Move Your Mind

CHAPTER 6PATHWAY 2: FEED YOUR MIND

My second pathway to better mental health is all about food and nutrition, and the way these affect your mental health. When you feed your body, you're also feeding your mind, and vice versa. If you don't feed your mind on a mental level, are overwhelmed, or consuming too much negative information and not thinking clearly, you're unlikely to eat well. And if you're not physically feeding yourself properly, it's likely to affect your mental clarity, leading to poor decisions or simply feeling sluggish.

Importantly, I use the term Feed Your Mind to encompass the content and information we consume too, which is critical to wellbeing. If you're glued to screens every day and consuming never-ending content from newsfeeds and social media, this can greatly affect your mental wellbeing. We're already seeing this play out with well-documented stories of people affected by negative aspects of social media, such as trolling.

In this chapter, I'll explore our relationship with nutrition and food. I'll take you through some of the science behind eating, common problems around nutrition and the most popular diets, and then give you some tasks to help you set up positive food habits in your life.

Food and our mental health

The close relationship between food and mood means that our choice of foods and dietary patterns can play a role in the way we feel. The food we eat affects our glycaemia (the amount of sugar or glucose in the blood), our immunity and ...