Why What We Eat Is So Important
The food you put into your body is crucial, as it provides the nutrition you need to function properly. Just like a car, your body requires the right kind of fuel to operate efficiently: Your organs to work well, your cells to regenerate, and your hair and nails to grow. Eating a healthy and balanced diet is essential for maintaining good health and fighting disease. In fact, 90% of your body’s serotonin, a hormone that stabilises mood and promotes happiness, is produced in the digestive tract.
It’s important to eat a variety of foods rather than sticking to the same every day. Remember, the food you eat is the fuel that powers your body, so it’s important to give it the right kind of energy to keep it running smoothly.
Replacing Bad Habits With Good Ones
When striving to identify your triggers, a detailed food diary can be a valuable tool. By recording exactly what you eat and drink, as well as the time and company you keep while consuming them, you become consciously aware of your consumption and hold yourself accountable.
Unfortunately, many of us turn to processed foods when we’re feeling down, not realising that they contain unhealthy levels of sugar, salt, and fat that can worsen our mood.
Keeping A Food Diary
Keeping a food diary can have a multitude of benefits for your overall health and well-being. By documenting what you eat, you become more conscious and accountable for your food choices. Often, we consume food unconsciously and without much thought, mindlessly snacking on sweets or chips throughout the day. These habitual behaviours can be difficult to break, but by taking conscious action and keeping a food diary, we can interrupt these patterns and start to make positive changes.
In addition to being a great motivator for avoiding unhealthy foods and making wiser choices, a food diary can also help you identify specific foods that trigger anxiety, low mood, or even illness. By understanding the circumstances in which you eat, such as the time of day, your location, who you’re with, and how you’re feeling, you can better identify potential issues and make adjustments to improve your diet. So why not start today and begin reaping the many benefits of keeping a food diary?
The Benefits of a Food Diary
Keeping a food diary can be a valuable tool for many people seeking to understand their eating habits better. It provides insight into what we eat and drink throughout the day, and when done mindfully, it can support overall health and well-being. However, for those with eating disorders, it’s important to approach this practice with care and guidance.
How Can a Food Diary Help?
- Enhanced Awareness: Recording what you eat helps you become more aware of your food choices and patterns. This can be especially useful for understanding how different foods affect your mood and energy levels.
- Identifying Patterns: A food diary can help you spot patterns, such as times when you may eat out of stress or other emotional triggers. Recognising these patterns can be the first step in addressing them with professional support.
- Tracking Nutrient Intake: For those working on specific dietary goals or managing a condition, a food diary can help track your intake of nutrients and ensure you’re meeting your health objectives.
- Supporting Recovery Goals: For some, a diary can help track progress and provide insights into how certain foods impact our well-being. It’s a tool for reflection rather than control.
Tips for Using a Food Diary Mindfully:
- Seek Professional Guidance: If you have an eating disorder, use a food diary with the support of a healthcare professional. They can help ensure it’s used in a way that supports your recovery rather than causing additional stress.
- Include Feelings and Physical Sensations: In addition to recording what you eat, note how you’re feeling emotionally and physically. This helps in understanding the connection between your emotions and eating habits.
- Focus on Support, Not Perfection: The diary should be a supportive tool, not a means of self-criticism. Use it to understand and improve your relationship with food, not to monitor or control intake obsessively.
- Review Regularly: Regularly review your diary to ensure it remains a positive and constructive tool.
Top Tips to Improve Your Diet
Our brain is a powerful tool that controls every aspect of our life. It helps us think, feel, move and breathe. But did you know that what we eat can have a significant impact on how our brain functions? Research shows that the gut and the brain are intricately linked, and the food we consume can affect our mood, behavior, and mental health. Here are some tips to help you revamp your eating habits for better brain health.
- Eat Regularly: One of the essential aspects of maintaining good brain health is to eat at regular intervals throughout the day. This helps keep our blood sugar levels even, preventing cortisol and adrenaline from releasing stress hormones that make our heart pump faster, resulting in anxiety. Leaving long periods without food can also lead to binge eating or cravings for unhealthy carbohydrates for a quick rush of energy. The importance of breakfast needs to be highlighted here as, after a night’s sleep, our body needs refuelling before it can efficiently face the day ahead.
- Follow a Realistic Healthy Eating Plan: Instead of going on a restrictive diet, consider following a realistic healthy eating plan that incorporates foods you enjoy. Diets are rarely sustainable over a long period of time because they don’t address how much you eat, what you eat, when you eat, why you eat and why you have the desire to eat when you are not hungry. Furthermore, when you restrict yourself from certain foods, the consequence is quite often an obsession with that food.
- Eat Mindfully: Learn to eat without distraction and focus entirely on your food. Eating while watching television or scrolling through social media leads to eating unconsciously, and we don’t acknowledge everything we’ve eaten, resulting in not being aware when we’re full.
- Remember the 3 P’s: Preparation, Presentation & Palatability. Using all your senses around mealtimes will make the experience of eating more pleasurable and positive. Listen to the food cooking, smell the ingredients, taste the different flavours, see the colours and contrasts on your plate, and feel the fuels replenish your system.
- Drink More Water: Water makes up on average 60% of the human body, and consuming enough of it has numerous benefits such as transporting hormones and nutrients to their destinations, flushing bacteria from your system, aiding digestion and preventing constipation, regulating body temperature, protecting organs and cushioning joints.
- Make Sure You Have Your 5 A Day: Fruit and vegetables are low in fat and calories but a great source of fibre, vitamins and minerals. The five portions should be a variety of fruit and vegetables because different fruits and vegetables contain different combinations of nutrients. They can be fresh, frozen, tinned, dried or even in juice form.
- Choose Whole Foods: Eat as much food in its natural state as possible. Reduce foods that are highly sugared, salted, processed, refined carbohydrates or factory-made, as these can lead to different health issues.
- Reduce Dairy Products: Dairy products can contain high amounts of saturated fats, sugar, salt, as well as antibiotics and hormones consumed by cows. Replacing dairy with alternative kinds of milk such as soya, rice, coconut, almond, cashew or hazelnut can have a huge benefit on health.
- Reduce Alcohol and Caffeine: Alcohol is a depressant and a diuretic. It alters levels of serotonin in the brain, which can trigger anxiety. Drinking in moderation (no more than 1 glass for women/ 2 glasses for men per day) is acceptable, but why not try some alternatives such as the many non-alcoholic options on the market these days? Consuming too much caffeine, which can be found in products such as tea, chocolate, certain headache medications, and energy drinks, can also have negative effects on our mental health. Too much caffeine can cause sleep problems and mood swings, but it can also trigger the “fight or flight” response, resulting in symptoms such as heart palpitations, nausea, headaches, and diarrhoea. It’s important to be mindful of caffeine intake and opt for healthier alternatives like herbal teas or decaf coffee. By reducing our intake of alcohol and caffeine, we can improve our sleep, reduce anxiety and stress, and promote a healthier mind and body.
