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How I Ate My Way Out of Anxiety & Depression

Mark Metry

LinkedIn Top Voice | Director | Mental Health Advocate | Follower of Christ ??

发布日期: 2019年2月17日

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“I don’t know what happened but I can talk to people now. My social anxiety is gone?!”

I was at dinner with one of my best friends at a restaurant in October of 2016 when I said this during our conversation. All of a sudden I could talk to the waiter with no sweat, a previously difficult task for me.

Naturally, I am an introvert. There’s nothing wrong with that, however I had severe social anxiety all my life. When you live a life where whenever you walk into a room with people, your monkey mind starts firing thoughts like “You are different” or “Everyone’s looking at you” it’s very hard to be yourself.

At first, I thought I was just naturally built like this and there was something inherently wrong with me. I eventually became conscious of the fact that I have social anxiety when I was about 18 years old. At first this felt like a death sentence.

Why? Because at that time in my life I fell into the propaganda of you can’t grow or develop yourself. You are just the way you are because life made you this way. However, I began researching online and fell down the rabbit hole of neuroplasticity and physical & mental growth.

When I started learning from people like Vanessa Van Edwards (Ep. 191), Tim Ferriss, and Tom Bilyeu …. people preaching growth and how we can all change to become the person we want to be….it sent my soul on fire.

Prior to this I fell down a pretty serious depression season in my life in 2015-16. But when I first started becoming aware of this, it gave me hope and hope is truly what you need to work towards a better future today and tomorrow. During my depressive season I ended up gaining a tremendous amount of weight from binge eating food.

I weighed over 210 lbs and realized that I needed to lose the weight. I saw the physical manifestation of my real problems and began to tackle those first. I began researching and instantly was bombarded by so much advice like intermittent fasting, to eating 7 meals a day, to going Paleo, Vegan, Ketogenic etc.

I eventually found a regiment called Bulletproof from Dave Asprey (Ep. 164) and started eating a base of vegetables, fruits, nuts, seeds, with healthy fats like fish, butter and eggs. In a month I lost almost all of the weight but more importantly felt my brain turn on for the first time.

All of a sudden my biological body was limitless. No more would I feel my heartbeat intensify or butterflies in my stomach when speaking to someone in public. I was far from perfect, but it was the spark to the powder keg.

Once I could think clearly for the first time in my life, I set out a plan and began to ruthlessly tackle my social anxiety. I would talk to every single stranger I could come across and make daily challenges for myself. Eventually, I got to the point where I could walk into a room and talk to anyone about anything. Which enabled me to go even deeper with my current relationships and even form new ones to create a life I actually wanted to live.

I’m writing this article because I don’t see anyone talk about this in the field of mental health. Nutritional psychologist is growing field in psychology but after speaking to so many legends on my podcast, I truly believe nutrition is the #1 - 3 priority someone should have in their life.

I was a college kid. I went to go see my doctor and after 20 minutes I was prescribed an anti-anxiety medication, which I decided not to take. It’s none of my business to recommend anything to anyone but after doing just a small amount of research I became aware of a tremendous amount of side-effects for this certain medication. I think prescribing medication to people who suffer depression & anxiety can be used as a good transitional phase in conjunction with other treatment…but prescribing someone a medicine for a mental disorder and leaving them alone in my opinion is a bad idea.

Well it turns out, if you remove the processed foods laden in chemicals that the average american primarily eats everyday and give their body the nutritional, mineral and essential fatty acid requirement….looks like you no longer have anxiety & depression!

Chronic Anxiety & Depression Can Be a Symptom of a "Bad" Diet & Lifestyle

Today I look back at what I was eating when I was a kid growing up in school.

Breakfast: Ultra Processed Cardboard Sugar Cereal w/ Milk

Lunch: Drank Chocolate milk and ate fried chicken fingers & french fries

Snack: Bag of Chemical Chips & Sugar Cocaine Candy

Dinner: Usually some other kind of a ultra processed fried meal

Snack: Chocolate Chip Cookies & other junk food

My body wasn’t getting anything beneficial. When an organism is constantly eating, but also starving for nutrients and not eating real food…your chemistry and function of your mind and body can go into dysfunction.

Growing up I would be in and out of the doctor’s office and taking medication almost daily for Asthma, Allergies, Lack of Sleep, Digestion problems, constantly throwing up and not once was food ever mentioned to me.

I began researching and found that the symptoms of asthma can actually be shut off if you get enough Vitamin D (coupled with Vitamin K2 + A) which means eating a lot of butter, eggs and fish. I eventually was able to be completely healthy minus a couple of other lingering symptoms which we will discuss below.

A study funded by Bill Gates & Melinda Gates (Gates Foundation) found that poor diet alone is a risk factor for one in five global deaths, according to the research. Surely, diet must also be the number-one thing taught in medical schools, right?

According to the most recent national survey, only a quarter of medical schools offer a single course in nutrition, down from 37 percent thirty years ago. While most of the public evidently considers doctors to be “very credible” sources of nutrition information, 6 out of 7 graduating doctors surveyed felt physicians were inadequately trained to counsel patients about their diets.

I’m not sure about you but I never understood the correlation between what you put in your mouth and what you think about yourself and even the various chronic illnesses so many of us have to deal with every single day.

Emerging New Frontier of the Gut Microbiome

According to most research it actually turns out we develop these chronic illnesses like asthma, IBS, and even things like Diabetes, heart disease, dementia and mental health disorders because out gut micro biome becomes unbalanced.

The Microbiome is what most researchers are saying now is the origin of our human species millions of years ago. Our bodies have approximately 20,000 human genes that are expressed, the microbiome has 2-20 million bacterial genes and these are the lowest denominator of organisms that grew over millions of years of evolution. We actually have some of this archaic bacteria in our human cells, mitochondria…yes the very thing that provides us with energy throughout the day is an ancient bacteria.

Researchers from the Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy at the University of Regensburg in Germany recently conducted an international review of microbiome-gut-brain (MGB) clinical studies. Their paper, “'I Am I and My Bacterial Circumstances': Linking Gut Microbiome, Neurodevelopment, and Depression,” was published online ahead of print August 22 in the journal Frontiers in Psychiatry.

"The main idea of our review is that there is strong communication between the GI tract and the brain and that changes to the microbiome-gut-brain axis could be associated with the etiology of different neuropsychiatric disorders such as depression.”

This research unveils the discovery of a new connection directly between the Gut & the Brain called the Vagus Nerve. Not only that but it is estimated that 90 percent of the body's serotonin is made in the digestive tract. In fact, altered levels of this peripheral serotonin have been linked to diseases such as irritable bowel syndrome, cardiovascular disease, and osteoporosis.

“The old story is that depression is caused by a deficiency of neurotransmitters like serotonin. This ‘serotonin model’ led to widespread treatment using selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) such as Zoloft and Prozac. If you’ve been diagnosed with depression, your doctor may have said that you’re “just born that way.” And you may worry that having a depressed family member means that you’ll get depression too.

However, gamechanging science is showing that our destinies are not written in our genes. Further, data revealing that SSRIs don’t work (and create dangerous side effects!), along with a mountain of research studies, have debunked the deterministic serotonin model of depression. Instead, we’re finding that depression is often a symptom of chronic inflammation.

We are all at risk for chronic, silent inflammation because we are living at a time of evolutionary mismatch. That is, our modern lifestyles create incompatibilities between what our genes expect of us and what our world demands.” - Kelly Brogan MD

The Ultimate Solution for Mental Wellness

After trying to tackle my health in my own hands, I began to run into a few minute problems after my initial success. I would feel the butterflies in my stomach before a speaking event or have some trouble digesting food and even some problems with sleep.

I discovered a billionaire philanthropist by the name of Naveen Jain (yes he also has a space company). Naveen (Episode. 139) found a technology created by the US government for National Security in Los Alamos labs also where the atomic bomb was created and through Naveen’s billionaire powers he was able to take that technology and license it and use it to start a company, Viome. Naveen said “If we find what’s making people sick, can we reverse engineer it to make people healthy?”

What’s special about this there’s a lot of talk about the gut as of recently because we are becoming aware that this is the root of all chronic disease. Well it actually turns out there isn’t a single functional microbiome test on the market right now. If you google microbiome test you will be bombarded by companies like uBiome and the American Gut Project that offer tests but only a genus level.

These tests don’t actually give you any meaningful information. Anybody can tell you what bacteria is in you, but Viome is the only tool that can tell you ALL of the bacteria, viruses, yeasts and exactly what they are doing now in your body through their RNA expression. Naveen recruited the world's greatest scientists and artificial intelligence experts from IBM to continuously improve the technology.

Viome works from an at home stool test and then recommends you what not to eat, what to decrease your intake of and what to really focus on in terms of the foods that will heal and promote bio-diversity in your gut.

I’ve been following my Viome regiment very strictly for the past several months and it’s a next level game changer. My mid-day brain fog after eating a meal is now gone, I sleep like a baby, absolutely no butterflies in my stomach and even my eyesight & dental health has improved which is crazy to me.

Please note I have no stake in Viome and am not affiliated with them in anyway other than being a happy customer. I feel indebted to Naveen and his team because it truly has been one of the biggest upgrades to my day to day health alongside meditation, exercise and sleeping well.

Please do your own research and question everything I’ve said in this article. Do not hesitate to reach out to me with any questions or comments you may have about this new frontier of treating mental health disorders.

I believe this is so important because even if you don’t have any health issues, you could potentially have something that could be placing limits on your energy and personal growth. You only have one body. The $300 investment into Viome is invaluable and I would easily pay $10,000 for a similar program.

How will you utilize this information into actions in your own life?

If you’re looking for a technological self-development podcast that focuses all about the human experience transformation in this 21st-century world, you should definitely check out my podcast, Humans 2.0

If you want more content like this, be sure to follow me on Linkedin.

You can Listen to my podcast, Humans 2.0 on iTunes, Spotify, Google, Stitcher Radio, iHeart Radio or YouTube.