Kim was 37 years old when she signed up for Quantify, after years of struggling with anxiety that had developed seemingly out of nowhere.
Her doctor had diagnosed her with generalized anxiety disorder when she described feeling an inexplicable anxiousness that would fluctuate in severity throughout the day, despite not having anything in her life to be particularly anxious about.
Without running any tests, Kim’s doctor prescribed anxiolytic medication—anti-anxiety medication—with instructions to ramp up the dose when needed, but the medication turned out to be only moderately effective at ameliorating the nearly constant anxiety that was increasingly affecting every aspect of her life.
In her first appointment at Quantify, Kim’s health coach recommended a metabolic panel, cardiovascular panel, and hormone panel, to evaluate her metabolic health, blood sugar regulation, insulin resistance, cardiovascular health, inflammation, and hormonal health.
Test results
Her first time conducting such a comprehensive evaluation of her health, her metabolic panel showed elevated glucose, hemoglobin A1c, and insulin, indicating blood sugar dysregulation, or the condition of having abnormally fluctuating blood sugar, which commonly causes anxiety and other chronic symptoms.
Providing an additional clue as to what was going on, Kim’s cardiovascular panel showed elevated high-sensitivity CRP (hs-CRP), indicating systemic inflammation, which also commonly contributes to mood disorders.
Kim’s hormone panel completed the puzzle, showing abnormally high estrogen and low testosterone, further validating that her anxiety was attributed to biological, rather than situational, factors.
Recovery
Helping Kim to make sense of her test results, her health coach explained that her blood sugar dysregulation, systemic inflammation, and hormonal imbalance all had a common cause: her diet.
Having never thought much about the healthfulness of her food, Kim had ended up on the standard American diet, as most Americans do, eating almost exclusively bread, pasta, cereal, crackers, cookies, and other high-carbohydrate, high-sugar foods that underlie most chronic conditions today.
Changing her diet would be a precondition to addressing the factors that were causing her anxiety, given the significant extent to which her diet was compromising her health, and Kim was impressively receptive to making the change.
Following her health plan closely, she eliminated processed foods, sugar, grains, and dairy from her diet, increased consumption of fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, beef, chicken, fish, and eggs, and took certain supplements, such as magnesium malate, glycine, and NAC.
Within a few months, her anxiety had completely resolved, she was off her medication with her doctor’s approval, and she reported having more energy than she’d felt in years, an unanticipated side effect of her new diet.