stabilizer, so it tends to want a little, and then want a lot more to balance out what the little bit did, and then pretty soon I’m just wanting nothing but sugar. Interrupting the cycle with protein, and then sort of dodging the cravings with fruit, seems to help this a lot. 

LEGUMES: avoiding for now. 
Been working on the other foods, haven’t reintroduced legumes in any way yet. 

CHOCOLATE/CAFFEINE: okay in small doses, but like sugar, hard to only have a small dose.
Those gluten-free brownies were wonderful, and after one small piece, I felt FINE. A few hours later, I had several more small pieces, and I felt anxious and sugar-crashy. Chocolate and sugar seem to be things that I could have in small doses if I could just only have them in small doses. 

CORN: perhaps the surprise problem food!
I wrote about how I wasn’t going to include corn in the elimination trial, because I just never thought I had a problem with it, but I was beginning to suspect I was wrong. Well, now it’s at the top of my list of suspects, after dairy. Last night we went to Greg’s parents’ house for dinner, and without even thinking about it, I devoured two cobs of fresh corn. I was distracted, I was so focused on not eating dairy that I completely forgot about my intention to continue avoiding corn.

I felt okay for awhile, and forgot about my mistake. Later that night, around bedtime, I noticed my joints were killing me again. I got out of bed to use the bathroom, and just walking from my bed to the bathroom door felt like torture. I was amazed, I hadn’t felt this sore in two weeks. It was awful. My first question was, could corn have cause this? I don’t know for sure, but it’s the only new thing I’d eaten. 

 

So what now? 

• I’m still avoiding beans. I’ll put those back after I have some stability, and a better idea of whether corn is a problem. 
• I’m avoiding corn as much as possible for awhile, to clear that out again and reintroduce it later. 
• I’m comfortable with small amounts of soy. 
• Sometimes I eat a gluten-free sweet treat (without corn syrup), but I’m working on only eating one or two and then stopping for the rest of the day. Sometimes this treat contains chocolate, but again, only in very small amounts. 
• I’m trying to eat lots of: VEGGIES! FRUITS! 
• I’m eating small amounts of meat and fish. 
• I tossed out the scale, and am now working on getting 30 minutes of exercise every day, and am committed to the idea of using exercise to heal or at least mitigate my underlying anxiety disorder. 

I do feel a lot better now than I did when I started. I’m becoming less sensitive to sensations now that I know their probable cause, which has helped me feel more in control of my body. I look at myself more from a data-collection perspective, rather than constantly throwing up my hands and feeling like my body is just melting down all the time. 

I’ll continue with the updates, as more connections are made and more news comes in! Thanks to everyone for their support, both here and in email (and in person!), and all the encouragement I’ve gotten to keep going.

Tagged as: caffeine, chocolate, corn, fish, meat, panic attacks, soy, sugar, wheat