Kelsey Marksteiner: Great, great question. This can kind of run the gamut a little bit, but typically what I see in my own practice is people will often feel very fatigued. I know that’s such a sort of wide, varied complaint that can apply to a lot of different conditions, but it is one of the things that I really do see a lot. Typically these are people that maybe don’t even necessarily have other major health issues. It’s really just like they’re really tired all the time. They’ll maybe get headaches, just sort of these various kind of nonspecific complaints, so fatigue, the headaches. They may have problems sleeping. A higher carbohydrate diet, especially at night, can help to get people to sleep a little bit more easily. This could show up as someone either having trouble falling asleep, so they have insomnia, or their mind is racing at night, that sort of thing, or they’ll wake up a lot during the night. Sometimes when they’re waking up over the night a lot, it can be due to getting some blood sugar drops overnight. That depends on the person. That’s more common with HPA axis dysregulation, so they may have something else going on, and I will say that HPA axis dysregulation is very, very common when you have been eating too low dietary carbohydrates for a long time in combination with other life stressors. You will see that a lot, and most of your HPA axis dysregulation clients will typically need to increase their carbohydrate intake.
Another symptom can be cravings, sugar cravings. If they’re feeling like they need to grab for the carbohydrate-dense snacks during the day, that, to me, can mean two things. It can mean, one, that they’re not eating enough food, in general. If they’re eating a much too low-calorie diet for their activity level, for their height, their weight, age, etc., that can show up as cravings, and specifically, carbohydrate cravings. And it can show up because of just a generally too low carbohydrate diet for, again, their activity level, height, weight, age, etc. If you see someone who has a really hard time not reaching for carbohydrate-dense snacks, you want to check two things. You want to check overall caloric intake, and you want to check overall carbohydrate intake, and check that against what you think would be appropriate for that particular client.