Food and Emotions

Americans love to feel happy. In fact, they demand to feel happy.

"The January 2007 professional publication, Lawyers and Settlements,
reported that the U.S. market for antidepressants accounted for 66 percent of
the entire global market, compared to 23 percent in Europe, and 11 percent for
the rest of the world (mostly in Japan). Since the class of drugs that
includes Prozac and Paxil became available in the 1980's, the market has
exploded. According to the journal, in 1985 sales of antidepressants in
the United States totaled about $240 million, but from September 2003 to August
2004, sales skyrocketed to $11.2 billion."
The Secret to The Secret
Karen Kelly

A lot of your feelings, emotions, and even decisions about food and diet and exercise and health and body image are due to poor dietary habits. Here's why:

The liver serves as the sieve for your body. It cleans the blood. It delivers enzymes to the stomach to break down food into usable substances. It helps syphon off the impurities in food so that the resulting nutrients can be rushed to your starving muscles and tissues and the trash can be removed.

The problem is that at the same time trash is running through your liver, so are your hormones. Hormone levels affect mood and your overall emotional state. So get a load of this: if you are detoxing, your liver is working overtime due to the removal of trash. But your hormones are housed in the liver as well and act like screaming children calling for attention at the same time. You end up with this warring mass of hormones and detox all going on in the liver at the same time. If you have ever had a few too many glasses of wine, you may have experienced the day-after blues while your body is trying to cleanse itself of the alcohol while fighting with the hormones also housed in the liver.

The only way to stop the insanity is to detox once and for all. Educate yourself on the function of the liver. Ask yourself what foods you must eat in order to ease the toxic load on your liver. Remember that beef and chicken products are hormone laden. It is possible that you are putting highly acidic foods such as steak, ground beef, tacos, chicken salad and baked chicken in your body and your liver cannot handle everything. Dairy products are animal by-products and therefore contain the same amounts of growth hormones and antibiotics injected in cows and chickens.

Once again, your emotions are intricately tied to your hormones which are housed in the liver. If you strain your liver, you strain your hormones, you strain your emotions.

Detox once and for all. Take 30 days to permanently change your physical and emotional health:

• decide to eat 3 meals per day every day. This regulates the digestive process and keeps it from being overloaded all at one meal/time.
• decide what those meals will be: juice for breakfast, eat-out for lunch, raw salad with nuts and olive oil for dinner
• drink half your weight in ounces of water per day: 120 lbs = 60 oz water
• of the 90 meals you will eat in the next 30 days, make 60 of those whole raw foods
• keep a diary of what you eat and how you feel for 30 days. Watch how your emotions try to override your good decisions. See it for what it is: a toxic liver speaking out of turn!
• after 30 days, determine to never go through the pain again. Plan 60 meat/wheat/dairy free meals per moth to keep your liver clean and in good working order.

Change your food and it will change your mind!