What to Eat When You're Feeling Scattered, Gloomy or Moody

My client Julie once arrived at her session feeling very unsettled and overwhelmed due to her recent apartment move. I sent her away with a seemingly unconventional prescription for sweet potatoes. She ate some that night and immediately felt more grounded.
 
More Than Fuel
Food is far more than just fuel. We tend to think of it in terms of nutrients, calories, good or bad. How often do you consider its energetic quality?
 
All food has unique energetic properties that affect your physical, mental, emotional and spiritual health. When, where and how it's grown, raised, produced or prepared determines its essential character and the energy it imparts.
 
By understanding food energetics, you can prepare balance-restoring meals based on the energy particular foods create in your body.
 
Let's take a look at vegetables.
 
Plant Prescriptions
The direction a vegetable grows can impart the same qualities in you when consuming it. Here are a few plant prescriptions for when you're feeling...
 
Scattered or Overstimulated
Root Vegetables: Because they grow in the ground, root vegetables like carrots, sweet potatoes, turnips, parsnips and beets have a strong downward energy. Eating these hearty vegetables can help you feel more focused, anchored and grounded.
 
Gloomy or Tense
Dark Leafy Greens: Kale, Swiss chard, collard greens, beet greens and other dark leafy greens grow upward collecting energy from the sun. Eating these chlorophyll-rich foods infuses your blood with oxygen, ultimately boosting your mood and spirits.

Light and cleansing, they also supply your body with flexible energy and remove physical and emotional toxins literally helping you lighten up.
 
Moody or Erratic Energy
Squashes and Gourds: To maintain an even keel, eat veggies that grow at ground level like butternut squash, spaghetti squash, pumpkin and edible gourds. These can help steady your mood and energy level.
 
You Are What You Eat
A food's life force directly impacts your quality of life. By selecting foods based on their energetic qualities, you can better nourish not only your body but also your soul.

Are You Breaking Your Own Heart?

This passage from author and wise woman Anne Lamott really resonates with me:

“Oh my God, what if you wake up some day, and you’re 65, or 75, and you never got your memoir or novel written; or you didn’t go swimming in warm pools and oceans all those years because your thighs were jiggly and you had a nice big comfortable tummy; or you were just so strung out on perfectionism and people-pleasing that you forgot to have a big juicy creative life, of imagination and radical silliness and staring off into space like when you were a kid? It’s going to break your heart. Don’t let this happen.”

In the past, I’ve shared how I let my so-called inadequacies and imperfections stop me from fully living.

I let the size of my body dictate the size of my life.

It breaks my heart when I think about how much time, energy and life force we waste berating ourselves for not having a better body and obsessing about how to fix it.

I often wonder, if we weren’t thinking about this, what would we be thinking about?

Where would we be putting all our energy?

How different would our lives be?

How different would the world be?

My highest intention is to help end this needless suffering so none of us dies wishing we would have gone swimming.

Pick a New Direction
I’ve seen with myself and with my clients that it is possible to replace criticism with compassion, judgment with curiosity, loathing with loving, rejection with acceptance, playing small with living big.

As Anne Lamott says, it all starts with the willingness to...

“Pick a new direction, one you wouldn’t mind ending up at, and aim for that. Shoot the moon.”

Have You Given Away Your Power?

There were times in my past when I hated my body for not being perfect.

I’d conceal it under baggy sweatshirts and pants. I'd dodge mirrors. I’d hide on the couch instead of going to parties. I’d push away boyfriends when they tried to wrap their arms around my waist.

Many of us reject our bodies when they don’t conform to the ideal size and shape dictated by our culture.

However, rather than self-rejection, what we really need to reject are the lies we’re incessantly fed (and buying into) about how our bodies are supposed to look.

We need to reclaim our power by loving and accepting our bodies unconditionally, and not becoming victims of the profit-making machine that thrives on making us feel inadequate, deficient, less than.

How I Reclaimed My Power
When I started partnering with my body instead of rejecting it, our relationship drastically changed. I began experiencing a sense of ease, peace and freedom I hadn’t felt since I was a very young girl (before I started believing all the BS).

Here are some of the ways I took back my power:

• I stopped believing I could hate, deprive, restrict, starve and punish myself into a version of myself that I finally loved and accepted.
   

• I started trusting my body again to guide me toward food choices based on what my body really wanted and needed. I no longer made eating decisions based on calories, diet plans, my weight, how many miles I ran, etc.
   

• I stopped feeling guilt and shame when I ate so-called “bad” foods.
   

• I stopped constantly weighing myself and letting the number on the scale dictate my feelings, mood and behavior.
   

• I fired my inner mean girl and started speaking to my body—and about it—with kindness, compassion, respect and gratitude.
   

• I created a more body-positive culture by ditching media (e.g., magazines, TV shows, websites) that promoted and perpetuated the thin ideal.

This journey hasn't been fast or easy. But, man, has it been worth it. I’m still a work-in-progress, but I’m never turning back.

How can you reclaim your power?