3 Ways Food Affects your Daily Mood
Have you ever taken a moment to think about how your mood influences your food choices?
Or how your food choices change your mood?
If you’re stressed, maybe you reach for a chocolate bar to feel some comfort... or maybe you skip lunch because you’re overwhelmed.
If you ate too many slices of pizza maybe you feel guilty and ashamed of yourself. Or maybe it's the end of the week and you want to celebrate with take out!
We tend to place a lot of emphasis on our physical health, the number on the scale, calories we consume, and visiting the doctor. While all of that has it’s place, we often forget to consider how we feel mentally.
A lot of my clients tell me they feel frustrated that despite eating well and exercising, they still can’t move the number on the scale.
They feel hungry and don’t know how to eat healthy.
Our health and wellness is more than just food. Movement, connection, sleep, and stress management are all pillars of wellness that need attention, too.
When your goal is to create an authentically healthy lifestyle, it’s important to prioritize mental wellbeing just as much as your physical health.
Your mental health or your mood can directly influence your food choices for physical, emotional, and physiological reasons.
And so with that said, here are three ways your mood impacts your food choices, and what you can do to implement self-care:
You may feel hungrier than normal.
When you struggle coping with your emotions, do you find yourself turning to food to help “numb” or “distract” from emotions you may be feeling?
Does it feel like you compulsively overeat or mindlessly eat until you're uncomfortably full?
There’s actually a physiological explanation for this that goes beyond “willpower.”
Eating stimulates a dopamine release: dopamine is one of those “feel-good” hormones, and your body has a high desire for pleasure when in a depressive episode.
This can cause a cycle of desiring that dopamine, using food to receive it, experiencing a temporary high, and then potentially a “crash” or feeling worse after eating.
The more you chase that dopamine, the stronger your hunger signals may be.
Conversely, if you’re not eating consistently throughout the day or you skip meals, you might think you're emotionally eating, but in fact you're physically hungry. Sometimes your hunger signals are just stronger because you really need food!
If you’re not eating consistently throughout the day or you skip meals, it’s easy to confuse emotional eating with physical hunger.
Sometimes you might be physically hungry and be experiencing stress, boredom, or loneliness. Without self-awareness, it’s difficult to distinguish between our physical needs and emotional state of mind.
2. You may not feel hungry at all.
Sometimes, instead of feeling compelled to eat more, your body loses its hunger signals altogether.
If you’re experiencing depression, anxiety, or stress, the body may enter a state of fight-or-flight. In that state, your body pauses all physiological processes at hand and focuses on one thing: survival.
While you do need food to survive, it’s not as “urgent” as removing yourself from the situation that put you in fight-or-flight to begin with.
If your body’s in a constant state of fight-or-flight or you’re experiencing high levels of stress or living a chaotic lifestyle, release of hunger hormones can be deeply affected. This can suppress your appetite; not only do normal tasks such as eating take more energy than normal, but your body isn’t giving you hunger signals in the first place!
3. Making food choices becomes more difficult.
If you’re someone who struggles with mental health, you may have experienced low energy levels or desire to complete everyday tasks, such as preparing a meal or eating in general.
This often increases the consumption of processed foods, takeout, or maybe even the same meal over and over again.
Consuming a healthy diet with a variety of whole grains, protein, healthy fats, probiotics, fruits and vegetables throughout the day can actually lessen depressive symptoms and improve your mood. It can even improve the signal pathways between your brain and your body, improving your body’s internal hunger and fullness cues.
Keeping a food journal is a great way to build awareness around your food choices.
A food journal doesn’t have to be about counting calories, losing weight, or judging yourself; it can be about examining your relationship with food, your body, and your mind with nonjudgmental curiosity.
You can write down what you ate, the time of each meal or snack, the emotions you experienced that day, any intense hunger or fullness signals, and how that food made you feel.
From there, you can notice any patterns in your mental health and eating habits and begin implementing small behavior changes to slowly break any patterns that aren’t serving you and slowly improve your health and mood.
Remember, when it comes to mental health, you’re never alone; speak with a mental health professional if you feel you’re struggling and need additional support.
If you want to learn how your food intake is affecting your mood (or vice versa), I created a Food & Mood Journal to help you dig deeper.
This is the food journal I use will my clients in my private practice to easily track eating patterns, identify mood triggers, and make a game plan for when those “low’s” hit! Get it here.
if you want to work through the Food & Mood Journal together, request an appointment here!
