INTRODUCTION
Blissfully thin. Take a moment to imagine what that would be like—to be joyously happy, fit, trim and sexy.
What would it feel like to wake up each morning after a deep and restful sleep, filled with energy, enthusiasm and anticipation of another wonderful day ahead of you? To have all the energy and mental sharpness to tackle any task that came your way, to thoroughly enjoy your job, family, friends and activities? To be filled to the brim every day with gratitude and hope, excitement and inner peace? To be calm, relaxed, at peace with yourself, your world, your future and your life?
What would it feel like to be lean, fit, confident and strong? To slip easily into a little black dress or the jeans you wore in high school? To have the energy and strength to bound up a flight of stairs, work in the yard all day with energy to spare, enjoy long hikes with the family or take up tennis? To feel comfortable in your own skin and to feel proud of yourself and desirable to others?
Accept that all of that is possible.
The Promise
No diet, book or teacher can guarantee bliss or a perfect figure for the rest of your life, just as no one can guarantee you will live disease-free until you die peacefully in your sleep at age 110. But I can promise that if you follow the secrets laid out in this book, you will stack the deck in favor of being blissfully fit. I also promise that if you follow my advice in the pages that follow you will feel the best you have felt in a long time, if ever, and will be thinner and fitter than you’ve ever been in your adult life.
How do I know that? I have been researching the link between diet and mood for decades. That research led me to write Food & Mood, which came out in its first edition in 1995. Since then, people have been sharing their stories with me of how that book changed their lives.
People have told me they followed my diet advice and found a new lease on life. Young, old, kids, teenagers, men and women all got happier, leaner, smarter or less stressed. Their energy improved. Their memories returned. They slept better, reacted faster, handled stress better. Menopausal women told me their hot flashes disappeared, men told me they no longer fell asleep in the recliner every night. Many times their depression lifted, or they were able to discontinue, or at least reduce, their medications. Often PMS symptoms vanished, or they no longer battled the Winter Blues. They were enthusiastic about life and looked forward to the future. I wish I had a dollar for every time someone told me, “I never knew I could feel this good!”
Michelle, a producer for NBC’s Today show, is a perfect example. When she was 12 years old, she was hit head-on by a car. “The car continued to drive with me on the windshield, and I eventually fell to the street and suffered a second blow to my head,” she told me. She was left with a traumatic brain injury, as well as back and neck problems. As a result of the brain injury, she forgot how to read and do any type of math. “Even something as simple as subtracting the number 6 from 10 was difficult for me in those early years. I suffered extreme anxiety and fell into a depression as well.”
Slowly Michelle regained her life, her mind and her mood:
“Good nutrition and health played a huge role in my recovery. It was Elizabeth’s advice about how to eat to improve my mood that helped me understand the power of foods and the effects of my eating habits on my brain and body. I gave up sugar and refined carbs and added in all the good stuff, especially depression-fighting foods she recommended, like salmon and berries. I made a full recovery and have accomplished more than anyone ever thought I would. I graduated from college with honors, served as a White House intern and now work for NBC’s #1 morning show. I can’t tell you how important eating well was in my recovery. It gave me the energy, determination and health I needed to battle my injuries. Food & Mood was my bible. I’m so grateful that something inspired me to pull that book off my mom’s bookshelf. I can’t imagine where I’d be today without it.”
You Are Exactly What You Eat
You’ve heard the old adage “You are what you eat.” Most of us realize the truth of that statement when it comes to our physical health. We know if we drink soda instead of calcium-rich milk that somewhere down the road we are likely to end up with bone loss and osteoporosis. We know that a diet loaded with greasy fast foods will cause heart disease, at least someday. Maybe you supplement with a few extra antioxidants in hopes of slowing the aging process.
I am in full support of getting enough calcium for your bones, cutting back on the saturated fat to protect arteries and getting all the antioxidants you can to slow aging. However, it takes months, years, even decades for a bad diet to show up as a physical problem, while the link between your diet and your mood is much more immediate.
Literally, what you eat or don’t eat for breakfast will affect how well you feel, how much energy you have and how clearly you think by midafternoon. What you have for lunch may well determine how sharp you are midafternoon or set the stage for whether you battle cravings at night for buttery popcorn or gallons of ice cream. It also might affect how well you sleep that night, which then affects how alert and energetic you are the next day.
Janet, an editor and actor in Southern California, says,
“When I eat the right breakfast, keep my lunch and dinner light, balance protein with quality carbs and definitely cut way back on sweets, I have tons of energy, sleep better and think more clearly. Also, I noticed that when I overindulge in ‘junk’ eating, I become oversensitive and ‘weepy,’ which is definitely not me. What a wake-up call for how food can affect me emotionally!”
Of course, your food choices today affect your long-term mood and mind, too. What you eat and how you supplement today will have a huge impact on whether you are depressed, develop dementia or Alzheimer’s, or lose your independence in later years. In fact, the better care you take of yourself today, the more likely you will live disease-free, sharp-as-a-tack and independent into your nineties or beyond. As one researcher put it, “the older you get, the healthier you’ve been.”
It Just Makes Sense
Every atom, every molecule, every cell, tissue, organ and system in your body is made up of the ingredients in the foods you eat, the water you drink and the air you breathe. Cell membranes are made up of fats and proteins from foods like the salmon or nuts you had for lunch. The iron in your red blood cells that carries oxygen to your brain and tissues comes from something as simple as the black beans in a burrito. The energy your brain uses to relay messages comes from the carbs in a bowl of cereal at breakfast, and the B vitamins that convert those carbs into cell energy came from the milk you poured over the cereal. So it just makes sense that you literally are exactly what you choose to eat.
There are 40+ nutrients and more than 12,000 phytonutrients in foods that your body and brain can’t make by itself but require to function in tip-top shape. The amount and balance of those thousands of nutrients determines whether you are happy or sad, smart or forgetful, energetic or lethargic, healthy or diseased, living vibrantly or dragging through the day.
Every sprig of broccoli, every leaf of spinach, every bite of tuna or egg or potato is converted into the living organism your friends call you. Give your body the right mix of the right nutrients at the right time, and your body hums along like a well-oiled, highly tuned, perfectly timed machine. Feed it junk, and it’s no surprise you feel horrible, gain weight and are likely to age before your time.
You Aren’t the First Human to Need Vitamin C
You know deep down in your heart that eating junk is bad for you. Sure, it might feel good to curl up on the couch with a half-gallon of ice cream on a lonely Friday night. But too many of those temporary indulgences always backfires. Always. Eat crap and that’s how you will feel: physically, emotionally and mentally…today, tomorrow and years down the road.
Just as junk brings you down, eating the right mood-boosting foods—the type of foods that the human body evolved to need and thrive on—and including those foods in the right amounts at the right times can be one of life’s most permanent uplifting experiences. Food really can be the way to a natural high! When you set aside the immediate gratification of eating a gooey, sticky, greasy, sweet glob of junk, and instead feed your body the foods on which it thrives—foods known to improve mood and slim waistlines—you will be amazed how good you feel, how much energy you have, how smart you are, how the pounds just melt away and how the mood pendulum swings from guilt and depression to pride and joy. I know because I’ve researched this topic for almost 20 years and have seen the results firsthand over and over and over again.
Just Take a Pill?
Oh sure, you can take medications to treat depression, anxiety and other emotional problems. In fact, medications like selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (i.e., Prozac) are the number one treatment option for depression. I’m not against that solution when all else fails. The problem is most mood-altering medications come with a slew of side effects. Many antidepressants, for example, cause weight gain, make you drowsy and lethargic, ruin your sex drive, slow metabolism or mess with your blood sugar.
I can understand why people would be willing to make the trade and put up with those side effects just to feel good again. However, medication is not always the holy grail for depression.
You should always seek medical help if the blues last more than a month or are accompanied by other symptoms. In all cases, however, even if you choose to begin with medication or therapy, diet always will help. A change in what and how you eat has benefits that are more immediate than those often experienced with drugs, with improvements sometimes noted within as little as one to three weeks. What you eat can be the ultimate natural high, since it comes with no side effects except a lowered risk for all diseases and an increased chance of living longer, smarter, healthier and leaner. In many cases, a change in diet is all you need to feel better and drop pounds.
Following the guidelines in this book will help speed your return to happiness with or without medication. The guidelines are the natural-high solution to lifelong joy and a fit figure. The more closely you follow the secrets and advice in this book, the faster and more dramatic will be your results. But any change, even small ones, will help turn the emotional tide.
The Latest and the Best
We’ve come a long way in the past decade or two when it comes to understanding how food affects mood, mind and energy. This book is a culmination of extensive research and experience, coupled with some amazing breakthroughs and new foods that speed the process of feeling your best by eating right. The following pages are filled with people’s stories of how making a few changes in what and when they ate turned out to be the ticket to joy and a sleeker figure.
In the next few chapters, you’ll learn the top 10 diet secrets to happiness, distilled from decades of research and personal experience. You’ll learn simple ways to tweak your diet that will have profound effects on how good you feel, how consistent your mood is, how sharp your mind is, and how energetic you can be, while you lose weight and regain your health.
Self-Assessment: Are You Blue?
Are you a bit iffy as to whether your mood is normal or teeters on depression? This quiz is by no means meant to replace a physician’s diagnosis, but it might help you determine if you need to make an appointment. The more “yes” answers, the more likely you are to be bluer than normal.
Which Comes First: The Mood or the Food?
How you feel and your weight are a chicken-and-egg match made in either heaven or hell. If you are happy (and I mean really happy, not just on-the-surface, pretend happy), you also are most likely to be leaner.
As people lose weight, their moods improve, or vica versa—as their moods improve, they lose weight. As their moods improve and they lose weight, they cut their risk in half for a whole host of ills, from heart disease to diabetes, in part because they are more motivated to take good care of themselves. But the link goes further than that. Boost their happiness quotient and they lower stress hormones, such as cortisol, and the inflammatory processes associated with disease. Lower stress means people sleep better, think more clearly and have more energy, which are all factors that help them lose weight and stay happy.
Additionally, people with sunny outlooks are more likely to choose healthy foods, which in turn fuel their good moods. They are less likely to get sick, they recover more quickly if they do get sick, they live longer—more than 7 and possibly up to 10 years longer—and they are healthier in those extra years than are people who are either depressed and/or overweight. It works in reverse, too. People who choose foods known to improve mood find it easier to lose weight, cope with stress and sleep better.
The opposite also is true. When people are overweight, they are most likely to feel sluggish, not sexy, tired and depressed. They turn to food—typically the wrong ones!—to soothe the gloom, which adds more weight and stress, disrupts their sleep and drops their mood even further. Poor sleep habits, in turn, increase the risk for being overweight…some studies found by up to 70%. It’s no surprise that people who are sad or downright depressed are twice as likely to be overweight, and people who are overweight are twice as likely to become depressed and anxious and suffer other mental health problems. For example, a potbelly at age 50 more than triples the risk for dementia by the time someone hits the senior years! Those people also are at highest risk for atherosclerosis, diabetes, high blood pressure, memory loss, osteoporosis and dementia.
The trick here is to make that chicken-and-egg scenario work in your favor. You can jump in anywhere in the cycle, put on the brakes and reverse the process, spiraling up out of depression and weight gain and into the sunshine of happiness and a fit figure. Adopt some of the secrets in this book, guaranteed to improve your outlook on life and slim your waistline, and you will feel better, more hopeful, happier and lighter. The better and more energetic you feel, the more motivated you will be to stick with it, the more weight you’ll lose, the better you’ll feel, and so on. I’ve seen it happen for so many people over the years, and I know it can work for you, too.
Janet knows firsthand how changing your diet can turn your life around:
“I was a breakfast avoider for many years, especially when I worked full-time. Or I’d chow down on coffee, muffins and, in my earlier years, cigarettes. Could I have been more unhealthy if I tried?! Then, if that was not enough, lunch was always something from the fast-food places on campus—Mexican, Chinese or the deli. I was so used to dragging myself to work then dragging myself home for a nap, I didn’t even realize how bad I felt. Everyone warned me that once I stopped working full-time I would gain tons of weight, but they were wrong. I took the time off from working as an opportunity to care for myself. I changed most of those unhealthy habits, started eating a sane breakfast and a light lunch, and included more of the feel-good foods that I knew would help me think better and energize my day. You know what happened? I lost 30 pounds! My stress levels went down. I felt so good that I got up the nerve to dive into my passion, which always has been acting. Today I have more energy and am a much happier human being, and it all started by making a few simple adjustments to my diet!”
The Happy Diet
We not only are what we eat, but certain foods tweak our brain chemistry and help us stay happy, energized and even calm. One example of how what we eat affects how we feel is the relationship between carbs and serotonin. It is no coincidence that we turn to carbs, from pasta to cookies, when we are in a foul frame of mind. Carb-rich foods stimulate the release of a brain chemical called serotonin that regulates appetite, mood and sleep. It makes perfect sense that we crave carbs when we are feeling blue, since these are the very foods that raise serotonin levels and lift our spirits.
Sweets raise levels of another group of brain chemicals called the endorphins. These are the feel-good brain chemicals associated with a runner’s high. Chocolate boosts levels of brain chemicals, like phenylethylamine and anandamide, that give us a euphoric or “in love” feeling. The fats in fish alter brain chemistry in favor of being happier and smarter, while the bad fats in meat clog blood vessels in the brain, which muddles thinking and mood.
Mood also affects the foods we eat (anyone who has soothed their anger with a bag of chips or calmed their nerves with a Long Island Iced Tea can relate to that!). For example, stress raises brain levels of another brain chemical called neuropeptide Y (NPY). This brain chemical turns on our appetites for carbs. We overeat and gain weight, which puts us in a funk that adds further stress to our lives, and the cycle goes round and round. Many of those neurotransmitters control both our mood and our cravings, and, like the proverbial chicken and egg, much of what we eat, in turn, turns on and off those neurotransmitters.
How important your diet is to your mood really crystallized for me when I received a phone call from a reporter in Cincinnati. He had called to interview me on the topic of food and mood. “They call me the office curmudgeon. Can you help me?” he asked. He sent me a three-day example of his diet, which immediately explained why he had transformed from an easygoing guy to a grump. First, the only food to grace his lips before noon was a chain of coffees. A light lunch, more coffee, then a huge evening meal just before bedtime was his normal routine. On weekends, he cut back on coffee, which explained why he battled headaches from Saturday to Monday morning (caffeine withdrawal usually includes a whopper of a headache). He was a living example of how to eat to mess up your mood.
After reviewing the reporter’s diet, I asked him to make a few changes, such as eating breakfast, including a few super mood foods in his daily menu, cutting back on caffeine and sugar and spreading his food intake more evenly throughout the day. Within no time, his reputation as a curmudgeon had fallen by the wayside. He was more agreeable, enjoyed his job more, no longer battled headaches on the weekends and felt years younger. Granted, healthy foods are not always the cure for clinical depression or other major mood disorders, but following the secrets and advice in this book will always help and is often all it takes to get your mojo back!
You Must Fight for Happiness
Maybe you have tried dieting before. Lost weight, regained it. Lost it again, felt miserable, regained it. If you are a bit gun-shy when it comes to another diet, let me soothe your fears. The eating style I’ve laid out in this book works, and it doesn’t work because it makes you miserable and forces you to live on packaged foods or follow some weird food-combining diet that is more of an eighth-grade science experiment than a gourmet meal. The advice in this book is a get-real approach that combines common sense with the latest research and decades of experience.
People lose weight every day. The trick is to maintain the weight loss and to watch your mood rise as the number on the scale drops. You want the joy and the figure to last. That’s what this book is all about.
I promise you it is not only possible to feel good while dieting, it is absolutely essential to long-term success! It’s a whole lot easier to drop pounds and make changes if you are happy, motivated, energetic and empowered. Your body will drop weight faster when you’ve had a good night’s sleep, are able to cope with stress and can think straight. In short, you must feed your brain while you are trimming your waistline. Luckily, I can tell you just how to do that.
The Catch
Before I get to the details, let’s get one thing straight right from the start: no one is effortlessly blessed with happiness and thinness. No one aimlessly wanders through life lean and gleeful. People over the age of 25 who say they can eat whatever they want and never exercise, yet stay skinny and joyful, are lying.
Anyone who is blissfully happy and fit works at it. They get real. They take full responsibility and they take action. They work at it every single day, sometimes at every single meal. They organize, prepare and regroup constantly. They plan ahead, make trade-offs, reward their efforts, occasionally keep records of what and how much they eat and monitor their progress. They stock their kitchens to accommodate healthy eating, they surround themselves with people who support their efforts and they practice thinking like a thin person. They push the self-defeating, negative thoughts out of their heads and replace them with positive, affirming thoughts. They nip in the bud each and every slip that might lead them in the direction toward weight gain and depression. Everyone who is fit and happy has earned it!
Not only does taking charge of your health, life, mood and waistline bring you more happiness than you ever thought possible, as well as allow you to finally get a handle on your weight, but it also is the ticket for ongoing success. A study at the University of Missouri investigated long-term happiness by following students who made intentional changes in their lives to be successful, like joining a club. They compared those “take-charge” students with other students who also had positive experiences that just happened to them, like receiving a scholarship. All the students felt happier at first, but only the ones who had made the effort to deliberately seek happiness stayed that way long-term. You must work to reap the rewards. The more effort you put in, the greater the rewards and the better you’ll feel—for the rest of your life.
There’s even more good news. I know most people don’t like to change habits, diet or make the effort to exercise. Wouldn’t it be great if you could just watch TV and get thin and happy? Sorry. Ain’t going to happen. You have to put in the effort, but what happy, skinny people find is that the longer you stick with the program, the easier it gets. The longer you follow the secrets in this book, the more likely the changes will become habit.
Self-Assessment: Do You Eat Like a Happy, Fit Person?
Be completely honest. Do you skip meals sometimes? Snack from the vending machine at work? Occasionally dine from the drive-through? Do you drink soda? Snack on chips? Are you eating to fuel a good mood or depression? Let’s get brutally honest. Now is the time to really take a look at what you’re eating.
Answer the questions (honestly!) then tally your score to see how you rate and what is working for you and what isn’t. Rank your answers 0 to 2 (0 = never, 1 = sometimes, 2 = always).
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1. Every day I eat at least eight servings of colorful fruits and/or vegetables (potatoes, fries and iceberg lettuce don’t count). |
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2. Every day I eat at least two dark green vegetables such as romaine lettuce, spinach and broccoli. |
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3. Every day I eat at least one dark orange fruit or vegetable, such as carrots, apricots, sweet potatoes or cantaloupe. |
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4. At least five times a week, I eat one or more of the following: nuts, soy, legumes, tart cherries, berries or wheat germ. |
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5. Every day I include in my diet at least one serving of citrus fruit. |
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6. I eat primarily whole grains, including 100% whole-grain breads, cereals, pastas and crackers. |
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7. I average three servings daily of nonfat milk, milk products and/or calcium-fortified soy milk/cheese or OJ. |
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8. I include salmon or other fatty fish in my diet at least twice a week or make sure I get at least 200 milligrams of the omega-3 fat DHA in my daily diet. |
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9. I am careful about my fat intake and only use healthy fats, such as olive oil or oils from nuts. |
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10. I read labels and choose foods with little or no added sugar. I also eat few desserts and always keep the serving size small. |
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11. I limit intake of processed, convenience and fast foods. |
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12. I eat breakfast every day. |
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13. I eat minimeals and snacks throughout the day so that no more than four hours goes by between meals. |
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14. I drink at least eight glasses of water every day. |
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15. If I drink coffee or caffeinated beverages, I do so in moderation (i.e., no more than 24 ounces a day). |
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16. At restaurants, I order low-fat, healthy foods like salads, steamed vegetables, grilled chicken or fish and fresh fruit. I also watch portion sizes. |
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17. I drink alcohol in moderation or not at all (i.e., one drink or less/day). |
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18. I limit my vices to small amounts of red wine, dark chocolate and/or tea a few times a week. |
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19. I take a moderate-dose multiple vitamin and mineral supplement. |
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20. I exercise for at least 30 minutes every day and up to an hour or more three or more days every week. |
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Score:
35 to 40 Outstanding. Your diet borders on perfection. You should be blissfully happy and fit. If not, recheck to make sure you are being completely honest, especially about portion sizes and activity level.
29 to 34 Good job. You are well on your way to being happy and lean. Stick with your current habits, but tweak your eating style to raise those scores lower than 2.
20 to 28 Average. You fit right in with most people, which means there are some changes to be made ASAP. Identify three or four 0 and 1 scores that you want to boost into the 1 to 2 range. When you’ve successfully accomplished this, tackle two or three more.
0 to 19 Needs serious improvement. Time to start taking your health a whole lot more seriously if you really want to be happier, healthier and leaner. Set a goal to gradually improve your score by three points every month until your score is above 19.
You Deserve the Best
You deserve to feel and look your best. You deserve respect and to feel great. You must believe you are worth it or you’ll undermine every attempt you make to re-create yourself, your health, your mood, your weight and your life. You’ll only get there if you make the decision and take the responsibility to make it happen. The steps are simple:
First, believe you deserve it.
Second, decide you want it.
Third, get started.
Fourth, keep at it.
That’s what Mary, a retired housewife in Austin, Texas, found. Mary was at least 75 pounds overweight. She wanted desperately to lose the weight yet denied she ate too much. She told me her diet consisted of vegetables, salads, grilled chicken breast and an occasional glass of wine. Mary was lying. Maybe not intentionally, but no one gets that overweight eating broccoli! Mary was in such denial that I finally decided to spend the day with her. The results were anything but surprising.
Mary’s kitchen was a telltale sign that more than vegetables were in her diet. Her fridge and cupboards were stocked with foods that would ruin even Pollyanna’s Little-Miss-Sunshine mood, including butter, sour cream, whole milk, a variety of cheeses, ice cream, Marie Callendar frozen entrees, store-bought muffins and bottles of alfredo sauce. Her cup of coffee in the morning was more half & half than brew. She tossed the remains of our breakfast in her mouth as she loaded the dishwasher, nibbled on organic trail mix all morning while we talked and then ordered the same salad as I did at the restaurant—only she asked for it with dressing, croutons and cheese, while mine had dressing on the side and neither of the other two.
We spent the entire day on our butts, never once doing any type of physical activity. “I’m having trouble with my hip,” she told me, which was her excuse to not exercise. Although dinner was roasted vegetables and chicken breast, the veggies were tossed with almost 600 calories worth of olive oil and the chicken was stuffed with greasy cheese. By the end of the day, Mary had consumed almost 3,000 calories, but she had expended only about 300 calories in the minimal walking we did around the house and from the car to the restaurant. Her 5'5" frame had no other choice than to pocket the extra calories as fat.
Mary’s first step in turning around her mood and her figure was to get brutally honest with herself (with a little help from me). Yes, she really wanted to lose the weight; she wasn’t just giving lip service to that wish. She agreed to toss the excuses, along with the butter and full-fat dressings, and to pick up a food journal. She kept a detailed record for one week of everything she ate and drank. That record was a blaring wake-up call on the habits she needed to fix. From there, we set to work tweaking her diet to fit the 10 tried-and-true secrets to happiness and a leaner body outlined in this book, which include
- Focus on real food, not processed junk.
- Follow the 1-2-3 Rule at breakfast.
- Choose quality carbs and toss the refined stuff.
- Use the 6% solution to rein in a sweet tooth.
- Sprinkle the diet every day with a few super mood foods.
- Include more mood-boosting fats.
- Accent the positive by taking the right supplements.
- Include a few of the right vices in the weekly diet.
- Get smart about which beverages—and how much—to drink.
- End the day with the right meal.
The last secret—number 11—is really no secret at all. Mary had to exercise if she was really serious about feeling and looking her best. You do, too. Any diet that tells you otherwise is a con job. Almost everyone who has successfully lost weight and kept the weight off, as well as raised their happiness quotient, exercised. No excuses. Period. But the benefits are so worth it that I promise you this habit is well worth adopting, no matter what your age, limitations or current physical fitness level.
Mary may have had hip problems, but that didn’t keep her from swimming and doing strength training at the gym. She exchanged her excuses and dishonesty for a clear plan for getting her weight under control. By the end of the year, she’d lost 45 pounds:
“Most important and something I wasn’t even expecting is that within weeks of cleaning up my eating act, I noticed that the grey cloud that had been hanging over my head for years began to lift. I started to feel like me again. I like that change even more than the weight loss. I’ll never go back to my old eating habits. It’s just not worth it!”