What you eat and when you eat it can have a big impact on your mood.
You can improve you mood and increase your energy by balancing your meals. Many people are in the habit of skipping meals. Because it’s so commonplace, people don’t realize how much better they could feel if they ate regular meals, balanced throughout the day. Skipping meals puts added stress on your body. Your blood sugar levels get out of whack, and you release the catabolic stress hormone coritsol. The problem with cortisol is that it doesn’t like to break down fat, it likes to break down muscle. You need muscle to keep your metabolism running efficiently and effectively. If you’re breaking down muscle, your metabolic rate is going to drop and you’ll have a harder time burning off fat.
Your body also likes to store more fat when you are a habitual meal-skipper. Many people see meal skipping as a viable weight loss strategy. Less calories in equals weight loss, right? NO! To quote JJ Virgin: Your body is not a bank account, it is a chemistry lab. There is so much more going on inside of your body that a simple equation such as “calories in, calories out” simply cannot work for everyone.
Let’s look at breakfast as an example. You wake up and you don’t have time to eat breakfast or you aren’t hungry, so you skip. Your body has been fasting all night while you’ve been sleeping. Now that you’re awake, it is ready for some fuel. When that fuel never comes, your body goes into conservation mode. Not only will your body try to save the fat stores that you already have, it will try to store as much as it can when you finally do eat a meal. That is because your body does not know when to expect it’s next meal.
So you’re storing more fat, you’re not burning fat, your metabolism is dropping, your blood sugar levels are dropping and you’ve got cortisol running through your veins. You’re probably hungry too. So what’s that doing for your mood? You can avoid all of these ill effects and be happier and more energetic if you balance your meals out throughout the day. Eating within an hour of waking up, and then eating lunch, snack and dinner every 3 to 4 hours afterwards will help keep everything in check and your body working the way it should.
Stay tuned for more ways to improve your mood with food.
