What you eat affects work, relationships and more

by Katherine Jamieson

What if you could be more joyful and less anxious, avoid fights with your partner, and be more productive at work, just by making some basic changes to your diet? Wouldn’t it be worth it to explore the connections between the foods you eat and the moods you experience?

Just by considering the possibility that your moods and emotions are, to a large degree, under your control, you can regain a lot of power over your life. Getting a handle on your moods might seem like an awesome task. This is especially true if you’ve never considered that your moods actually are in your control. Often, our moods seem to arise spontaneously or in reaction to the outside world, i.e. you get angry because you feel your co-workers are incompetent. When I work with clients, we can often figure out that the toughest days they have at work coincide with days they haven’t had breakfast, or have only a donut or coffee in the morning. By making this basic connection, we can begin to draw the connection between low blood sugar and low moods.
Randi Cestaro is a 33-year-old health counselor and yoga instructor who runs a private practice called Happy Healing in Manhattan.

She used to get tired every day around 3 or 4 in the afternoon and start craving candy or cookies, anything sweet. “And if I didn’t get that sweet treat, oh, watch out here comes mood swings!”
She would start to get very irritable, shaky and a little clammy, and then she would have a sweet to boost her energy, only to find herself yawning again two hours later. “I was so fatigued, all I wanted to do was go home after work and sit on my couch. I didn’t have the energy to work out at night because I was so tired from the energy wave in my body.”

The connection between her food cravings and her moods was very clear. “If I had a bad day at work, I would reach for a cupcake (my comfort food), or if I had a fight or a breakup with a boyfriend it was Swedish fish or gummy bears. My mood would get better for about an hour then the roller coaster would start again. I would be happy and hyper for a time, and then I would start to crash, and it just kept going on and on.”

After years of eating sugar and suffering the resulting mood swings, Randi developed hypoglycemia, an insulin imbalance in the body, which, if left untreated, can eventually lead to Type II diabetes. She was able to cure herself by eliminating white sugar, white flour, and caffeine from her diet. She has lost a good deal of body fat, feels and looks much better, and no longer has mood swings and dips in energy.
Randi’s story may seem severe, but many people are addicted to sugar, caffeine and other extreme foods that wreak havoc on blood sugar and cause intense cravings and mood swings. The key is to begin noticing patterns in your own life so you can identify which foods set you off and then work on balancing your diet so you experience fewer cravings for these foods.

Here are five important steps you can take to reduce mood swings and create balance in your emotions:

• Acknowledge that what you eat affects how you feel.
This is the most basic and important step you can take to balance your moods with food. Most people have noticed how children react to sugar, how too much can immediately cause hyperactivity and acting out. Just because we’re adults doesn’t mean we don’t suffer some of the same results, we are just big children after all (that’s why we all still love sugar so much!).

Start to think about the patterns of moods you’ve experienced in your life, especially if you’ve experimented with various diets. Did you feel differently on a vegetarian or meat-eating diet? Have you tried a weight-loss diet and did it affect your moods? Think back on times when you’ve been extremely happy or depressed, what were you eating? It might take awhile to make the connections, but often they are quite obvious once you take the time to notice them.

• Reduce high-stress foods
High-stress foods put the body out of balance and undermine its self-healing capacities, as well as throwing your moods into a tailspin. Common high-stress culprits are refined/white sugar, coffee, artificial sweeteners, dairy foods, sodas and, for some, tropical fruits. Be aware of how many high stress foods you have in your diet and consider reducing them gradually. This will help the body recover its natural, self-regulating abilities, stabilize blood sugar levels and reduce tension.

• Eat breakfast
It’s cliched to say that breakfast is the most important meal of the day, but for good reason: it is. By neglecting to nourish the body first thing in the morning, many people compromise their chance for stable moods throughout the day. In addition, by substituting coffee for food, the body not only has to cope with the stress of caffeine on an empty stomach, it has no real fuel to keep going. This can lead to irritability and intense mood swings, as well as cravings for other extreme foods throughout the day.

Even a quick and small breakfast can make a difference. Instant oatmeal, a piece of fruit with nut butter, or dried nuts and fruit are good places to start. Once I started eating breakfast regularly, I found not only did my moods stabilize but I could also moderate how much I needed to eat in the morning depending on what I had to do during the day. For lighter days I can have just a bowl of cereal; when I have a presentation or a full day of clients, eggs and whole grains is a better bet.

• Make your diet “whole”
Whole foods are foods that have not been fragmented, preserved and greatly modified from their original state. Whole foods have just one ingredient; the ingredient of an apple is an apple, and they have not been processed or chemicalized in any way. Whole foods have a healing effect on the body and typically take longer for the body to break down, providing a more gradual release of energy into the system. The more whole foods are incorporated into your diet, the less likely you are to experience extreme mood swings.

• Try a “breakfast experiment”
(Adapted from “The Self-Healing Cookbook, A Macrobiotic Primer for Healing Body, Mind and Moods with Whole, Natural Foods, Earthtones Press,” written by Kristina Turner.)
It’s easiest to notice how foods affect us when we eat them at breakfast. After a natural 12-hour fast (finishing dinner at 8 p.m. and eating breakfast the next morning at 8 a.m.), the body is clear and ready to respond to the food you give it. This is a great time to experiment with different kinds of foods and notice how you feel a few hours after eating them. Try having a whole grain, like oats, for breakfast one day, and then eggs or fruit another day, and just coffee one morning. Write down how you’re feeling a few hours after eating. How is your mood, what is your energy like? The results can be quite interesting and elucidating.

Katherine Jamieson is a freelance writer and Certified Holistic Health Counselor. This article first appeared in Pathways.