Diet and Mood

Most people understand that there is a connection between diet and mood, but it can be difficult to determine exactly what that connection is. The foods you eat can have a profound impact on how you feel, and how you feel can determine whether you're motivated to exercise and do other things you need to do to lose weight.

How Diet and Mood Interact

You've probably seen how diet and mood can collide in your own experience. Maybe you've eaten too much sugar or drank too much coffee and suffered when the inevitable crash came. Or maybe a rich and fatty meal left you feeling like you couldn't move for hours afterward.

Sure, that food feels good when you eat it, but your mood can quickly change when faced with the physical and emotional consequences of overindulgence.

It's not just the big food mistakes that can lead to mood swings, though. Even little things like not getting enough of vital nutrients because of skipping meals, or eating a lot of junk food can send your mood into a tailspin.

At the most basic level, food is fuel, and our bodies are machines. Just like your car runs better when you get the oil changed regularly and fill it with gas when needed, your body performs better—and you feel better—when you eat the right kinds of foods. Eat too much of the wrong thing and you could be facing depression, anxiety, exhaustion and other foul moods.

Using Food to Boost Your Mood

It's not too difficult to use the diet and mood connection to your advantage. The key, as with many healthy diets, is to moderate your blood sugar throughout the day.

Mood swings are often caused because when you eat highly processed foods and refined carbohydrates, that food converts to sugar in the body very quickly. That means it also leaves the bloodstream quickly, leading to a sugar crash that just makes you cranky and wanting to eat more.

So the best diet for your mood, it turns out, is what most people would call a healthy diet for anyone:

• Limit processed carbohydrates
• Limit sugar
• Eat frequent smaller meals
• Include breakfast
• Drink lots of water
• Get some exercise daily
• Eat more fruits and vegetables
• Include whole grains
• Limit caffeine and alcohol
• Don't completely exclude any food groups

You might also want to include a multivitamin if you aren't getting enough of some of the key vitamins and minerals. Check with your doctor for more information and to get a check on your nutrient levels.

Food and Mood Diets

Feeling moody? It could be your diet.

Many different diets in the past few years have latched onto this food and mood connection to help people lose weight without so many of the cravings and mood swings that are frequent complaints of dieters.

Diets like Sugar Busters focus on the glycemic index, a measure of how quickly food converts to sugar in the body. Eating more foods that take longer to convert makes you feel full longer, as well as lightening your mood.

The Good Mood Diet includes daily doses of power foods that improve the mood, such as dark chocolate (in the form of a nightly mug of cocoa) and good-quality canned fish, while eliminating a lot of processed foods that make people feel bad.

What a diet for your mood really gets down to is eating more natural, unprocessed foods, more fruits, vegetables and complex carbohydrates, and fewer things that come out of bags, boxes and jars. This sort of healthy diet will go a long way toward moderating your moods and helping you lose weight if you need to.

Adding an exercise program to a diet such as this will make it even easier to lose weight and start living a healthier life with fewer mood swings. You may find you have more energy and a better outlook on things just because you changed the way you eat.