Here's Why Your Diet is Giving You Anxiety

 There are people out there, even doctors, that will tell you that your diet has nothing to do with anxiety. They’ll say that these two things are completely unrelated. But that’s simply not the truth. What we put in our bodies has a direct effect on how our body functions and that means your diet may have helped start your anxiety, or may even be preventing you from recovering. So, in today’s episode, let’s discuss why your diet can give you anxiety, and how you can change your diet to help supercharge your recovery from anxiety.

Before we dive in, you need to make sure you are on the path to recovery. As we’ll discuss, it’s important to make sure you are getting all the right nutrients from your diet, but simply changing your diet won’t allow you to recover from anxiety. Therefore, I’ve put the 5-Step Cure to Anxiety and Panic Attacks in the link below. It’s completely free and it’ll show you the steps that will take you to a full recovery, so you never have to worry about anxiety again.

Alright, I remember before I had anxiety, I gave no real thought to my diet and what I was eating. If I was hungry for something, I would eat it. I’d have hamburgers, pizza, chicken nuggets, ice cream, you name it – If it sounded good to me, that would be my next meal. 

But what I didn’t realize back then was that a majority of my diet consisted of highly processed foods. Highly processed foods are manufactured foods that are characterized by their high-calorie content and low nutritional value. These foods are often high in sugars, unhealthy fats, and additives, while lacking essential nutrients, fibers, and proteins. 

The list of processed foods is seemingly endless, but some of the worst offenders are as follows: frozen meals, packaged meals, fast food, certain meats like many deli meats, baked goods, candy, and ice cream - those kinds of things.

Unfortunately, highly processed foods are responsible for many devastating health problems. In fact, they are mostly to blame for the soaring rates of diabetes, heart disease, high cholesterol, and – most noticeably – obesity. Now, these problems are easy to detect, measure, and diagnose, so they get all the attention. However, to our detriment, we have largely ignored the effects this diet has on our mental health, including anxiety.

But the reality is that your diet can significantly affect your nervous system. The first way it can do that is by affecting your neurotransmitters. Neurotransmitters are these tiny chemical messengers that your nervous system uses to communicate with the rest of your body. They are essential for your nervous system to be able to function properly. I want you to think of your nervous system like a well-orchestrated traffic system, and it relies on these neurotransmitters to regulate and transmit signals effectively. But here’s the key: the nutrients that you derive from your diet are pivotal in the creation and workings of your neurotransmitters. So, when you're not getting the right nutrients from your diet, your neurotransmitters can stop working correctly. When this happens, it’s like when traffic lights aren’t changing from red to green—everything gets halted, and the whole system is in chaos. Inside your body, this chaos primarily comes in the form of enhanced stress responses and heightened levels of anxiety. 

Historically, getting the proper nutrients never used to be a problem because processed foods didn’t exist. In fact, since the beginning of time, we’ve primarily lived on what we now call a whole-foods diet. We ate meat, fish, fruits, vegetables, and nuts that existed in their natural and unmodified state in nature. Well, this whole foods diet did a fantastic job of supporting the proper functioning of our neurotransmitters by being rich in certain essential nutrients. For instance, 

• The amino acids and zinc that is derived from meat, as well as the B vitamins from grains, help facilitate the production of neurotransmitters. 
• Omega-3 fatty acids from fish contribute to the integrity of the neuron’s cell membrane. 
• Magnesium from vegetables assists in the communication between neurons; and
• Antioxidants from fruits help prevent oxidative stress from damaging neurons.

Our whole foods diet was high in most, if not all, of these nutrients. However, today’s “standard American diet,” with all its highly processed foods, is stripped of many of these essential nutrients. And that creates a big problem because it can cause a breakdown in communication with our neurotransmitters.

To help our nervous system function properly, it’s critical that we eat a whole-food diet and get all these essential nutrients. To help out with this, I have put a link to Fearless Diet below. The Fearless Diet is the diet you’re going to follow to make sure you are getting the right nutrients and supporting the proper functioning of your nervous system. This is the diet that I recommend to my clients to help supercharge their recovery and get them back to feeling normal as quickly as possible.