 Hello my friends and welcome to the depression 2 expression podcast Scott St. Marie here. Does diet play a role in our mental health? Well of course it does. It plays a huge role in our physical health. The brain is an organ. It only makes sense. It only makes sense. The more gummy bears he eat, the more gummy the brain feels. I don't know but today sitting down with Michaela Peterson to talk about the role that diet played in her resolving depression. Autoimmune disorder, skin conditions. I don't want to spoil everything for you but we recorded this a few years back. This is a repost. If you want to watch the video interview she came over to my condo. We had a great chat so you can watch that video on my YouTube channel depression 2 expression and listen her story is her own. She's an awesome person. My story is my own. Your journey through whatever you're going through whether you want to try an elimination diet, whether you want to try antidepressants, whether you want to try a new exercise regime. I'm telling you all from the bottom of my heart with no judgment at all you do whatever you need to do. You do whatever it takes. No judgment here if you're on medication, if you're getting off medication, if you eat you know the carnivore diet, if you're doing keto, if you're eating only bread whatever works get it done baby get it done you're doing great so here's Michaela Peterson. Yeah the daughter of Jordan Peterson if that's what you're asking yes this is her and I actually first noticed her on this program called the agenda that comes out of Toronto Canada that's where we're both from and I saw her on there she was so open about depression I said oh my gosh I need to talk to this person and then they came up with another episode with her and her dad Jordan Peterson and they're talking about diet and food and depression like man this is interesting stuff so you know listen carefully but just remember this is her story and I know you're gonna learn a heck of a lot from this episode and interview so enjoy my friends. Okay so Michaela thanks for coming. Thanks for having me. For sure. This is exciting. Okay so I guess starting from the beginning of what's what's your history with with mental illness with depression and what was the the treatment that really helped so much without going into too much detail because we'll talk with the diet later but what's the history there? So I was formally diagnosed with depression summer of grade five so that makes me I think 11 or 12 and I was not having I just wasn't happy I was very unhappy and I guess mostly angry and I was having nightmares and I was having some like obsessive compulsive stuff going on so you know reorganizing all your books in your bookshelf from like A to Z and then by author and then by like type of book and like late at night as a kid and that I did did for no reason so that kind of stuff and it was not a good time and dad recognized it as depression because he has it and it kind of runs in our family so my grandpa has it and my great grandpa had it and it's just like horrible severe depression and he looked at me and thought okay she probably has it so we went to a psychiatrist and they gave me antidepressants so I was on I think I started with Prozac but switched over to Selexa fairly quickly and that actually helped like a huge amount as a kid I can remember starting them and then just relaxing as if I'd been like holding myself in like a rigid position for a really long time so that helped a lot and I took those until I was 23 and unfortunately like they helped a lot but the depression was still there so it obviously it's not a cure so it it got worse as a teenager so when I was 14 I for whatever reason I had this you know dip and my mood took a turn for the worse and I up the antidepressants and then when I was you know 18 or 19 it happened again and I up the antidepressants and then by the time I was like 20 20 yeah I moved away went to university and whatever the anti the antidepressants were doing something but the depression was so horrible that just wasn't enough so I tried switching antidepressants I tried adding on another one and it just wasn't you know compared to not being on antidepressants it was better but it was horrible right right so that's kind of the background with the experiences with depression and then I had like a plethora of other health problems which I'm sure like many people with depression do and it was like auto immune problems I had or severe arthritis enough that my hip and ankle were replaced when I was 17 so like bad times and then chronic fatigue that hit when I was 14 so the same time when my depression got worse I got really tired and like tired passing out like not passing out falling asleep in class like at around 11 and then napping in the afternoon and I was just napping all the time and that just got worse and worse and worse and I had skin issues and then when I went away to university I gained weight and it wasn't like the freshman 15 that everyone gains it was like the freshman like 35 in a really short amount of time okay and so that's also when I was going to the gym more because I was like gotta counteract this somehow I'll just work out more which did not help yeah and then I started looking into food so they had that's a long list of and so autoimmune disorder what does that really involve as far as symptoms um so like the main symptom for the autoimmune disorder I had so I was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis and then that diagnosis changed to idiopathic arthritis it was just arthritis basically and so that was joint pain joint swelling and joint deterioration so that was the main symptom for that autoimmune disorder and then people with autoimmune disorders also generally have a whole bunch of other symptoms that are like minor in comparison so fatigue is a really common one having rashes mouth ulcers like those kind of things are commonly associated with autoimmune disorders as well and mood obviously like that hits a lot of people with autoimmune disorders too right so you're 23 years old or not now but you were 23 years old when you stopped the antidepressants or when you started to look into diet more oh yeah I definitely did not stop the antidepressants before figuring out the diet yeah for sure there were like I couldn't get off of those things I tried I was getting side effects so I tried tapering them down and it was just so awful tapering them like the depression would come in stronger so I was like I'm on these forever I'm never gonna stop taking them I actually started looking into diet because I was starting to get really bad skin problems so I was getting rashes I was getting acne and then one winter I got something like my skin stopped healing properly so I had these like this is just horrible it was horrible I had these sores like here here just around that wouldn't heal and I want to see some like doctors and dermatologists and they basically said well it's not bacterial we don't know what's going on and I was like holy shit but this is really bad not only is it on my face and everyone can see but this is not a good thing and then it's slowly like this was at Christmas and then my birthday came around so that's January 4th and it slowly healed and I was like okay whoo don't know what that was about but whatever so then I started I'd been looking into it before trying to figure out my weird skin problems because I'd also had this thing show up where I got little tiny blisters on my fingers and I had one person tell me I was a hypochondria I was like obsessively googling these blisters I was getting stopped being like such a hypochondriac and was like I physically have blisters this is not hypochondria so anyway I started looking into rashes and whatever and I found finally found this weird rash I was getting and it was associated with celiac disease and it took a lot of googling to find the right rash and I went through a lot of horrible Google pictures finally found this celiac rash so that's celiac disease the autoimmune disorder where you can't eat gluten right and causes gut damage and anyway I did my 23 and me and it turns out I have the celiac gene so it was possible I never actually did the biopsy that confirms it because I don't want to do that and right there's a very high false negative and for the the viewers 23 and me is is what 23 and me is just a genetic testing you can do so you basically spit into a vial and send it off and they decode part of your genome and show you some of your genes and is that you kind of an overview right and is that like more for health reasons rather than ancestry they do both they do both yeah they get into the ancestry part which is really interesting did you find out anything shocking yeah oh we totally did quarter Jamaican not no I'm not that would have been more interesting but what we did figure out was we thought part of my family my grandpa so my dad's dad his parents were Norwegian but it turns out he's how like half Scottish so his dad actually wasn't Norwegian he was Scottish so that was yeah that's cool yeah so that we did figure out some interesting ancestry stuff yeah but I did see that the gene for the celiac and so I cut out gluten I was made 2015 because I was like okay well what if I don't have like what if the arthritis is a celiac did the celiac disease because autoimmune diseases can like they can clump up people can have multiple auto immune disorders right was like maybe the arthritis with celiac disease so I cut out gluten and it didn't do that much like my skin issues probably calmed down by 15% but it didn't really solve very many of my problems so then in September my mom my mom brought me to a natural path and she'd been trying to bring me to natural paths for like decades and I've been like no they're just taking advantage of sick people and taking their money and giving them false hope right okay opinion of natural paths right I went to a natural path and they said well try an elimination diet and they give me this list of foods and I kind of looked at the list of foods and didn't really make any sense I didn't know anything about diet at all I just like you couldn't eat oranges but you could eat lemons I didn't really understand that and there were just a whole bunch of things I didn't get so I tried it for about a week and then was like it's not doing anything and I made myself gluten free like sugar-free banana almond flour muffins yeah and I had a couple that night and I woke up in the morning my wrists were really stiff and I was like oh that's interesting like maybe it does have something to do with the arthritis right but then I had a couple more of the muffins because the muffins were really good my wrists were that stiff and then two days later I couldn't walk my knees weren't such bad shape that I didn't walk and I was in the grocery store and store and my knees locked up and I was like whoa so then I cut out like everything I could cut out and I went down to chicken in actually it was not as restrictive as I am now but I was eating rice chicken beef fish root vegetables but not potatoes and green vegetables so I cut out a lot like I had no dairy no gluten pretty much no grain except for rice I was still eating eggs at that point okay and this was while you were still on a select so okay oh yeah I was trying this this out and yeah I had stopped so before I before I realized the gluten thing I had stopped taking my arthritis medication because I wanted to monitor my flare-ups got it going gluten-free so I wasn't taking my arthritis medication so I was immune suppressants but I was still taking Adderall Tylenol free for the arthritis pain birth control I was on antibiotics for my skin and then anti depressants I was still on a whole bunch of medication yes time I also didn't think that the diet had anything to do with depression I thought maybe I could use it to fix my skin and the arthritis right depression it didn't even occur to me that that could be a diet related thing yeah so I went on that and most of my problems got you know 95% better within a month it was like my skin was finally clear my arthritis wasn't there and this was like a month after eating just fairly restrictive but not like now and that was the sorry that was the elimination diet that the naturopath recommend no that was a stricter one oh okay the one the one they recommended I tried for a week and then didn't think it was working and then when I realized there was something to do with food there I kind of made up my own and cut oh some of the foods they had included got it I didn't really understand why they included like I cut out all the fruit okay I'd heard from somebody that what we known we we've known since grade 2 that oranges gave me flare-ups but we just left it at that and we're like that's weird yeah we just won't look further into that like I don't know so I cut out all the fruit anyway after like a painful trial and error of trying to reintroduce things and getting these flare-ups and having my skin break out and getting like itchy and arthritic in December so that was in September when I started it in December or like late November I started feeling like my mood was better and that never happened in the winter time it always got worse my mood started getting better and got better and better and better and I was like you know okay this is this is good and so I tapered down the antidepressants which I'd never been able to do and I went off of them completely and it was like the best I've ever felt and so I told dad because he has the same depression I was like like holy shit what if this is diet like you have to you have to try something to yeah so that was December I was off my antidepressants told him to go on it he went on it and then I reintroduced soy because soy was like one of my favorite foods and I put soy sauce on everything yeah and I had the worst depressive episode I've ever experienced like for like a three-week period it came back and it didn't it wasn't just like it wasn't just mood I ate a whole bunch of the I'm like made my own miso soup so that it was gluten free and everything and then I ate a whole bunch of that and tofu and edamame beans like soy in every form and then I got a huge stomach ache I spent like the next hour in the bathroom it was like okay so my body doesn't like soy fair enough and then four hours later I got itchy everywhere so like like a allergic reaction itchy and I was like okay you know whatever and then the next morning I woke up and it was like I could feel the depression coming backwards just like a cloud of doom came in and I like stood in the shower and cried and was like okay this whole food thing was just me being hopeful like obviously it's nothing and then it just got worse and worse and worse for like the next week it was just horrible but like part of me the logical part of me was like well the arthritis did lift it's never lifted in my entire life like and then for absolutely no reason other than the fact that I ate all this soy it's back like hell the next day it was like this this is probably food but it was really hard to convince myself that was true anyway for the next year I basically went up and down trying to reintroduce foods having these horrible reactions you know getting better trying to reintroduce another food horrible reaction getting better yeah so that's been my experience with food okay is it on is it working oh yeah thank god everything come back sunday so 2016 yeah so I'd done the previous tv o thing where I'd gone on and said you know antidepressants were godsend which they were right um and then I went and then it was like holy shit maybe diet has something to do with it so I went back on and that was February and that was when I tried to reintroduce way so I was doing way better then than I had been in the previous video but I was still not doing particularly well because I was in one of these stupid reactions right um so that was yeah 2016 and then I spent most of 2016 trying to reintroduce other foods because like you miss eating foods so you know I tried to reintroduce all my favorite foods like soy was first sugar yeah um cheese and then I tried just whey protein because I was like that would be easy in the morning and I don't have to cook all the time because I was just cooking all the time right and I was used to eating out all the time so that was 2016 and then so sorry with the experimentation uh so you introduced cheese how do you know that it's it how how long of a time period before you're like nope can't can't eat cheese because my you know depression came back or my arthritis is back is that within the 24 hours that you know or it depends so um if you know within 24 hours it's gonna be a nasty reaction so like the soy I knew then like I knew that night that was bad um cheese yeah cheese I well after not eating dairy for a month I lost my lactose tolerance so I got this huge stomach ache felt like I was gonna die and then this was I tried to reintroduce cheese when I was still on antidepressants so in like October it was one of the first ones and I spent I was like crying the next day which now I realized was because my depression worsened but I I thought it was just because I realized I couldn't eat cheese and I was really upset about not being able to eat cheese because cheese is yummy that's what I thought at the time and now I know it's because the depression worsened um but it depends yeah if I ate a whole huge quantity of something which is what I was doing at the beginning because I was like hey if I can't eat this might as well go out with a bang then I was getting reactions yeah the next day okay but then I started getting you know testing smaller and smaller amounts because I realized how sensitive I was and sometimes it could take up to four days so that complicates things a lot which is why I had to space out the reintroduction so far because it was like I need something I'd feel okay and then the next day I'd feel a little worse but not enough to be noticeable and it wouldn't really hit until day four okay got it so it made it complicated and complicated to explain because it sounded like some sort of conspiracy theory um yeah and then the arthritis sometimes would take up two a week okay yeah so when I so you had to keep a I had it was all journaled yet because if you have a flare up four days later okay what did I eat four days before type of thing and it wasn't just that is when the depression came back so did all the doubts about whether this was a real thing so every time I'd have a reaction I'd be like oh yeah I'm just following some weird conspiracy and this has nothing to do with anything but then it was always the same period of time and it would lift again and it was a long time like these were three week reactions that the depression would come back and then it would go away again and then it wouldn't come back until I reintroduce something so I could see the pattern but it was just so hard to believe that it was good I kept a journal right right and geez three weeks of that too yeah it was rough but it wasn't as rough as thinking that I was stuck with that forever okay there was still you know I would count down like the days and then I you know it would get better yeah so and I was less tired like my fatigue had gone away so that was a huge thing and my skin was better than it had been so there were benefits um and the depression was going like this instead of just solidly so right but if we if we rewind a bit because that's a lot of work yeah that is a lot of work and was the first motive for you to do this was that because of the skin part when you first looked into this right yeah but then just minor improvements kept you going and experimenting throughout the next you know year and a bit well because that's so much I'm saying it's incredible it's so much effort though like what kept you wanting to do more research and keep this journal and introduce food it was skin like purely looks based yeah was like I was like I can you know maybe I can handle severe depression and a whole bunch of medication and maybe I can handle an autoimmune disorder but freaking my skin too like I can't do those three things oh yeah and the chronic fatigue like I can handle I can't do four yeah I can do three things I can't handle four right like I can't do it it's too much I have to fix the skin thing or like it was just emotionally and physically it was too much for me to handle okay like I have to fix one of these yeah so that started me going but then when I realized maybe the celiac disease maybe that was causing the arthritis I mean obviously you want to get rid of the arthritis yeah what that's just that was like a huge bonus on top of the improved skin then and you're just like let's follow this trail and see how yeah and it didn't I mean I didn't even expect the depression to have anything to do with it just randomly happened November yeah it was almost like seven months after I stopped eating gluten oh my gosh we're almost out of battery I fully charged that baby I hope that didn't if that cut out I'm sorry in regards to the diet that you're on now I don't even know do you even call it a diet anymore it's really just a lifestyle of so so what you're not up to date with the secret I'm not up to date in this I'm actually only eating meat yeah that's kind of the face I was expecting hold on hold on so I'll explain a little bit behind that yeah yeah for sure so I had this original elimination diet and it was pretty much greens sweet potatoes apples pears and meat and coconut oil like apple cider vinegar it was very limited but it was still like well very well rounded compared to just eating meat and I was doing really well on that and then I got pregnant and something changed and it stopped working as well so I was still doing better than I was pre diet but I wasn't at that like my depression is gone like it was um and it took me almost a year to figure out what was going on because that diet has been working um and then you know step away from that for a bit so I had put dad on this diet which was the same you know sweet potatoes greens meat that's about it um and he lost a whole bunch of weight lost like 50 pounds in the first year and he'd been trying to lose weight for a while okay healthy pounds yeah I mean I have people being like that's not healthy but yeah he's about he's like out of normal weight now exactly but it was just fast and it was I guess it was kind of scary for us too because it was fast um so he lost a whole bunch of weight he stopped napping um he had some psoriasis that cleared up and his I would say his depression lessened but it didn't go away and the anxiety didn't go away fully okay and for some reason it just didn't go away fully for him it helped but not like it helped my mood so anyway we'll leave that be so then this diet stopped working for me and I started cutting out more and more and more things and I was eating more and more meat because I knew I don't know how I knew it's like I can't be allergic to chicken I don't know yeah um um so then in like frustration in December I googled like allergic to everything which is something I'd googled multiple times before and I came across this lady who had been diagnosed with Lyme disease like 20 years ago and the only thing she was eating was meat and she could control her Lyme disease by only eating meat and the reason I hadn't tried that before was because I thought it was going to die of scurvy like in the first month right so I just I didn't try it but um I saw that she had only been eating meat for like 18 years and she was fine yeah 18 years um and then I thought okay screw it like I'm not I just got a taste of what not having depression was like I'm not going back into it right if I hadn't had the taste like it would have been okay I guess but like I knew what that was like so I needed to anyway I so I stopped eating everything other than meat December December okay 2016 December no or sorry 2017 sorry 2017 December okay so this is fairly fairly fresh okay and um when you say only eating meat I mean water sparkling water salt okay yeah salt yeah um and beef and beef I was eating chicken before I'm not anymore and fish no no fish just beef I think beef makes me feel the best okay I know how strange it sounds but it's working there's there's a lot of good stuff and beef apparently that's a very scientific answer there's a lot of good stuff and there's a lot of good stuff okay but that you've gone through that experimentation of of fish and then you did chicken and and pork no um so I always stayed away from pork I stopped eating pork in high school because I felt bad about the pigs pigs yeah so I stopped eating pork in high school um and then dad did some food sensitivity tests and pork showed up high on his so I was also a little it didn't show up high on mine but I also hadn't really been eating it so I was a little weird of pork anyway so I just didn't didn't bother with the pork okay so strictly beef strictly now um please check out Michaela's Instagram great stories if you're looking for some sweet beef recipes um but so on a breakfast do you do three meals a day eat three meals a day okay so I'm looking at your Instagram and you're cooking up a steak for breakfast so what does your what what kind of does your daily intake of meat look like so I rib eye is what I'd like generally like the best which I'm pretty sure most people like the best so uh and it's really fast in the morning so I'll fry one of those in the morning um and then I could just eat rib eye all the time but it's expensive so we have ribs uh hamburger roasts and then I make jerky on Saturday so that I have like something easy to grab right all the time yeah and um as far as like hunger and cravings of other foods nothing nothing nothing I show you some sour keys I have here you don't want sour keys sour patch like I always really liked sour patch but no so I had cravings on the first elimination diet I did yeah I the cravings were way less than what I used to just get normally like before any diets I was hungry all the time even if I had just eaten like I was hungry all the time so I used to have cravings all the time then so even with the first elimination diet my cravings went down but they never went away I'd say with all meat they're virtually gone unless I go out and have a couple of drinks that's like that's the cheating thing I'll do sometime that's that's the human condition right there oh yeah and then I'll get cravings the next day oh the next day not while you're drunk no and I mean the consequences to cheating are so high for me that I don't like there isn't an option right I'm not spending a month arthritic and depressed for one for one twinkie no thank you one twinkie yeah not worth it no not worth it no okay so that is the diet that is simple time consuming though or no not at all not compared to cooking like before I mean even so a steak that's like 15 minutes right frying it on the barbecue it's even easier oh I don't have a barbecue right now ribs I don't put anything on them you just put them in the oven and you take them out like it's way easier than even just eliminating the salad that I had been eating saved a little bunch of time because I don't have to chop anything it's really easy okay so there's definitely other people in the world that do this yeah so this is the other interesting thing okay well first I'll tell you um my mom went on it right away because she has arthritic knees there's not like an autoimmune disorder like what I had but osteoarthritis and her knees and her hands and she hadn't been able like she'd been on the diet I had put forth the first elimination diet and it hadn't eliminated her symptoms um so she went on I'll meet a couple weeks after I did and her arthritis cleared up she went skiing in March and she hasn't skied in like seven or eight years she's going hiking in Croatia next week yeah so her so her arthritis cleared up and then last week no 10 or 11 days ago I put dad on the diet because the elimination diet just hadn't been he was down he cut out the sweet potatoes because we realized they were for whatever reason maybe too much sugar or something they were making the depression worse so he was eating meat and salad and I said you know honestly it's not like we're eating foods that are super I mean meat's fun to eat everything's fun to eat but it's not like we're eating you know pizza or something that you're cutting out what's the difference between eating meat and salad and just eating meat and there is a difference but I was like just give it a try maybe it'll clear up the last of your anxiety because he was having horrible anxiety in the mornings and just in general and he was fairly volatile and so he went on it and he feels significantly better and it only took him a couple of days to start feeling better and he started that 11 days you said 11 10 11 days ago and from you know a few days he felt better and now he's getting better and better better and better yesterday um and just beef sorry oh no oh no chicken and fish and beef okay yeah no uh and but no veggies or anything else no veggies so just the meat part but yeah okay and he feels better and he's going like can this really have been the vegetables like really yeah yeah yeah yeah but but yeah he's feeling better and it didn't take him long but I think the reason it didn't take him long was because he was so close to that already that's right but yeah heck what do we give it we're giving science the middle finger here no what happened to leafy greens what happened to omega three your your body and brain especially needing those omega threes or just beef I don't just beef I thought that was mostly fish and nuts and everything like that I don't know I don't I don't know what's going on um that's like I got desperate right because I was like I'm seem to be reacting to the the salad um so what do I do if I react to salad and I don't react to beef am I just gonna eat beef if I die like or am I gonna die like what if what if I'm just doomed to react to the foods I'm eating but it turns out you can just cut it out but there's whole like groups of people like thousands of people doing this it's called zero carb um yes uh yeah and there are tons and tons of people and obviously it's all it's mostly anecdotal but with really good results especially for people who are really sick like shocking results yeah so I'm getting some flak online for telling people maybe you could try it for a bit and see how you feel and then you can try to reintroduce other foods and see how they make you feel but at least you're at like a baseline absolutely getting some flak for telling people that but I was in a really really horrible shape like I had like you know multiple surgeries and the depression was just I wasn't gonna make it for very much longer yeah yeah how can anyone argue with your testimony you know and your own experience and the results you can't argue with that yeah so I think it's um pretty awesome of you to to share this and and create the blog and and show everyone what you've done do you have and so you just moved into your new condo do you have like a shrine a cow shrine I've really because cows that's thank god for cows thank god for cows but not the milk the milk that's probably bad no anyone horrible reactions oh yeah did it's dairy and gluten are those are big inflammatory those were the worst worst well soy was really bad for me soy too um but yeah on my blog I recommend like the least you can do for your health is get rid of the gluten and the dairy and then you know if you're not even sure about it get rid of it for a month reintroduce it back in and see how you feel mm-hmm but yeah those are the two bad ones so I'm definitely a lot of people on this zero carb diet eat just animal products so they'll eat a dairy um yeah dairy and meat and that would definitely not work for me right okay but they won't do pasta no cookies cracker sugar all of that all of that stuff okay uh this could be a simple answer but since you're doing you know this beef only diet and you've completely oh sorry so let's go over this first you've completely come off of all medications oh yeah I haven't been I haven't been taking medications for quite a while like um so a year a year and a half is the last oh no that's not true about a year ago I started getting seasonal allergies I'm still allergic to everything like right the the meat diet hasn't cured my allergies I still experience them so during the pregnancy I had just terrible seasonal allergies and I tried to take antihistamines turns out antihistamines have lactose in them and so then they made me depressed oh no I'm allergic to the outdoors and I was really allergic and I can't take these stupid antihistamines so that was the last time I took something so that was a year ago okay but I mean actual like prescription medication it's been it's been quite a while so yeah I'm not I haven't been taking anything and so that's no medication for arthritis uh depression uh yeah antidepressants and so with no Adderall I've been taking so much Adderall to stay awake oh to stay awake yeah it wasn't yeah it was for focus no it was for hypersomnia okay there's that new documentary on Netflix called take your pills and it's all about Adderall and college students oh yeah I had no idea it was such a big thing oh really not for people like who actually need it for ADHD or ADD but like just to study everyone's taken this stuff yeah well I mean it it it's really effective like like I was taking it to stay awake but man can you focus but it's focused to like a obsessive level okay it's also very useful if you need to clean everything right right I was just so surprised how many students yeah lots of people when I went to Concordia lots of people were taking it to write essays and things right right so back to the diet though there's there's knowing that diet in your case and and many others has helped your depression so much and those everything you've experienced mood-wise does that make you almost not antifarma but question that whole uh business of of antidepressants no uh no the antidepressants first of all if you tell anyone that their depression is going to go away if they only eat meat they're just that's the end of the conversation right no one is going to you're just going to get laughed out of the room it's like take the most ridiculous diet you can and say that's how to get rid of your depression it's really unfortunate because it really works for me it works for my dad it works for my husband he's doing it okay he had severe depression okay there's thousands of people and they're anecdotal obviously but it's working for them but it's ridiculous sounding so am i antifarma like no because antidepressants helped me uh i am a little pissed off that when you go to medical school they don't teach you anything about nutrition or they tell you you know eat your whole grains yeah and like make sure you drink enough milk so your bones stay healthy like that was a horrible trigger for the arthritis right that wasn't useful and i used to just drink i i drank so much milk i ate so much dairy it was horrible that it's still um the um so on we're almost out of battery i hope we don't get cut off on mikaela's blog it's like the food pyramids a lie yeah um are our kids still taught that food pyramid of whole grains at the bottom yeah yeah dairy yeah but well that's a whole that's a whole canadian dairy industry thing to say that you still need dairy for healthy bones yeah i had a friend who just went to the doctor and the doctor asked if he was getting enough milk for a calcium and it was like really there are other things broccoli has so much calcium spinach okay yeah yeah i know it's strange so no i'm not antifarma because well hell if i hadn't been on all that medication keeping me you know half alive i wouldn't have been able to come to the conclusion that diet would help like the aderol was a godsend for keeping me awake that being said if i you know if diet had been maybe more looked into originally i wouldn't have to had to go on the medication right but no i'm not antidepressant anti antidepressant anti antidepressant they did help you out they did help me a lot but um i i am annoyed that you get laughed at when you mention nutrition at a doctor's office like yeah you could at least look into that a little bit more right there was um i did a video i'll upload it i'm not sure when but on the agenda it was there was a segment called last week the science of antidepressants and 80 percent of on nontario 80 percent of prescriptions for antidepressants go through a family doctor not even a psychiatrist so it's almost like you'd have no time to talk to your family doctor you have like 15 minutes they want to do something when someone comes in with distress um they automatically you know they have to help but here's a here's a script this could make you feel better it's it is difficult to ask the questions and analyze diet and give like kind of go deeper into that yeah people need to take responsibility if if they're able to look into different things like this or people need to be told that it's an option like i always assumed i had people come up to me when i was depressed and say well have you looked at diet and it was just like you know fuck you like what do you think i do sit around eating candy and that's causing my horrible depression or like something i'm doing wrong is causing my mental health that's a you get i mean you get a lot of you get a lot of that when you're depressed like maybe you don't exercise enough yeah it's like thanks yeah it's me and that's what's causing my problems right so i think if we somehow could switch the conversation from diet being something that you're doing wrong to you know some foods may be causing a depressive reaction like that's a different thing like if i eat a tiny bit if i cheat you know once once a week my depression doesn't go away right but that would so it's not really something you're doing wrong it's just people just don't know i love that yeah it's not putting the blame on the person's suffering saying no i mean you're already things but i hate that you're already suffering you you go to somebody that happened to all the time of the doctors you go to someone for help you go like these are my horrible symptoms and they go oh here are three things you're doing wrong right right thanks that's why i came here oh my probably sleeping too much that's right eating the wrong foods and not exercising and if i turned those around things would be fine yeah completely fixed that's why the mental health and mental illness is so complex um and you're not saying that a meat only diet if everyone did this depression cured like this is a full cure or are you saying that like i i don't know or are you just advocating hate experiment try some elimination like get rid of dairy gluten see what happens yeah okay yeah so if if you know between me and you if i were to to try this meat only solidly for a month yeah i think you'd see insane benefits insane and i can like there's a website called meatheels.com okay and there are anecdotal reports of people going on the carnivore diet carnivore zero carb diet and there are crazy stories on there and there's hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of reports and there are and normally i wouldn't believe something like that because it's so strange but i've experienced it and my dad has experienced it like his anxiety is gone and i couldn't get it under control with just eliminating well my elimination diet which was very strict yeah and he never cheated right um and he's not he's not exercising like it's not something else it's not like some stressor in his life just lifted it's the diet right so it's not like you weren't you it's not like you weren't meditating and uh you know this is pure diet yeah so um the last part before battery dies which is such a damn shame um any um other things that you do other diet was like a huge piece obviously the biggest but anything else you do that that keeps your mind sharp that keeps you mentally well um that you kind of want to want to tell people here well so now i would say okay yeah i guess so like no not really most like it's it's diet but if i do end up reacting to something using an infrared sauna really helped me feel better exercising does give me a boost so if i do have a reaction i'll exercise i'll make sure i'll exercise every day because it gives me a boost or multiple times a day the infrared sauna helps um what i used to do before when my depression was really awful when i was in university is right and that helped a lot because then you know you get those flares of like i used to get them anyway extreme anger where you want to like punch something i could write until that had calmed down so that's what i would use but honestly i'm in like really good shape now so i don't i don't use much awesome and for the last comment for those watching many um on the channel i love you all um many have diagnoses many struggle with depression and anxiety and haven't told anyone um yeah and and you come on uh with your dad on tv o years ago and then just two years ago and are really open about how you struggled with depression and and these physical illnesses as well um why did you do it why why was it's you know not easy for you but any advice to people who are having trouble opening up about these things and not seeking seeking help um i think it was harder for dad to tell people than it was for me because i'd been telling people for almost my whole life um dad had a harder time i think if if there wasn't so much i guess stigma is the right word or blaming the person who's depressed for being depressed um that would be easier but i guess i would say you're not you're not doing anything wrong right you're extremely unfortunate that this has happened to you but it's not your fault and it's bad enough to suffer from a mental illness than to also think this is my fault somehow so about getting help like yeah talk to people it it helps and try not to talk to the people that are going to tell you right you need to you're just lazy and that's why yeah they have all the answers some people yeah and i guess that's part of depression to expression too it's like expressing yourself in positive and healthy ways but there is not a lot of the time one fix all for a lot of people like some people writing doesn't do anything for them right exercise didn't do anything for me right see there you go try it it helps now i can get a boost from it but i'm not like i'm not like i was yeah it didn't help at all exactly so you've been telling people that you started with depression since a very early age but was that was that honesty and openness was that how you were raised like how did that come more naturally to you because some people it's all internal and they won't tell a soul was that kind of what your parents taught you to seek help or to be open with your thinking um how did i get there like when i was first diagnosed with arthritis so that was a grade two i didn't tell anyone i didn't want anybody know and then in grade seven i stopped caring for some reason about the arthritis about the depression i was just like i don't know what happened i guess i just root decided you know it wasn't my fault and and i guess i had told enough people slowly and they hadn't cared that i was like oh people generally speaking and i've had some bad experiences but generally speaking don't care or they'll say you know you'll say you know i have i have this and they'll go oh you know my so-and-so has whatever so maybe i'm just lucky and didn't get a whole bunch of bad feedback maybe it's bad i'm not entirely sure what it is i mean it's not like i opened up to someone and they immediately said this is your fault here all the things you're doing wrong and then i was like oh well i'm not gonna tell anyone else about this right um so maybe luck yeah to have that that first bit of experience and people not caring as much as you thought they would in a good way yeah yeah yeah so i would say probably that yeah i'm not sure i just didn't care and care and if people did give me hell just like fuck you um i generally write well i write about what's going on so for the last i started when i was on this elimination diet so i had recipes for you know that elimination diet i was on colored greens you know broccoli just different ways to make food that way so it's a lot different other i'm just eating meat and the better i feel and the more testimonies i get from people saying you know i cut out all the rest of the vegetables and now i feel better i don't really know what to do because well i don't know it's hard for me not to tell people to give it a try because it made me feel so much better yeah but it's just so out there like you get flak from going gluten free you get a hell of a lot more flak from being like don't eat vegetables yeah so anyway so the blog has that um it has testimonies on there from other people who've had benefits from cutting certain things out of their diet so there are more and more people who've just gone to meet writing their experience down awesome um yeah and it has updates about my family dad's on there sometime yeah well he's everywhere though he's everywhere yeah yeah if any of you came to see um uh dr peterson just youtube his name and you can probably find a lot of videos yeah for sure um mikaela thanks so much and everyone uh take care don't forget to subscribe to depression to expression and look at the links below to see more mikaela boom cool thanks well thanks for having me that was really interesting i'm so glad i didn't look at the latest version of it that is shocking