It has to be said that sometimes we rarely think about the connection or correlation between food and our mood. It doesn’t really matter whether you are feeling happy, depressed, anxious or agitated, there is a deep relation between your mood and the foods that you consume.
When you are on a healthy diet, you feel naturally healthier and substantially revived. Just the way healthy food impacts your body and circulation of blood, fast food degrades your health.
The real question is whether it impacts your mental health too?
Impact on the Mood
Mood swings. Are they a common occurrence for you?
You must have realised how your mind enters the different realms of happiness and ecstasy when you eat a pie. Or a brownie? Or maybe even a burger?
But what if all along you could have been eating foods that makes you feel all these different kinds of emotions. And, does the impact on our mind only influence our emotions or do we feel the impact of food in every fleeting moment through our mood.
Mood Fluctuations Due To Food
The high abundance of food nowadays is quickly resulting in the biggest problem. Food items are packaged in so many different ways, we may or may not even realise what we are actually eating. Such is the power of marketing these days. Though many consumption items tell you what you are eating is healthy when nothing could be further from the truth.
Let us take, for instance, the ready-made meals you can either cook in the oven or fry on a kadhai, are quite the time savers for busy people but the packaging tends to sell the product and sometimes the consumer may be misled as to what they are actually buying. It may come branded with the words low-fat on its casing for instance but may have large quantities of salt and sugar to compensate for this. In fact, you are not buying anything that is healthy at all from it. So essentially you are eating high levels of sugar-based items that are making your brain overthink a lot! Instead of eating such items off shops, order cake online Chennai by reading the ingredients list thoroughly.
A study was done recently on television whereby two families swapped eating habits for a month, to see how it would affect them. One family ate freshly prepared food while the other family ate supermarket ready meals, after the trial was over, they were asked how they felt and also various medical tests were done to see how their health had changed during the trial period.
The family that ate the ready meals whose health was checked before and after the experiment, their health improved due to switching to fresh food while the other family who switched to eating ready-made meals now had problems of high blood pressure, raised levels of cholesterol and slight liver damage. Due to the amount of fat in the diet, they said they had no energy and didn’t feel like doing much at all.
Summing Up the Results
So, there is a direct link between how you are feeling and what you are eating. Hence, the saying, you are what you eat is completely justified. Eating foods that contain less sugar in them as well as carbohydrates will tend to make you feel quite relaxed.
Here is a list of foods that will make you feel more upbeat if you are feeling down:
- Chicken,
- Veal,
- Low-fat cottage cheese,
- Low-fat yoghurts,
- and beans.
If however, you are feeling quite a bit stressed, eat some of the following healthy options – bread, rice and potatoes.
It is not a good idea to get into the habit of eating sweet delicacies when you are trying to lose weight. But, by staying healthy with an improved lifestyle, you will get an insight into how certain foods can make you feel which in itself can lead to comfort eating at times. This is something we want to avoid really if we are trying to lose weight and stay fit.