The Food and Mood Connection

The connection between the food and our mood

For many years, the medical field has not acknowledged the connection between food and your mood. This includes the role stress >plays in weight gain. Want to reduce stress naturally? Try my guided meditation.

 

What you eat directly affects your brain which also needs to be supplied with the right fuel. If you eat processed foods which contain refined sugar, which is the main staple of the American diet, you are actually doing harm to your brain.

 

Multiple studies have found a correlation between a diet that includes a lot of refined sugar and reduced brain function and mood/depressive disorders.  Although one in six Americans say they have taken psychiatric drugs and eighty five percent of them have been given multiple drugs to deal with anxiety, insomnia and depression, without being aware of how their lifestyle and what they eat can help to mitigate against this. There is a food mood connection.

 

Studies have shown that when people take probiotics, anxiety levels drop and mental outlook improves. In fact, mental health is much improved on a ‘Mediterranean diet’ that includes foods that contain high amounts of omega 3 fatty acids and fermented food that research confirms can affects the bacteria in the gut which in term can boost one’s mood. Artificial sugars like Splenda lower good bacteria.

 

Cultivating ‘good bacteria’ in the gut is also critical to our emotional well-being as it aids in the production of serotonin naturally. Many of my clients, once they were able to make this switch away from processed foods reported feeling so much better both physically and emotionally. There is a food mood connection. If you do not understand how to deal with and change your ‘emotional’ relationship with food, you may be more likely to turn to junk food as a form of self-medication that starts to feel like an addiction.

 

The recidivism we see with weight loss is the same for any addiction. In fact new research with rats has shown that sugar can have the same effect as cocaine does on the brain.

 

No wonder we have a big problem. Eating patterns once they become a habit may not be controlled entirely by the conscious mind or will.

 

In fact, it’s the emotional brain that has more control over what, why and when you eat than you think. Neuroscience supports this theory in terms of how the brain can rewire by force of habit to misinterpret feelings such as anger and sadness as hunger. Only by re-interrupting and changing these habits of mind can we build new ones and change.

 

According to neuroscience our brains are inherently malleable. This is called neuroplasticity. You need to train the brain can to become your ally as you program in new ways of thinking, acting and of course eating. So that is why most people when they first came in to see me would say “I know what to do to lose weight; I just can’t seem to do it.

Sooner or later, I lose focus… not weight… and stop doing what I need to do.” Well the sad part is they did not really know what to in order to make a lasting change. That is one of the things that the Nirvana Diet helped to address, the misconceptions of what it takes to succeed in a true lifestyle transformation.