Inositol

After I first wrote the biotin rant, I've gotten a reputation of being "anti supplement". That is simply not true.

I'm anti "mindlessly doubling or quadrupling your supplement intake based on that someone on some forum said that this vitamin is water soluble, so therefore safe to take enormous amounts of" and I'm anti "thinking that you're smarter than the scientists who dedicated decades of their lives to study this and give out recommendations based on what will keep the general population fit and healthy".
I take supplements. But I take supplements based on recommended daily allowances.
I also experiment with supplements from time to time. Granted, with no noticeable difference, but none the less I have experimented.

Today, I got two new supplements in the mail. Coconut oil to replace my fish oil, and inositol.

It's funny... Hubby and I have different attitudes to supplements. Hubby believes in "Just eat healthy instead", where I believe in "Try to eat healthy" but recognize how difficult it can be to get everything "good" through diet alone. So some times Hubby can give me a bit of attitude when I try a new supplement. This time however, he was very, very interested in the coconut oil supplement!

Anyways.

Last year in October, I decided to tell about my dermatillomania for BFRB awareness week. It's something I have struggled with for as long as I can remember, but only knew there was a term for (Or that I wasn't completely alone in the world with this!) for a couple of years.

For about a year or so, I've noticed information about inositol for anxiety and related disorders on the BFRB blogs and information sites.
At first, I ignored it.
There are so, so many "fix alls" floating around there on the internet. They come and go.
But it seems that inositol stayed. I even ran into it a couple of times on unrelated blogs where bloggers took it for other types of anxiety.
So of course I got curious.

I've read up on it a lot of places now, but let's just take the condensed, easy wikipedia version:

Some preliminary results of studies on high-dose inositol supplements show promising results for people suffering from problems such as bulimia, panic disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), agoraphobia, and unipolar and bipolar depression.[21][22][23]
In a single double-blind study on 13 patients, myo-inositol (18 g daily) was found to reduce the symptoms of OCD significantly, with effectiveness equal to SSRIs and virtually without side effects.[24] In a double-blind, controlled trial, myo-inositol (18 grams daily) was superior to fluvoxamine for decreasing the number of panic attacks and other side effects.[21]
Similarly large doses of inositol have been studied for treatment of depression. A 2004 meta-analysis by randomized controlled trials, with mixed results. The authors concluded the evidence is insufficient to determine whether inositol treatment can reduce depression symptoms, but no evidence of harm or negative side effects is seen.[25]

Link

Sounds good, doesn't it? Worth a try at least.

Of course the problem with reading up on things like this, is that you convince yourself you have a lot of other issues. It's like reading a horoscope or something... You always find something that fits!
(Seriously itching to get a check for PCOS since a lot of the symptoms matches. Sigh)

The pills are huge!

The one thing I find myself objecting to the most though, is that the dose mentioned is up to 18 gram. Holy crap, that is a lot! I like to split my supplements up in three portions (Breakfast, lunch and dinner) so I would need six of my enormous pills for each meal. No wonder inositol is linked to weight loss with those doses. I would be seriously full after a handful like that!

I don't want to have to go so high up in doses, no matter how "virtually side effect free" this is. I think my limit would be at two pills for each portion, maybe?
Anyways, my plan is to start with just one. Then go up in one pill/one gram intervals each week and see what happens. Maybe it will help, maybe it won't.
Stay tuned.