Anxiety and Blood Sugar

Well, let me cut to the chase: I officially only made it to day 12 of the Sugar Detox.

Yep, the day after my last post that was all about toughing it out and sticking to it, I had coconut flour chocolate chip pancakes for lunch. I felt guilty and a little disappointed in myself, because I thought that I could stick to this for 21 days, even if it was rough, and maybe learn a few things about myself, even if nothing else came of it.

But, the reason I quit is not quite that simple.

On Thursday morning, I woke up with a familiar, but awful, feeling: lots and lots of anxiety. You know that horrible jolt you get when you wake up and realize you missed your alarm and are going to be an hour late for work? My anxiety on Thursday felt like that, only it lasted all day. Whether it’s from wedding stress, food stress, just being tired, or maybe for no “reason” whatsoever (anxiety is like that, after all), I found myself at about 9:30AM sitting on my couch, trying to answer an email (I work from home on Thursdays), and suddenly bursting into tears. It is not a fun feeling when that happens, especially to someone who is not typically a very emotional person. In fact, it sort of makes me feel like I am literally going crazy. After a few minutes of recovery, I decided that, even if it wasn’t the root of the problem, 10 days of low blood sugar was certainly not helping my cause. So I walked into the kitchen and made some chocolate chip pancakes. And I was disappointed, and I felt bad, but I also immediately felt more emotionally stable, and even though that panicked anxiety feeling lasted all day, there were no more random bouts of crying. There were, however, some apples and a few more small handfuls of chocolate chips.

Unfortunately, anxiety like that does not just switch on and off (well, it does just switch on, but not so much the “off” part), and I spent most of the weekend trying to regain my emotional footing. To aid in this process, Brandon and I even split a beer at the Broncos game on Thursday night (one perk to living 5 blocks from the Broncos stadium is that scalping tickets is pretty dang easy), we went to one of our favorite sushi restaurants on Friday night, and I had a little bit of tequila at a Mexican restaurant last night. Apart from those instances, I am still working to keep my diet as clean as possible for the rest of the month, because while restrictive eating was adding to my anxiety, I know that swinging to the other extreme won’t help, either. So now I’m treating this more like a Paleo challenge that occasionally allows tortilla chips (I just can’t resist them).

So, if you have been following along with my 21DSD, I hope that your third and final week of this detox is going amazing. But I also hope that, if you have found yourself stressed and grumpy and generally just not benefitting from the detox at all, and most especially if you have found yourself randomly bursting into tears at the sight of your email inbox lately, that you will give yourself permission to have a few chocolate chips.