For how long, is the question though? Depression and anxiety are like the "common cold" of mental health suffering, and everyone endures it a few times in their life.

Well, it's been about 10 years. And I'm still a completely different person with absolutely no signs of it.

The lifetime risk of clinical depression is someething like 30% for men and 40% for women in the west.

Recurrence is about 50% for people with one major depressive disorder occurence, and 80% for people with 2.

That makes it more akin to something like cancer in western countries with regards to lifetime prevalence (but not recurrence)

That may be true for severe cases. But if you consider the checklists used to determine depression, it offers the results on a scale. For example, the Becks depression Inventory (BDI - II) suggests that the depression maybe either "minimal, mild, moderate or severe". Similarly the Burns Depression Checklist (BDC) tests identifies depression as either "mild depression, moderate depression, severe depression or extreme depression". Anxiety is also measured in a similar scale.

The "mild or moderate" segment of depression, or anxiety, is what is said to be a more common short-term occurrence amongst all of us. Most of us manage to often deal with this kind of "situational" depression / anxiety due to some stressful event (losing a job, death, breakup etc.), on our own. But long-term and / or severe / extreme depression is what often requires an outside intervention.

Yeah, no. Please further educate yourself before saying this out loud again.

A lot of people who have no fucking idea what's it's like to have debilitating mental illness apparently.

This has me very curious! How did you decide on eliminating wheat and sugar? Or did you cycle through various eliminations until you found a combination that worked? And how did you know when to keep going/stop?

I was doing a big job for some hippies, and they fed me lunch every day. And even though I thought it was bullshit, I was polite and ate their gluten free, sugar free, organic, free range, etc, etc food. My entire life I hated eating, but I quickly realized that I really enjoyed eating with them, and I felt really good afterwards.

And since then I've done a lot of experimenting and reading other peoples thoughts, and reached the conclusion that simple carbohydrates are fucking terrible for you, for multiple reasons. The biggest is that it causes an insulin spike. If you're then physically active, you'll burn off the sugar you just ate, but your insulin levels stay high, so you'll never start burning your body fat. You just get hungry and eat more sugar.

> My entire life I hated eating

this makes it sound like you have some sort of celiac, gluten allergy, or low-key diabetes