Good to Know: Food Affects Your Mood
We could all use a little (or a lot) less stress.
The Oxford & Em team helps our clients have more time and less stress by taking on their copy and content writing tasks.
We’re also fellow humans with our own bouts of stress and anxiety. While we can’t hand off our copy and content (!!!) we can use our stellar research and composition skills to uncover surprising ways to improve our mental and physical health.
Our quest to gather insight from other professionals who help people live healthier, more balanced lives has become our Good to Know blog series.
Part one of our series was all about acupuncture and mental health. In this second part, we’ll explore the impact of diet and nutrition. To learn more about how diet affects stress levels, Oxford & Em founder Melissa Garretson interviewed Kylee Pedrosa — a licensed dietitian nutritionist and diabetes health coach.
Kylee knows a thing or two about how food affects our bodies, and not just from her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in nutrition. The pursuit of her extensive education jumpstarted after her daughter’s diagnosis of type 1 diabetes at the age of two. Frustrated and overwhelmed by the initial diagnosis and how to manage it, Kylee gathered her supermom determination and set out to learn everything she could to help her daughter live her best life despite this enormous obstacle. Now, she has the knowledge and experience to not only help her daughter but also countless other patients who are struggling with diabetes as well.
Although her specialty is diabetes coaching, Kylee has a wealth of practical information about diet and nutrition that applies to everyone. Melissa’s interview with Kylee revealed that when it comes to managing stress with diet, it’s all about the three C’s: consistency, cortisol, and self-compassion.
Consistency
One of the biggest challenges to living a healthier lifestyle through diet is staying consistent. These aren’t strategies you make once and check off a list; they are choices you have to make each and every day. Here are some of the most important elements to keep consistent when working towards a more healthy diet:
Hydration: Break out those Stanley tumblers (Kylee says they work!). Drinking enough water daily is essential to a healthy diet. Water is necessary for our bodies to perform all tasks, from digesting food to absorbing nutrients to eliminating waste.
Protein: We need protein to give us energy, build and repair cells, and help our immune system. Kylee suggests eating some kind of plant or animal-based protein at every meal and aiming for 30% of your calories to come from protein. Besides meat, you can get protein from beans, broccoli, chickpeas, peanut butter, lentils, and more.
Omega-3 Fatty Acids: These healthy fats come from foods like fish, flaxseed, and walnuts. They help keep you feeling full longer and ensure that all your body's cells are functioning at their best.
Magnesium: Looking for a way to promote healthy blood sugar levels, get better sleep, reduce stress, and keep your bones and muscles healthy? Time to up your magnesium levels! Whole grains, legumes, eggs, spinach, seeds, and nuts are all high in magnesium.
Eating Schedule: Kylee says small, frequent meals are best, and for most people, it’s important not to go too long without eating. An inconsistent eating schedule will cause blood sugar levels to fluctuate, which directly affects your mood and causes stress.
Sleep: Yes, this blog is about diet. But the connection between sleep and nutrition is so strong, it needs to be addressed. Not getting enough sleep causes your body to signal that it needs more energy, potentially leading you to feel hungry and eat more often than you need to. Furthermore, feeling tired often leads to poor food choices. Consistent, quality sleep will help tremendously in making better choices and reducing stress.
Cortisol
We can’t talk about stress without mentioning the stress hormone cortisol. Here’s some background on what cortisol is and how it relates to our diet:
What is cortisol?
Cortisol is a hormone our body produces that helps us regulate our reaction to stress. When we’re confronted with any challenge — from a car accident to getting our sleeve caught on a doorknob — our adrenal glands produce and release cortisol, giving us a boost of energy and keeping us alert so we can deal with the issue at hand.
Cortisol is important and meant to help us, but if we’re under too much stress for long periods of time, our baseline cortisol levels increase. This can weaken the immune system, cause weight gain, and raise blood sugar and blood pressure levels.
What does cortisol have to do with diet?
Cortisol is a stress hormone that also helps control metabolism by influencing the body’s use of fats, proteins, and carbohydrates. Eating a balanced, nutritious diet can naturally lower cortisol levels if they are too high. And just as the food we eat affects cortisol levels, the reverse is also true. It is common to turn to eating, specifically carbohydrate-rich foods, when stressed.
Kylee also emphasizes the importance of following natural cortisol patterns when it comes to fueling our bodies. Cortisol levels naturally spike in the morning and are meant to decrease by the afternoon. However, if we skip breakfast, our cortisol levels will continue to increase, and our bodies learn to produce more, causing us to feel stressed.
This is a particularly important point for perimenopausal and menopausal women. While some people, particularly male athletes, can improve performance thanks to the increased cortisol spike from intermittent fasting or fasted cardio, it’s generally a bad idea for women of a certain age. Continually skipping breakfast actually trains most women’s bodies to make and use cortisol as a primary fuel source, and intense workouts add to the stress.
Our bodies are trying to help; they think we’re in danger and need an extra alert boost.
On the other hand, starting your mornings with a small, protein-packed meal followed by moderate-intensity exercise reduces cortisol and sets you up for a less stressful day.
Self-Compassion
We’ve learned that we want to keep our cortisol levels in check to avoid stress and that eating a balanced diet helps us do so. But what happens if we’re constantly thinking about our diet and eating the wrong foods?
We get stressed.
Beyond remembering all the percentages of nutrients to ingest, the portion sizes, and the lists of what to eat or not eat, Kylee reminds us that we also need to have self-compassion. This means allowing yourself to enjoy food — even the occasional doughnut or your favorite pizza. It also means if you fall off track, as we all do from time to time, don’t beat yourself up and get caught in a shame spiral. Instead, reflect on what went wrong and make a plan to move forward.
Look at cravings like data.
Is it hard to resist comforting foods with lots of fats and carbs? Maybe what you need is … comfort! Getting that from food occasionally is fine, but wouldn’t it be better to scratch that itch for good?
Do you have super healthy days and then uncontrollably scarf everything in sight when the sun goes down? Maybe you’re not fueling your body what it needs during the day, so it’s making a last-ditch effort at homeostasis through Cheetos.
Kylee suggests talking to yourself like you’d talk to a friend — be reassuring and encouraging, and think of setbacks as learning opportunities. Don’t look at food as good or bad; instead, stay mindful while eating. Pay attention to how different foods make you feel and what your body is telling you it needs.
We hope that by remembering the three C’s — consistency, cortisol, and self-compassion — you can work towards a healthier lifestyle with less stress. Look for more Good to Know blog posts coming soon, and as always, let us know if we can help with your copy and content needs.
