Now, the ideal diet for the panic attack sufferer is a slightly modified vegetarian diet. To be specific, it is a Lacto-vegetarian diet minus eggs. There are, however, two things included in this diet that I would warn one in the beginning to eat of sparingly. These are bananas and cooked cabbage.

If they agree with you, well and good; but if they do not, let them strictly alone.

Eat all kinds of vegetables, both fresh and cooked. Eat all kinds of fruits, especially fresh fruits. There is an old saying and a good one,

“An apple a day keeps the doctor away.”

There are a thousand ways to prepare vegetables and fruits for the table, and there are a number of books that give good recipes. If a nervous individual has never yet had a breakdown I believe he can safely eat most of the vegetarian dishes that have eggs in them, but it would be a serious mistake to select the special dishes that contain eggs and live on those just because they contain eggs.

I believe, too, that after a nervous person is restored to health, if he strictly observes the rules of eating sparingly and of chewing all food to a cream, he may safely try out such courses as are found in Bardsley’s Recipes for Food Reformers or Broadbent’s Forty Vegetarian Dinners.

It may seem odd, but there are people who for some reason or other lack the instinct, or whatever is needed, to know that a certain thing they eat hurts them. I have had men and women sit in my office and say with the utmost sincerity that they were certain that it wasn’t anything they ate that hurt them because they never had any pain in the abdomen.

Sometimes these people were in a dreadful state of nervous breakdown. So you see the danger that lies here. If you know, you can always tell what special thing disagrees with you. For example, I know eggs disagree with me, and like John Burroughs and many others, I know when they harm me.

Therefore, after you have recovered you might try being your own physician. But if you are not sure as to what disagrees with you, you would much better stick to a vegetarian diet and go without eggs the remainder of your days.

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I am not alone in this fight against the use of eggs for panic disorder people. John Burroughs back in the 30’s said that eggs poisoned him, and I have talked with men of great wealth and great business ability who have reached the top by their own efforts, who have told me that eggs poisoned them.

Now I have found that for these anxious people animal food is a slow poison. Sooner or later it will do its work. And just here I wish to say that there are some people who seemingly can eat almost anything and not suffer from doing so. 60 years ago, my uncle talked with Count Ilya Tolstoy, son of Leo Tolstoy, the celebrated Russian writer. The Count, who was also a lecturer, told him that he was obliged to have eggs and that he had eaten them all his life. He said his appetite was never satisfied unless he ate eggs. He was then past sixty, and apparently was strong and rugged. Now eggs no doubt were good for him.

But right here is where infinite harm can be done to anxious and panic prone people like myself. People who can eat everything - and among physicians seemingly there are many who can do so - will say to these unfortunate sufferers:

“Why, it’s all nonsense about things hurting you! Eat anything you want and all you want and then forget about it.”

Physicians have said that to me and during the past twenty years I have heard them say it thousands of times to others. Personally I do not believe in Christian Science - physicians of the Regular school do not believe in it; but do you know that when a physician says to a sufferer from anxiety, “It’s all nonsense about what you eat hurting you; eat anything you want and then forget about it,” that physician is fully endorsing Christian Science. He is telling the person to whom he is talking that there is no such thing as physical suffering. Of course, such a physician is nothing but a fool.

Yet that’s why so many of these people turn to Christian Science.

Yes, that is exactly why they try it. It bolsters up an anxiety and panic attack sufferer for a time just as contact with a magnetic and hopeful personality may for a time bolster one up. But such people almost always go back to the psychiatric hospitals.

Anxiety and panic attacks are not a mental disease; that is, the seat of the trouble is not mental but physical, and the mental phase of anxiety and panic attacks is only a symptom, or rather one of the symptoms of the disease.

We people who have gone down into the dark valley have experienced a million, more or less, different kinds of feelings. I fully believe a third or more of the American people are the offspring of nervous parents. This means that there are maybe one hundred million of this nervous type of Americans. This type includes people all the way from the man in an office who gets angry quickly, to the individual who is in a state of complete collapse.

And the man who is afflicted with nothing more than a quick temper, or is living under high nervous tension, is liable to beget children who will suffer from the malady in a far worse degree than ever he will, unless, indeed, he eats only the things he should eat and observes a number of other rules besides the two I have already laid down.

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People who are the offspring of  parents suffering from anxiety and panic attacks and who have had a nervous breakdown should not eat commercial sugar, eggs, or animal food of any kind whatever. These statements may seem wholly unimportant to some people, but I realize what a tremendous bomb I throw into the camps of others when they read them. You see, for centuries people have believed meat and eggs to be the best of all foods; so when I make a statement like the foregoing, the effect is not unlike that which followed Columbus’ statement that no matter what people believed, the fact was that the earth was round, not flat.

From the very beginning it has not made a single bit of difference as to what physicians or anybody else thought; facts count. And no matter what we may think or how long we have thought it, facts go right on being facts just the same.

Sometimes, even after twenty years’ experience, about once in two or three months - because there is nothing else at hand - I find myself eating a small bit of meat. This usually happens when I am on a lecture tour. But if I eat only a small slice of bacon at the evening meal I dream bad dreams and the next morning feel drowsy, heavy, and sluggish.

Animal foods as well as eggs and commercial sugar poison all those born of nervous parents. I have proved the truth of this by my own case and by several years’ observation of other cases.

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I run over an interesting aproach regarding insurance. I didn’t know about the several limitations you can encounter when you are over 50 years old. This site helped me take some very important decisions regarding my father’s insurance. You can check it out by clicking here.

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