The Doctor's Diet: Dr. Travis Stork's STAT Program to Help You Lose Weight & Restore Your Health (52 page)

Sleep energizes you—getting enough of it can really rev you up for a great day. Weight loss energizes you also. Once you start to really take control of your diet and your health, you’ll probably find yourself smiling more than you used to. And once you start shedding excess pounds, you’re likely to feel lighter emotionally as well as physically. Stay with me, and I’ll tell you about another wonderful weight-loss payoff: high-octane energy that will help lift your mood.

We all know what it’s like to be in a bad mood. Everything just seems kind of grey and dull. You may feel sad or lethargic, bored with activities that you usually enjoy, irritable with the people you come in contact with, discouraged and kind of hopeless that things are going to get better anytime soon. When these feelings last for a while, doctors diagnose depression, but for most of us, a blue mood is just something that comes and goes every now and then.

It’s impossible—and unrealistic to expect—to be in a sunny mood all the time. But you can take steps to push your mood up a notch. In fact, one of the most enjoyable payoffs of following The Doctor’s Diet is an improvement in your overall outlook on life.

Moodiness has many causes, from genetics to upbringing. But the choices you make everyday about food and activity influence your mood as well. As with so many other aspects of health, the decisions you make throughout the day really do matter. By picking mood-boosting foods and eating patterns, losing weight, and zipping up your daily activity, you can optimize your emotional health, boost your mood, and energize your spirit.

Food can affect your mood in a few ways. Certain foods contain substances or nutrients that actually contribute to mood improvement, so it’s good to include those foods in your diet, as The Doctor’s Diet does. Other kinds of food can impede your mood, so it’s best to avoid them.

Let’s start with the foods that support good mood:

Tryptophan is an essential amino acid, meaning your body needs it but cannot manufacture it (as it can with some other amino acids) so it must come from your diet. One of the ways your body uses tryptophan is to make serotonin, a brain chemical that helps regulate sleep and stabilize your mood. Serotonin is the brain chemical that is targeted by
selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), a class of antidepressant drug that includes fluoxetine (Prozac) and paroxetine (Paxil). Low levels of serotonin are associated with depression and anxiety.

Turkey is probably the best-known high-tryptophan food. Others include cheese, chicken, eggs, fish, milk, nuts, peanuts and peanut butter, pumpkin seeds, sesame seeds, soy, and tofu.

There’s a lot to love about the nutrients in nuts—which is why eating nuts is one of my most important Food Prescriptions. In terms of mood, the magnesium in nuts is important. Being low on magnesium can interfere with sleep, and as you know, it’s hard to be in a great mood when you’re sleep-deprived and exhausted.

Almonds, cashews, peanuts, and peanut butter provide good amounts of magnesium. Some other high-magnesium foods include wheat bran, spinach, raisin bran cereal, soybeans, wheat germ, oatmeal, and legumes. Brazil nuts are high in selenium, a nutrient that has also been associated with improved mood.

The cocoa in chocolate also helps boost blood levels of mood-improving serotonin. And compounds called polyphenols in chocolate help promote calmness and contentedness. Remember to go dark: the darker the chocolate, the more cocoa and less sugar it contains. Look for chocolate with a high percentage of cocoa (ideally over 70 percent), because cocoa is the source of chocolate’s health benefits. And limit yourself to a small piece (about half an ounce) per serving because the calories can add up.

I do want to add a caveat to this advice, though: some people can eat a small piece of dark chocolate and stop there. But for others—you know who you are—all it does is set off a craving, and before you know it you’re gobbling up candy bars. If eating dark chocolate just triggers your chocoholicism, skip it—there are plenty of other mood-boosters that won’t end up costing you hundreds of empty calories.

Keeping blood sugar at a stable level throughout the day helps keep your mood even because when blood sugar falls, so does your mood. One way to keep blood sugar at an even keel is to avoid getting too hungry. You can do this by eating a meal or snack every three to four hours. Make sure those meals and snacks contain the right combination of protein, healthy fats, and whole grains, because too much of one and too little of another can make blood sugar go up and down.

Whole grains help your mood in another way as well. Complex carbohydrates contribute to your brain’s manufacturing of serotonin. And they tend to be good sources of folate, a B vitamin. Research has found that depressed people may have lower blood folate levels than those who are not depressed, so it makes sense to keep an eye on your folate intake.

When I eat foods that contain omega-3 fatty acids, I feel as if my mood zips up just thinking about how great they are for my health. As we discussed earlier, omega-3s bring a lot to the table in terms of health benefits: they reduce inflammation and help your heart, your brain, and your joints in a variety of ways. They can also help raise your mood—in fact, studies suggest they may help reduce depressive symptoms in people with clinical depression.

Top sources of omega-3 fatty acids include flax seeds, walnuts, sardines, salmon, mackerel, herring, soybeans, tofu, and shrimp.

Levels of vitamin D are sometimes low in depressed people, and some small studies have found connections between vitamin D and mood. While the researchers figure out the details, go ahead and keep your vitamin D levels up, because it’s great for bone health, lowers inflammation, aids your immune system, and may help ward off some kinds of cancer.

Top sources of vitamin D include salmon, tuna, and vitamin D–enriched milk, orange juice, and breakfast cereals.

Failing to get enough iron can lead to fatigue, moodiness, lack of focus, and an overall feeling of having very little energy in your tank.

Top sources of iron include red meat, oysters, spinach, legumes, dried fruit, turkey, tuna, egg yolks, and iron-fortified cereals.

Just as there are foods that boost mood, there are foods that can bring your mood down.

Start with processed foods made with refined carbohydrates, low-quality fats, salt, sugar, artificial flavors, food additives, hydrogenated fats, and all kinds of chemicals. These are not the foods our bodies were designed to use as fuel, and eating them is like putting trash in your car’s gas tank instead of gasoline. Simple carbohydrates and sugar cause blood sugar spikes and falls that send your mood up and down like a ping-pong ball. Cheap, low-quality oils put a strain on your system as it fights to digest these highly processed, toxin-filled fats. And who knows what our bodies are thinking when they try to handle all the additives in these pseudo-foods.

Eating junk food can push your mood up temporarily. If we think of them as treats, our brains react by saying, “Yay! Cupcakes!” or “Yum! Potato chips!” We’ve been conditioned to get excited by these “special” foods. But once we start really paying attention to how they make us feel, we realize that the good feeling doesn’t last long.

Start paying attention to how these foods make you feel. You might be surprised by how much they impact your mood. A friend of mine got into a habit of buying a candy bar when she would stop at the grocery store for dinner supplies. She’d be hungry after a long day at work, and she’d “treat” herself to a candy bar, thinking it would give her the energy she needed to haul the groceries home and get a healthy dinner on the table.

When she really started to pay attention to how certain foods made her feel, though, she noticed that while getting dinner ready she often felt sick to her stomach. She also realized she was short-tempered with her kids. She assumed both of these feelings were caused by the stress of the evening rush, but then she started to wonder if the candy bar had anything to do with it. One day she skipped the candy bar and grabbed a bottle of veggie juice instead. She was amazed at how much better she felt—no icky stomach, and, even better, she wasn’t snapping at her kids. Once she noticed this, she started paying attention to how other foods made her feel, and it became obvious that eating junk food made her mood suffer. Realizing this made it much easier for her to make smarter choices. Sure, junk food may taste good going down, but if it leaves you
feeling cranky, sad, exhausted, and unmotivated, it’s just not worth eating.

As for eating junk in an effort to get yourself out of a bad mood, don’t bother, because it really doesn’t work. Research has found that when people who are concerned with their weight and their diet binge on junk food, their moods get even worse—no surprise there.

There’s no two ways about it: getting out there and moving your body is a major mood booster. Study after study has found strong links between exercise and mood. In a nutshell, the findings show that active people are less likely to become depressed than inactive people, and active people who stop exercising are more likely to get depressed than people who stay active. Research even shows that for some people with major depression, exercise is as effective a treatment as antidepressant medication.

And here’s the best part: activity can have an almost immediate impact on your mood. Psychology researchers say that mood can begin to improve just five minutes after you start exercising moderately. Five minutes! There aren’t many other health interventions that start to work that quickly.

For these reasons—and so many others—I truly hope you’re making activity a part of your daily life.

Exercise’s mood-raising effects seem to come from changes in serotonin, dopamine, and other feel-good brain chemicals that activate when you exercise. An enjoyable workout—whether it’s swimming laps in a pool, walking around your neighborhood, jogging on the high school track, taking a Zumba class with friends—also gives you a great sense of accomplishment that lingers for hours. Our psyches feel pleased when we engage in a meaningful activity, so exercise can make you feel as good about yourself as doing volunteer work. It also lowers the levels of stress hormones such as cortisol in your blood.

A good mood is sort of like money: no matter how much you have, it’s always nice to have more. Whether or not you struggle with feelings of sadness, depression, or anxiety, following The Doctor’s Diet should help improve your mood. It starts with good eating: when you focus on the whole, healthful foods that make up The Doctor’s Diet eating plan, you’re filling your plate with mood-boosting foods and staying away from foods that bring you down. When you exercise, you enjoy psychological and physiological benefits that can start to cheer you up within minutes and last for hours. And when you start shedding pounds, you’ll feel fantastic about yourself, not only because you’ll look better but because you’ll be setting the stage for a longer, healthier, happier life. Those are some great reasons to feel good about yourself!