I guess what I should do first is hit up a library database and find out if anyone has already researched this.
Don’t think it’ll help you much—you need to find out how you work, not what happens to some sample of some population of people none of whom are you.
In your place I’d start keeping a detailed mood/mental state diary AND a detailed food diary. After a few months you should be able to get a decent idea of what kinds of food do what to you.
You might also want to talk to gwern—he does “how X affects me” mini-studies and has good methodology.
Sorry, I didn’t make the intent clear. I do want to do more experiments on myself, and I need to work on figuring out a non-annoying way to collect data so I can do that. But I’m also really curious how common this sort of thing is in other people. So the library research is for testing your alternate hypothesis, and my hypothesis that some people are strongly influenced by food but mistake it for a chronic problem.
But I’m also really curious how common this sort of thing is in other people.
Browse forums for non-mainstream diets, e.g. paleo or vegan. You’ll find LOTS of stories by people who found out that a change in their diet massively affects their health and/or mental state.
The thing is, though, on paleo forums the stories will be “So I stopped eating carbs and the mental fog just lifted and now I have energy...” and on vegan forums the stories will be “So I stopped eating animal products and the mental fog just lifted and now I have energy...” :-D It’s all very individual, you still will need to figure out how you react to stuff.
Ah, thanks :) I figured that different diets are good for different people, since that’s what seemed to happen for people I know. But I wanted to find out how common and how extreme that sort of thing is, since if people are getting results like “I can handle going to school now”, then people should be more aware of it than they are.
I’m pretty sure I already know the most important reactions for me—I’ve gotten to the point that there’s not anything really really wrong anymore. I didn’t expect the rest to just be in a book somewhere, since what I’ve already found out by experimenting doesn’t match up to any known pattern other than “diet does stuff”.
Don’t think it’ll help you much—you need to find out how you work, not what happens to some sample of some population of people none of whom are you.
In your place I’d start keeping a detailed mood/mental state diary AND a detailed food diary. After a few months you should be able to get a decent idea of what kinds of food do what to you.
You might also want to talk to gwern—he does “how X affects me” mini-studies and has good methodology.
Sorry, I didn’t make the intent clear. I do want to do more experiments on myself, and I need to work on figuring out a non-annoying way to collect data so I can do that. But I’m also really curious how common this sort of thing is in other people. So the library research is for testing your alternate hypothesis, and my hypothesis that some people are strongly influenced by food but mistake it for a chronic problem.
Browse forums for non-mainstream diets, e.g. paleo or vegan. You’ll find LOTS of stories by people who found out that a change in their diet massively affects their health and/or mental state.
The thing is, though, on paleo forums the stories will be “So I stopped eating carbs and the mental fog just lifted and now I have energy...” and on vegan forums the stories will be “So I stopped eating animal products and the mental fog just lifted and now I have energy...” :-D It’s all very individual, you still will need to figure out how you react to stuff.
Ah, thanks :) I figured that different diets are good for different people, since that’s what seemed to happen for people I know. But I wanted to find out how common and how extreme that sort of thing is, since if people are getting results like “I can handle going to school now”, then people should be more aware of it than they are.
I’m pretty sure I already know the most important reactions for me—I’ve gotten to the point that there’s not anything really really wrong anymore. I didn’t expect the rest to just be in a book somewhere, since what I’ve already found out by experimenting doesn’t match up to any known pattern other than “diet does stuff”.
You might want to poke around Chris Kresser’s blog—he’s a non-doctrinaire paleo guy, and his commenters include a lot of people with unusual symptoms.
Thanks! I’ll have a look.
You might want to poke around Chris Kresser’s blog—he’s a non-doctrinaire paleo guy, and his commenters include a lot of people with unusual symptoms.
You can also try using Eureqa; it’s good for finding potential correlations and relationships. It also tries to suggest possible experiments.
Thanks! That looks interesting.