How I Discovered the Brain/Gut Connection

There is a news article going around from NPR called "Gut Bacteria Might Guide the Working of Our Minds." Quite a few people have contacted me about this article asking if I have seen it since they know I use diet rather than medication to manage my bipolar disorder. For me, the article is not new information. I heard about the brain/gut connection many years ago but it has not been widely accepted or talked about in main stream medicine so few people know about it. However, this information is saving my life so I wanted to let you know how I found out about it and give you some resources for your own research.

The NPR article only talks about gut bacteria and how they have found that the bacteria in our gut effects our brain. For instance, in one study with mice, they put the gut bacteria of non-anxious mice into mice with anxiety and the anxiety in those mice decreased. They then reversed it and gave non-anxious mice the gut bacteria of anxious mice and the non-anxious mice developed anxiety.

I first discovered at least a connection between what you eat and mental illness when I was a child. As early as I can remember, I would constantly overeat sugar in order to make myself feel better. I actually ate spoonfuls of sugar out of a 5lb. bag. Throughout my childhood I was anxious, scared, sad, manic, angry, and seeing things that were not there. Somehow I discovered when I ate large amounts of sugar, these things got better. Of course, at that age I had no idea what was really happening and I did not make the connection that eating large amounts of sugar only perpetuated the problem, making me more manic if I did not keep up with eating copious amounts of sugar daily. I first read about this and how sugar increases serotonin in the brain when I was in my 20's and found the book "Potatoes, Not Prozac." This started my journey of researching how food and gut bacteria effect the brain.

Brain food snack. Photo copyright Jeff Norris.

I think the hardest part about using dietary and lifestyle changes to manage an illness, any illness, is that most of the researchers never work together and they only focus on one part of the problem. For instance, "Potatoes, Not Prozac" does tell you to eliminate sugar but there is no research in there about gut bacteria and brain health. Basically, you need to do a lot of your own research and put together the information all of the scientists have discovered and find what works for you.

My next step was a psychiatrist who told me that cutting out sugar and increasing my daily amount of animal protein could help with my ADD and mania. He said he read a few papers on it but usually did not recommend it because medication was easier, "no one wants to change their diet," he said. As I did more research, it was not surprising to me that more animal protein helps with mania. There is a lot of research about using a ketogenic diet to manage epilepsy and the drugs used for epilepsy control bipolar disorder so it seems to make sense that for some reason a diet that helps epilepsy would also help bipolar disorder. But again, two fields of research working independently of each other and thus information is rarely shared.

Every time I implemented one of these dietary changes, I got better. After a few weeks of sugar withdrawal, not eating sugar made my depression better, but I was still angry all the time (mania). Increasing animal protein got rid of the anger. The biggest issue with any of this though, at least in my experience living in the midwest, is that few doctors, even if they have read the research, really ever use diet to treat mental illness so none of them can help guide you find out what works for you. I will write a full post on this issue, but this has been for me and the people I work with, the biggest reason it is so hard to stick with dietary and lifestyle choices, it is just not supported in our culture, especially by society in general. Try going to a dinner party and not eating dessert or drinking and you will find just how difficult it is to eat what is best for you. I also developed a binge eating disorder from the sugar addiction and then trying to follow Weight Watchers which got me to be militant about food rules. So for years I have gone back and forth with what I eat.

Then my husband, who has always had a iron stomach, got very sick. He could not keep any food in him and his immune system was shutting down. He had all the tests done and was told he had Irritable Bowl and there was nothing they could do for him. We could not imagine that his whole life would be like this and a friend told us to try cutting out gluten (wheat) even though my husband did not test positive for a wheat allergy. He got better right away and since I was eating the same as him, I noticed my moods evened out. From there I went back to researching the link between food and mood and then found the Paleo diet which cuts out all grains, dairy, sugar, and legumes and I felt even better.

Photo copyright Jeff Norris.

Through the Paleo community is where I found a wealth of information. Books explaining why I had Irritable Bowl since I was a child, as well as eczema and a whole host of other issues. There were many stories from people who said their moods improved on the Paleo diet and then I found all of the research on bacteria and gut health. It was amazing. All of these things completely made sense to me and just a week into a Paleo diet I start to feel remarkably better.

Over these many years, my eating disorder has gotten worse and today that is still the thing that makes it hard for me to stick to eating Paleo. Not only will people argue, shame, and pressure you not to eat this way, but any way of eating that seems to have a lot of rules can trigger your eating disorder if you have not worked through the eating disorder with a therapist. However, more people are writing about this and talking about how to ease into a Paleo diet and find the foods that work with your body and help you recover from an eating disorder. That might mean you eat some dairy or none at all. You might tolerate white rice, or not. However, no where have I found that people with mental illness do well eating wheat, sugar, or artificial sugars. Sugar and wheat easily allow detrimental bacteria to grow like wildfire in your gut.

I will not say this has been an easy path because it has not been for me. I will write more about the journey in future posts. Basically, I have been Paleo for over a year now and when I can be 100% Paleo, my moods even out within a week and I am very stable. It works better and faster than any medication I have ever tried, with none of the side effects. As I work through my eating disorder I am confident I will be able to stick to this better and better as time goes on.

I would like to link you to some resources that you might find helpful in doing your own research about the brain/gut and food/mood connections. These are just a few of the resources I have, but I think it is enough to get you started!

Blessings,
Rev. Katie

General Resources:
Blog: Evolutionary Psychology by Emily Deans, M.D. This is the place to go for all the real research and studies about food/mood and the brain/gut connection.  Seriously, fantastic. This is the place to start your research!

Blog: i bee free - Fantastic blog by Courtney who has been able to really stick with the Paleo diet with modifications that fit for her. From i bee free: "Under a doctor’s care for hypothyroidism, Courtney Rundell ended up in a mental hospital and was misdiagnosed bipolar. A year later, she was diagnosed with Hashimoto’s Thyroiditis, an autoimmune thyroid disease that causes both hyperthyroidism and hypothyroidism. Neither her psychiatrist or endocrinologist reconsidered her bipolar diagnosis...Improperly treated Hashimoto’s Thyroiditis and Adrenal Fatigue were the cause of decades of suffering. After a lot of trial-and-error, she’s found the Paleo Autoimmune Protocol, minor supplementation, a regular sleeping schedule, yoga and meditation to be much more powerful than handfuls of pharmaceuticals."

Book:  Gut and Psychology Syndrome: Natural Treatment for Autism, Dyspraxia, A.D.D., Dyslexia, A.D.H.D., Depression, Schizophrenia. by Natasha Campbell-McBride, M.D.


Paleo Resources:
Website & Books : Balanced Bites by Diane Sanfilippo, BS, NC. Diane's website is a wealth of information but so are two of her books, Practical Paleo and The 21 Day Sugar Detox. She has information about the connection between food and your gut and all different illnesses.

Website:  Paleo Parents by Matt and Stacy. They have two cookbooks as well as chronicle living Paleo with kids. Stacy has lost over 100 pounds and talks about finding the diet that works best for you and loving your body as it is. This is a great resource for anyone with an eating disorder to start to learn how to eat even if you have health restrictions but not turn to eating disordered militant rules and body shaming.

Podcast: The Paleo View. Podcast featuring many Paleo experts covering all kinds of topics, including eating disorders, food and mood, and the brain/gut connection.

Website: The Paleo Mom by Sarah Ballantyne, Ph.D. Sarah is a wealth of information about using Paleo to heal autoimmune disorders and she explains the science behind the Paleo diet.

Website: Chris Kresser L.AC. Lots of science about the brain/gut connection.

Go-to Books about Paleo and all the science behind it:
The Paleo Solution by Robb Wolf. If you want a book with all the science but that is easy to understand, this book is for you.

The Paleo Diet by Loren Cordain, Ph.D. Considered the first book about Paleo that really got the movement started. There is a lot of science in this book and on his website with tons of published research papers.

Paleo and Eating Disorders Information:
Paleo and Eating Disorders from Paleo Diet Lifestyle by Sebastien Noel
Can the Paleo Diet Cure Bulimia? from Paleo Healing by Doron Dusheiko
Disordered Eating from Paleo Pepper.

The Messy Reality of Mania

I have decided to write a more vulnerable post than I usually do because I want people who do not understand mental illness to understand bipolar better and I want to let other people like me know they are not alone. Too often bipolar is portrayed as an illness of non-functional people and no one really knows what the illness is like for those of us who live and work with rest of world every day. Also, when those of us who write about having the illness are never honest about the darker sides of it, especially when we are in the midst of living it, we make other people with bipolar feel like what they are experiencing is abnormal. I hope this post helps raise awareness that in the midst of struggles like this, we still work to be contributing members of society. I also hope that others with mental illness feel held in a community of people who understand what they are going through.

Recently I have been noticing what I have to do to clean up after a night of mania, all the things required to be able to "present well." (Presenting well is what they say when those of us with mental illness are able to look ok on the outside and function just enough to get by.) This post-mania clean up and presenting well is one of the hardest parts of the illness and I wanted to share with you why with the story of a average day after mania.

After finally falling asleep at 7am, I wake up two hours later in a panic that I might have missed my alarm and I am late for a meeting. (I did not miss the alarm and now I am awake hours before I needed to be.) I think of the many tasks I still need to finish so my work does not fall behind, so I frantically lay in bed with my computer and get a few things done through the haze of sleep deprivation. I hope that everything I write sounds coherent. I have extreme stomach pain from everything I ate and drank last night in a binge eating episode.

I get out of bed and find that coming down from a mania and being extremely tired has made me quite dizzy, and I trip over my own feet and run into the side of the bathroom door. I barely brush my teeth and I shower, but don't wash my hair because that is too much work. I get dressed and try to pull up my pants without aggravating the now angry, red, and swollen cuts I made on my thighs and stomach. I know every step I take for the next few days will hurt. I make sure my son does not come into my room before I am fully dressed so he does not see the damage to my body. When I buckle my belt I realize my stomach is in fact two belt notches larger than it was yesterday thanks to everything I ate.

For me, this photo is a bit embarrassing, but real.

After I am dressed, my husband tries to get me to eat something for breakfast but I am full from various fast food items, the wrappers of which I now have to clean up. It is humbling and shocking to have to gather up the remains off all the things I ate since I don't really remember eating some of it. My husband has already cleaned up the shards from the dishes I broke in anger the night before. There is a lot of regret and questioning "What the heck did I do?" and "Was that even me?"

In order to not look like death warmed over, I sit in front of my extensive makeup collection doing everything I can to attempt to cover the huge red welts I have nervously scratched into my face. I put concealer under my eyes and curl my lashes to make me look less tired. A bit of light shimmer eyeshadow in the inner corner of the eye helps brighten the eyes as well.

At some point the night before or that morning I had sent my therapist an email saying I was not doing well, and he calls to help me look at what happened and see what triggered it. His call helps me realize the mania was not random, but a reaction to an event. This understanding stops me from falling into self-loathing, shame, and plunging into depression. Thank goodness for good therapists!

I try and interact with my son and husband, trying not to let the stomach pain and drowsiness make me too snappy. I fake a smile and hope my son has no idea how bad I am doing. I drag myself to meetings, with the pain of my stomach making me double over just a bit, and my brain being completely filled with what seems to be cotton. I can't really follow exactly what is going on so I smile appropriately and ask relevant questions, all the while knowing that while my body is in the chair, my mind is trapped somewhere else. I can see myself looking fairly presentable and not noticeably off to people who do not really know me, and yet I feel a million miles away trapped in a post-mania fog. I track the conversation while having a totally other conversation in my brain of how terrible I am and the agony that is life, which I have to live day after day.

I do all the things I have to do to "present well" and not cause too much alarm, and I go home. I get in bed and sleep, until my husband makes dinner and he and my son try and wake me up so we can eat together and we try to make tomorrow a better day.

Blessings,

Rev. Katie

Controlling Mania With Energy Medicine

I had a particularly bad manic episode Monday that kept me awake and driving around the city at 4am. I was arguing with my husband and feeling like I would never get better even with the new integrative approach we are taking with my treatment.

This was my first really bad manic episode since starting with my new therapist and in my mania I thought all this energy medicine was never going to work. I was such a wreck that I could not do the energy work on myself and I fell apart. I thought I would go into the office yesterday and prove that when I am this bad energy work will not help and all of this is pointless.

Instead what happened is that I left an hour later totally fine and with a plan of what to do when these times happen again.

I do not understand how energy medicine works. It is all confusing to me and honestly even doctors who use it say we just do not have enough double blind studies to have good scientific evidence. However, they see it work with people and so they use it.

So, we talked a bit about the things in my life that might have triggered this episode but in the end what worked was the meridian work my therapist taught my husband how to do for me.

My husband is a very logical computer scientist and so I was completely surprised that as he was working with my meridians he could tell if I was calming down or not. He could tell if I seemed stuck and unable to let go of anger and anxiety, and he could feel the energy from me and all he was doing was holding onto a few points on my feet.

Yes, we wrote with a Sharpie numbers on my feet for meridian points :-)

For me, the energy medicine seems to be working in a few ways. One is that I can actually feel the energy in my body being off balance and the energy work fixes that and makes me more relaxed and even. Second is that during the energy work I am able to figure out what is contributing to my illness. I have done talk therapy for forever and what I am learning is that all my talking, self analyzing, and trying to have an answer for everything has not helped me very well. The energy works seems to balance everything out, make my mind more clear, and honestly the answers just come to me. Then I am able to work through things and understand what is going on better, but at that point, it almost does not matter. It is as if just identifying the issue lets me release it.

As my husband sees it "You have two completely different systems in your body, the logical and the emotional. Trying to talk through something only helps if the problem is in the logical area. If it is emotional you really need to do the energy work and center yourself to access what is going on."

Third, the energy work is something concrete that I can do as part of a routine but it is also something that my husband can do with me when I can't help myself. It is very hard to find things that our loved ones can actually do to help us and finding something like this that is so concrete and works so well is really a blessing for us.

I am surprised that I walked out of the office with my mania under control in just an hour. (If you have mania you will know how amazing that is.) I am surprised that even my husband can actually feel a difference and feel the energy when he is helping me. I am surprised that I have discovered more of my triggers and understand my illness better in such a short time with this new approach to therapy. I am surprised that this works at all.

I have a long way to go but this type of progress is new for me and I look forward to seeing where this all goes.

Blessings,

Rev. Katie

Am I Getting Better or Am I Just Manic?

I have been feeling better the past few days. I have been relatively happy and able to handle things pretty well. My impending sense of doom has been gone since yesterday afternoon. I should be happy about this and would like to think that this means I am getting better. However, I know this probably means I am actually getting sicker.

What Is Happiness? (Photo by Jeff Norris)

How do I know this? Well, I am feeling better even though I have not been very strict with my diet. I just got a bunch of files cleaned up in my office and I have written four blog posts in the past three days. All these signs tell me that I am unreasonably happy. I am probably manic and this could get bad pretty fast.

However, knowing all of these things and paying close attention to what is happening may mean that I can stop the mania from getting out of control. In order to do that I need to make sure my diet is strictly adhered to, make sure I sleep, don't overwork myself, continue to record how I am doing, keep up my exercise, take my medicine, and have Jeff keep a close eye on me.

It makes me sad to know that I can't just enjoy being happy. Happiness is usually actually a sign of illness for me and I wish instead that this were something I could just celebrate. I wish I could see this as a sign of getting better and hope for the future. Anything is possible, but I know from past experience that when I let this happiness run rampant, it quickly turns into mania.

What I am hopeful for is that I can get through this without a severe manic episode. I hope this happiness is productive and not destructive. I hope what I learn from getting through this will mean that I am getting better at treating my illness. It will never go away, I know that now. What I am learning now is how to best live with it so my life is balanced and productive.

If you have bipolar disorder, how do you manage your mania and let it be a productive time in your life without it spiraling out of control?

Blessings,

Rev. Katie

Mania

I have been reading a lot about bipolar disorder online and watching videos of people's stories and I noticed something interesting. People seem very comfortable talking about the depression side of bipolar, but they hardly ever mention the manic side. They will go into detail about their suicidal thoughts, feelings of hopelessness, inability to work or care for themselves and others. Then they say, in passing, that they also have manic episodes.

Is this because depression is becoming a bit less stigmatized so it is easier to talk about? Is this because mania is the part that scares other people? Is this because mania is when we do really embarrassing or stupid things?

Mania is described as a feeling of euphoria, feelings of grandiosity, reckless actions such as excessive spending, feeling that nothing bad will ever happen to you, fast speech, and racing thoughts. In my experience, this is the part of bipolar that people are most scared of. No one wants you making a fool of yourself at a party, spending all of your savings, speeding down the highway, or Facebooking and texting while manic. We do not want this to happen either, and I think that is why we don't talk about it.

I was not diagnosed correctly with bipolar disorder until I finally told my doctor about symptoms that I was too embarrassed to mention. My mania is actually more anger than euphoria. I might speed down the street not out of a sense that I am invincible, but because I am so mad.

I noticed the other day that I was in a manic phase, but it was a bit different than what I was used to. I had turned up the music really loud and was dancing and singing with my son. I did feel euphoric and like nothing bad could ever happen. I also didn't notice that it was 10pm and the backyard speakers were on so I think the neighbors got a bit too much Selena Gomez and Black Eyed Peas when they were trying to sleep. Happy mania is new for me, and if it is controlled, can make for some really fun times with my son who laughs hysterically at me.

I have no scientific evidence to back this up, but I think that some of us may manifest mania as anger or happiness based on our life situation. When I was little, there were many things that happened in my life that made me mad, such as illness of loved ones for one example. Now life in general is better and I think my mania is changing as well.

I don't think either kind of mania is good because you are more likely to do stupid things when you are either really happy or really mad. Actually, excessive spending or excessive eating happens during either time. Or you might commit to things you really can't do, start a new businesses, or make huge life changes.

after manic organizing

I do have to admit that there are advantages to mania because this is usually when we are the most creative and the most brilliant. Medication takes that away for many of us and that is one of the reasons some of us stop medication. To me, mania represents the creative spark, and I don't really want to get rid of that. I would not mind if it was a bit less like a firecracker and more like a candle flame though.

Mania can be embarrassing, scary, extremely creative and productive, and no one wants to talk about it. However, until I did talk about it, I went misdiagnosed for seven years.

Mania is just part of who we are and part of what we have to manage.  I try to think of managing the manic phases as harnessing the power I have within me to make it productive and not destructive.

Blessings,

Rev. Katie