The Nutrition Coach Blog London Nutritionist The Nutrition Coach offers advice on healthy living, nutrition and diet issues such as IBS, bloating, gluten intolerance and more.

Mind hunger is based upon thoughts and is influenced by information we take in from our senses – particularly our eyes and ears.  Typical mind hunger thoughts include:

‘I should eat more protein’

‘I deserve some chocolate today’

‘I should drink 1.5 litres of water a day’

Mind hunger is often based upon absolutes and opposites i.e. good food versus bad food and what you should eat versus what you should not eat.  However, becoming caught up in extremes can become a dangerous pattern, as you end up clinging on to certain foods and hating others.  It is of course very true that some foods are more nutritious that other foods, but what really matters most is the quantity and frequency that certain foods are eaten.  Blueberries, for example, are a nutrient dense fruit but if you were to eat tonnes of them every day for breakfast, lunch and dinner, you would set yourself up deficiencies in the nutrients that not found in blueberries and your body would soon be longing for more variety.  Similarly, chocolate eaten daily in large amounts isn’t nutritionally advisable, but a small amount of chocolate on occasions is certainly fine, and not something that needs to be avoided for life in order to achieve good health.  It is therefore often the middle way that emerges as the more sensible way to eat. 

Many people have learned to choose food by numbers, such as by how many calories, carbs, protein, fats, RDAs or the price of food, rather than relying on their sense of taste and smell.  When taken to the extreme, this sets the scene for a society of anxious eaters.  When the mind is fretting about what you ‘should eat’ and ‘should not eat’ your enjoyment of what is actually being eaten evaporates.   There are a number of great studies showing the power the mind has over our eating habits, and how easily people can be convinced to like or dislike certain foods based upon false information. 

The ideal to eating the ‘middle way’ is to eat a nutritious diet, but to be mindful of your individual needs and to have a relaxed attitude towards food.  For example, whilst most people might do best with 1.5 litres of water per day, if you go to the gym and sauna every day then your requirements will be higher.  Similarly your needs might vary in the winter and summer months.  Likewise, your mind might say ‘It’s 7pm, I need to have dinner’, but if your body isn’t hunger then why not wait until 8pm or later when it is hungry for dinner?  

As with the other types of hunger already discussed in this blog, in order to reduce mind hunger and re-engaged in real body  you first need to become  aware of what your mind is tell you about your food.  Before you eat, pause and look at your food and hear what your mind is saying about the foods.  If you are hungry for the food, identify where in your body the hunger lies. 

The difficulty with the mind is that it’s constantly changing.  For example, one day it might decide that you need to diet, and the next day it convinces you that you need some chocolate cake. The mind also contains the inner critic, so can often end up criticising you no matter what you eat or drink.  The mind is only truly content when it is quiet, when the many voices around eating are still and you can become fully present as you eat.  When you are filled with awareness, you become filled with satisfaction.  So take time to be still before and after eating to taste you food and how it makes you feel, rather that how you think it should make you feel.

Mind hunger affects everyone, but can be a particular problem in cases of binge eating and other disordered eating patterns.  If you have a question about disordered eating then please do give us a call to see if we can help you, or to book a consultation at one of our London nutrition clinics.

Julia

Seriously. How depressing is this? You’re sitting in the office while it’s pitch black outside, realising you still have to work three more hours, when all you want to do is cuddle up on your couch with a duvet and a big bowl of comfort food (usually found in forms of simple carbohydrates).
Know that feeling? Congratulations. You’re likely to suffer from the winter blues.

Research suggests that 10% of the population of Northern Europe suffers from some mild symptoms of seasonal affective disorder (SAD), also referred to as winter or seasonal depression. I wouldn’t be surprised if most of these 10% are living in London.

SAD is widely identified as being linked to a lack of exposure to sufficient sunlight during the winter months, causing feelings of low energy, fatigue, cravings for junk food (and weight gain), and feeling of cold and sleeping disorders. Can’t stop pressing the snooze button in the morning? That’s sad or SAD!

But what’s going on in your body with the lack of sunlight?

The lack of bright light causes hormonal changes within your body associated with the disorder. With less sunlight, the brain does not produce enough serotonin, the soothing neurotransmitter in the brain – often referred to as the ‘happy hormone’ as it greatly influences an overall sense of well-being. Serotonin helps to keep our mood under control by helping with sleep, calming anxiety and relieving depression.

On the other hand, there’s melatonin, the hormone responsible for regulating our sleep/wake cycle. Normally melatonin levels begin to rise mid-to-late evening, remaining high for the night and dropping in the morning. Light affects how much melatonin our body produces, and with less light, our bodies are likely to produce more melatonin, causing drowsiness. Melatonin is also responsible for regulating female hormones; this explains why SAD is also recognised to affect women more frequently than men. Melatonin is also linked to a drop in one’s body temperature in the winter months, and this may then result in lowered energy levels and contribute to the feelings of winter blues. Furthermore, research studies have linked high levels of the hormone to an increased craving for food containing carbohydrates, which explains our love for comfort food in the winter months.

To avoid the winter blues, the junk food cravings AND the muffin top, it is important that you follow a mood-boosting diet and keep eating regular meals following the circadian rhythm. The main two food groups that stimulate serotonin production are protein and carbohydrates (complex not-simple carbs). Protein helps you to stabilize your blood sugar levels and provides you with the essential amino acid tryptophan, which is used by the brain to make serotonin. Carbohydrates help tryptophan pass into the blood stream so that it can actually reach the brain. A balance of complex carbohydrates and lean protein at each meal, therefore, is best to avoid the symptoms of SAD. Boost your tryptophan levels by eating turkey, chicken, red meat (once a week), fish, oats, brown rice and nuts.

You may also consider light therapy treatment to help keep your circadian rhythm on track. There are some great light boxes and body clock dawn simulators that wake you with a sunrise, naturally re-setting your sleep/wake cycle, to help you feel refreshed, alert and energised all day, reducing the production of melatonin.

Now you just need to cancel your snooze alarm for the morning! And if that still doesn’t work, give us a ring, we can help you enjoy the winter!

Lisa

Having a healthy relationship with food and eating mindfully, means being able to turn our awareness inwards to listen to what our body is telling us it needs.  Listening to our instinctive needs is the basis of tuning into cellular hunger.

As babies, we have an instinctive awareness about what we need to eat, but as we grow older this inner connection gets lost as we are bombarded with advice on what food to have and when to have it.  Let’s take salt as an example.  Most of us have lost our ability to know whether our body has too much or too little salt.  For example, people are prone to heat stoke if they spend a long time in the heat and sweat excessively, due to the loss of mineral salts, whilst others suffer with high blood pressure due to excessive salt consumption.  Our dietary habits tend to reflect what we think we should eat, based on what we’ve been advised, rather than listening to our unique individual needs.

You may notice seasonal aspects to cellular hunger.  In the winter, for example, as the temperature drops your body is likely to call for more food to keep you warm, whereas in the summer you’re likely to want less food.  This is natural, as we need more calories to keep the inner furnace going in the winter and shivering burns extra calories. 

Through mindfulness we can become more sensitive to cellular hunger and learn to separate what the body actually needs from what our mind is demanding.  If we listen carefully enough we can step in the right direction of being able to do what animals do – that is to taste a food and know it is what we need.  In this way we would eat a banana when our cells called for more potassium, sea vegetables when we needed more iodine or peppers if we needed more vitamin C.

The essential elements that satisfy cellular hunger are water, salt, protein, fat, carbohydrates, vitamins and minerals.  Being deficient is any one of these will therefore result in cell hunger.  Normally we aren’t very good at identifying which one our body needs, but when we are ill and our attention is focused in on ourselves we often get a clearer message about what we need to eat. 

To satisfy cellular hunger we therefore need to get in tune with our body and to ask it what it needs.  Take time to stop and pause both before and during a meal to gauge what it is that your system wants.  What is it hungry for? Solid or liquid? Vegetables?  Root or leafy? Citrus? Salty?  Taking time to focus your awareness on your body will allow you to tune in and give it what it needs, rather than what you planned to feed it when you drew up your meal plan last weekend.

Cellular hunger affects everyone, but can be a particular problem in cases of binge eating and other disordered eating patterns.  If you have a question about disordered eating then please do give us a call to see if we can help you, or to book a consultation at one of our London nutrition clinics.

Julia

Sarah came to see me last April complaining of constipation, stomach pains and tiredness.

The first thing we did was improve her diet – she had got into the habit of grabbing a muffin and a coffee on the way into work, and sometimes not eating again until 4.00pm!  I get her to eat breakfast!  I do this a lot with patients and in over 10 years of practice – I think I have seen just a handful of patients having a really proper start to the day.

She told me a bit about her life – she had recently been made redundant but had found another job quickly but had gone through a period of real worry and stress – she was trying to compensate in her new job by being extra diligent and putting in loads of extra hours of hard work.

I got her to do 2 biochemical tests – An adrenal stress index (which tells us how her stress hormones are affecting her gut) and a gut test to see what the function of her gut was like.

When she came back after a month – her IBS (irritable bowel) was a lot better but still giving her problems – but as we had her test results back I was really expecting to find what the problems was from them.  We found that the gut test showed that she had a very common parasite called Blastocystis hominis, and a bacterial infection called Klebsiella, very low gut immunity and an inherent problem with gluten.  Her friendly bacteria were also very low. Her adrenal profile showed that her stress hormones were very low (exhausted) and she was unable to cope with the amount of stress in her life.

The test we use showed that gluten was a problem and so before dealing with the parasite or bacterial infections – I got her to slowly change her diet.  I gave her a course of probiotics too.  Then we dealt with the infections with herbal intervention.  We only have about a 60% chance of getting rid of the Blasto but luckily she responded well to the herbs and when we retested it showed that this tricky customer had gone.

More importantly Sarah is feeling a lot better – no pain and better energy.  As the Blasto can cause constipation, getting rid of it has made her whole digestion function better.

In case you haven’t noticed, there are only 51 days till Christmas. Now, that freaks me out a little bit (and I’m not just referring to all those upcoming over-indulgent client lunches, dinners, parties, mulled wines and mince pies).
And if you are freaked out, just think about your poor digestive system and liver, which will have to deal with the toxic overload. Surely your detoxification organs are taking a bit of hammering during the festive winter months, so I’m calling in a Detoxmas – a detox before Christmas.

A detox works by ‘resting’ the organs that eliminate waste – liver, kidneys, gut, lungs and skin. And don’t you freak out now; I’m not going to tell you to drink fruit and vegetable juice for a week straight while sitting cross-legged on your yoga mat.

A detoxification plan doesn’t have to be completely restrictive and boring. Actually, it should be fun and tasty. (In fact, the better the food tastes, the more likely you are to stick to your plan.) What we eat can be very much a matter of habit, and a detox is a great way of realising you may not be as dependent on some of your unhealthier eating habits as you might think. Undertaking a detox eating plan will help your body rebalance, release built-up congestion, and restore itself to strength and health.

The definition of my Detoxmas plan is pretty simple: remove the foods and ingredients that have the highest toxic load and are causing problems with your health – caffeine, alcohol, refined sugars, (white, sweet and fluffy) carbohydrates, artificial sweeteners, and food additives. Now try and focus on simple, fresh foods – foods you would find in the hunter-gatherer diet – foods that grows on trees and in the ground (such as abundant, colourful fruit and vegetables, nuts and seeds, plenty of water and vegetable protein). Start off by writing out a plan of what you’re going to eat, keeping track of it in a food & mood diary, going shopping beforehand and cooking larger portions of healthy meals for your lunch (think soup – easy to throw in all those delicious vegetables!).

So, how long should I detox*?

Detox for one day a week, one week a month, or one month a year. All of this will bring your body benefits. The great thing about a detox is that you can usually achieve results in a very short time. Depending on how healthy – or toxic – you are, you may start to feel better immediately, simply by removing caffeine and your afternoon sugar treat, though a long caffeine and sugar-addict is likely to notice some withdrawal symptoms, like headaches, tiredness and mood swings. But hang in there, the first days are the worst, and then it only gets better. You’ll feel more energized, your digestion and skin is likely to improve, and the pounds will drop off (great for that upcoming Christmas party). If you have been feeling very run down, or have been burning the candle at both ends, detoxing for a month may help restore you to top condition.

There are some great nutritional supplements and herbs to support a longer detox plan, but for now I’d suggest to keep it real and focus on all those delicious foods out there. And if you don’t have time to go shopping, go and get one of those organic fruit and vegetable boxes delivered straight to your door.

It doesn’t have to be hard: you can order it while you’re doing all your Christmas shopping online!

Let us know how you get on!

Lisa

* Don’t detox if you’re pregnant or breastfeeding, and always consult your GP if you’re going to change your diet drastically.

This week we’re moving down from the mouth to the stomach, for the fourth type of hunger …. Stomach hunger.

I’m sure everyone can relate to hunger pangs coming from their stomach, but what signal does your stomach really give you when it is hungry?  It may be an emptiness that wants to be filled, or a constriction as if the space is being ground up. 

From an evolutionary point of view, hunger pangs from the stomach are essential as they are a reminder that we need to eat.  However, as well as the stomach telling us when to eat, we also tell the stomach when to be hungry.  For example, if we travel to a different time zone, the stomach learns when to expect food according to the new time zone and therefore when to be hungry.  Similarly, if we’re used to eating three course meals then that is what the stomach expects and will growl at only being given one course until it re-adjusts.

Emotions can often be confused as stomach hunger.  Anxiety, for example, can make the stomach growl and grind.  However, trying to satisfy anxiety with food will only make the stomach growl and ‘act up’ even more.

In order to help satisfy stomach hunger it is therefore important to:

• Tune in to your stomach and identify whether it is actually signalling hunger pangs, rather than anxiety or stress.
• Eat slowly so that the stomach is not overfilled, as it can do its job best when it is two-thirds full rather than over loaded.
• Eat at the times and the quantities that you aspire to eat.  The stomach will grumble for the first day or two, but will then quickly adjust and learn the new eating patterns.
• Rate you level of stomach hunger from zero (not hungry) to ten (‘starving’) at the beginning and end of a meal.  Once you have this awareness of how your stomach feels it will be easier to tune into it and eat accordingly.

Stomach hunger affects everyone, but can be a particular problem in cases of binge eating and other disordered eating patterns.  If you have a question about disordered eating then please do give us a call to see if we can help you, or to book a consultation at one of our London nutrition clinics.

Julia