about claudia

I started this blog a month after I graduated college, because I was starting to get anxious again.  I am one of the lucky hundreds to have an anxiety disorder - mine in the form of social anxiety peppered with a little panic disorder, meaning that I get really nervous during most every day social interactions which has a tendency to lead to life-interrupting panic attacks.  Its not life-ruining, just inconvenient and terribly frustrating most of the time.  For most of high school I spent most of my time in an anxious fury, trying to figure out a way to control something which I felt that I had absolutely no control over.  By college, I had found that yoga, positive thinking, and lots and lots of breathing helped keep the panic attacks at bay.  However, I was still anxious 80% of the day, and couldn't quite find the right outlet for releasing all that pent up nervous energy.  It wasn't until the summer after my sophomore year that I found my outlet.  Its no secret that college food isn't anything to write home about, but for me, it was the first time that I noticed how food had a direct effect on my body and my anxiety.  By second semester I started to feel almost claustrophobic at the dining halls - I had no way of controlling what I was eating or what was in what I was eating.  That summer, I made two big changes in my life.  The first was that I decided to go vegan, which wasn't that big of a change since I've been a vegetarian since birth.  Immediately I felt an immediate change in how I was feeling, both physically and emotionally.  The second was