Behavioral Nutrition

🐣 to everyone ❤️❤️❤️

The definition of a diet is simply, what we eat. At least over the past decade, fad diets have become a popular topic on social
media and news. The marketing for fad diets has increased dramatically, which draws attention to these diets. A fad diet is
considered the new popular “diet” out there that provides “promising” results. Fad diets typically involve cutting out food
groups from your diet. For example, the keto diet involves cutting out most carbohydrate sources from your diet.
By cutting out one or more food groups from your diet, your body is now cutting out a variety of vitamins and minerals.
Here are a few reasons that carbohydrates are important for our mind and bodies:
•Fiber plays an important role in digestive health
•Your brain and gut communicate – the brain is part of the control system for the gut 1
•Complex carbohydrates can increase healthy gut bacteria 2
•Gut bacteria is associated with mood and mental disorders 3
•Carbohydrates are essential for the production of serotonin that regulates mood. Inadequate carbohydrate intake can increase cortisol levels, the stress hormone
•Carbohydrates regulate blood sugar - without it your blood sugar can drop too low and cause lethargy and irritation.
Maintaining a healthy diet with finding the right balance of indulgences such as
cookies, cake, etc. is ideal as this allows you to eat healthy, avoid any restriction and helps you develop a healthy relationship with food. By restricting foods from your diet, leads to deprivation and potential binge eating behaviors, which in turn can lead to restriction behaviors as well.
Some reasoning being: individual nutritional needs, taste, smell, hunger, satiety needs, social events, culture and pleasure. In fact, food is a part of many social events.
Especially while being in quarantine, I’m sure you can all relate to how much you can’t wait to start going back out to eat with family or friends. As food is an important component of our health, overall wellbeing and social life, adapting to a healthy diet and being able to
incorporate some of your favorite indulgences in moderation, will
improve your health, well-being and fear/anxiety around food.