Category: mental health

Food and Mood: The Final Foray

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I’m going to top myself in this blog entry. I make no pie-in-the-sky promises. I don’t sell a product. I don’t guarantee that you’ll lose 30 pounds in 30 days by following my rules.

However what I’ve been writing in here for years about the food we eat improving our mood has been verified by two M.D.s

Drew Ramsey, M.D. the author of Eat to Beat Depression and Anxiety I found out is a psychiatrist in private practice. Long before I read his book I was eating the food he recommends: eggs, cod, cashews, bell peppers, salmon, shrimp, fermented dairy (yogurt) and mussels. (Italians love our mussels!)

The connection between food and mental health has been taken up by Georgia Ede, M.D. in her 2024 book Change Your Diet, Change Your Mind.

After watching a YouTube interview with this nutritional and metabolic psychiatrist I was astonished to find out I’d been doing what she recommended as well long before hearing her talk.

She recommended a ketogenic diet. Though I don’t eat meat I was surprised that all along I’d been eating the other foods in a ketogenic diet for years.

I have three eggs for breakfast. Seafood like shrimp, mussels, salmon, red snapper, flounder, and scallops for dinner. Organic chicken.

No grains at all. (I stopped eating grains 20 years ago before an expert like Ede told people not to.)

Dr. Edie told viewers to cut out refined sugars and refined fats. Like Dr. Lipman she’s no fan of vegetable oils or canola oil or seed oils. She rails against the modern-day scourge of eating processed food.

On this note the Mediterranean Diet is toast. Even the Nutritarian Diet doesn’t hold a candle to eating animal fat.

Watching the video unsettled me. It shocked me to find out that I’d been eating all the food you’re supposed to be eating.

Even smoothies got creamed by Dr. Ede. She is against this standard advice experts give people when they tell us what to eat.

Dr. Ede has had success using the ketogenic diet to treat patients not helped by traditional psychiatric medication. Some had been ill for years or even decades. After Dr. Ede prescribed a ketogenic diet in coordination with slowly lowering the doses of the traditional pills they had a miraculous recovery.

I’m no fan of taking Big Pharma pills for medical conditions that are caused by lifestyle choices. I say Take the Pill! if you need to take a pill to be well mentally physically or emotionally. By all means take the pill if it’s helping you be well.

The friend I watched the YouTube video with clarified that the psychiatric medication hasn’t been effective for a lot of people. Things got better when they went on the ketogenic diet. This is one of the few instances where I think alternative treatment should be considered. I think this because in my own life I’ve benefitted by eating ketogenic food.

I turned 60. I look and feel decades younger. The proof is in the fact that I exercise consistently and eat well. I hope by reading this blog entry you followers are energized and empowered to consider what you swallow: the lies being told as well as the Coca-Cola.

Now: I will always take the pill I’m taking. It strikes me that maybe this pill works precisely because my diet aids and abets the pill to be effective. You can’t outrun chowing down on candy bars and expect to be healthy.

The best thing is we don’t have to be rich or go broke to eat food that can improve our mood.

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World Organizing Day

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May 20 is World Organizing Day. I found this out reading an article on the Container Store website today.

Right on cue unwittingly the shoe rack I ordered from the Container Store arrived today. I’ve been keen to organize my shoe collection better.

Does a woman or other person need 35 pairs of shoes? I wonder about this. Is having only 10 pairs of shoes okay?

You can’t wear suede shoes in the rain, so this makes having Converse in your array a benefit for inclement weather. Or else don’t buy suede footwear to begin with. Cutting down on your required number of shoes.

Oh–I think I have 30 pairs of shoes.

I’m going to review Christine Platt’s new forthcoming book Less is Liberation when it’s published. She wrote The Afrominimalist’s Guide to Living with Less. Platt’s life took a turn for the better when she became famous after this first book was published.

Her motto was to “live with intention” in how you make choices. Paring down and helping readers do so had a profound impact on Platt.

You can subscribe to her new newsletter which I recommend. In a future blog entry, I’ll talk about Platt’s entreaty for readers to be “self-ish” that is chiefly concerned with our own life and livelihood and health and happiness.

Christine Platt wrote in The Afrominimalist’s Guide that she counted every pair of jeans she owned and found out that she had 53! Pairs of jeans.

How could a person buy and own 53 pairs of jeans. This boggles my mind. I own 5 pairs of jeans total. That’s all folks.

Taking the time today to just breathe is called for when faced with the overwhelm of an overstuffed living space. Starting out with a 15-minute tidying project can help. I will write in a future blog entry here too about a super time management strategy. It could be perfect to use this technique when embarking on a tidying festival like Marie Kondo talks about.

Happy World Organizing Day!

The Happy Home

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I’ve gotten a kick out of the book above. The subtitle is The Ultimate Guide to Creating a Home that Brings You Joy.

The six chapters are Uplift, Calm, Energize, Comfort, Empower, Express.

What I’ve believed is that a person can transform a drab space or a not-ideal living arrangement into a wondrous haven with a little art-felt ingenuity and creative decorating.

A person who lives in a room in a halfway house can hang a poster on the wall with Command hooks.

Ways exist to brighten your abode and boost your happiness living in it.

In a coming blog entry, I will talk about Christine Platt’s newsletter. She is the author of The Afrominimalist’s Guide to Living on Less. Her new forthcoming book is Less is Liberation.

As said, I think that livening up your home can turn it from boring to buoyant with a little simple and not costly tweaks.

For years I’ve studied and practiced feng shui. Using feng shui guidelines in our homes we can attract abundance. Generating good fortune not with money more than anything else but with health and wellbeing.

Why settle for less. Like Marie Kondo attested in her book Kurashi at Home: Organize Your Space and Create Your Ideal Life. She wrote that you’re not limited in how you express yourself in challenging quarters like a 350 sq. ft. apartment.

The Happy Home book gives readers questions to write down answers to about your ideal living space and aspects in your space today that disrupt your ease and harmony.

With guidance for creating a home that instills joy.

Sometimes a tiny act can spark a right-then improvement. Like simply arranging objects atop your desktop in a neat and tidy way. Banishing the items you kept on the desk and keeping only za few items remaining.

Simply rearranging something like this can give cheer. I’m a fan too of removing items from view that clutter up surfaces and storing them out of view.

For instance: I took magnets and other small objects off the desktop.

I would say that clutter is an insidious force that can cause us to feel miserable not only about our homes. It can erode how we feel about ourselves and our prospects in life.

I’ll end here by saying that organization is a form of self-care by design. Forget the cleanses and bubble baths and other influencer-peddled forms of self-care that aren’t really effective in improving our health long-term.

If those forms of self-care had any real lasting benefits Americans would not be getting ill with diabetes heart disease and other issues like we are today.

Tidying up is one of the best forms of self-care that I know of. It works to give us self-confidence and a spring in our step.

Now that it’s spring I say let’s tackle a tidying project or two.

Thoughts on Popping Pills

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I’m thinking of how I want to live my life when I get older. In light of a milestone birthday coming up.

The choice a person makes to take pills to be well is a personal choice. No one should attack you or me for taking pills.

The conundrum faced in old age is the advent of taking medication. I read that ninety percent of old people are in poor health.

Could it be the luck of the draw that ninety percent of old people—nearly one hundred percent—has health problems. How could only ten percent of Americans be well when we reach retirement age at 65. What accounted for who was in this minority.

Googling the ninety percent statistic brought up an American Psychological Association article that verified this fact. Ninety-two percent of old people had one chronic condition. Seventy-seven percent had two medical conditions.

I have experience seeing a person who is 87 take 5 or 6 pills every day for heart, cholesterol, high blood pressure and other ailments.

This is not how I want to live should I be lucky to get to my eighties. I’m not keen to rely on pharmaceutical intervention for health issues I’m creating via my lifestyle choices.

This is the real deal: If you want to buy half gallons of ice cream every week and polish them off in that time you’ll likely be required to take a pill to be able to do so.

In my life I’m going to have the affogato 2x per month as a treat. I would rather not take any extra pills. The fact that lifestyle choices require a person to take medication is hard for me to swallow.

This was why the MD author wrote the book Metabolical that I reviewed here a while ago. About how the current U.S. medical model is predicated on treating disease not preventing illness in the first place.

Today you and I must act as our own healers. Take pills if it will keep us healthy.

Yet I say: Consider scaling back on sugar, trans fat, saturated fat, high fructose corn syrup, natural flavor, and the other ingredients in food or drink that ARE making us ill.

We cannot control external factors like an inherited risk for disease. We often cannot prevent getting ill should we have any kind of breakdown either mental physical or emotional.

What is within our power is how we respond to what happens to us. The enormity or severity of a setback doesn’t determine our fate. How we respond to this obstacle is what matters.

I call creating a baseline of health “establishing the floor.” So that if we’re treating ourselves right and taking care of ourselves as a matter of course it will be easier to thrive after we get ill.

I say: each of us has the choice. A person might want to have ice cream every week. They’re likely OK with popping a pill to do so.

Th ex-governor of Tennessee easily 15 years ago wrote a book titled Fresh Medicine about what’s ailing the healthcare system in America. The governor’s primary care MD told him: You can either eat healthy or choose to have the cheeseburger. You can eat the cheeseburger when you take a statin.

What kind of credible advice is that? This is what’s not right with medical care in America. It’s almost like healthcare professionals are in collusion with pharmaceutical companies.

Food is making us sick. I want no part of making myself sick.

In no way am I going to take an extra pill just so that I can eat food that would make me ill otherwise.

In the future I’m going to post a blog entry about Acting As Our Own Healers.

Coming up new recipes that are quick and easy to create. With the weather getting warmer day by day I’m going to share no-oven required recipes that are tasty.

Risking Change

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About five weeks ago I attended a Zoom event that the Roadmap Coach Christina Bryan hosted. She talked about her method of creating your Personal Brand. In my view it’s the simplest most effective way to sell yourself.

Her pitch to obtain clients was that she helps women succeed despite their fear. Fear of change is a big issue for everyone of any identity. So too internalized shame stops us in our tracks. Feeling shame keeps us stuck and unable to change.

The writers given a platform in the media who attack readers I call the media darlings. A person who is made to feel guilty won’t be motivated to change their behavior. Attack someone and their natural response is to get defensive.

I’m struck with how fear and shame prevent us from reaching our potential. Our old habits might have served a purpose. In the light of today when we know it’s time for a change we can be afraid of making the change(s). Since the old way of life has become comfortable.

This has implications not only for our health and wellbeing. It prevents us from having the confidence to express who we are and what we stand for. This is where internalizing the shame others impose on us keeps us afraid to speak out and celebrate our worth.

I don’t know about you followers however I’m done with making myself small so that others will approve of me and feel better about themselves.

The media darlings–and any others who hate judge fear and shame us as a way of life–would be out of business if we stood up straight and stared them in the eye and said: “Look in the mirror not at me.”

The Personal Brand I want to sell is linked to the goal I have that peers can establish and sustain health, wealth, and happiness after facing illness, trauma, or injustice.

I’m not going to cut people down. My aim is to give everyone a shot in the arm of confidence to go after our goals with gusto.

The way to conquer the fear is through action. To act despite the fear. To keep taking action. Especially when the naysayers shoot down what you want to do. Tell you that it’s impossible. Or that you should stay where you are because you’re full of yourself and too big-headed.

Be proud of yourself. That’s what I say. It’s no sin to have pride.

Coming up my ideas on how to sustain change after you’ve gotten the courage to risk doing this.

My hope is that through my blogs I can create a Beautiful Community of followers. To entertain readers not just educate and empower you.

We’re going to live on earth too long in reality to harbor ill-will towards others. Too long to castigate ourselves for imagined faults too.

The Joy of Ritual

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In this blog entry I want to inspire followers to make a positive shift when our life has been derailed on the old track. It was synchronicity not an accident that I checked the above book out of the library. Liking it so well that I bought a new copy from an Amazon reseller as it’s out of print.

The guide The Joy of Ritual teaches readers how to create and use these rites. The subtitle is Spiritual Recipes to Celebrate Milestones, Ease Transitions, and Make Every Day Sacred.

Struck I was by how a workout can be a ritual. An exercise routine is a sacred act not just an expression of physical prowess. Creating a new weightlifting ritual eased my transition into working out again after the arm injury.

As a form of prayer, I wear a cross around my neck while lifting. Not a Catholic cross–I think it’s a Celtic cross. Saying an actual prayer before I lift the first dumbbell. To invoke the ministration of God to “Bless my body. Give me the energy to go about my daily routine and the health to achieve my goals.”

Intertwining the sacred and the spiritual into everyday life with the commercial and material aspects of living our lives benefits us. Though this kind of daily devotion can seem “woo-woo” it’s a dose of positive mental medicine.

Creating a ritual or two can help us heal and recover. This I found out when I started to lift weights again. Redesigning how I exercised was the gateway to better health.

The idea of using a ritual appeals to me as a form of practicing mindfulness. To enjoy each moment before it goes by.

In fact going in a slow and steady rhythm is called for. Rushing around engaging in nonstop busywork every hour of every day is not the way to live.

It can be hard to change what’s not working even when the change would be positive. My goal in here is to encourage and motivate followers to try. Simply try. See what happens. Like me you might be surprised at how well things turn out.

Keeping a Grateful Journal

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While others rail against keeping a grateful journal as a form of self-care I’m all for this weekly thanksgiving practice.

Research indicates that writing down what we’re thankful for can alleviate sadness.

My recommendations:

Buy one of the spiral-bound colorful-cover hardbound journals you can get in Rite Aid or even in the aisle at Kohl’s waiting in line.

Write in the book 3 times per week. Before you write a new entry read the last 3 to 5 entries to get you going.

Instead of simply listing what you’re grateful for list Why you’re grateful for this blessing.

Write things you like about yourself too. Write what brings you joy as well. Go further and write about specific achievements.

Remember: ordinary actions taken are worthy of documenting in the journal not just “superstar” accolades to give yourself.

Practicing gratitude is a way to build self-esteem regardless of your life circumstance at the time.

Sustain-Ability

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The photo above is of a “continental breakfast”-style dinner.

I’ve taken to making this meal when I have no energy or desire to cook and then clean dishes pots and pans.

Food items:

Mary’s Gone Crackers gluten-free crackers.

Black seedless grapes.

Driscoll’s organic blackberries.

Cento olives in the yellow can.

Grillies halloumi cheese.

Have no idea if this is a healthful dinner.

What I’ve come to realize is that sustainable habits like a weekly routine should sustain our ability to thrive as human beings living in a society where the scarcity mentality is alive and well.

We shouldn’t view things in terms of competing with each other to get what we need to survive.

To sustain our ability to live life whole and well I think adapting and being flexible is paramount.

So take having that weekly routine:

In some weeks we’ll be cooking our dinners 4 or 5 times a week. In other weeks we’ll need to find quick-and-easy meals to prepare because our energy is shot or we don’t have the time to cook and clean.

Before we can save the planet we need each of us to attend to our own health and well being.

That’s because we might live on God’s newly green earth down the road. Yet if we don’t have the health to enjoy our time here it’s likely going to be harder to feel good about ourselves.

I eat well to feel well.

With the summer heat coming on I’m all for making dinners that don’t require using the hot oven. A way to save on your gas or electric bill too.

Sparking Joy to Live Longer

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I had COVID for exactly two weeks. Though a mild form it was terrible to live through. A friend told me that because I exercise and eat well this was most likely why I had only a mild form.

What got me mentally energized when my body was slowed-down was binge-watching Sparking Joy with Marie Kondo on Netflix.

In a burst I tidied up my desktop and desk drawers. I placed in a donation bag a small wooden box that hung out atop my desk for 11 years.

The tidying up was life-changing. It led me to want to adopt atomic habits like James Clear wrote about in his book Atomic Habits.

The trick is to tidy up every evening instead of letting tasks and objects pile up in your household.

If you ask me Marie Kondo’s clutter-control method is the only one a person should use. This Japanese tidying-up guru is not only transforming her clients lives and relationships. She might be improving their health.

A Health magazine special edition titled Living Longer the Science of Longevity has an article titled Fastidious Forever.

The mortality risk drops 35% for highly meticulous people according to research.

To wit from the article written by Marta Zaraska:

Fastidious people also have a better relationship with stress. They often thrive when life feels controlled and stable–think structured days and a relatively predictable future.

Science reveals that people who are good at meeting deadlines and maintaining tidy surroundings can have lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol, which has been linked to a litany of afflictions from diabetes to cancer to heart disease.

When hardships do happen, neat freaks tend to cope better.

Inflammation may also play a role. “People who are more conscientious have healthier inflammatory profiles.” According to Angelina Sutin, PhD.

They tend to have lower levels of interleukin-6 and C-reactive protein, common markers of inflammation.

Interleukin-6 and C-reactive protein have also been associated with severe cases of COVID-19.

Did I have a mild form of COVID because I’m a neat freak 🙂

I rest my case: Marie Kondo is actually improving the health of her clients.

Watching Kondo’s clients pile mounds of clothing on their beds to assess what to keep and what to toss I felt better.

It’s because though I’m a Fashionista I own nowhere near half the amount of clothing Kondo’s clients had clogging their numerous closets.

In the coming blog entry I’m going to talk about adopting atomic habits.

Binge-watching Sparking Joy with Marie Kondo I realized the solution is to not let things get out of hand to the point of being overwhelming.

Dumping clothes everywhere could cause a person to feel “down in the dumps.”

As I can attest when I tidied up my desktop and desk drawers I was energized and had more hope for recovering from COVID.

Summering in Place

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The COVID-19 outbreak is still in effect.

New York State has gone from having the highest number of cases to having the lowest number of infections as of today.

Where I live in Brooklyn people walk outdoors with open faces not covered with a mask or bandanna.

I walk far far away from these yahoos to get where I’m going.

It’s going on four months that everything shut down around here. We are now in Stage 3 of our reopening.

In this time I have achieved my goal using the Changeology 90-day action plan. My new goal is to cook my own dinners 5x per week.

I would like to talk in the next blog entry about imposing a structure on daily activity and automating a weekly routine.

Has anyone else found like I did that during the pandemic when you’re indoors you have whole chunks of time with nothing to do?

I would like to talk in the next blog entry too about what I’ve learned living through this pandemic.