Healthy Nutrition for Chronic Pain, Anxiety, Trauma
I am sometimes overwhelmed by the loads of nutrition & diet information out there… What about you?
Researching & understanding the impact of nutrition on our whole body, especially the nervous system, has been more than just a hobby for me, it became vital for the possibility of our daughters healthy development.
Before our daughter, Myron & I already had a passion for integrative whole-person health & therapies. But the thing that hit our daughter amped up that passion.
I was already telling my counselling clients that anxiety & PTSD were not just nervous system impairments, but was going on for the whole body. I would talk with them about how nutrition impacts the anxiety or PTSD symptoms they were experiencing. So, among other areas of treatment for my daughter & for the benefit of my clients, I did a deeper dive into nutrition & dietary changes to help our daughter live the best life possible.
Nutritional changes have made a significant difference for our daughter’s wellbeing… healing gut damage, anxiety, sleep problems, cognitive impairments, gross motor & fine motor challenges, self-harming autistic stimming…
Nutrition has helped each of our family with individual needs for anxiety, energy, muscle development, brain fog & sleep.
“What we eat impacts how long we live, how well we live, and whether our body can be a vibrant foundation for the work we’re here to do on earth”. (Dr. Ellen Vora, “The Anatomy of Anxiety”) (1)
Krystal Sarasin met with Myron & I soon after our nutrition journey began with our daughter. The 3 of us gravitated towards working together, sharing a philosophical view of wellbeing.
Krystal is our Functional Nutrition therapist at BiTS. She wholeheartedly believes in bio-individualized nutrition & lifestyle. She encourages her clients to develop a deeper awareness of their health & vitality. Sometimes even a small shift makes a big change.
Tips for today:
Here are some smaller nutrition shifts our Bedford family has used for managing the release of cortisol (affecting anxiety & stress):
mindfulness of the refined sugars we eat
(in fact we all joined our daughter in eliminated refined sugars for over a year – what a difference it makes!)
caffeine reduction (can be like a drug with real withdrawal effects!)
enjoying high protein & variety of vegetables
(not keto – although for a short season keto was helpful for seizure control)
healthy fats – higher Omega 3 fatty acids (2)
eliminating gluten reduced anxiety (& seizures for our daughter) (3)
** Take 3 months to really notice the difference in your life. I suggest picking one of the above ideas to try. Write down your symptoms before & review after 3 months.
Warmly,
Tanya Bedford, RCC, ACS
Tanya Bedford
Registered Clinical Counsellor
Approved Clinical Supervisor
MA Counselling Psychology
Living with chronic pain, hurts and trauma? My focus is to offer hope, through meaningful & transformative counselling… for you that are struggling with chronic pain trauma, dissociation, anxiety & attachment hurts. My approach is integrative of your whole self, offering EMDR, OEI, CBT, ACT, Satir systems, Safe & Sound Protocol listening, somatic therapies, and including spirituality & existentialism. You may most benefit from profoundly transformative VIP Intensives where we meet for a longer session to power through a significant block, or integrative co-therapy sessions with Myron’s osteopathy treatment. In other words, I have flexible integrative strategies to offer for your complex needs.