Musings on Food and Mood

[learnteach]

It's very self evident that food does affect your mood, both in simple and complex ways. Comfort food for psychology, chocolate for the warm fuzzy effect, pasta for carbs for performance, various aphrodisiacs (theoretically), etc. It's obvious that food moves through your system at varying rates--from the time curve of the buzz of drinking, to the smell of asparagus leaving you, to the aggressiveness after a week of eating lots of meat.

Some recent experiences I've had in this have lead me to believe I need to curb a serious sugar addiction. The weight I carry (334) and the difficulty I have with mood and food are obvious, but there's other things.

Fri/Sat/Sun I tried to get to a state of ketosis by eating mainly meat; mainly white meat (chicken) in this case. What happened is I exercised so hard fighting on Saturday that I went straight through ketosis (where you burn fat fast enough that you can't completely metabolize it, and sweat and urinate ketones) into something else--my hands got cold, my effective field of vision narrowed, and while I didn't feel particularly tired, everything was an effort.

Strange. Didn't recover until I ate a big dinner (chicken salad) and slept it all off Monday night.

More research!

Comments

[xot.livejournal.com]

On first pass I'd guess at dehydration. I'm pretty certain you're cautious about such things... I think "drink lots of water" gets riveted on the INSIDE of the fighter's helm if I'm not mistaken...
Guess number two would be: something else missing that's essential to a healthy working body. Did you inadvertantly cut out something else? Guess number three: short term sickness of some sort. Possibly even an alergic reaction or some sort of "stress" related sickness. That's my two cents worth on that. Free Advice is always worth the asking price, or less.

In your short dialouge about food effects you didn't even mention "issues" about food that each of us has built up in our sick little skulls. I know one of mine is a false perception that food is somehow scarce in our environment. It causes me to overeat, to eat too quickly, and reinforces the misconception that more is better.

[redsquirrel.livejournal.com]

I'd go with the dehydration theory myself. I'm sure you were remembering to drink, it's just that, IIRC from my biochemist days (could be wrong, it's been a long while), while it takes ONE molecule of water to digest each monosaccharide (carb building blocks),it take TWO of them to do the same for an amino acid (protein building blocks).

So if you're eating a high protien diet, you really, really need to keep your hydration levels up. Add in the water loss from exercise to the extra water needed to break down the protein you ate and you'll dehydrate that much faster. So drink twice as much water as you think you need to and you'll probably be OK. :-)