Mood and Food

Over the last few years, I have devel­oped a lit­tle hobby about food. I have known for years that food and feel­ings go together. Some time ago, I got into the con­cept of food as med­i­cine. For most of my life, I have just eaten as the cul­ture around me has — obliv­i­ous to effects of fats, sug­ars, cho­les­terols, and food addi­tives. As a white-collar worker, I con­tin­ued eat­ing the big meals that I had to eat when I was a teenager work­ing on a farm. Need­less to say, I have spent money on expanded sizes of cloth­ing.

Food is its own lan­guage. We talk food. We use it to cel­e­brate, con­sole, bury feel­ings, express feel­ings, and even gen­er­ate cer­tain kinds of feel­ings (ice cream and look­ing out the win­dow at a sun­set is a rather euphoric phe­nom­e­non). Neg­a­tively, I have dis­cov­ered that sugar on an empty stom­ach trig­gers anger (almost exactly thirty min­utes after I eat some­thing sweet). Man does not live by caf­feine alone either. Three hours after cof­fee on an empty stom­ach and I can hardly sign my name. Any food that makes you feel good even­tu­ally helps you feel bad. So we repeat the cycle. No won­der the whole world around us looks manic-depressive.

Other than an occa­sional aspirin, I don’t take any med­ica­tions. How­ever, the med­i­c­i­nal enzymes in cer­tain spices and herbs can do more for your health than half the phar­macy com­bined. Research­ing those foods can be kind of fun. Red wine has hun­dreds of enzymes, some of which expand the blood ves­sels around the heart, boost the immune sys­tem, and in men, reduce the pos­si­bil­i­ties for cer­tain types of can­cer. Almonds, wal­nuts, and pretty much the whole range of fruits and veg­gies have med­i­c­i­nal qual­i­ties too. I don’t mean to sound like a com­mer­cial, but it isn’t just that we are what we eat, but food and feel­ings go hand-in-hand. Maybe it is not what is eat­ing at you but what you are eat­ing that makes you feel lousy.

I am not a food Nazi. What oth­ers eat is their busi­ness alone. Food is not the pri­mary issue, the mood beneath is. Food is the most com­mon sub­sti­tute for feel­ings. Anorex­ics, for what­ever rea­son, do not want to feel. Try­ing to get them to eat is futile. Get­ting them to accept feel­ings (espe­cially the bad ones) — that is the task for the coun­selor. The food will fol­low. As a coun­selor, I learned to ask early on about what peo­ple have eaten the day of the ses­sion. I dis­cov­ered that often peo­ple needed a qual­ity meal as much or more as some good insights. Feel­ing full and feel­ing ful­filled some­times imi­tate each other.