Doctors often assume depression and anxiety are caused by stress, when they can be caused by poor nutrition even if you’re eating well. Everyone is has different nutritional needs, especially if you are a vegetarian, vegan or like me you had to have your colon surgically removed because of ulcerative colitis and are now intolerant of certain food groups. This means you may be lacking certain vitamins or minerals.

So what I discovered is the body has lots of ways of letting you know you need more or less of something.

At this point I want you to ask yourself these things:
What food do you crave?
What vitamin or mineral is highest in that food, for example there is lots of potassium in oranges. You can find the nutritional facts by searching Google?
This maybe what you lack.
Have you ever heard people say ‘now I’m eating healthily I don’t crave junk food any more’. We are an adaptive species, evolved to live nomadically where fruits and meats available to us that change with our location and the season, so our bodies are trained to crave what’s available.
So if you’re eating a lot of junk food and your body is a bit low in iron you’re bound to crave a burger or two but when you stop eating burgers and start eating veg high in iron which will you crave?

I crave chocolate like I could crash through walls to get to it, but the sugar and milk can make it less healthy for me. Now everyone is different, and I’ve long since stopped listening to people on the news saying ‘a recent study suggest that you shouldn’t be eating…’ they’ve often studied less than a thousand individuals and not from a wide ranging demographic like age, race, gender etc. How can a one size fits all approach be the answer to a healthy lifestyle? I never manage to eat the 2000 calories a day. Yet, I am 5ft 1 and 56 Kg and exercise regularly. There are woman much taller than me, who eat more, do less and way less.
So, we need to kill this prescription culture and start listening to our bodies!

My story
Insomnia was my biggest problem from June 2013 to March 2014, it took about a year after that to get totally sorted, in the meantime here’s what I went through and what I learnt.

I had insomnia for 8 months straight, 2-6 hours a night, I didn’t yawn for the whole of that time or was able to doze off during the day, I never caught up. I felt as you can imagine awful, brained fogged, life actually hurt and there was no escape. When I slept I barely dreamed, I never had that sleepy feeling, or ever felt drowsy. I would fall asleep and two hours later I would be awake, feeling the peaceful way one feels before they fall back to sleep again, but no, it didn’t happen. I was happy, and as active as I could be, my business was going well. We are all tougher that we think we are, and to this day i don’t know how I got as much work done.
I went to the doctors 6 times. I knew the insomnia wasn’t psychological. I’d had hypnotherapy which I believed would work but didn’t from a reputable hypnotherapist and I was doing all the right things to help me sleep: getting up and going to bed at the same time, eating what I thought to be a varied and healthy diet, low in sugar and no caffeine, hot bath before I went to bed, read a book before I went to sleep.
I have no colon, low bone density and I’m pretty sure I’m early perimenopausal. My blood tests for magnesium, potassium and calcium all kept coming back ‘normal’ yet I was in a terrible state, I kept any sign of this from social media. The last doctor I saw, shrugged his shoulders and said there’s nothing else we can suggest. I don’t think the medical profession take insomnia and sleep deprivation as seriously as they should. Sleep isn’t a luxury, it’s as important as water, oxygen and food. He prescribed me sleeping tablets (which I didn’t take) and gave me details of a sleep therapy group! OK this from doctor who has just taken my blood pressure which was extremely low, my pulse very high, and I have no colon! Which means I am prone to electrolyte imbalance, why did he not suggest some salts at the very least??? I’m quite frankly appalled when I remember this. Sleep therapy? I went back home, rang the number and spoke to the nice lady, who told me that they talk all about how sleep works and insomnia, by this time with all the researched I can done I couldn’t imagine what they had to teach me, and not being a driver at the time getting to Ipswich in the state I was in didn’t seem feasible. So I declined. That was wednesday, Sunday, I have no idea how it came to me but a little thought entered my head while eating breakfast ‘potassium’ No shops open, found what I could in the house pumpkin seeds, bananas, goats milk
within an hour, I felt warm from the inside out for the first time in 8 months and heavy, I hadn’t realised I’d been feeling light a faint, this may have been my blood pressure rising.
With something to go on in my research – potassium. I realised I needed magnesium to help metabolise that, calcium and vitamin D. Too much vitamin D, potassium and calcium can cause a magnesium deficiency, as the body uses it up to metabolise . Now I can’t back this up with anything other than my own experience, and there is an awful lot of misinformation on the internet, so you need to figure these things out for yourself. I think: firstly that because I don’t absorb nutrients as easily, secondly I have osteopenia, and lastly I’m certain I’m in the early perimenopause. So firstly that makes sense, not absorbing what I need, secondly – could my body be absorbing extra magnesium to lay down stronger bone? My blood tests state that my magnesium levels were normal, so perhaps my body has been trying to please my blood and bone by trying to share out the magnesium best it can? I know that doesn’t sound very scientific. And lastly hormones, during our periods and times of hormonal upheaval we need more magnesium.
A dietitian confirmed to me, we all need different amounts in our bodies, magnesium isn’t just stored in our blood, what they say are the recommended levels may not be correct to everyone.
After seeing that doctor, I had a blood test and was due to see a different one soon after. He’s seen me in the waiting room and had known me all my life, I’m sure he could see I had been in an awful state. But when I had my appointment, I’d been on the supplements and had been sleeping and feeling human again after so long. I sat down and the first thing he said to me was ‘you look amazing!’ I said back with some derision and slight bitterness ‘I’m sleeping’ I knew it wasn’t his fault that the other doctors had missed it but I was quite angry and told him all about it, when he said ‘it could be psychological’ I said what about the hypnotherapy? What do my blood tests say’ he shut up and checked, and look a bit more like listening than telling me what he thought, he was worried I was overdosing, they all showed normal, took my pulse – it was lower, my blood pressure was higher but still low. I felt much better but knew I had a long way to go before I healed which is still occurring now. He didn’t dispute what I had to say, and I felt pretty vindicated.

So what was happening? I have a theory that your body/brain have a fail safe that stop your blood pressure from getting dangerously low in your sleep when it drops anyway, so what if you already have low blood pressure? Or maybe this is how my body works, it keeps me awake until I’ll figured it out, the only way to do that is to listen.

Insomnia, vitamins and minerals
I have a friend who had a vitamin B12 deficiency for years, she had terrible insomnia to, when they finally figured it out she got better. Another person I’ve spoken to on Facebook had insomnia, was given sleeping tablets, turned out to be anemic. So how many more people are suffering unnecessarily

A lack of magnesium and potassium has been linked not just insomnia, but also depression and anxiety. At times I had these, and it wasn’t the same as I’ve had in the past. I would get fearful and upset about things that would normally make me laugh in defiance. One day I spilt some water on some expensive letterheaded paper I had printed, I nearly cried, until I realised how ridiculous this was. This was only a few months ago and realised it was magnesium deficiency again so I adjusted my dose and over a week I started to feel more emotionally sturdy and confident.
While I was suffering with brain fog, and the pain of sleep deprivation, I was desperate to turn my mind off to let it heal, I tried to keep to a regular sleep pattern but there was times in the say when I needed OFF! I could have turned to drink but instead by myself I learned how to meditate. Weird huh? I would shut my eyes, I’d make it to seven and a half minutes, then all of a sudden like someone flicking a switch I’d be back in the room and that email that said ‘please make it blue’ wasn’t gobbledegook after all it meant to ‘make it blue’ 🙂 I thought at first I was microsleeping, but I was fully aware, both of the outside and in. I decided when I would do this and the time increased to 10 and then 15 minutes. I think this helped a great deal and possibly helped me realise about what I needed. I find now when I meditate it’s like opening up a conversation with my conscious, subconscious and body, when you sleep the same happens. So I ask my subconscious and body ‘what do you need?’ sometimes I get images of what I need in response. I was in a terrible dark place and I’m not going back there, so I also go through as many things I can be grateful for in my life that have happened since I last meditated, small things like seeing a lovely friend or getting a new client, which are big things really we’ve just been taught to make the bad things seem bigger. Unlearning learnt behaviour isn’t easy, having had a breakdown in 2010, I know that a good mental state can mean the difference between life and death. So focus on the positive and take control!

I take well over the recommended allowance for magnesium, there are horrible side effects if you overdose, I don’t recommend this to anyone but you must listen to your body and what it needs. I monitor my dosage and my sleep and other health effects. My sleep now is regular, not without the odd bout of insomnia but I now have dreams, I fall asleep.

If you’re craving something unhealthy or you can’t have, find out what it’s high in and have something else high in that vitamin or mineral, listen to you!