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Has anyone else struggled with anxiety while increasing sugars and carbs etc.. I’ve always had a strong mood change with higher volumes of those foods. Matt says it’s hypoglycemia and goes away once the metabolism heals. Now I’m looking for those who have gone through that and come out at the other end with stable moods.Anyone?
The thing about carbs is you have to eat them properly. Properly meaning as part of a balanced meal. Matt and others recommend a high carb diet but it’s not as simple as drinking coke and eating cereal.
If I eat an all carbohydrate meal I get a massive burst of insulin, my blood sugar plunges, adrenaline and cortisol go up and I get stressed and cold. I’ve fond you have to eat them with protein and fat to balance them out which retards the absorption of glucose and smooths out the insulin response.
Also there is a considerable sugar/starch debate. Some people do better with one, some with the other. Personally I can’t drink pop anymore without an instant stress reaction but baked potatoes (even though they have a higher GI than sugar) with some butter and salt (although boring to eat) make me feel nice and warm and stable.
Thank you sa230e. That’s very helpful! Matt doesn’t get into this in his book. I’m imagining that he would say that once hypoglycemia is overcome, as the metabolism is restored, there won’t be such a problem. I don’t know if he’s right. But I will experiment with different combinations. After all, it’s just no fun to be anxious?
Are you able to eat ice cream or cake without anxiety after?Yes because ice cream in particular is quite balanced in itself actually. It has plenty of fat and probably some protein too. When the blog was still around Matt had a blog post about ice cream being the most similar food to breast milk. As for cake, I don’t eat it much. Don’t really care for it.
I think the connection is more about the spikes in adrenaline and cortisol that are causing the “hypoglycemia”, which is really the idiopathic postprandial syndrome Matt talks about. For me, having high cortisol levels lately, and on my third attempt to follow Matt’s advice with very different results this time around, and higher anxiety levels in general, I just don’t think it’s the food’s fault. I’ve done the high carbs before (both of the last two summers) and not had the anxiety, but this time around, I’ve struggled to find anything that didn’t make me crash hard and feel very anxious and panicky. But I’ve pushed through despite the initial reactions and am starting to see steady improvements. I still can’t tell whether I do better with sugar or starch because it’s too stressful for me to consider restricting one or the other at this point, but I do think that even if sugar makes me crash harder, eating it in order to just eat something that shuts down my adrenal response is better than eating nothing because I don’t have a good starch cooked and ready to eat.
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