Dear Nancy Sheldon:

You wrote: “My mom used to complain about how quickly I get sad or emotional”- any of your sadness caused by her?

anita

How are you doing at the physical level? Would you say in good or bad health? There are way too many MDs who still go for immediately drugging patients and therapists who ignore physical basics in favor of the things they think they can alter.

Depression and chronic emotional stress have profound effects on your immunity and this can drag you down long before obvious physical manifestations. The depression itself can produce chronic illness, this was and still is part of the conundrum of “chronic fatigue syndrome”. There are some thing you can do right away.

How is your diet? Any addictive-type “binge” eating going on with sugary starches/dairy/fatty foods? Many of these will develop addictive responses, and as the book “Salt Sugar Fat” shows, the “snack foods” have been engineered to produce exactly this result. Eat “whole” foods only, snack on fresh fruits, explore the wonderful world of smoothies where you can create nutritionally-dense meals and snacks that will actually get you well. The web teems with resources for this.

Try a fast. Just one day will do for a start; a genius researcher at USC, Dr. Valter Longo, studies the effects of fasting on immunity, his work applies to everything from curing “autoimmune” conditions resistant to all conventional treatments and cancer (both prevention and treatment) as well. You can see his videos on Youtube, and USC has sites explaining his work in very accessible terms.

There are some really good MDs whose work on diet everyone should know about. Dr. Mark Hyman is on PBS lately promoting some kind of “Eat fat get healthy” thing but you can obtain his excellent “Ultrametabolism” used for really cheap on line. That one book or others by Dr. Daniel Amen (the brain imaging guy also on PBS) might be enough to restore your energy and direction all by themselves.

It wouldn’t hurt to do some physical exercise and  just plain try and get strong. Some basic Hatha yoga (the old paperbacks by Richard Hittleman or later by Lilias Folan will do) can work miracles. There are free lessons on line. Learn how to breathe properly (the “alternate nostril” procedure will balance out BOTH hyper and depressive states!) The shoulder stand (stimulates the thyroid) plus the plow, and especially the sequence cobra-locust-bow have profound effects on your nervous system and are so much better than the Prozac drugs it’s criminal they throw meds at people without telling them about this stuff. (the SSRI drugs are out-and-out dangerous as can be seen at the sites SSRI.org and .net.) Plus they habituate and stop working just as abruptly as they sometimes start, yet most MDs are afraid to even warn the patient of this.

Low thyroid can produce depression all by itself. Look up the risk factors and see if they might apply to you, there are self-care strategies you can do long before resorting to expensive drugs that are probably better ways to deal with it as well.

“Fall in love with yourself if no one else will”–Dr. Arnold Ehret