I have suffered with Generalized Anxiety Disorder for a number of years, during this time my weight has plummeted and ballooned and I have found it very hard to maintain a good weight. Prior to Generalized Anxiety Disorder sticking its big nose into my happy and carefree life I was a good weight, fit and healthy. I was a UK10-12, I swam and ran and loved my food. I knew I was prone to putting on weight so would keep a check on my diet and weight and make the changes that were needed.

When anxiety and panic first hit I stopped eating and drank nothing more than a little water. I was often sick in the morning and if I tried to eat was gagging on food. My weight dropped but because I wasn’t skinny to start with it was not considered a problem, except by my hubby who was terrified by how little I was eating. For me what was a problem was that I had no energy, I stopped running and my children were noticing I never ate. I permanently had the shakes which my daughter was fascinated by and still remembers. It was at this time that I was first prescribed anti-depressants.

After the first week on them my appetite came back with a vengeance. I could not stop eating and not good healthy food either, I craved cakes, chocolate and burgers, all high sugar, high carb bad, bad food. I was eating again, that’s all that mattered. The weight piled back on and then some. I kept telling myself I would start being careful tomorrow then I stopped thinking about it altogether. My Doctor had described my medication as “nonchalance pills” and he was right. It just did not matter to me, I was feeling OK and I didn’t have thoughts of getting on the scales. I am grateful, in hindsight, that I did not have this attitude to the kids diet, I managed to maintain a healthy diet that they had always had.

I’m not sure when it hit me or why it suddenly mattered but one day I saw how big I had become, I got on the scales and I was 2 stone heavier. I decided to come off the anti-depressants. I just stopped taking them. Low and behold a few weeks later the anxiety was making my life a misery but this time no sudden weight loss, I was still eating anything that I could get my hands on. I was back at the Doctors being prescribed a different type of anti-depressant and also counselling. Another stone and a half went on this time and I did not feel the benefits of the anti-depressants. I managed to get myself running again but I always lacked energy and spent a lot of time beating myself up about my weight, my diet and how my running had slowed so much - was it any wonder, I was carrying an extra 3 stone!!

I came off that medication with Doctor supervision and with the help of CBT began to feel better, I lost a little weight, felt more in control and began to get my running up to where it had once been. Then there was trouble at work, I had no way of coping, no reserves left, I was highly sensitized to the anxiety I was feeling and panic set in. This time I refused medication, I was more concerned with my weight than anything else - by this time I was a UK 16, the biggest I had ever been. I joined a weight loss programme and began to eat more healthily. I was back to eating five a day and cut right back on sweet snacks. I have a sweet tooth and never want to completely deprive myself of the food I love, but moderation has very much made a welcome return to my life.

As I began to get better I realised that diet is linked into the feelings of exhaustion and self loathing that I had been living with. If you eat rubbish food you feel rubbish, with a good healthy diet and treats as just that, a treat, you feel less tired. It can be hard work at first, you have to make a real effort to get cooking and get moving. I stopped giving myself a hard time about running. I’ll run when I feel like it, I don’t force myself out of bed at 6am to run for an hour anymore. I walk the children to school everyday and I go for a jog when I feel like it. My diet, my health and my attitude improved together and I truly believe that they are all linked together and part of the road to recovery from Generalized Anxiety Disorder.

Fear and anxiousness are normal feelings which help us to deal with dangerous situations. They prepare the body for taking action. But as cognitive (thinking) animals, we create fear in unnecessary situations and it can spiral into larger, more pronounced panic attacks. These unnecessary situations are usually just distortions of normal thoughts. We take a typical situation, like a minor medical ailment or accident and our minds begin creating layers upon layers of exaggerated problems which get further and further away from reality.

Do These Negative Thoughts Plague You?

Magnification: Have you ever done this? Let’s say you cut yourself shaving. You say to yourself, “This cut is really bleeding, I could have leukemia!” So you run out and have a battery of tests performed. Of course, the tests come back negative. This kind of negative thinking is called “magnification” whereby small, even insignificant, situations become the seed to a whole distortion of something bigger and much more worrisome. This leads then feeds your panic engine, possibly triggering an attack or episode.

Another kind of anxiety-inducing negative thought pattern is emotional reasoning. In this case, you start to reason about how you’re feeling, which only solidifies unrealistic thoughts. For example, you might think, “I feel like I’m about to crack up, so I must be on the verge of a nervous breakdown.” Or “I’m feeling scared right now, I must be really in danger or else I wouldn’t feel this way.” This kind of distortive thinking causes you to leapfrog into evermore unrealistic scenarios, again moving more and more away from what is really happening and feeding that system of panic-inducing hormones.

How To Deal With Panic Anxiety

One of the most successful ways I’ve found to overcome these kinds of negative thought processes is through journaling them and re-reading them to recognize them as they start AND, more importantly, how they ended up to solidify them as being irrational. This method has given me a great amount of personal leverage in controlling my thoughts and staving off larger panic problems. So, let’s say you have a pang of fear over something - it could be anything from a new situation (e.g. “I don’t want to join Toastmasters - they’ll all laugh at me.”) or your inner hypochondriac showing up (e.g. “I hope that stomach pain isn’t appendicitis.”). Write that down.

Next, I try to put down reasons why that fear or anxiousness is irrational. For example, for the Toastmasters scenario, I might write down “Toastmasters is about introducing people to giving presentations. Everybody starting out is new. Nobody will laugh at me.” Same thing with the appendicitis concern. I might even investigate what the real symptoms of appendicitis and even some statistics on how often it occurs in order to write those down next to that irrational thought. At this point, I actively try to reconcile my thoughts with reality - trying to influence my thinking in order to stop propping up distorted realities - hopefully keeping any escalation into a panic attack at bay.

Lastly, I write down the outcome. Was the Toastmaster’s meeting embarrassing? No? People where actually helpful and nice? I note that. Was the stomach ache just gas? I write that down too. I then study these to recognize my patterns of thinking and how they actually turn out, cementing in my mind how these thoughts no longer serve a useful purpose.

Are you experiencing panic attack or anxiety attack In this article I am going to give you some information about these disorders as well as ways you can use to eliminate them.

A panic attack or anxiety attack has a lot in common with post traumatic stress reactions. If you have ever experienced one of these attacks you would probably rate it as one of the scariest things you have ever experienced. They are so scary that most people actually believe that they are dying during the attack. Many visit the doctor afterwards thinking that there is something seriously wrong with them, only to be told that they are perfectly healthy.

Because the experience is so traumatic it sticks vividly in your mind replaying itself over and over. This causes many people to avoid anything and everything that they think might set of an attack.

The key to overcoming these panic attack anxiety attack is to understand how they take hold. Once you do this you will lose your fear of them and will then be able to learn how to prevent them from ever happening again.

An attack will usually start with one of the following symptoms.

Palpitations or sensation of a pounding heart

Quick shallow breathing

Copious sweating

Sudden feeling of nausea and dry mouth

A sense of desperately needing to urinate of defecate

Sensations of shortness of breath smothering and choking

At this point most people will usually start panicking; they take huge gasps of air which is a very bad thing to do. Because we are taking in so much extra oxygen our bodies can’t process it properly and we start to hyperventilate, gasp and struggle to breath. Hyperventilation then causes the following to happen.

Imaginary chest pains

Trembling and shaking

Dizziness and faintness

A feeling of numbness or weakness

Difficulty speaking

What most people don’t realize is that all this would be over in moments if they just learned to relax. A panic attack or anxiety attack is just nature’s normal response to what it perceives as a strong emotional or physical threat. If left to its own devices it would burn out in just a few minutes. The reason why they get so bad is because our terrified thoughts and imaginings lead us to hyperventilate and thus increase and perpetuate the symptoms.

The key then to end these attacks is to say calm at all times, practice deep breathing and just relax. When you recognize the symptoms of an attack do not let your thoughts run wild bring them under control and tell yourself repeatedly that you are calm relaxed and under control. By doing all this you should be able to avoid most of your problems with anxiety, If you feel you need more help please visit my website where you can learn a state of the art method for eliminating anxiety forever.