A Topic of Mind-Body Change – Harmonising Your Diet with Your Performance

Change is more than a conscious decision. Change, in order to be wholly successful, needs the support of every cell in your body. I am sure I am not the only one to have used the phrase ‘Go with your gut feeling’ before. A gut feeling gives us that guiding voice in times of uncertainty. A sense of trusting yourself and your decision. The closest feeling to doing what is right in that moment. From a scientific angle, your gut feelings are a combination of your gut bacteria communicating directly to your brain via chemical messengers in the blood (cytokine transmission) and the gut neurons connection to the limbic (emotional and intuitive) part of the brain.

This feeling is a fantastic representation of the power of the mind-body connection influencing our choice when we tune into our subconsciousness – the subconscious mind relaying information to our conscious mind. When our cells are healthy, this can make tremendous positive contributions to our performance in everyday life. However, at the other end of the spectrum, the opposite may be true.

We have roughly 37.2 trillion cells in our body. Each cell stores the workings of our brain- our values, our beliefs, our fears, our joys. When our cells are unhealthy we tend to grow stressed and anxious, and similarly, when we’re going through emotional suffering our cells becomes weak.

To survive, every cell must have a constant supply of vital substances such as sugar, minerals, oxygen, and dispose of waste products. However, often with change we experience mixed emotions which can have us craving excessive amounts of substances like sugar, fat and alcohol in order to give those feelings of ‘comfort and pleasure’. With the unstable blood sugars that follow, we place excessive stress on our cells – our physical health working overtime to keep up with our mental health, occupied with trying to clean out the build up of waste products, leading to conflict between the two.

Besides breathing and sleeping, eating is life’s most vital activity. Food gives us energy, and allows us to think, move and prosper. Certain gut cells produce neurotransmitters, those important biochemicals that the brain needs in order to regulate thought and emotion. Disrupted serotonin levels are accompanied by feelings of sadness, hopelessness, insecurity, anxiety, agitation, insomnia, and digestive issues. Dopamine is another example of a neurotransmitter that is affected by our gut microbiome diversity. Dopamine is described as a main regulator of cognitive functions such as memory, attention, decision making, motivation and reward. Similarly, dysregulation of dopamine system has been linked to anxiety and depression. In short, how you feed your gut affects how you think, feel and perform.

So when you start to feel like you are just stuck, ask yourself the following questions –

• How do you align your diet to support the changes you pursue to make?
• Do you notice any connections between what you eat and how you see the world?
• Do you eat mostly real, whole food or highly processed food – stuffs that rob your body and brain of the nourishment needed for physical and mental vitality, health and well-being?
• How do the standards you set for your diet relate to the standards you set for yourself as a person
• Can you identify windows of opportunity to clean up your nutrition, stress management, fitness, and recovery?

Your body and mind can either work in harmony to produce well-balanced mental,  physical health and performance; or against each other, producing poor mental health, physical inflammation and disease.

What eating habits and thought patterns are keeping you stuck, sick and unhealthy?

By Leah Headon