inCYSTer Michal Hogan recently did a presentation about PCOS at Ohio State University. Michal is a wonderful resource to women in Columbus…if you missed her presentation I strongly encourage you to seek her out for individual counseling. In addition to being PCOS-trained, she is an incredible detective when it comes to working with food sensitivities and allergies. Sometimes those can interfere with your success.
Michal has a lot of success with migraines and fibromyalgia as well, which are common issues occurring with PCOS.
If you'd like to contact Michal, you can call her at 866.396.4438. Or, get to know her at her website, http://www.nutritionresults.com/.
If you're a regular reader of this blog, you know I write a lot about how not sleeping well can affect how you eat.
Have you considered that maybe the other may also be true? How you eat can affect the quality of your sleep?
Binge eating is often a night time activity. It is recognized for its ability to self-medicate, and many of you may even consciously seek out the behavior because you are aware of its sedating effects. But did you know…after the soothing effect of the binge wears off, you may actually feel more anxious? CCK, the chemical that is released to help digest protein and fat, is released in proportion to the amount of protein and fat that you eat. So if you binge, you release more CCK.
CCK is an anxiogenic agent. That is, it causes anxiety. So if you've binged, your temporary respite from your anxiety is likely to elevate not long afterward. If you don't make the association, you might turn to another binge for relief.
CCK is also a nociceptic agent. That is, it causes pain. So if, in addition to your PCOS, you have fibromyalgia or some sort of chronic pain, you might find that your bingeing is the behavior that, in the big scheme of things, is worsening, not helping your pain.
A sleep researcher once asked me about an interesting observation in one of his studies, with men who experienced excessive limb movement while sleeping. The movements seemed to get worse if they ate a large bowl of ice cream just before bedtime. We had an interesting discussion about how the CCK mechanism could have been part of the explanation for this phenomenon.
Time to connect different dots in your brain.
Carbs don't help anxiety, they worsen it. Carbs don't medicate pain, they intensify it.
