*must Read* I Found a Treatment That Works For Me!!

Okay. To give you a little background, my doctor told me that I was hypoglycemic a couple of years ago. After awhile I learned to listen to the messages that my body was sending me. I learned when I needed to eat. It was basically every two to three hours.

A few weeks ago my fiancé and I were at the library. I was standing next to him as he was looking for a book, and I turned around and noticed a section about natural remedies. I pointed it out to my fiancé, who is into that sort of thing. He grabbed a couple of books. One of them is called 5-htp the natural way to overcome depression, obesity, and insomnia by michael murray, n.D.

One evening my fiancé pulled the book out and started flipping through it. There is a chapter about carbohydrate addiction, which is the cause of the obesity mentioned in the title. There is a little quiz to see if you are addicted to carbohydrates. The quiz seems like it could almost double as a quiz for hypoglycemia. Here is the quiz:

-i get tired and/or hungry in the mid-afternoon.
-i crave bread, pasta, cereal, candy, and other carbohydrate-rich foods.
-when I start eating starches, snack foods, or sweets, I have a hard time stopping.
-after eating breakfast, even if it is a large satisfying meal, I get hungry before lunch.
-i am overweight.
-my body fat is primarily distributed around my abdomen and upper body.
-if I do not eat every two or three hours during the day, I feel tired, shaky, and irritable, and sometimes I develop a headache.
-i have one of the following health conditions: elevated cholesterol or triglyceride levels, diabetes, high blood pressure, hypoglycemia.
-i eat more when I am stressed or depressed or when I am traveling.
-i tend to gain more weight or have trouble losing weight in the winter months.

Here is the scoring to determine the extent of your carbohydrate addiction:

8-10 yes answers – severe
5-7 – strong
2-4 – mild to moderate
0-1 – none

i have to admit that I haven’t read the book, but that evening my fiancé read some of the relevant parts to me. Apparently 5-htp is used in the production of serotonin, a neurotransmitter that regulates mood, makes you feel happy and calm, and is released to tell you that you are full, and helps you to feel satisfied after eating. If you don’t have enough 5-htp and your body can’t produce serotonin your body goes into an emergency reaction – you feel terrible and you need to eat. Your body can use the sugar from the food you eat to produce serotonin. So it keeps demanding food to make sure you have enough serotonin.

I know that there are several causes of hypoglycemia. I don’t know if I have ever heard of serotonin deficiency listed as one of them. My doctor didn’t do any tests for hypoglycemia. She just told me to make sure that I eat. I borrowed a glucometer and checked my own sugar for a week. I’d wake up in the morning and wait until I started feeling ill. My sugar would generally be in the 70’s. Low, but not dangerously low. So, my sugar does in fact go low. I am wondering if maybe my body is using a ton of blood sugar to produce serotonin, and then I feel ill because it dips too low. I really have no idea what is going on. I just know that when my fiancé read me bits out of that chapter, I immediately took some 5-htp. And it worked. I’d already eaten dinner, and I didn’t eat again that night.

Immediate effectiveness. It was amazing. Two days later I realized just how well it was working. I woke up at about 10am and got directly into the shower. Usually, that would have been a bad choice. By the time I got out of the shower, I should have been feeling sick and running straight to the kitchen for food. Instead, I felt just fine. I didn’t bother with breakfast. A little later I headed to taco bell for lunch. I ordered less than I normally order, sat down, and realized that I had no interest in eating the food. I ate it anyway, figuring that I needed to eat. Then I went home and left for work. It takes me two hours to drive to work. I normally have to eat something as soon as I get there before I start my shift. I didn’t eat anything. At 4:30 I started serving dinner to the troubled teens that I work with. As I was walking around the table it dawned on me that *i* was supposed to eat dinner, too. I hadn’t even thought about eating and didn’t even have an appetite. Once again, I ate just because I thought that I should eat something. I had a couple of tomato slices on a hamburger bun. That wasn’t much, and a couple of hours later I felt hungry. *hungry*! I hadn’t felt hungry in a very long time. I’ve wanted food, felt a panicky sort of warning feeling that I needed to eat soon…but eating every two hours doesn’t leave much room for feeling hungry.

A lack of appetite didn’t last long. But not needing food all the time lasted. I wake up, and don’t have to eat breakfast right way. After breakfast, I don’t have to eat until lunch. Today I skipped breakfast, ate lunch, and didn’t even think about eating until 5:30. I talked about food, made dinner plans, bought a birthday cake…but at no time did I think about *eating* food until I was naturally hungry! 5-htp is really working for me. I thought that I would be eating every two hours for the rest of my life. I’ve gained 35 pounds, and I couldn’t imagine how I was going to lose them when I have to keep shoving food down my face. I’ve been worried about getting diabetes, and now it seems like that won’t happen. I can’t believe how well this is working for me.

So. If you would like to try 5-htp and see how it works for you, here is how you should do it. Start by taking one 50mg or 100mg tablet three times a day with a meal. The book says to take it 20 minutes before a meal, but I am usually not on top of things enough to do that. I usually don’t remember to take it until after my meal. It can cause nausea. I’ve experienced everything from feeling a little off to being very ill. I had to figure out how to take it right. It really does need to be taken with food. You can also buy enteric-coated 5-htp. It won’t dissolve in your stomach, it will wait until it gets to your small intestine. So it shouldn’t cause nausea. I haven’t found any at the stores in town, not even gnc. But i’m going to look for some on the internet.

Once you’ve taken one pill at a time for awhile, you can increase to 2 and then 3 at a time depending on what you need. I’ve tried 1 pill, and it really isn’t effective enough for me. Two is working. This may be why i’ve experienced some illness. I didn’t give my body enough time to get used to taking it. I’m considering taking 300mg doses. Just to see what happens. If I can eat even less, I should start really losing weight. That sounds great!

I’ve noticed that my mind still has the habit of eating all the time. If I am busy and active, I won’t even think about eating. If I am bored – sitting in the back of a classroom monitoring my group of teens in school – then my mind will think about eating at about the time that I would normally eat from hypoglycemia. But my body does not go through the normal warning signals, and I don’t actually need the food. I am hoping that with time my mind will get out of the habit of telling me that I need food.

The first time I heard of 5-htp was a few years ago. At the place where I used to work, the nurses gave our clients who had trouble sleeping 5-htp. One 5-htp and a b-6 vitamin at 5pm and another 5-htp at 9pm. So, I was worried that it would make me sleepy. It doesn’t make me sleepy at all. In fact I feel like I have more energy. Apparently 5-htp is used to produce serotonin and some of the serotonin is changed into melatonin, but your body doesn’t release your melatonin for sleep until nighttime. From what I remember, the b-6 was something that the body needed in the whole 5-htp to serotonin process. So, i’ve been taking a b-complex vitamin every morning with my first dose of 5-htp. I recommend the time-release ones. So that it will be released throughout the day. If you take one that releases into your bloodstream all at once, your body will just take out what it needs then, and the rest will end up in your urine.

The book recommends that you avoid caffeine because it counteracts effects of serotonin and depletes the levels of serotonin and melatonin cause sleeplessness. And it says that you should drink plenty of water. I’ve noticed that i’m thirstier than usual.

Do not take 5-htp if you are on an mao inhibitor or you can experience levels of serotonin that are way too high. There is no danger if you are taking 5-htp alone. Also, do not take 5-htp if you are on an antidepressant. Remember that depression is often caused by hypoglycemia…it may be possible for you to treat both with only 5-htp.

5-htp can be used to treat depression. My fiancé is having great results. I would describe myself as a happy person, but with 5-htp I feel even happier. I often feel as if I am on the edge of a smile, and I feel more invigorated.

5-htp is a natural substance. The substance tryptophan occurs naturally in foods. You may have heard of it in reference to turkey. It is why people say turkey makes you sleepy, since turkey contains a lot of tryptophan. Your body changes tryptophan into 5-htp and then 5-htp into serotonin and melatonin.

I know that there are a lot of causes of hypoglycemia. There is no telling who it will or won’t help…if it will be completely effective, or just help a little. I know that depression and insomnia often go hand in hand with hypoglycemia. So 5-htp might at least help with those things.

I hope that a lot of people read this, and I highly recommend that everyone at least try it. It can’t hurt, and you might find some relief. Check back and let me and everyone else know how things are working for you.

Cassakane