You are what you eat. So …what would YOU like to be?
What you eat matters. As you read this article, your body is using the calories from your last meal or snack to regulate body temperature, breathe, maintain blood flow and fuel digestion.
But what about your brain- do the brain’s activities like regulating emotions and thinking actually utilize calories?
The answer is yes! Your noggin burns energy to perform its normal functions. While your brain makes up only two percent of your body weight, it uses about 20 percent of the calories you consume each day just to think. That’s at least 370 calories a day! In fact, your brain burns more energy at rest than your leg muscles do when running.
So, as you are running the marathon of life, it is essential to feed your brain well every day. If you nourish it wisely, your brain will reward you. Such rewards will manifest through a more favorable mood –otherwise known as the “food-mood connection.” Our food choices can positively or negatively affect our mood and our overall mental wellness. All too often we only associate calories and food choices with our waistlines. However, the benefits of healthy nutrition reach far beyond physical appearance, especially when it comes to children and their developing minds.
There is growing evidence that diet and mental illness are closely linked, and that improving a child’s nutrition can directly affect mental health-related symptoms and improve overall mental wellness. According to the American Psychological Association, children who eat well-balanced meals are more likely to feel good about themselves, their bodies and their abilities. They are also more likely to cope with stress in a healthy way, manage their emotions better and have improved self- esteem.
Self- esteem and body image are strongly linked. Helping kids feel good about who they are can help motivate them to maintain healthy behaviors. Self- esteem also helps kids cope with mistakes. Even if they fail at first, they feel encouraged to try again. At KidsPeace it is our goal to help the children we serve build their self-esteem and know how valued and important they are. While eating well and making good food choices may not be considered part of the standard therapeutic approach to mental illness, a balanced diet and stable food intake create a solid foundation on which healing can begin to occur.
Quite often, when children are dealing with mental and behavioral challenges at home, their eating patterns become disrupted and good nutrition suffers. Struggling with a depressed mood often occurs in conjunction with a poor appetite. If there is no motivation to live, there is often no motivation to eat. Without food, there is no energy and without energy there again is no motivation to live; as you can see, it is a vicious cycle. On the other hand, overeating behaviors may also be a way to compensate for negative emotions. Some individuals find themselves binge-eating food in an effort to stuff away bad feelings or intentionally change their appearance. Others restrict their intake in a desperate attempt to lower their weight, leaving them weak and sad.
No matter what the situation- lack of food or buried by food – when children arrive for inpatient mental health treatment they are often at a very low point in their lives. Emotions are running high. Feelings of anxiety, loneliness, emptiness, bewilderment, hopelessness and uncertainty lurk. In this time of despair, they may find themselves placed in a residential or hospital setting with all new surroundings and unknown people. There is a need for something familiar, something steady and quite often something comforting.
This is where food comes in. Food is more than just sustenance; it brings people together and is our common ground.
As a dietitian at KidsPeace, whenever I meet with clients who are struggling with eating, I remind them that food is at the center of their lives. If they are not eating well, the negative impact of poor food intake will filter out into all other areas of their lives – how they look, how they feel, and how they perform. Food represents energy and it is important to reassure the clients that they deserve to have energy and they deserve to feel good, to let them know they are worthy of eating well!
While in residential or hospital placement at KidsPeace children are offered balanced meals as well as snacks to provide them with energy in between scheduled eating times. Menu cycles are designed to meet the nutritional needs of clients in terms of calories, protein, fat, whole grains and sodium. Following a consistent schedule of eating three meals per day provides their bodies and brains with the calories needed to begin healing both physically and emotionally.
Indeed, for many children who come to KidsPeace it may not be simple to “just eat” the 3 meals a day that are provided. Such clients may not be used to eating at a table with others, as they may have been isolating or deprived of the shared experience of eating together. Some children also may not have had meals prepared for them; instead, they were forced to make their own meals, regardless of their age. Quite often when a child is given full responsibility for their own food preparation, they end up filling up on snacks and convenience foods; commonplace menu items such as hot turkey with gravy and mashed potatoes are foreign to them and potentially scary to eat
It is the role of the dietitian to educate clients on their body’s nutritional needs and work together with the client to plan an individual approach to eating. For some this approach is avoiding foods with specific tastes or smells that may elicit bad memories or trigger negative reactions. For other children it is offering the same food item at every meal to give them comfort and familiarity and the courage to try something new. They gradually learn to enjoy a wider variety of foods and take time to listen to their body’s internal clues of when, what and how much to eat.
It is evident that the relationship between diet and mental health is complex and there is no one path that works to get a child to embrace healthy eating. However, no matter what the initial approach, the end goal of nutritional intervention is to help clients think about their diet as something they can control – something they can use to improve not only their physical health but also their mental health. With exposure to new foods, children learn that no one ingredient is ever off limits and fear and guilt are emotions that should not be at the table– we must strive to replace them with joy and balance on the plates of the clients we serve, and it will resonate in their minds.
