Category Archives: Panic and Anxiety Issues

Week 4 Summary

This is the end of my first month of moderation! I updated the progress page to reflect this week’s achievement of staying pretty nearly in the exact same place. And it’s okay! It doesn’t look like anything is happening, and yet I just know it is. I’m not worried at all about the lack of anything visible on the outside, because I know a lot is changing on the inside. Blogging is such a huge help, it really keeps me focused on this project, when I’d otherwise get bored and discouraged and wander off. I had some really hard days this week, and at one point I felt pretty sick and thought I was getting the Hamthrax, but through it all I kept thinking about how I could keep working toward my goals, even while I was miserable and curled up whining.

Food tracking success – by which I mean success at tracking, and success at inhaling anything chocolate that came near me

I tracked 4 days worth of food this week, which is a new habit, and an incredibly useful one. I don’t know if it was being sick, or what, but my nutrient percentages are awful. This is the daily average of four days worth of tracking food:

  • 10% protein
  • 51% carbohydrates
  • 38% fat (which is hilarious when you consider that I myself am about 38% fat – suddenly that phrase “You are what you eat” takes on a whole new meaning).

This isn’t normal, for what it’s worth. I’ve eaten a heapload (that’s the technical term) of candy over the last four days, easily many times more than I usually would (normally I don’t really eat candy, to be honest – I’m more inclined toward cookies). What have I learned from this? First: Halloween is evil. Second: a bowl of candy in my house is sort of like a bowl of beer in a frat house – it just isn’t going to last long. Next year, there MUST BE PLANS put in place for the leftover crack cocaine candy.

I’m going to try and kick it up a notch in Month 2, starting with daily tracking using Lose It!, and a more structured exercise program that will include working with weights 2-3 times a week.

Panic attacks and lactic acid?

I’m currently doing research (uh, that is I have a good friend of mine doing research, she’s a librarian) on the connection between lactic acid and panic attacks. I’ll write more about this in the coming weeks, but basically I’ve noticed a very specific kind of “attack” that happens to me after weight lifting. It very rarely happens after aerobic exercise. For years I’ve tried to tell people that I have trouble with panic attacks after working out, and for years the response from shrinks and doctors has been, “Oh yah, people who are anxious get nervous about their heart rate getting high, and they panic.” I get that this is probably true for a great many panic sufferers, and I admit I’m not a big fan of my heart racing, but what I’m feeling is very different. I can do an aerobic workout with my heart thumping and be just fine, but it’s after I do anything with weights that I have this very particular kind of attack.

I finally made the connection to lactic acid, and the small amount of Googling I’ve done on the issue seems to suggest that there is a connection between lactic acid and panic attacks. For that reason, I’ll be starting my strength workouts very, very slowly, and build up. It will take a great deal of consistency to make the slow and steady progress I hope to make, and it’s really important to me that I stick to it. If you notice me over-focused on strength work for the next few weeks, this is why!

Post-flu: food is confusing

tearing-hairMy body is a bit of a mess lately. Ever since that flu hit a week ago, I’ve been feeling awful. I’m exhausted all the time. I keep trying to do a few minutes of exercise, to get that effect where doing a little exercise gives you energy, but I can barely keep going longer than five minutes. Honestly, five. I set my watch and everything. If I make it past the 5-minute mark I’m pleased.

My innards are all confused and messed up, and food is also doing weird things. For example, whole wheat 7-grain toast seems to be pleasing and even soothing, but the Kashi 7-grain cereal I bought gives me headaches, stomach pains, “brain fog”, fatigue, tightness in my chest, anxiety, and bloating. What the heck? It’s happened three different times, consistently. Just to add to the confusion: the gluten-free, wheat-free coffee cake I made from a mix by The Cravings Place, does the same thing the Kashi cereal does (again, I tested a few times – leave it to me to make ABSOLUTELY SURE the coffee cake won’t work, heh).

At this point, I don’t know what to think. The plan of action I like the best is to start working on collecting veggie recipes, so that I can go back to eliminating a few things while not starving.

Tomorrow, on my 35th birthday (hurrah!), I’m off on a visit to Portland to see my bonus sister get married. I admit I’m a little nervous about coping with food, and a lot nervous about coping with anxiety, but I’m trying to keep an optimistic outlook on everything. I’m taking a lot of good snacks with me, and honestly I’m even tempted to take my Vita-Mix down too. I’ve heard a lot of people travel with theirs.

Living dairy-free is frustrating sometimes

Unfortunate run-in with nail fun

This guy probably doesn't feel sorry for me.

While I realize that there are worse things in the world than not being able to eat dairy products, like say elephantitis, or a third (or fourth) nipple, or having a few dozen nails shot though your head, it is sincerely frustrating to have to turn down every treat that comes your way because someone, a long time ago, thought, “HEY, you know that white stuff that comes out of a cow? Let’s PUT THAT CRAP IN EVERYTHING!”

And then the rest of the world was like, “Man, could those French get any more suave?”

I’m upstairs in my room right now, having run up here a half hour ago when I wasn’t sure if I was going to throw up or have a panic attack, or both. Now you could say that this is merely the karmic punishment of a food and fitness blogger who JUST YESTERDAY posted about how she was going to buckle down and get in shape and all that*, having had a decaf soy mocha and two chocolate chip cookies (the cookies were FREE, YO!) for breakfast. You could maybe argue that I sort of had this coming, but no, I’d like to blame it on the cows.

I just called the cafe where we got our treats, and yeah, the cookies are chock-full of butter.

LE SIGH.

*In my defense, I did 40 minutes of light aerobic exercise yesterday.

The Twinkie Defense: “But I didn’t know it had DAIRY!”

twinkieLast night certain monthly womanly things happened (subtlety, I has it), and I was craving something bad for me. Now, normally, I’d want Greg to run up to the corner store and get me a Skor bar, but for some magical reason, the mere mention of anything with milk (like milk chocolate) has me cringing. I haven’t had anything with milk or cow-derivatives since June 30th, and I sure paid for that salad and bread, lemme tell you.

Normally I start craving cheese about three hours after the last meal with cheese. The cycle goes something like this:

5pm: Eat cheese.

6pm: End up in bathroom for hours, cursing cheese’s name, calling out for chamomile tea, and sketching out plans for how I’m going to wipe out all cows with some kind of APPARATUS that I will call, THE BOVINATOR.

6pm-9pm: Vow never to eat dairy again.

9:30pm: Now that digestive system is completely empty, go to fridge to nosh. Hmmm……..leftover pizza sounds good….

Greg has been so fed up with me before that he’ll say things YOU JUST CAN’T TAKE BACK, like, “If you do that one more time, I’m never bringing you chamomile tea while you sit in the bathroom again,” or, “If you eat another slice of pizza, I’m not calling 911 when you think you’re dying later.”

So you’ll be proud to know, as he was proud to hear, that I turned to him after ten entire days off dairy and said, “I don’t want chocolate! I’d like a Twinkie, please! Everyone knows they don’t have dairy. They just have vanilla-flavored lard.”

“Well, that’s appetizing.”

“JUST DO IT, MAN.”

He came back with a 2-pack of them, and I dove in. Halfway through the first one things seemed a little suspicious. Don’t get me wrong, they tasted just as horribly and delightfully gross as I’d hoped, but there was something…..amiss. I checked the wrapper. Yep. About twelve ingredients down, after all the preservatives and lard and vanilla flavoring and what I assume must be some alternative form of embalming fluid, there it was: sweet dairy whey.

I threw the rest out. Aren’t ya’ll proud? I chucked those puppies.

I still consider myself emotionally dairy-free, since accidental dairy doesn’t count.

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.