I’ve been thinking about food a lot lately. I think there are lots of reasons for that, not least of which is my growing understanding that what I thought was a good diet, the diet my kids grew up on and that has sustained me all my life, may not have been as healthy as I imagined.

Dietary fads and fashions come and go. The focus of the advice we read is often weight loss, and diets that are focussed on weight loss are not necessarily healthy in either the short or the longer term.

Take the Israeli Army Diet for example. This diet has nothing to do with the Israeli Army and why it got that name I don’t know but I do know it was fashionable when I was young in the 1970s. The aim was rapid weight loss and like all rapid weight loss diets it was low in calories, poor in nutrition and led to rapid weight gain as soon as you stopped doing it. (Unless of course it tipped you over into anorexia nervosa which is what it did to one of my high school friends).

The diet was simple. It consisted of two days of nothing but apples followed by two days of cheese then two days of chicken, followed by two days of salad. Then repeat!  It’s crazy and unsustainable and bad nutritionally but not entirely unlike a lot of weight loss diets still touted today.

For all my life weight loss or weight maintenance has been what eating has been all about. Good nutrition has come a distant second.  I don’t think I am alone. Research suggests that many more than 50% of Australian women are dissatisfied with their weight.

Of course I knew about micronutrients and ate as best I could, given the self-imposed constraints of my calorie count, but limiting calories often led to ravenous moments where only foods with immediate impact in terms of blood sugar boosts were acceptable. Bread, sweet biscuits, lollies, refined carbs of any kind were the only things that would bring me back to life when my brain was suffering acute glucose depletion. It’s a cycle that many of us have experienced even though we may not recognise it for what it is.

The trouble with restrictive diets is that after a while we stop recognising hunger.

There’s an advertisement for a chocolate bar that talks about being “hangry” that provides pretty good evidence that this distortion of hunger is not a rare phenomenon. Hunger makes us irritable. It also makes us fatigued (even sleepy) and easily emotionally overwhelmed. Hunger-driven mood swings can be misread as mood disorders. Longer term nutritional deficits can contribute not just to transient mood disturbance but to entrenched mood shifts. Is that the micronutrient deficit at work or the effect of the disruption of the microbiome?

Everybody has heard about the microbiome by now. We know that the balance of bacteria in our gut has a big impact on both our physical and mental health. We also know that what we eat determines the balance of bacteria in the gut by a whole variety of mechanisms. It’s very complicated!

A modern Western diet does not promote a healthy gut microbiome even if we keep the famous “food pyramid” firmly in mind. Most of us eat too much refined carbohydrate, drink too much coffee, tea and alcohol than is good for our gut and don’t eat enough fresh fruit and vegetables. The trouble is of course that the refined carbohydrates pick us up fast and let us continue on with our fast-paced lives. The other problem is they are cheap and easy and once we have a taste for them fresh fruit and veggies or a plate of porridge are just not satisfying in the same way. We are conditioned to want the things that are fast and easy.

I think we all probably already know what to do but there are so many websites with dietary advice out there and not all of the advice is good.  The trouble is that many websites are focussed on weight loss rather than nutrition so it all gets pretty confusing.

What we need to do for our health is take a step back to a more traditional way of eating focussed on plenty of wholefoods, plant foods such as wholegrains, fruits, vegetables and legumes, and healthy fats coming from fish, nuts, seeds and olives. And we need to reduce our intake of ultra-processed foods.

If we are mental health practitioners we need to remember to talk to our patients and clients about their diets, not just in passing but in depth, and we need to motivate them to improve.

I’ve found a great website that comes out of Deakin University’s Mood and Food Centre. There is a blog on the website with some really interesting posts about diet and mental health like this one, some great consumer resources and links to two online courses, a free course and a CPD accredited online course for mental health professionals. 

I’ve also found a brilliant website from the University of Newcastle called No Money No Time  which provides ideas and recipes for those who are struggling to find the time and money to provide good nutritional options for themselves and their families.

And the yoghurt and blueberries I’ve been eating for breakfast are doing wonders for my late morning moodswings!