It has taken me a lot longer than I was willing to admit, that the saying: “You are what you eat” began to make sense. In a nutshell, you eat well, you will feel well. You eat like shit, you will feel like shit. The latter of which I did for most of my teenage and young adult life.
I used to wonder why did I feel awful all the time, surely it wasn’t the food I was eating. It must have been something else which I couldn’t put my finger on whilst I tried to take another bite of my boiling hot microwave pizza. I spent hours scouring the internet for answers, I purchased all the various supplements, nootropics, expecting a quick fix and getting nowhere. All the while I kept shoveling ultra processed food down my throat. Hindsight is 20-20.
It wasn’t until I had to take my diet seriously and started doing research on diets and came across more and more information on the gut brain axis. The same neurotransmitters which affect you mood, your mental health, are also responsible for the regulation of your gut speed. Why is this important? To properly digest your food, get the right nutrients, and ensure sufficient absorption the speed of passage or motility is so important. Too fast and nothing is absorbed, or digested properly, too slow and it can lead to blockages. Something I found out from a recent podcast I listened to – Diary of a CEO episode 225 with Gary Brecka, is that according to Gary 90% of your bodies serotonin is stored your gut, not in your brain. Which really changed the way I thought about it. I don’t know if this is true as I am not an expert in human biology but it got me thinking.
I can look back and tell with absolute certainty the moments in which my mental and physical health were at their peak, life was seamless and stress free, my diet was good. I ate clean. My inflammation was low, I had very little anxiety, my mood was elevated and happy. Things were good. Life Was good. When my diet was terrible my mental health was down, depression, anxiety sky high, mood to the floor. I didn’t want to get about of bed. I felt like the world was against me, I hated the world, I was miserable. My IBS or Ulcerative Colitis flared up. It was a terrible cycle for years. That is when it made sense to me that diet and mental health go hand-in-hand.
When one is down, the other is dragged down with it and vice versa. It is a feedback loop, and depending on the input the change makes a drastic difference, and each one will compound if it continues in a singular direction. I work a busy and often stressful job, and I am a stress eater at the best and worst of times. I will binge on anything processed because of the stress, in that moment I am craving the feeling of relief from something sugary, tasty, crunchy, and I will eat it to binge levels. This in turn means that my gut health worsens over time as I keep eating the junk food. Its not an instant change, but you get ingrained in the repetitive habit which keeps giving you that little injection of dopamine in the chaos of everything over days, weeks, and months. It becomes easier to turn to the wrong types of foods each time you turn to them for relief. Each time your gut health gets a little worse, it begins to affect your mental health, which in turn causes you to eat worse, which makes you feel a little worse, etc. That is a negative feedback loop.
Our brains have not yet evolved past their primitive states to catch up with the modern world which causes us problems. Our brain’s primary function is survival, and in the modern world that line becomes a little blurred; what happens in the world, and what our brains perceive are two different things. Anxiety is very mild fight or flight response which is not is not down regulated by the body as it is missing vital nutrition to do so. You can really trick yourself into a full blown anxiety attack if you try hard enough, it becomes easier as your gut health worsens. The state of your gut health is linked to the level of your anxiety, which I have found out first hand. The better my diet, the better my gut health, the lower my anxiety was overall.
The podcast also mentions methlyation of certain compounds in the body, as everyone’s genetic makeup differs, the research indicates that there are possible breaks or inefficiencies of methylation processes. I would advise you do your own research as it is all new to me, and I do not understand the methylation processes. All I know is that breaks or inefficiencies in the systems are linked a myriad of issues including gut disorders, for me I have seen a noticeable boost when I tried methylated vitamins, but in my research some people online have reported negative effects instead. In my opinion the key take away is a good diet plays an important role.
A varied whole food diet provides the body with the full spectrum of nutrition it needs to operate efficiently. By feeding your gut with the right nutrition, the right foods, over time it will be able to heal itself and you can go back to living your life the way it was meant to be lived. Full of life.
Until next time
Faz