Fix Your Mood with Food

You may change your diet to help yourself feel better, physically.

But can you also use food to help improve your mood or address other emotional issues?

Absolutely.

In fact, food and nutrition has been utilized as a part of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) for hundreds of years.

In TCM, every emotion has a physical manifestation (or multiple manifestations). Sometimes you won't even realize or recognize that you're being affected by things in your past -- whether it's yesterday or 20 years ago -- and you will feel physical ailments because you haven't addressed those events.

A prime example is anxiety and panic attacks. Oftentimes, before you get to a full-on panic attack -- which may have been building up for years based on scary or uncomfortable situations from your past -- you'll suffer from low back pain or knee pain, insomnia, high-pitched ringing in the ears, and even menopause.

Nutrition is key in relieving these symptoms, and you can even address certain mood variations with specific foods.

For example, if you're dealing with anger issues, which can manifest as headaches, PMS, muscle tightness, and a whole host of other health conditions, you can address some of that by eating beets, turnips, cabbage, broccoli, quinoa, asparagus, and pin nuts (just to name a few). These foods all help detox the liver, which is related to anger.

You may not see immediate relief; in fact, you may go through a healing process where you actually see and feel an aggravation of symptoms before you feel better.

Stress falls under the same category as anger in TCM, so those same foods can help with your day-to-day stress. A few more foods to help in this area include cucumber, kelp, parsley and kale.

Acupuncture can be a viable option for addressing these symptoms, as well as the underlying condition. The process of acupuncture helps remove any energetic blockages in the body by stimulating energy (chi) flow. It can also help reduce inflammation.

Listen in as acupuncturist and nutritionist, Heather Lounsbury, joins Andrea and Lisa to share more about foods that can heal your mood, as well as the reasons these foods work so well.