Jamie Brown was in her 40s when she had her first panic attack. The owner of Haberdish, Growler’s, and Crepe Cellar with her husband Jeff Tonidandel, Brown had recovered from a stomach bug only to begin suddenly experiencing anxiety.

She found herself worrying about her kids more, and wiping down their home incessantly. The panic attacks started on Easter Sunday, surrounded by friends and family at her home. There were kids and babies playing, and a homemade meal cooked by Jeff. She felt a need to escape it all, and found herself hiding in her bedroom.

“I’d never experienced anything like this before,” Brown recalls. “I started thinking, ‘Am I dying, or what is this darkness?’ Just absolute fear.”

Dozens of panic attacks hit her during the following six months. Her doctor mentioned diet, but as someone who always ate well, Brown discounted its importance. When she found out about a condition called leaky gut, she began paying more attention to what she ate and how it made her feel. Leaky gut causes your intestines to become porous, allowing food particles to seep into your bloodstream, a result of imbalances in your digestive system.

She cut out most foods from her diet, eating almost exclusively vegetables with olive oil, salt, and pepper. The first few weeks, she thought she was immediately cured. Yet as she continued with the strict diet, she continued to feel better each week. It’s been 14 weeks now, and Brown has been amazed by the improvement.

“Sometimes I want to scream it from the rooftops, if you suffer from anxiety it’s not you, it’s your food,” she says. “It’s your gut. You’re not in balance. And I want to scream it because I’ve watched what’s happened with this.”

After a visit to the Cleveland Clinic, Brown is slowly adding foods back into her diet. But the experience will have a lasting effect on her, and is changing the way she eats at home and feeds her kids. It’s also changing her and her husband’s perspective on what they serve in their restaurants. At Haberdish, for example, the staff is working on improving their vegetable options. Crepe Cellar has offered a buckwheat-based crepe batter for those who are gluten-sensitive since Brown cut out gluten several years ago. And what comes next will be a concept that looks at how people will eat in the future as they begin to understand the impact of what they eat, and as stories like Brown’s become more common.

“In the next two years, what does that look like if our food pyramid does get flipped on its head?” she says. “If people start being more mindful of their gut and how they eat and yet they still want to eat out? That’s something that’s been hard for me, the emotional side of food and enjoying it.”

Brown has chronicled her journey to wellness through food on her Instagram page, and it has inspired many followers to ask her questions. She fields messages about insomnia, anxiety, and unhappiness — things she struggled with herself. Often, she could tie insomnia or nightmares back to what she’d eaten for dinner. Red wine, for example, was a trigger. Each time she looked back from an anxiety attack, she could pinpoint exactly what she ate that caused her body to react. She’s glad to be the catalyst for this conversation. She encourages folks to cut back on meat and grains, focusing their meals on vegetables with protein as a garnish, and to encourage eaters to seek out organic and sustainable products. With their growing knowledge, she and Jeff want to create restaurants that are more inclusive going forward.

“We’re definitely considering not necessarily me/my diet, but how people are supposed to eat,” she says. “And to give us legs, too, going into the future, because I think people are going to be looking for that more and more.” —Kristen Wile

 

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