Kim was 37 years old when she signed up for Quantify, after struggling for years with anxiety, and not getting anywhere with conventional medicine.
A psychiatrist had diagnosed her with generalized anxiety disorder when she described feeling an inexplicable anxiousness—as if she was being “chased by a tiger”—despite not having anything in her life to be particularly anxious about.
Desperate for relief, Kim started taking the anxiolytic (anti-anxiety) medication her doctor had prescribed, but the medication turned out to be only slightly effective at ameliorating the nearly constant anxiety that was increasingly affecting every aspect of her life.
What’s more, when she asked her doctor if there were any tests he could order to investigate the causes of her anxiety, he dismissed the question, insisting that there weren’t any tests, that she probably had a “neurotransmitter imbalance,” and that medication was her only option.
Frustrated by her doctor’s obvious bias, Kim decided to pursue a more data-driven approach.
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 a comprehensive evaluation of her health, Kim’s metabolic panel showed elevated glucose and hemoglobin A1c, indicating blood sugar dysregulation, or the condition of having abnormally fluctuating blood sugar, which commonly causes anxiety, fatigue, weight gain, and other chronic symptoms.
Providing an additional clue as to what was going on, Kim’s cardiovascular panel showed elevated high-sensitivity C-reactive protein (hs-CRP), indicating systemic inflammation, which also commonly contributes to mood disorders.
Completing the puzzle, Kim’s hormone panel showed abnormally high estrogen and low testosterone, indicating hormonal imbalance, and 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, and grains from her diet, increased consumption of fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, beef, chicken, fish, and eggs, started drinking at least 64 ounces of water per day, and took certain supplements, such as magnesium malate, glycine, and saw palmetto.
Within a few months, the unrelenting anxiety that she had lived with for years started to improve, an encouraging indication that she was on the right track.
Within a year, her anxiety had completely resolved, she was off her medication with her doctor’s approval, and a follow-up metabolic panel, cardiovascular panel, and hormone panel showed no abnormalities, further validating the work she had done to recover her health.