Five Good Minutes in Your Body: The Food-Mood Connection

The science of nutrition includes the significant connections between food and our minds and emotions. The food you eat can affect your emotions. The same research also shows how feelings affect food choices. How does food affect your feelings and vice versa? The next practice allows you to follow your food-mood relationship. If you want an in-depth understanding of your own food-mood connections, start a food journal to track your feelings before and after meals.

1. Before preparing a meal or grabbing a quick snack, pause and take a minute to check in with your emotions. What sort of mood are you in—grumpy, impatient, serene, elated?

2. Consider the foods that you select in terms of the mood you’re in. How do your emotions influence your healthy versus unhealthy food choices?

3. After you make your food selection, pause and reflect on how these foods might affect how you will feel after you eat. Do you usually feel irritable and rushed, tired and lethargic, or pleasantly full and content after a meal?

4. Consider the foods that might have played a role in how you’re feeling right now. How would a light meal versus a heavy one affect your emotions?

When you become more aware of the food-mood dynamic, you will empower yourself to make better food choices that will relax or energize you and enable to you think more clearly.

Excerpted from FIVE GOOD MINUTES® IN YOUR BODY: 100 Mindful Practices to Help You Accept Yourself & Feel at Home in Your Body