Who knew good food choices would help you to have a good mood? I started to notice a few years ago that my mood was changing more drastically than usual. I would feel tired all the time, agitated, no energy and fatigued. I would wake up feeling groggy in the mornings and have that hungover feeling of nausea even though I actually hadn’t been out the night before. So much so I started to feel this was normal and I started to accept the fact that this is how I would feel day in day out. It wasn’t until I started to change my diet and attitude towards food that I soon realised that the problem lay in the types of foods I was feeding my body and how this was impacting on my mood.
The Realisation
Despite some scepticism at the start I eventually decided to get a food allergy test done and low and behold it came back that I was highly intolerant to yeast – meaning NO BREAD! And diary – meaning NO CHEESE!
And these were the very foods that I was living off and craving all the time. This meant no chocolate, ice-cream, bread and most importantly no pizza. But I needed to give my body a break and a chance to heal because as a result of years of bad eating habits and a diet high in refined sugar I had developed leaky gut. This meant that food was leaking into my blood stream and my body put up a defence mechanism to fight of what it thought were invaders.
Eating out with a food intolerance
As you can imagine eating out was extremely difficult at the beginning as this was a whole new experience for me. I was so used to being able to eat what I wanted and all of a sudden the choices on the menu were severely limited and almost whittled down to only one or two dishes. When it came to ordering, I always felt like people just thought I was a fussy eater and I would have to order very dry food such as steak with no sauce or a dinner with no gravy or butter as I soon realised that sauces were the main culprit for me. They are filled with sugar, additives and yeast which needed to be cut out of my diet completely. The way I looked at it was “Is that piece of bread or ice-cream really worth that feeling of nausea, bloating and tiredness?” No, it really wasn’t. I was not willing to give up this new found feeling of relief and normalness for an ice-cream. Plus, I got used to this way of eating and my taste buds changed and adapted.
Feeling the change
By replacing the takeaways and junk/processed foods with healthy, freshly prepared meals I started to notice a dramatic change in my mood. I no longer experienced that ‘hungover’ feeling or the extreme tiredness and fatigue. It was a relief to say the least but who knew that food could play such a crucial role in your mood. This lends itself to the saying you really are what you eat. If you feed your body full of crap and junk food you’re going to feel like crap. I now had bundles of energy and was starting to feel more positive. It was only when I started to make these changes that I realised how poor my diet was. Who would believe I used to eat 3-4 pizzas a week plus takeaways such as a Chinese or McDonalds and not think much of it? Tara’s program promotes a flexible nutritional plan which you can easily adapt to suit your individual needs and it can be used as a guide to kick start your new healthy diet and lifestyle.
Three years on
Now here I am three years later still following the same good eating habits, haven’t eaten a takeaway since and I am only 24 years old. I am leading a much healthier lifestyle and I have never looked back. My advice to anyone feeling the same or considering getting a food allergy test done is to be prepared to fully commit to changing your eating habits and go in with a positive attitude that you can do it and stick to it because once you start seeing the changes you won’t want to go back to your old ways. It is well worth it in the end.