Natural Anxiety Therapy

Proper nutrition is a huge part of your anxiety therapy.  As part of this blog, some of the yummiest and anxiety liberating food recipes will be posted.  Most of my healing has been through proper choices of food. Sometimes though making healthy quick, but YUMMY recipes can be challenging. Here’s one of my latest that just knocked my socks off!

Marinated Fresh Trout:

1 trout cleaned

raspberry vinegar (Vom Fass is the best!)

olive oil

fresh or dried dill

Real Salt

Oyster Mushrooms – chopped

Marinate fish in olive oil and raspberry vinegar.  About a 2:1 ratio of the olive oil and vinegar.  Sprinkle with dill, and lightly salt.  After a few hours of marinating, pan fry in a tablespoon of coconut oil at med/high heat. Start with skin down and add all the deliciousness of the marinade!  When you flip after a cooking  the fish a minute or so, add the oyster mushrooms around the sides to cook in the marinade.  Fish is cooked when flakey and tender, it’s very quick – just a few minutes. Serve fish with mushrooms and a fresh spring greens salad!

Why so good for you? Trout is a good source of calcium, vitamin A, potassium, phosphorus, and of course PROTEIN.  Help anxiety, cook trout!   Enjoy, until next time…

Possible Food Allergies

Many of us would never link what we eat with anxiety, depression, panic attacks, auto-immune disorders, chronic fatigue and over all feeling like “junk”. A few years ago one of my doctors suggested doing Dr. Doris Rapp’s Allergy Elimination Diet. This is where a select group of foods that are potential allergens are eliminated for two weeks. Then they are re-introduced one by one and any reaction is observed. The items that are common allergens are wheat/gluten, corn, sugar, soy, dairy, additives/preservatives, chocolate, sugar, caffeine, nightshades, eggs, citrus, and peanuts.

The results indicated I had issues with wheat/gluten, soy, corn, chocolate, sugar, nightshades, and caffeine. Since then I eliminated these items from my diet my health has increased tremendously, especially anxiety. But, I felt I was missing something. The Allergy Elimination Diet is a great place to start to know what may be creating problems. Recently, I asked my doctor about doing an ALCAT test that uses blood to determine allergies and intolerances to food and chemicals.

The results came back with some additional items that I was completely unaware were giving me problems. Results indicated a severe reactions to casein (milk protein), peanuts, pinto beans, yellow squash, baker’s yeast, and moderate reactions to whey (the other milk protein), apples, garlic, mustard, apples, brussel sprouts, and cottonseed. These are things that I had been eating on a regular basis. I definitely was missing A LOT!

In essence, the Allergy Elimination Diet helped got me off to a good start. However, there were still other lingering symptoms that were probably food issues (congestion, tiredness, foggy thinking) and were identified using the ALCAT comprehensive diagnostic panel. Consider food allergies as part of anxiety therapy!

Is this the right doc?

Help anxiety, find the right doctor to add to your health care team. There are some of the important tests to have your doctor run to help determine what’s going on in your body that might be causing anxiety. But first it’s important to find a doctor who is on the same page as you. Even when I had worked with doctors who were supposedly holistic and not as likely to prescribe drugs, they did not know what tests to run to find the root causes of my relentless panic attacks and anxiety.

In hindsight, here are 5 simple questions that I wish knew to ask could have been:

1. Do you do 12 hour cortisol tests? Answer should be YES.

2. What do you find the causes of your patients anxiety to mostly be? Answer should be things like hormone imbalance, thyroid disfunction, hypoglycemia, vitamin/mineral/amino/fatty acid acid deficiency, candida overgrowth, damaged digestive tract, and /or insomnia.

3. How do you go about treating anxiety, panic attacks, depression, etc? Answer should be nutritional changes, nutritional supplementation, hormonal balancing, detoxification, and medication only if absolutely necessary.

4. If you prescribe a medication for me, what is your approach to get me off of it? Answer should be that as your body gets stronger, you will feel better. They should closely monitor your progress and wean you off medication properly when the time is appropriate.

5. What is the most important item you address first with your patients? Answer should be getting you to feel like a human being again ASAP!

Relief  from your symptoms is your #1 priority. It can be achieved fast if your doctor knows what tests to run based on your symptoms. I floundered around with incompetent doctors for over 6 months. When I found a doctor who knew what tests to run and was given the appropriate amino acid formula for my deficiencies, I experienced almost 80% symptom relief OVERNIGHT! Of course it takes time to really heal the my core issues which were be lifestyle, digestion, nutritional deficiency, food allergies, toxicity, etc. But feeling like a sane person was my first priority, I was at my wits end. Asking the right questions to your physician is the most important part of your anxiety therapy.