Food and Your Mood

Are you sitting in the waiting room feeling like your health is out of control?  In a time when you may feel you have little control over your mind or body, there is one thing you can control with depression and anxiety.  That is your daily food.  With therapy and medication, food can be a part of your overall treatment plan to help you feel better.

I love date night when I can relax with Mike and have someone else cook. I also really enjoy some nights when we go out as a family and I don’t have to feed 3-4 teens. Most of the time, we have a plan so we rarely go out spontaneously. That’s because we do take cooking at home seriously and we are both working on our nutrition and working out. But...those nights when we do go out, we still try to eat the same way we would at home. That can be a challenge.

Health and Fitness Expert, Shawn Stevenson, has a great analogy. Our health is like a three legged stool. The three legs are Nutrition, Exercise and Sleep. If we take any one of those legs away, the stool falls.

Stressed out? Me too! Let’s talk about stress and specifically how we react to it with food. Whether it’s the hurricane coming to our area, a job situation, busy family or any chronic stress, our bodies are under attack.  Sadly, many people report a high level of stress on a daily basis over very long periods of time. 

Did everyone else grow up on cereal? I did!  I even ate it for dinner many times in college. I didn’t love granola until I was older. I liked the typical sugar filled cereals like Froot Loops and Frosted Flakes.  Of course, Cap’n Crunch beat them all out because I am a peanut butter freak.

I admit it! I attempted so many fat loss diets and even used some very unhealthy ways to lose weight fast.  I was on the only potato diet, the grapefruit and hard boiled egg diet, the low fat diet, the juicing diet and even the don’t eat anything diet.  That one backfired into me eating more.