Ep.76 PCOS and Anxiety: Why No Doctor Ever Explained This to Me

If you've been to every doctor, gotten every test, and still no one has connected the dots between what you're eating and the panic attacks you're having, this episode is for you. You're not broken, your blood sugar might be driving the bus.

EPISODE SUMMARY 

Sari gets real about the daily pattern that was quietly feeding her panic attacks for years: no breakfast, a punishing workout on empty, hours without eating, then whatever was easiest to grab. After being diagnosed with PCOS and learning she was insulin resistant, she started connecting symptoms she'd always chalked up to anxiety. The lightheaded, dizzy, shaky, heart racing, and so much more. Something no doctor had ever mentioned before: blood sugar.

This episode breaks down how blood sugar symptoms and anxiety symptoms can look nearly identical, why that overlap kept her stuck in a cycle no doctor was catching, and the one shift that reduced her panic attacks by roughly 30%, without medication.

If you've done the doctors, the tests, the medications, and you're still wondering why nothing's changing, this might be the missing piece nobody handed you.

WHAT YOU'LL LEARN

• Why blood sugar symptoms and anxiety or panic attack symptoms can look almost identical
• How skipping meals and running on caffeine can quietly trigger panic attacks that feel like they come out of nowhere
• Why insulin resistance and PCOS make blood sugar regulation even harder, and how that connects to anxiety
• The one food habit that helped reduce Sari's panic attacks by about 30%, without medication
• Why doctors so often medicate the symptom instead of asking what you're eating
• How self-research and self-advocacy became the real turning point, not another prescription
• What it means to take your power back from anxiety, one small, doable choice at a time

REFLECTION 

What did you eat today? When was your last meal, and how long did you go without eating in between?

Have you ever noticed your anxiety or panic attacks get worse when you haven't eaten?

If changing what you eat could reduce your panic attacks by even 20 or 30 percent, would you be willing to try it?

Work With Sari

If anxiety feels like it comes out of nowhere and you're exhausted from bracing for the next crash, grab the free 5-Minute Nervous System Reset. Something that actually helps tonight.

And if you're the woman who's already done the research, tried the things, and is ready to put the full picture together, not just the food, everything, book a free Freedom Roadmap Session. Let's map it out together.

You're not broken. You're not behind. And you're not alone. If you made it here, that means something.

TIMESTAMPS 

00:00: Running out the door on coffee, no breakfast, and wondering why your body falls apart by 2 or 3pm 

00:53: The reveal: one change reduced her panic attacks by roughly 30%, no medication involved  

02:43: Diagnosed with PCOS, and what insulin resistance actually means for her body 

04:02: Thinking it was "just anxiety," and the cycle no doctor ever connected for her 

04:55: Why doctors don't ask about diet, and finding a functional doctor who finally did 

05:24: Blood sugar symptoms versus anxiety and panic attack symptoms, and how identical they look 

06:38: The real trigger behind her panic attacks: blood sugar dropping, not random danger 

07:31: The blood sugar rollercoaster: spikes, crashes, and why every crash felt like a panic attack 

08:58: Feeling like "a fucking lunatic," and why the metformin her doctor prescribed made it worse 

09:49: Finding the book that connected the dots when no doctor would 

11:40: Wanting control back, and why food became the tangible thing she could actually touch 

13:34: The non-negotiable rule: protein with every meal and snack 

14:58: Cutting the sugary coffee, fueling before and after workouts, and the 30% drop in panic attacks 

16:24: Comparing that 30% to how effective most FDA-approved drug studies actually are  

19:00: Anxiety as a subconscious operating system, the same way eating patterns are 

20:16: Why blood sugar was just the first thing she took back, and where it led her next 

5 minute nervous system reset ad for midroll

Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:08

Fuck anxiety. It's a battle cry to all the women out there who are so tired of continuing to let anxiety keep them imprisoned in their own lives. If you wake up already exhausted, even after a full night of sleep, move through your day taking care of everything. The kids, the work, the responsibilities, you show up with a smile like you have it all together. Something doesn't feel right. No one can really tell. So stick around, because I'm going to share with you and stories that get you back. Are you running out the door on coffee and no breakfast, pushing through a workout on empty, eating whatever it is in front of you whenever you remember to eat? And then wondering why your body feels like it's falling apart by 2 or 3 p.m. Do you get lightheaded, dizzy, shaky, out of nowhere, and immediately think something is seriously wrong with you? Have you been to every doctor, gotten every test, maybe even gotten a diagnosis like PCOS, and still no one has connected the dots between what you're eating and the panic attacks you're having? Are you also so deep in a cycle of anxiety that you don't even realize your body might just be screaming for fuel? What if I told you that one change, something completely in your power right now, reduced my own panic attacks by roughly 30%? No medication, no doctor, just understanding what my body actually needed in the moment. If any of this resonates for you, keep listening. Because what I figured out on my own, what nobody was telling me, changed everything. And it started with something as simple as understanding and regulating my blood sugar. Welcome in, guys. Let's jump in to this juicy episode. So I want to just kind of paint the picture of what my daily life looked like when I discovered all of this. Okay. So I would leave early in the morning to get my kids to school and maybe make a coffee or definitely not eat anything. If anything, I probably stopped at Starbucks on the way and got some sugary latte. No breakfast. And then I went to a workout where I destroyed myself. I used to work out at Orange Theory and like kill myself, didn't eat after, went straight to work, probably had more coffee, and waited until I was starving, you know, around one or two o'clock lunchtime. And at the salon, we would order like tacos or chips and queso or, you know, just things of this nature, like not always the best options. You know, somebody would bring in cookies and you'd be like, ooh, that looks good. I haven't eaten in a while. And then you wouldn't have anything the rest of the day, or I wouldn't have anything the rest of the day because I would be slammed with clients. And then it would be five or six o'clock, and now I need to go and run and get my kids, or I've already gotten my kids from school. I've gone back to the salon to start working. And it's just go, go, go, go, go. And I was reaching for things like a bag of chips or just whatever was available that was easy because I hadn't planned. And meanwhile, I had also been diagnosed with PCOS, which if you don't know what that is, it's polycystic ovarian syndrome. And I think even recently they've called it something else. Um, I don't know what that is. I would have to look it up. Um, but with this, one of the big things with having PCOS is that your body is already dealing with something called insulin resistance. And when you're already insulin resistant, and then I was feeding my body even more chaos with the lack of eating or the shit eating. And then the symptoms of this are you're lightheaded, you're dizzy, you're shaky, you're kind of out of it. I didn't even know that these were actual blood sugar symptoms of your blood sugar spiking and then dropping. I just thought it was my anxiety. I thought something was wrong with me. And then that in turn made my anxiety worse, which then created more panic attacks because I was so sensitive to my body sensations, the physical sensations in my body, that it just exacerbated the anxiety and the panic attacks. And then it was a cycle that no one, not a single doctor, was connecting for me. And looking back, it's so frustrating to not see where that's connected. And even I recently had a client tell me that her she went to see her regular doctor and her cholesterol was high, but the doctor didn't talk to her about diet. The doctor didn't want to know what her exercise routine was. And she's a really healthy woman. And why that conversation is not happening, I don't understand. Luckily, I have now found a functional doctor that I love, which to me, functional doctors are the way to go because they get to the root of the problem versus trying to slap a band-aid on it. And that's exactly what happened for me. So let me get back into the symptoms of what low blood sugar looks like and anxiety symptoms and how they can almost look extremely identical. And this is the piece that nobody told me. Let's go back to what I shared being lightheaded, dizzy, shaky, your heart racing, feeling like something is wrong. These are all also blood sugar symptoms. They are also textbook anxiety and panic attack symptoms. I've shared before there are over a hundred different physical symptoms, sensations of anxiety that can show up in your body. If you Google it, you will see. And these same symptoms, I just correlated them with my panic attacks. And so I assumed it was my anxiety. And then I also was like, well, why do I keep having these? What's wrong with me? Why is there something wrong with me? It was always the worst case scenario of what is wrong with me. So what happens? I start to feel those sensations, and then my brain says something is wrong, right? That's the trigger, that's the alarm bells, that is the danger, that is worst case scenario. So now I'm in full panic attack. Not because there's an actual threat. It's just because my blood sugar dropped. And then my body sent a signal, and my brain does what my brain does, which is freak the fuck out, and also think that this is random. But in reality, it wasn't random. It was a physical trigger. And that trigger was trying to alert me to let me know that like something was wrong. My blood sugar dropped, but I didn't have the information, the education to understand what was happening in my body, which is what was really fucked up for me at the time. The fact that my own doctors couldn't let me know that that's what was going on. So when I found out that I had PCOS, which comes with being insulin resistant, my body was already struggling to regulate blood sugar on its own. And then on top of that, I was feeding it shitty coffee with sugary additives. I was skipping meals. I was going hours without eating. And when I was eating, it was shit food. And so my blood sugar was on a roller coaster all day long. And I guarantee you that if you're listening to this right now, there's a part of you that has experienced this, that has been in this type of lifestyle where we go, go, go, go, go, and we're constantly doing for others and for our job and for our families and so many things. And we just forget about ourselves. It's almost like we put ourselves on the back burner. And then we have spikes and crashes and spikes and crashes all day long. And every crash felt like a panic attack to me. And it felt like a panic attack because my body was responding in a way to alert me, to signal to me, hey, your blood sugar's low. If you were a diabetic and you wore like an insulin pump, your body, it would be alerting you every time your insulin was really low. Your blood sugar was really low. It would be alerting you. Now, granted, I'm not a diabetic. I was just insulin resistant. So I don't need to wear an insulin pump. But when you don't know and you're just experiencing these symptoms, you feel like you're a fucking lunatic. You feel like you're losing control, like you've lost it. And so, and I can even remember my doctor trying to put me on metformin, which was supposed to help with like weight and insulin resistance, didn't work. I think it actually made me feel worse, um, which, you know, unfortunately, medications tend to do. So I want to tell you the thing that started changing everything for me. And that was just one, my willingness to start researching that, like clearly my doctors are not giving me answers. They're not helping me, they're not supporting me. Who's going to help me? And so I really had to advocate for myself. Luckily, we live in this amazing age of information where we can Google everything under the sun. And so, in doing so, I found this book that changed everything. And it's a book called Healing PCOS. And it's by the PCOS diva. And it's all about managing blood sugar with PCOS, understanding what's happening in your body. And this was the first time somebody had really connected the dots for me. It wasn't a doctor, it wasn't a therapist, it was a book I found on my own. So I encourage you to, whatever it is that you're struggling with, just start Googling it. See where you are led, because this is the most empowering thing. And trust where you get led to and what feels good. So I realized, you know, in this moment, the doctors, they just wanted to put the band-aids on it. They wanted to give me the metformin. They wanted to slap a band-aid. And instead, they weren't asking me what I was eating when I'm eating. How is your blood sugar affecting your nervous system? I think someone who's able to diagnose you as PCOS, they actually found this out because I had a cyst rupture. And it was really, really painful. And I went into my OBGen and it was already like too late. You wouldn't be able to see the cyst rupture on a sonogram, but she could see one of the only ways that they could, I guess, diagnose this at the time was your ovaries look like chocolate chip cookies. And it's because they have all of these cysts, meaning polycystic ovarian syndrome. So what I figured out when I found this book is that number one, my anxiety had created an environment, a reality, a world where I felt so out of control. And what I wanted to feel was to get some of that control back in my life. And so at the time, it gave me something tangible, something I could actually do. So I maybe wouldn't be able to control my anxiety in the moment, but what I could control was what I put in my mouth. And that shift was huge for me, not just nutritionally, but mentally. And, you know, for I've also shared on this podcast that I've had weight issues my whole life. You know, I wasn't the perfect ballerina body as a dancer. And I never understood that. And so I was constantly like trying to be skinnier, trying to be thinner. And, you know, this is something that's still like stuck in the back of my head even today. I'm still trying to really love my body in the moment and that it's unique and it's beautiful for what it is. But this book really taught me that what I put in my mouth can actually change how I feel in my body. Not even so much from an aesthetic out, outside perspective, but from a like, how do I actually want to feel? And it was the first real time that I started gaining my power back. So let me tell you what happened. Number one, first of all, if you're resonating with any of this, I highly go recommend searching out this book. I will put it in the website show notes if you want to go check it out. But number one is having protein with every single meal, every single snack is non-negotiable. If you are insulin insulin resistant of any kind, and making sure that you're not going hours without eating. And when you have protein with each snack, each meal, your body doesn't drop in sugar because the protein helps sustain the your blood sugar balance. So making better food choices, choosing to not like, you know, having a bag of chips or having a random like chocolate chip cookie, that's gonna make your blood sugar spike and then drop, right? So choosing instead of that, maybe packing a protein bar or packing some nuts. Nuts were huge. I used to have nuts on me all the time. And it was just enough protein to help balance my sugar and also stave off a little bit of like that hunger in that moment. And it was just about making better food choices. It's not about perfection, just the awareness that if I choose this right now, if I'm choosing this bag of chips right now, I'm probably gonna have my blood sugar spike and it's gonna drop. If you're someone who's dealing with insulin resistance, if you're having blood sugar issues, if this is not you, great. But also pay attention to your body, right? Like if you are just having that, you know, vanilla latte from Starbucks in the morning, is it just the caffeine that's making you like drag afterwards? Or is it because that's all you had? There was no protein in it, except for maybe some of the milk. But what is the thing that's actually causing you to drag afterwards? Is it just the coffee, the caffeine, or is it also potentially your blood sugar? So fueling your body before workouts and after workouts, cutting out the sugary coffee and doing all of this made my panic attacks diminished by I would I would guess like 30%, 30% just from what I ate. I want you guys to know how huge this was for me. There were days where I would have up to 15 panic attacks a day. So I can't do the math perfectly in my head, but even to just have like four of those cut out was huge for me. Most pharmaceutical drug companies studies don't even show 30% effectiveness that get approved by the FDA. Okay. Most drug studies, like their effectiveness is like 26% and they get approved by the FDA. And that's what we're taking. We're choosing to put that shitty ass fucking pill in our mouth that's gonna give us 26% effectiveness versus just doing one change in our life, which is changing our diet. And you know, a lot of people don't want to do that. They don't want to stop eating the way they are, but they're wondering why they still feel like shit. And so this is where you take your power back. You get to decide. This is the choice. We talk about choice so much on this podcast. I feel like I should rename this podcast The Choice, which I'm not gonna do. But and another thing with this, I just want to circle back in is, and I know this isn't everyone's story that maybe you have a really amazing doctor that talks to you about everything. But for me, in my situation, in my case, no doctor told me this. I found it out myself. And this is the part that mattered most. I'd been to every doctor, I tried medications, I had done every test, and nobody connected my eating patterns to my panic attacks. They wanted to just medicate my symptoms without ever looking at what was causing them. I researched it myself, I tried it, and I got results. And that opened the door to the biggest question of all. If I could do this for myself, what else could I do? And this was the turning point. Not in just the blood sugar for me, but in everything. Because I researched something. It worked, and what else could I research that could work? And if changing my panic attacks just by what I'm eating changed it by 30% without a doctor, without medication, what else is in my own power that I don't even know about yet? What's in your power that you don't even know about yet? This is when my power started coming back into my court and out of my anxieties, feeling less like a prisoner of anxiety and more like I just found a key, a key to unlock me from this prison. Right. But within that, the will, the want has to be stronger than the anxiety, the patterns, the programmings themselves, right? Because a lot of my anxiety was subconscious. I had created an operating system that was like, it's three o'clock, we're gonna have a panic attack. Why aren't you having a panic attack? We're gonna make sure that you have one, right? So now by changing what I was eating, at three o'clock, I wasn't having a panic attack because I wasn't having my blood sugar drop. Right. But just as my anxiety was an operating system I had created, so is the way that we eat, right? So you have to be willing to choose to do things different, to get out of the same complacent ways that you're being that are causing the discomfort and decide to do something else. This is part of what changes our subconscious network that gets us beyond our stuckness, beyond the thing that we feel like we're in a prison in. I was no longer powerless in the way that the identity of anxiety had made me believe because I tried something and it worked by myself. Blood sugar may have been the first thing that I took back, but it wasn't the last. And once I realized my body was responding to what I was giving it, I started looking at everything the food, the thoughts, the beliefs, the subconscious programs running underneath all of it. And ultimately, there's the root, right? Is the subconscious programs that are running underneath all of it. And that's what led me to. I did meditation and hypnosis and the work that I do now with my clients, where the real programming lives, right? What what is what are the real programs that are choosing to eat shitty for you? What are the real programs that are causing your anxiety, causing your grief, causing your achievement addiction, causing your perfectionism? What is the beliefs behind all of that that are running an autopilot? And when we work with those one-on-one, we start to change them at the root. The same way your food changes your blood sugar, changing your subconscious programming changes your entire nervous system. And if you're ready to find what else is in your own power, visit thegrowth goddess.net and book your free freedom roadmap session where we can have a conversation of curiosity of what this could look like. Put the full picture together. Not just the food, but everything. So here are some questions to sit with for today. What did you eat today? When was your last meal? And how long did you go without eating in between? Have you ever noticed that your anxiety or panic attacks get worse when you haven't eaten? What's the feeling in your body when you haven't eaten? And if you had a panic attack recently, what had you eaten that day? How much water had you had? What were you nourishing your body with? What does your morning routine look like? Are you fueling your body? Or are you running on fumes? If changing what you eat could reduce your panic attacks by even 20 or 30 percent, would you be willing to try it? Maybe even it's more. And where else in your life have you been giving away your power to anxiety instead of taking it back? What's one small thing you could change this week to start taking your own power back? And if you have any questions or you want to leave any comments, please do. I'd love to hear from you. Send me a DM. I want to know what's hitting for you. You made it here, and that means something. So keep showing up. If this episode felt like it was speaking directly to you, share it with another woman who might need to hear this too. And please leave a rating and a review. This helps boost the podcast so women just like you can find it and find real-time support and belief also. Stay tuned for more episodes with stories, tools, and real hope. Because you're more than just the identity of a woman who has anxiety. And when you begin to heal your relationship with anybody, you're not just changing your life. You're changing what gets passed down to your daughters, your granddaughters, and the women who come after you. You are not. And this is where we get to truly take.