Eating to Live Well

by Vaughn Gray, MA, CHC

Everyone knows that good nutrition is an important part of a healthy lifestyle, but very few people realize how profoundly what we eat influences our daily experience of life. The food we put into our mouths begins changing our brain and body chemistry within minutes, with far reaching effects on our energy levels, mood, and ability to focus and think clearly. Brain chemicals that help us pay attention like dopamine and epinephrine are built from the foods we eat, and we cannot produce optimal levels of these chemicals without a healthy diet. The same holds true for chemicals like serotonin and endorphins, which affect our mood and sense of wellbeing. What we put into our mouths begins changing the levels of these brain chemicals within minutes, with profound changes occurring over a 1-3 hour window after a meal. This is why you can get a quick buzz from eating sugar – it rapidly elevates brain serotonin levels. However sugar causes a surge in energy levels and mood that is inevitably followed by a crash. Healthy whole foods, on the other hand, create more moderate sustainable improvements in brain chemistry. To build a stable supply of healthy brain chemicals, increase your intake of high quality protein foods like truly free range poultry, grass fed beef, wild caught salmon, and wild caught shrimp. Beans, raw nuts, and raw seeds provide decent vegetables sources of protein. The healthy brain chemicals that you build out of these foods also help your body perform better.

The immediate effects of what we eat on how we function and feel are substantial. The effects of food on our brains and bodies over the long term are even more profound. We all know that our heart health, GI health, and even our susceptibility to many cancers are powerfully dependent on diet. However, the knowledge that poor food choices may lead to disease down the road doesn’t motivate all of us to make changes in the way we eat now. Instead of focusing on eating healthfully to prevent disease, I encourage my clients to focus on eating in a way that helps them feel best, allowing them to live their lives with more energy, stamina, and joy. When we eat healthful foods that are right for our individual bodies every day it builds a robust biochemical foundation in our brains and bodies that allows us to live fuller, more enjoyable lives and better express our potential. This is also the only way to create sustainable, healthy weight loss.

Eating to live as well as possible means finding a nutrition strategy that both supports optimal mental and physical health, and fills your life with foods that you enjoy. To do this, you first have to understand what really constitutes health food. Eating healthy is not about eating a low calorie, low carb diet. It’s about eating foods that are in harmony with your basic biological design as a human being and which are also a match for your individual nutrition needs. All of us share a basic biological design, and as a general rule, all of our bodies function better when we eat the foods that our bodies are designed to eat. These are foods like vegetables, fruits, raw nuts and seeds, free range meats, wild caught fish, beans, and true whole grains – so called “whole foods” which have not been altered from the form that they occur in out in nature. At the same time, all of us have different metabolisms and unique nutrition needs that depend partly on our genetics and partly on our lifestyle. My goal as a counselor and teacher is to first educate people about the basic nutrition principles that apply to all of us, and, on this foundation, help people determine how to eat right for their unique bodies. To do this, we need to fund ways to make healthy food tasty without having to invest a lot of time in preparation. This is a major focus of my counseling work and my classes.
For more on my nutrition philosophy, visit my information website – www.reevolution.com. Or to read more about me, and the services and classes that I offer, visit www.vaughngray.com. I teach nutrition classes at Your Rx for Health. The next class “Total Nutrition: From Weight Loss to Wellness” begins Thursday Jan. 14th at 7pm. For more information or to register call Your Rx for Health or email me at info@vaughngray.com .

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