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Diet, Health, and Mental Health
Diet, Health, and Mental Health

Diet, Health, and Mental Health

In “An Unconventional Approach to PCOS,” Peggy Emch writes about how powerful a factor diet is for health, mental health, and well-being.
When I was 14, I went to the emergency room with 4 cysts which had ruptured on my ovaries in unison (utterly agonizing pain). But after the ultrasound confirmed that the cysts had ruptured, the doctors said I should be fine and those too were ignored. I had other signs that something was wrong with my body. When I was 12 my hip joint fell out of its socket and I had to go to the ER to get it put back in place. They didn’t know why it happened so they sent me on my way (my hip and my shoulder continued to do this until I was 26, when I quit eating gluten). Once I had a head ache so bad it sent me to the ER. The pain that day was worse than childbirth. The spinal tap showed nothing and so it too was ignored. I looked so healthy despite the symptoms I guess it might have been hard to take me seriously since I was such a pretty young teen. How could anyone so pretty and thin be such a wreck? And so, I was eventually diagnosed with mental problems. All the cramps, the diarrhea, the pain, the joint problems, the feeling of being out of control were all in my head. By the time I was 12 it would become the job of psychiatrists to fix me, but they didn’t do a bit of good for someone whose mind suffered as a result of malnourishment and hormonal imbalances. (Even today it seems psychiatrists are mostly clueless about the connection between the mind and the body. Depression and mental problems are totally avoidable and correctable. Emily Deans is aware of this. I wish she had been my shrink.) … Like with every other modern health condition PCOS can be avoided and controlled by diet and lifestyle changes. (Genetics can predispose a person to develop the condition but genetics are rarely the cause of disease. Check out this article on Mark’s Daily Apple for more information about the relationship between genetics and disease.) After learning about grains and sugars, I discovered Loren Cordain’s book, The Paleo Diet. My health improved immediately and within 3 months I was pregnant. It was amazing that I was starting to get my hormonal problems under control but, unfortunately, a return to an evolutionary diet was not the whole solution for me. So I started taking vitamins, minerals, and hormone balancing herbs. I stopped over-exercising. I did all the things that I read should take care of the problem. But I still didn’t fully recover – many of my thousand symptoms improved but not all of them. For years, even after going Primal, I struggled with (minor by this point) PCOS symptoms.
Read the article to find out what else Mrs. Emch did to return to health — to a natural state of physical health, mental health, and well-being. Very interesting read!  

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