Good Mood Food

How’s your post-holiday mood?  I found myself with a bit of a negative mood after the holidays. And I knew why and how to turn it around. Do you?

Two main things helped me:

Good food

Good exercise

Number 1 Good Food

Yep, food and mood can go hand in hand by affecting your mind and your emotions positively or negatively. During the holiday feasts we tend to eat more of those foods that have:

Bad Mood Food:

1. Sweets

2. Gluten – in wheat, white flour products

3. Processed food

Clean Body and Clean Mind!

So it’s fun to return to a clean diet of lots of veggies combined with small amounts of protein, non-gluten grains, nuts and fruit. The more eaten raw, the better.  Raw food feels so clean! Healthy eating has such great benefits.

To give your mood an extra boost, these foods actually help you feel happier.

Good Mood  Food:

• Protein – high quality like organic eggs, almonds  or optimally processed whey protein
• Bananas
• Dark Chocolate
• Omega-3 fats
• Purple berries
• Turmeric
• Coffee

When I read that list of mood-boosting foods, I thought, “Oh my, that’s why I love our Chocolate-Banana morning Power Drink so much.” Now we don’t use just any old chocolate in it. It has to be certified organic cacao powder with no sugar. That’s the main problem with eating chocolate – it has to have a lot of sugar to make it palatable and that defeats the purpose of eating it for its antioxidant effects.

I love preparing these Power Drinks in the Magic Bullet because of convenience and easy clean up!

Chocolate-Banana Mood-Boosting Power Drink

This Power Drink contains 4 of the *mood boosting foods:

1 Tablespoon flaxseeds (*omega-3)

1 Tablespoon *almonds

½ cup water

½ frozen *banana

½ teaspoon organic *cacao powder

1/8 teaspoon green stevia powder (or 1/16^th teaspoon white Stevia powder)

1 scoop non-denatured *whey protein powder (30 grams) – We use Designs for Health “Whey Cool”.  Or use rice protein powder.

Directions:

Grind the flaxseeds and almonds (I love to use our Magic Bullet for this whole process)

Add ½ cup of water and blend again

Allow to sit overnight to activate enzymes and sprouting process

Next morning:

Add ½ frozen banana, cacao powder and stevia and blend. If the mixture is too thick add some coconut or rice milk or more water. Last, add the protein powder and blend just enough to mix. Over blending may destroy some of the good qualities of the fragile immune boosting and regenerative components.

Enjoy your refreshing mood-boosting drink and the rest of your day!

It might be interesting to experiment with adding the rest of the good mood foods to this drink, purple berries, coffee and turmeric. Share with us if you come up with some tasty combinations by posting them in the comments below.

A work of caution: Go easy on the coffee! You don’t want to spoil the beneficial effects of coffee by over-indulging and over-stimulating your system. In fact I advise against drinking coffee at all because it upsets and unbalances body chemistry. But if you still want to drink coffee, drink only one cup per day made from organic, freshly ground coffee beans. Or just add a little to this Chocolate Banana Power Drink to make it a mocha drink.

Number 2 Good Exercise

During the holidays my exercise level declined, mainly because I, along with lots of others, had that dang persistent cough. Without exercise my muscles, gut and my mind feel stale and lethargic.

But they awakened to a whole new level of exhilaration when I ran high intensity interval sprints. The blood started flowing washing out the toxins and elevating the endorphins!

Yeah! I love exercise!

In 2013 we shared about HIIT – High Intensity Interval Training and especially about Super Slow exercise develop by Dr. McGuff because it only takes 12 minutes per week to attain a wonderful level of fitness and improvement in health.

Did you engage Super Slow last year? Don’t tell me you did not have time – it’s only 12 minutes per week. OK it may take 20 minutes – but still that’s a drop in the bucket of time.

If you did not devote 20 minutes per week to you well-being, would you devote 30 seconds per day to improving your fitness level?

Find out here!!

Blessings,

Dr. Jo