Are you looking for reasons healthy eating improves your mental health?
You should all know that healthy eating can have a phenomenally positive impact on your physical health. The healthier you eat, the slimmer and more active you will be, as well as things like having a well-regulated blood pressure and managed cholesterol. It’s not rocket science that the better the food is that you consume, the more nutrients and benefits you will receive when it is broken down and sent to do its good work throughout your body. Something you might not know so much about, however, is the fact that healthy eating can also have a huge impact on your mental health. Want to know how? Here are five reasons healthy eating improves your mental health.
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1. Mood Boosting
One of the best reasons healthy eating improves your mental health is because the right foods can boost your mood. Numerous studies shown that when our bodies are lacking key nutrients, our mood is extremely low and this can lead to depression. To restore this balance, you should be eating foods high in omega-3 fatty acids, which can be found in salmon and walnuts. You should also be getting folate and magnesium, which are abundant in asparagus, spinach and yogurt.
2. Antioxidants
Antioxidants are vital for fighting off much of the bad stuff going on in your body, and you can receive more than the usual dose if you eat things like kale, carrots, tomatoes and sweet potatoes, as well as all of the ‘superfood’ berries that you may have heard a lot about in recent years. The carotenoids and antioxidants are particularly effective at boosting your mood in a short time. Antioxidants also boost your immune system, improve skin and hair. When you feel healthy and you look good, you feel better.
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3. Stops Grumpiness
Have you ever heard the term hangry? It’s a mixture of hungry and angry, and is something we can all relate to when our tummies are rumbling and we are desperate for nourishment! When you are enjoying a healthy, sustainable diet, you will find that you rarely get hunger pangs in between meals, and this will put a complete stop to hangry outbursts that leave you feeling down in the dumps and annoyed!
4. Better Sleep
Maintaining a healthy diet leads to better, more regular sleep at night, and if your brain has been given the opportunity to rest, then your overall happiness and contentment levels will be much higher than if you were suffering from interrupted sleep and constant tiredness. Exhaustion can lead to a low mood, which if experienced for an extended period of time can certainly turn in to something more serious related to your mental health. A stomach full of nourishing food will help you sleep well, which means your overall well being will be greatly improved.
5. No More Stress Eating
Mental health manifests itself most often in the form of everyday stress, and one way that we humans like to deal with stress is to binge eat on unhealthy foods. If you commit to a healthy diet, you may well find that your stress levels go down, which in turn will break the cycle of needing to comfort eat at the end of the day. This banishes those gloomy feelings that you beat yourself up about when you have binged. And when you aren’t beating yourself up (about anything), you aren’t denting your all-important self-esteem.
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