I no longer experience daily anxiety and depression!

Story

By: Sam Gabriel

I’ve been overweight ever since I was a kid. Growing up, my diet was consistent with the standard American diet high in refined carbs and very low in dietary fiber. I was also given many rounds of antibiotics as a kid, so my microbiome never stood a chance. I was also diagnosed with Bipolar disorder at age 15 and due to my extremely volatile mental state. I was morbidly obese for well over a decade. By age 20, I was in the high 200’s and by September 2018, I was 302lbs. I’d hit that weight in years prior as well but it’s my highest recorded weight. At the very end of November in 2018, a friend of mine started the ketogenic diet and since I learned about it here in college and was finally able to see that it wasn’t just a fad diet, I took a chance on it. I was highly successful with it. She was flying up from Arizona for the Comic-Con in Seattle that upcoming March so I was determined to lose as much weight as possible. I tried tracking macros but the only macro I could keep track of consistently was net carbs. During this time, I watched a ton of YouTube to learn about the body and your channel was of course one of my favorites. By March I was 244lbs. By the summer, I was a little burnt out on my weight loss regimen. My first year at Central was over in June of 2019 and an excess of time on my hands while I looked for a job and my unhealthy relationship with food combined to start an awful disordered eating cycle. The previous 6 months of tracking carbs and focusing on what I could and couldn’t eat made something in my brain snap and I found myself binging left and right. Having educated me on the science and benefits of fasting, I would utilize it after I had a binge to get back on track. Little did I know, even though fasting is a wonderful health tool, that in that context, a fast is considered a purge. I stayed locked in a battle with bulimia for the next 10 months. I gained and lost the same 10lbs during that time frame. I was desperate not to lose the progress I had gained. Eventually, I built myself a solid sleep schedule, started eating whole foods, and stopped reacting to my binges with compensatory measures and it was via these methods that I was finally able to recover. And during that recovery on my quest to transition to a lifestyle based around whole foods and natural living, I discovered that I had several unresolved intestinal issues. I have leaky gut, SIFO, candida overgrowth, and several food intolerances, all of which I figured out on my own after months of trial and error. In my treatment of SIFO and candida overgrowth (with Megaspore Biotic and New Zealand Naturopath Eric Bakker’s Canxida formula), my mental health symptoms began to disappear. Over the course of a month, I tapered off the 1,800mg of Gabapentin I had been taking for the last 15 years. It’s now been months since I’ve taken any medication for my moods. I no longer experience daily anxiety and depression. I sleep much better and though my intestinal woes are far from over, I’m well on my way to recovery and I have never had more hope for my future.

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