I’ve put off writing this post for too long. I wanted to have achieved 100% wellness so I could write from a place of triumph and authority, but life seldom works like that. The truth is, I’m still fine tuning my health, and am working with my naturopathic doctor to understand why I experience some mood fluctuation reactions to certain foods and supplements. However, it’s ALSO true that I’m experiencing real strides in wellness that lead me to believe long-term depression remission is possible and am experiencing higher levels of health that treatments like antidepressants, talk therapy, EMDR, and Ketamine therapy were all unable to achieve. I attribute all of this success to naturopathic medicine and my own relentless attempt to understand gut health and the microbiome’s relationship to mood disorders. My hope is to let you into my life and to give readers another avenue to consider if they haven’t experienced the results they wanted with the mental health treatments they’ve tried.
Here is how my journey started. It’s relatively well known that stress negatively affects a myriad of systems in the body, and it’s common to experience IBS symptoms during periods of high stress. I heard one comedian light heartedly refer to this phenomenon as “pre-show diarrhea.” For me, the stress of caring for my dad through his bipolar illness wreaked havoc on my body. In addition to pretty severe anxiety and depression that one might expect having gone through a trauma, I also developed serious food intolerances. Gluten and alcohol were the most obvious triggers that would make both my IBS and mental health symptoms worse, but I also had another trigger that no one I talked to had ever heard of. This was so unusual that even members of my family didn’t believe me when I told them. Exercise was making me more depressed. The one thing that is universally prescribed to help people climb out of depression and grief was actively setting me back in my recovery. At its worst, too long of a walk or a single body weight squat could send me crashing into hot flashes and deep depression within minutes. This also robbed me of the ability to go out dancing, which is one of the things that brings me the most joy in life. And it could take 2-3 weeks for my mood to get back to the baseline after a dip. Needless to say, everything I ate, drank, or did with my body had drastic consequences. Even having cut alcohol and gluten out of my life, I struggled up and down with minor improvements from 2017 until 2022 when I started to make some real discoveries.
While I was remote working in Santa Marta, Colombia, my mental health was in shambles. I was at the most beautiful beach villa I will ever see in my life, a place where Shakira legitimately once stayed, and I was the saddest I could remember being since my Dad died. I talked to my older brother and he encouraged me to commit even harder to a diet that I now know to be called a low-fodmap diet. It consists of only eggs, meat, some nuts, non-starchy vegetables and water. That means no fruit, no grains, no potatoes, no sugar, and no dairy. This is an EXTREMELY restrictive diet and way to live, BUT I started seeing some huge gains in my physical and mental health.
I also started transitioning off my SSRI’s and onto a multivitamin and mineral supplement specifically created to help with mental health conditions called emPower Plus by a company called TrueHope. For the first time in 5 years, I started feeling my exercise intolerance get better. I could use the stairmaster and not get increasingly sad or anxious as my heart rate rose. This was huge for me. It also meant I could start dancing again!
But why were these things working? What is the connection between diet, vitamin supplementation, and depression? TrueHope’s support team was tremendously helpful in educating me on what causes gut dysbiosis, and I eventually sought the aid of a naturopathic doctor that helped me do stool testing and fill in the rest of the gaps in my understanding. Here’s what I know about my condition now. Stress lowered my immune system and slowed my digestive system down which allowed food to ferment in my stomach and intestines. A form of pathogenic yeast called Candida began to grow and outnumber the good probiotics and microbes that normally keep it in check. Some combination of the stress and Candida also began to strip the mucosal layer that lines my gut allowing toxins and digestive byproducts to leak into my bloodstream. This is known as leaky gut and is linked to many autoimmune conditions like psoriasis. My exercise intolerance was most likely caused by these free roaming toxins being pushed out of my muscles into the bloodstream all at once and overwhelming my body’s regular detox channels like the liver. Leaky gut also prevented me from properly absorbing nutrition from my food, leaving me with vitamin and mineral deficiencies, which is why supplementation began to help so much.
So how do I get rid of Candida and cure my depression once and for all? I was close to reaching this step recently. First, the low-fodmap diet starves the Candida of any form of sugar (which includes carbs and lactose) that it can use to replicate. Secondly, taking antifungal herbs like coconut oil, oil of oregano, and garlic go to work killing off the yeast. The problem is that killing off Candida also releases mycotoxins that also leak into my bloodstream and cause severe brain fog and mood issues, so the healing process has involved constant willingness to suffer more mental health symptoms.
In addition, my naturopath prescribed me to start using L-glutamine, an amino acid that helps rebuild mucosal gut lining, and a specific form of probiotic yeast called Saccharomyces Boullardi that is supposed to help with gut lining and also crowd out the Candida. Sacch B is a different form of yeast than the pathogenic Candida. Following this protocol, I was feeling better than I had in 5 years, and was able to start adding fruit, dairy, and beans back into my diet without issue.
However, I was still experiencing a little bit of brain fog and decided to make one final push to rid myself of this beast forever. The stool testing I had done showed a form of single cell parasite in my system called blastocystis that could also be disrupting my gut flora. I decided to take a course of antibiotics to kill it off. This unfortunately also let the Candida grow back pretty aggressively. Let it be known that antibiotics are awful for you. Depression, brain fog, and feelings of dysbiosis in my gut all returned. Even with the knowledge I have of what worked the first time, it has been difficult and doesn’t seem to respond the exact same way this time around. The Saccharomyces probiotic seemed to be doing more harm than good, so I switched to a multi-strain probiotic supplement called Therbiotic Complete from Klaire Labs which I am happy to report appears to be pushing the needle back in the right direction. I am having more days where I am starting to feel normal again, and hopefully will be able to reintroduce some foods back into my diet soon.
The summation of all of this might be THE BRAIN – GUT CONNECTION IS REAL. I hope you never experience a decline in your gut health like I have, but if you experience any combination of IBS symptoms, gas, bloating, food intolerances, and/or mental health symptoms I want you to know that a naturopathic/functional medicine practitioner can help you navigate this world and guide you back to health. I wish I had gotten off reddit forums and paid to have a real trained professional in my corner years ago. Our bodies are insanely complex, and unfortunately Western medicine largely turns a blind eye to the real causes of both digestive issues and mental health diagnoses. I have heard it said that doctors will see a patient for pain in their foot and will quickly write a prescription for pain killers instead of taking out the rock in the shoe. I believe in SSRI’s and antidepressants, but they aren’t the only tools we have at our disposal, and people deserve a fuller, more holistic view of their health and what they can do to help it.
